Page 55 of The Echo Wife
I could see without having to look closely that her mouth was full of earth. I didn’t want to know that, but it was the kind of thing that makes itself immediately apparent. The hang of her jaw, and the rich thick darkness behind her teeth—I knew without thinking, and that’s not the kind of knowledge one can just let go of. I looked at her mouth and the smell of turned earth was so rich in the yard that I choked on the taste of it.
One of her arms was behind her, flung back as if in a stretch. Her hand almost touched the outstretched fingers of the next corpse.
I could see it in my mind clearer than anything—Martinefinding the first body, digging her up, brushing dirt away from her face. Uncovering that second set of fingers, lifting her shovel again, and then again, and then again, angry and afraid, how many are there? I could picture her hoeing this awful row with increasing speed, harvesting the nightmare of it. These dozen lifeless faces hidden beneath her roses, some of them half-rotted, some of them choked with soil, all of them identical to hers. This strange family she’d never met.
Her secret lifeless sisters.
I made my way from the first corpse to the last. Martine had barely uncovered this last one, the furthest from the house; it was just a loose mound of earth next to a spill of white-blond hair and a chin. If not for the other bodies, I would have mistaken it for a protrusion of roots next to a paving stone. I would have walked right past her.
I crouched down and brushed at the half-turned earth. It looked as though it had hardly taken any digging at all to get to her. Something in me bucked at the improbability of it, demanded that I acknowledge it as a hoax. She was rightthere,superficial enough that someone could havetrippedover her. How long had she been so close to the surface of the soil? How could she have been so shallowly tucked into the earth, but still hidden?
“I had to stop there,” Martine said from her place next to the house. “I called you after I found that last one. I couldn’t… I couldn’t keep going.”
I swept my hand across the dirt one last time, uncovered the awful meat of the clone’s face. She was much further gone than the first body, most of her flesh missing. She was harder to recognize as a human thing.
Eddies of loam-smell drifted up around me as I shifted the soil. I swallowed hard.
Focus, Evelyn. Focus. That’s the way.
“She’s wrong,” I muttered to myself, and then I said it again to Martine, louder. “She’s all wrong. Here, come see.”
Martine had changed since we met, but not so much that shedidn’t come to me when I called her. She didn’t hesitate, didn’t object. I listened to her approach, her footsteps light through the freshly ruined section of her garden, and then she was there next to me, ready to look at what I wanted her to see.
Should I say that it occurred to me that she might not want to see? Should I pretend that it was a consideration? I wanted her to look with me, wanted her to understand what I understood. I didn’t want to be the only one who knew what Nathan had done. I could keep my own secrets, but I didn’t want to keep his. Not this one.
“Look,” I said, and I used my middle finger to trace the air just above the spiral of the rotted specimen’s exposed jawbone. It twisted like the central spire of a shell, dozens of teeth forming a long ridged spine along the outer contour of the helix.
“What,” Martine said, and then she didn’t say anything else. She reached out her own hand, touched the bare white bone with her fingertips where the flesh had sloughed away.
“She’s wrong,” I said. “She came out wrong. She’s a failed attempt.” I looked along the row of partially exposed bodies, and as they came into focus, my loose understanding of the situation took solid form in my mind. I straightened up and walked along the row, looking closer this time, stopping in a few places to expose the specimens more thoroughly.
Each of them was, in some way, wrong. The ones furthest from the house were worse, more obvious blunders. One had a chest that was caved-in; I recognized the shape from my own early failures, a problem with the development of cartilage and collagen. Another looked hollow, deflated: her bones had never set. I used my hands to scoop soil away from the legs of a third, and I saw the purple weblike mottling of too-tight fascia. A growth-rate failure. I went on down the row, finding all of Nathan’s hidden mistakes.
Only the last body, the fully unearthed one, looked like a true success. Something, I knew, had been unsatisfactory to Nathan—something about her hadn’t turned out the way he wanted it to.It could have been anything. Her voice, her programming, her imprinting. Her fertility.
Nathan hadn’t liked the way she turned out, so he had killed her, buried her with the others, and started over again.
I counted the bodies out by letter. There were a dozen of them. A through L.
“Martine,” I whispered. “You were his thirteenth try.”
A swell of noise rose from inside the house. Martine looked away from me, up at a half-open window, toward the rising wail.
The baby was awake.
We should have examined Nathan’s personal files before we attempted to program him.
I can take responsibility for that error. With the clarity of hindsight, I can see how I rushed things. Digging Nathan up and taking a core sample and rushing off to the lab to get started on his replacement—it was all too fast, too sloppy, predicated on the assumption that I knew enough to proceed, when really, the very fact of Martine’s existence should have demonstrated to me that I didn’t have the contours of Nathan’s interiority fully mapped.
I didn’t know all of his secrets. Neither did Martine.
Taken together, our view of the man Nathan had been was a more comprehensive picture than either of us could see individually—but we had missed so much. This huge window of time and energy and focus in which he had been hiding an ambition, a secret, aproject.
We hadn’t known, and we hadn’t thought to look. It was an unforgivable oversight driven by desperation, and reinforced by our own hubris. We knew that we didn’t know everything about Nathan, but we imagined that we knew him well enough.
We were wrong.
Before the pregnancy, Martine told me as she led me into the house, the nursery served as Nathan’s home office. It had always been a temporary accommodation, she said, looking over hershoulder at me, her pace quickening as the baby’s cry grew frantic. “I’ve been getting that room ready my whole life.”
