It was like handling a doll. Martine was mute, pale-lipped. Her eyes stared right through the wall in front of her. I unzipped the blood-soaked dress and let it fall to the floor, a stiff puddle around Martine’s ankles. Her underwear was nice, obviously expensive: black lace with white stitching. I heard the echo of my own voice in the tea shop: What are you for?
I eased Martine’s lingerie off, touching her skin as little as possible in the process. I tried not to look at the gentle swell of her belly, or the way her nipples were the kind of dark and full that comes with pregnancy. I led my clone by the arm, helped her step over the lip of the tub, and guided her under the spray. She shivered, and I turned the hot water a little higher.
“There,” I said, watching the water around Martine’s feet turn pink, ignoring the water that was soaking my own shirtsleeves. My vision narrowed to the swirl of blood around the drain. I blinked hard. “That’s better. Can you wash?”
She nodded silently, but she didn’t move until I handed her a bottle of exfoliating soap. She scrubbed at herself mechanically, the dark brown of drying blood giving way to pink skin.
She didn’t have any of the freckles or scars that I did. Her skin was smooth, unblemished, hairless. She didn’t even have stretch marks.
I stared at the woman my husband had wanted, and I saw all the ways in which she was nothing like me. Another corner cut: Nathan had neglected her conditioning.
But then, maybe that wasn’t an accident. Why would he want a wife with a scar on her knee, when he could have a wife without one? Why would he take the time and care to break her wrist and splint it just a little crooked? It wasn’t another me that he was after. Martine was something—someone—else altogether.
She was the woman Nathan had been looking for. Had he been looking for her all along? Had I been a rough draft?
She didn’t stop scrubbing until I reached in and laid a hand on her wrist. “That’s enough. You’re all done.”
Martine turned once in the water, rinsing the last of the soap from her arms and face. She reached down to turn off the tap, her arms and hands moving slowly, her grip weak.
I wrapped her in a purple towel. She shivered in my arms, trembling under the terry cloth with her eyes squeezed shut tight.
“I do want this,” she was whispering. “More than anything. I just wanted to know if it was my choice. That’s all. I swear.”
“I know,” I murmured, using a foot to shove Martine’s blood-soaked clothes behind the toilet and out of sight. They left a faint pink smear across the tile. “I believe you.”
“I swear,” she said again. “I swear.”
I left Martine sitting on the edge of her bed wrapped in the towel, staring at her hands. I needed to leave before the crying began. I could deal with a lot of things, but I didn’t have the patience for her tears.
Martine would need to weep alone.
When I got to the kitchen, Nathan was still dead.
I looked at his unmoving back, and I didn’t see the person I’d slept beside for the better part of a decade. So long as he was facedown, he could have been any corpse at all.
I stepped around the blood on the floor and took it in, the scene somehow absurdly small and simple: an onion next to the cutting board, stripped of its papery skin, waiting for a knife. A plastic-wrapped package of chicken thighs next to the stove. The knife block on its side, knocked over in what must have been Nathan’s haste to stab Martine. And then, of course, the blood.
When I’m training lab assistants on conditioning, I make them watch as I throw a vial of blood on the ground. Ten cc’s—less than a tablespoon—but when it’s on the floor, it looks catastrophic. I teach them not to freeze at what seems to be a high volume of blood. I teach them how much blood a specimen can lose during conditioning before they should start to worry. I inoculate them to the panic that comes naturally at the sight of blood spreading across cloth, across tile, across steel.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about blood volume in the course of my research. The numbers are always at the front of my mind. Nathan was an adult man: he had twelve pints in him, give or take. He was dead, not just unconscious. Dead, which meant that there were at least six pints on the kitchen floor. Maybe more.
I thought of the many nights we’d spent at our favorite dive bar in the early days of our relationship, downing pitchers of weak beer and playing darts and talking about the future we were going to shape together. The conversions came so reflexively that they were almost comforting: Six pints on the ground. Three and three-quarters pints in a pitcher. A little less than two pitchers of blood on the ground, then. It doesn’t seem like so much, put that way. Not even two full pitchers.
Still. He looked so small. He was so empty.
I looked at him, and at the blood, and I waited for grief to strike me down. I was sure that it would hit me at some point. For all that I was furious at him—for all that I hated what he’d done and who he’d become—he was still my husband. I had stood across from him on a Saturday afternoon, in front of all of our friends and all of his family, wearing a dress and the jewelry he’d given me. I had tied my life to his. I could smell my own grief, distant, like the first hint of smoke on the wind.
But it wasn’t on me yet. All I could see was his back, and his blood, and the only thing I needed to feel just then was the weight of the task ahead.
I couldn’t call the police. That much was obvious; the consequences would have been ruinous. At a minimum, my research funding would be frozen while an ethics committee investigated the fact that the impregnable clone model had been undermined. And I would be publicly humiliated. The scientific community would forget that I had ever been a luminary of the industry, a pioneer, a genius.
They would instead remember me as the woman whose husband had used her own research to make a better version of her.
Aside from that, there was the sheer impossibility of proving what had happened. If Martine decided to lie, there was no way for an investigation to show beyond a doubt that she was the one who had murdered Nathan. We had the same DNA. And who, a small voice in my mind asked, has the obvious motive to kill him? Who took a car here? Which of you is crying because he’s dead, and which one is cleaning up?
No. Turning Martine over to the authorities simply wasn’t a viable option.
I threw the chicken into the trash—who knew how long it had been sitting out?—and returned the onion to the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, considering my options.
At the lab, specimens were cremated along with the medical waste, but oversight was too intense down in Disposals for me to toss in an extra corpse. I tried to remember things I’d seen in crime dramas on television, and the mistakes people made in novels, the drunken late-night conversations I’d had with friends about the best way to hide a body. People always brought up the idea of feeding the body to pigs, as though there were a pig farm on every goddamn corner.
I left him lying on his face as I discarded possible solutions. There was no reason to turn him over. Not until it was time. I was scrubbing the knife when Martine came in.
“You’re still here.” She stood in the doorway. Her hair was tucked under a kerchief. It made her look more like me. “I thought you’d gone.”
I blinked at her a few times. It hadn’t even occurred to me. She had called—I had answered. I was here.