Page 57 of The Echo Wife
They were specimens, subjects, bodies, corpses, cadavers, failures, data points. They were biowaste.
But to Nathan, they had been women.
He hadn’t created them with a single function in mind. They weren’t there to absorb bullets, grow organs, host experimental therapies. They were supposed to be wives. He had created them to live alongside him. Incomplete lives, maybe, but he probably hadn’t seen it that way. He’d bought a house, and clothes, and rose bushes for the garden. He’d been trying to make a home and a life with each one of the clones he built, just like he’d tried to make a home and a life with me.
There wasn’t a notebook with my name on it. But the reality was that Nathan hadn’t thought of me as a different kind of thing than the specimens he buried in his backyard. To him, we were all iterations of the same experiment. We were all vehicles to carry his dreams.
There hadn’t been twelve attempts prior to Martine. There had been thirteen.
I was his first failure.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
The baby needed so much more from Martine than I could have anticipated. I trailed around the house with the two of them as Martine and I talked about the truth of the man she’d lived with for nearly her entire life. Martine strapped Violet into some complicated tangle of fabric, one that let her wear the baby like a shirt. She said something to me about the necessity of skin-to-skin contact in development, the importance of early bonding.
I like to think that my study of infant development was comprehensive. It was certainly comprehensive enough that I’m capable of building a functional person from raw materials. But I wondered, then, what I was missing. Martine used phrases I’d never encountered, ideas that I now recognize as being part of the attachment theory she’d read about in the books I brought her while we lived together. She’d studied ideas that I’d dismissed as infant-oriented, as too simplistic, as behavioral rather than physiological.
She asked me if I had ever explored the long-term effect of isolation on my clones in their earliest stages of cognitive development. She asked me if I had ever considered letting them meet each other in their first few hours out of sedation.
She asked me if I was sure that they never remembered their conditioning.
I asked her questions in return, and she answered them with a greater degree of patience than I’d ever shown her in the lab. She turned out to have studied harder than I’d realized. She described a vast labyrinth of interweaving parenting models to me, describedthe theories behind each, explained the logic behind several of the choices she’d made. “I never had parents,” she explained, and hearing her voice was like listening to a taped version of one of my own lectures. She was confident, authoritative.
Certain.
“I don’t have my own model to work from. I don’t have any built-in ideas about what works and what doesn’t.”
She stroked the back of Violet’s head through the swathe of cloth that held it upright. With her other hand, she held up a finger, then turned and vanished back toward the nursery. When she returned, she was holding a yellow notebook with her own name on the cover.
“Actually,” she murmured, “I might be wrong about that.” She tossed the notebook onto the kitchen island, the same one where she’d been cutting onions the night the original Nathan had died. “Nathan programmed me with ideas about what’s important and what’s not. He gave me my priorities.” She drummed her fingers on the notebook cover, chewed her lip in a twitchy way that I didn’t recognize. A new habit she’d picked up in the time since I’d last seen her. Her eyes had gone distant. I waited as she studied the cover, tracing the ascender in the letter M over and over. Finally, she nodded, her decision made. “I’m reading it,” she said.
“Is that a good idea?” I asked.
She nodded again, and it was the kind of authoritative gesture that didn’t leave room for disagreement. “Yes,” she said. “It is a good idea. That’s why I’m going to do it.”
She didn’t offer any explanation, didn’t leave any spaces into which I could wedge doubt. I felt caught in a strange trap of my own making—I’d wanted to argue with her, wanted to undermine her certainty enough that I might then be able to change her mind. But she wasn’t prepared to have her mind changed.
She wasn’t talking likeher. She was talking likeme.
In that moment, she was subtly demanding that I treat her as though she knew what she wanted. As though she didn’t have any need for my approval. On some level, I’d still been thinkingof her as a child; she was asking me to extend her at least some measure of the respect I might show to a peer.
So I did. I asked her to help me understand her reasoning.
“I want to know why I’m making the choices I’m making,” she said, stroking the long hummock of Violet’s swaddled back. “It’s about Violet, but it’s also not. I’m just—” She peeked under the edge of the cloth, smiled at the baby’s face, and let the cloth fall back into place. When she looked back up at me, there was something arranged about her expression. Her resolve was formal, practiced. “I know that I’m responding to my programming a lot of the time, but I want to feel like I’m deciding whether or not to let it guide me.” She gave her head a tiny shake and tried again. “No. I don’t just want tofeellike I’m deciding. I want todecide. I have a choice, and I’m going to exercise it.”
All at once, I understood why she was being so formal, so rigid. Why she seemed prepared for a fight.
She was going to do something that went against my work.
But I hadn’t been the one to program her. I could have argued that it didn’t matter what she did, because if she managed to make decisions that went against her programming, then it was a sign of Nathan’s poor craftsmanship, and nothing more.
I would have been lying to myself.
Nathan had done good work in Martine, and if she succeeded in bucking off her programming, she would be proving that my methods weren’t ironclad.
She was going to try to prove that she was her own person.
