Page 40 of The Echo Wife
I refilled the kettle and considered the question. “No,” I said. “I’m not okay. But I’m okay.” Martine sat in the chair I hadn’t been occupying and watched as I pulled down a mug for her. It only occurred to me to ask her the same question after the silencebetween us had stretched long enough for the kettle to boil. “Are you okay?”
“No.” She said it slowly at first, as though she were trying it out. She repeated it again, this time with more conviction. “No, I’m really not.”
I gave her a cup of the mint tea she’d been drinking in the mornings. I sat down across from her and looked at her. The line in the center of her forehead was a little deeper. Her face looked softer than it had when we’d first met. This, I thought, is what I would look likeif.
I cleared my throat and decided to try to be the kind of person who knew how to say the right things.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
“I’m scared,” she said. “That appointment today was scary, and I don’t know if I can do this, which is a scary thing to think about.”
It was the first time I’d heard her express doubt, and she’d done it so immediately, so openly. She hadn’t tried to hide it at all.
My instinct was, of course, to ask her if she still wanted the baby—but I remembered her outburst in the car earlier, her vehemence. Her hurt. Her anger. I sipped my nearly cold tea and waited, hoping she’d continue on her own, but she simply mirrored me, drinking her own tea. “What’s scary about it?” I finally asked.
“I’m alone,” she said. “I was never supposed to have to do this on my own. Nathan was supposed to be with me the whole time.” She set her tea down and sat back in her chair, ran her hands over her belly. She wasn’t looking at me. “I don’t know how to do anything, you know? And I have no idea what I’m missing. I didn’t know that the bleeding could be a bad sign. I didn’t know that there were books I was supposed to be reading, or classes I could attend. What am I going to do when the baby comes? How am I going to take care of it, without him there to tell me how?”
I shook my head. “You shouldn’t have to,” I said. “This isn’t fair to you.”
“No,” she agreed. “It’s not.”
I stood up then, walked through the kitchen and into the living room. I returned holding an old biology textbook. I’d used it as a yearbook at the end of my first year at the boarding school my mother sent me to when I was thirteen. The insides of the covers were thick with signatures, and more than a few of the illustrations had been defaced. I handed it to Martine.
“This might help,” I said. Seeing the look on her face, I hesitated. “Can you read?”
“Of course I can read,” she murmured, opening the book to the first page of text. It showed a long double helix of DNA, each nucleotide color-coded. “That was one of the first things Nathan taught me. Why will this help?”
“Well, you don’t know anything about your body, really,” I said. She frowned at me, but I continued. “I mean, you don’t know how it works, or why it does things. Right?”
“Right,” she said. “So you think I should learn about it?”
I nodded. “I think it might make you feel better about, you know. What’s changing.” I tried very hard not to look at her belly. “And if there’s anything you don’t understand, you can ask me. Or Seyed.” I hoped, on a deep level, that she would ask Seyed. “And tomorrow I’ll see if I can find something for you to read about pregnancy. And childbirth.”
She smiled at me. It was a warm smile, a real one. It didn’t look like it was calculated to make me feel welcome or calm. She thanked me, and even as she was saying it, her eyes slipped away from mine and fell back to that strand of DNA. She took a sip of her tea and began to read.
After a moment, she stood up and walked out of the room. She returned with the same legal pad she’d been using in the lab to record Nathan’s traits for programming. She flipped to a fresh page and wrote down a word. She wrote in tidy, even cursive. When I asked what she was doing, she answered without looking up again.
“I’m writing down words I don’t know,” she said. “So I can ask about them all at once, instead of one at a time.”
I swallowed a smile of my own. “Can I show you something?”
She looked up at me with her eyebrows raised. Standing next to her, I flipped to the back of the book. I showed her the glossary, the index, the appendices. “A lot of the things you have questions about will be here,” I said.
She beamed. She looked up the word she hadn’t understood—macromolecule. Her lips moved a little as she read the definition. She turned back to the first page of the textbook and, tracing the lines with her index finger, reread the paragraph with the word in it. “Oh,” she murmured.
She turned the page, and I realized that, to her, I had disappeared. She had been starved for the information that was suddenly at her fingertips, the information that my bookshelves were filled with. The information that, ultimately, had created her.
I padded back up the stairs and went to bed, and sleep came more easily than I could have hoped. When I woke a few hours later, Martine was still at that little table. She was reading about the human skeleton. The legal pad was covered in her neat, careful cursive.
She was still smiling, and she was still reading, and she was so absorbed that she didn’t even hear me leave the house. I eased the front door shut behind me, locked it, and got into my car to head to town. There was still one brick-and-mortar bookstore downtown, I was certain of it. They would have the things Martine needed. The things that would help her understand how to have the baby, how to give birth to it and raise it and survive on her own.
For the first time, I was certain that she could do it all.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
After two and a half months of development, specimen 4896-Zed was ready for conditioning.
