Page 49 of The Echo Wife
“No,” I said, and I meant it. “I want to figure out something—there has to be a better way, a way to protect you.”
Martine shook her head, her eyes smiling, her mouth flat. “I always knew it would be like this,” she said. “I assumed you’d thought it through.”
It hit me hard, just the way it had hit me hard every other time I’d let her down, failed in my unexpected role of caregiver to this person I’d never wanted. Even as I felt myself collapsing around the pit of guilt at the core of me, part of me raced to justify the way things were going to be.Really,that part whispered,she’s right. She’s made for this. It will be just like it was going to be before. You don’t have to solve it.
“He’s going to wake up soon,” she continued. “We have to go back in there. I’ll change into a dress, tell him I’m visiting. I can act like you called me.”
“But you can’t lie,” I said. “I mean, you sort of can, but you’reterrible at it.” I felt slow and stupid, like I was a step behind somehow and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there.
“I can lie to him,” she said. “If it makes him happy. It’s always been easy for me. I suppose it’s part of my programming.” Her smile was cold. “I can lie if it means I can tell Nathan what he wants to hear.”
She walked out of the airlock mid-cycle.
A red light flashed above the door to the lab. It kept flashing until I hit the button again, restarting the cycle, reassuring the system that I was going to stay put until the vents had finished cleaning the outside world off of me.
By the time I got inside, Martine had already changed into her regular clothes. She was wearing a soft pink cardigan I hadn’t seen before, one that seemed perfect for the woman I’d met at that tea shop. Pearl earrings, a full skirt with a waistband that stretched high over her belly. Her dishwater eyes that were my dishwater eyes shone with bright anticipation, and she’d pushed a headband into her flat, colorless hair, the hair that was just like mine, only longer. She looked the part. Shewasthe part.
She was made for this, and looking at her now was a stark reminder of how different she was from me, and the awful truth that every difference was on purpose. There were no coincidental differences between us. Anything I admired about her was, by necessity, something I found lacking in myself. I had to hate her just a little if I was going to survive any of this, because if I truly believed she was better than me, it meant that the original Nathan had been right to make her.
If Martine was better than me, the original Nathan had been right to stop loving me.
I closed the airlock door behind me, coming fully into the lab just in time to see her duck behind the curtain that separated his bed from the lab where he was made. “Oh, Nathan, there you are!” Her voice drifted across the lab, bright and sweet and relieved. “I was so worried. Nathan, I came as soon as I heard.”
“Martine,” he said, his voice slow and slurring. There was a beep—her dialing down the sedative drip, letting him begin to come back to himself. “Thank God you’re here. I was in an accident.”
“What happened, Nathan?” Her voice again, high and soft. “Oh, your poor face. Thank goodness you’re all right.”
I stood just inside the lab and listened to them talk. Martine put on an incredible performance: the worried wife, who hadn’t heard from her husband in a few days. She kept saying his name, kept reminding him about how he’d been in the mountains for a few months on a solo trip, a last long trip away from home before the baby came. She layered her fingerprint on top of mine and pressed down until the ridges and whorls were deep enough to stay.
I looked over my lab—tungsten tables, tall tempered-glass tanks, massive fume hood, autopsy table, cabinets. All of it was scarred by this. Martine and Seyed and Nathan. All of them had carved their initials into my lab. This place would never be mine again, because some part of it would always, always be theirs.
Ours.
I had never wanted anything to beours. At least, not with Martine or Seyed. And not with this version of Nathan. Not with the version of him that was relieved to see Martine. Not with the version of him that liked her better.
“Who’s your doctor?” Martine asked in a carrying voice.
“I don’t know.” Nathan’s answer came soft. He sounded embarrassed. “I didn’t get her name. She looked like—”
“It’s okay,” Martine said quickly. “I’ll find her. I’ll find out when you can come home.”
She kissed him. It didn’t sound passionate, but it didn’t sound removed, either. When she came out from behind the curtain, she looked around the lab, and in the seconds it took her eyes to find me, I saw it.
She was happy.
She was relieved that he was back. She hadn’t been acting, hadn’t been injecting false affection into her voice. She was gladto see this man again, the man who had kept her trapped under a bell jar of domesticity, the man who had wanted her to look only at him.
She was glad to see him again.
“Okay,” I whispered once she had crossed the lab to me. I put my lips next to her ear, barely breathed the words so that only she would hear them. My heart pounded in my throat, and I tried hard to control my breath so that she would hear my words and not my panic. “Okay. I get it.”
“It’s so good to have him back,” she murmured, her chin bumping my shoulder. “I know you think it’s stupid, but I missed him, I missed him so much, and—”
“Listen.” I cut her off because I couldn’t bear the idea of hearing more. “Listen, I get it. I understand. But he tried to hurt you before, and he might try to do it again.”
“He wouldn’t, I know it,” she said, and the bright hope in her voice struck me hard in the ribs.
“I won’t send you home with him without protection,” I said. The idea took shape faster than blinking, forming in my mind as though I’d set an electric current into the amnio of my mind. “But there’s a solution. A killswitch. It’s easy. I do it all the time. The people who…” I hesitated, then realized I was hesitating because what I was going to tell Martine might hurt her. It felt like weakness, that consideration. “The people who use clones want a way to get rid of them without getting messy.”
