I thought he’d given up on all that. But as it turned out, he hadn’t given up on that dream at all. He had just given up on me.
I drank wine down like medicine and I tried not to regret the things I’d said to Martine. I tried not to feel the cruelty of my words. It had been wrong to say the things I said, I knew that, but it had felt good in the way that vomiting felt good sometimes. It had felt right, getting that poison out of my belly.
You’re not even a real person.
You’re just a science experiment.
You’re just a declawed version of me.
Martine had looked hurt. Shocked, even. It probably wasn’t in her framework to say things that were cruel just for the sake of saying them. Nathan wouldn’t have put that into her patterning. It was one of the things he’d always hated about me. My “needless venom,” he’d called it. “You’re like a hornet,” he’d told me dozens of times, “stinging just because you can.”
After I left Martine at the tea shop, I sat on the floor of my condo with only that wine bottle for company, digging deep into the bruise.
I could have turned away from it, but I was feeling flattened and sad, and, masochistically, I wanted to feel sadder. I wanted to get all the way to the bottom of the hurt, to let the weight of it crush the breath from my lungs. So I let myself curl up around it.
I thought that if I could just cry, maybe I could let go of the anger that had driven me to say such awful things to Martine. I meant the things I said, that was the worst part. Even the cruelest thing, the thing I knew I’d said only because I couldn’t bite it back in time: Why do you think you exist? What are you even for?
Martine had rested her hands on her belly, taking the stream of abuse with placid neutrality, until that last one. Her face had crumpled, and I stormed out, not wanting to see my clone shed the tears that I hadn’t been able to muster.
Toward the end of our marriage, Nathan had switched from calling me a hornet to the simpler, more straightforward mode of calling me a bitch. The former stuck with me more than the latter. Partly because it was more unique: I’d been called a bitch any number of times, occasionally for good reason.
Nathan hadn’t been calling me a bitch for any good reason—he had been calling me a bitch the way a cornered dog growls, hoping it will seem bigger if it makes a noise.
I’m embarrassed, still, by how long it took me to notice. Everything was right there in the open, right there in front of me, but it still took me so long to see the person I had married.
It took me so long to hate him.
Now, I pressed the bruise again and again—the way Martine’s chin buckled, the way her forehead had ruched into an expression of bewildered hurt. The way her hands had flown from her stomach and settled on the table.
Shame. That’s the thing I had wanted Martine to feel in that moment, and I succeeded. I watched shame sink into the furrows of a face that was exactly, precisely my own, and I felt satisfaction.
The tears still wouldn’t come. It was the same emptiness I’d been trying to work with since I first felt that twist in my belly, staring at my own signature on the sequencing result I got from her errant hair.
My eyes burned, and a pit yawned open at the hollow of my throat, but the tears wouldn’t spill over.
I ran a hand through my hair and let out a long, slow breath. I needed to cry, but every time I got close, something old and deep in my bones echoed a familiar refrain: Quit crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.
I couldn’t overcome that directive, no matter how hard I tried.
Another failure.
My phone, still on the floor where I’d left it after texting Seyed, lit up. Nathan Caldwell, the screen said. I knew that if I didn’t answer, I would have to listen to one of his long, rambling voicemails later—no matter how many times I’d told him to just text me, he insisted on leaving messages that were needlessly descriptive and detailed. If I didn’t pick up, I would have to delete it later, would have to decide whether or not to call him back. I clenched my jaw and answered.
The first thing I heard was heavy breathing, wet and ragged. A cough on the other end, a whining intake of breath. This was not Nathan. This was something else. “Who is this?”
“Evelyn?” The voice was not light, was not airy and nonthreatening. It was hoarse, almost a growl. “It’s me. It’s Martine.”
“Are you okay?” I said it automatically—the raw edge of Martine’s voice wicked concern up out of me unbidden.
“Something’s happened. At the house. I need you to come here, please. Now. It’s—it’s an emergency. Please.”
I tried to ask what happened, but Martine had already hung up.
I stared at the phone in my hand, at the open wine bottle on the counter. I didn’t have to go. What right did Martine have to call on me? What right did Martine have to anything? She wasn’t even legally a human being, much less a friend. But then, I thought, Martine had called me. Even after everything I’d said, Martine had called me.
Which meant Martine was alone, too.
I called a car, and by the time I’d gotten my shoes on, it was waiting outside. The afternoon had been freezing. As I stepped out into the thin, pale light of the waning day, sobriety hit me hard in the temple. Not the kind of sobriety that would render me safe behind the wheel of my own car, no—rather, the kind of sobriety that nearly stopped me in my tracks with the weight of reality. It was like waking from a dream, except that the dream and the reality were the exact same thing. Yes, I told myself, forcing my feet to take me to the waiting car. You are walking out of your new town house in order to help the pregnant clone your husband made to replace you. Yes, this is real. Yes, you are doing this.
The car had complimentary bottled water in the backseat. I drank one fast, trying not to notice the taste of the plastic. I rolled down my window and let the cold slap my cheeks, clenched my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering. It was a twenty-minute drive, just long enough for me to feel stupid. I was reading too much into Martine’s tone of voice, I told myself. I didn’t need to go—it was a bad idea to set a precedent like this, that my clone could call me and I would come running. Besides, I told myself, if Martine has an emergency, she should call Nathan. He’s the one who opened that can of worms. It was uncharitable to think of Martine as a can of worms, but it was the truth. If the clone had problems, they were Nathan’s problems. And if Nathan had problems, they were his own. That was the whole point of the divorce.
By the time I tipped my driver, I was mentally composing a speech to give Martine. Something about how I regretted losing my temper at the café, a gentle apology for my behavior. Something acknowledging how that had been wrong of me, but also emphasizing the fact that Martine and I simply could not have a relationship. I would prefer if you live your life and I live mine, I rehearsed in my head. It isn’t healthy for the two of us to know each other, and I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to call me again.
My father’s voice echoed in my memory. There will be no further discussion of this matter. It was the last thing he’d ever said in front of me.
I kept rehearsing as I walked up the paved path that bisected the dew-shining lawn. It isn’t healthy. I took in the house, a lovely gingerbread-looking thing with leaded windows and climbing ivy and a porch swing. It was one story tall, brick and shingles, an English cottage nestled into an immaculate American lawn. I would prefer if. The house was exactly nothing like the home I’d shared with Nathan, which had been modern and easy to clean and then shockingly easy to leave. This was a house for children to play in, for Martine to work hard at keeping clean. I don’t think it’s a good idea. The front porch was wide enough for jack-o’-lanterns to line up on, and the big bay window right in the front would have made a perfect frame for an enormous Douglas fir, whether or not Nathan had decided to start celebrating Christmas.