Martine couldn’t be pregnant.
Martine was pregnant.
Later, I would kick myself for losing my composure. I should have kept it together. But when Martine came back and sat down, it was still the first thing I said.
“This is impossible.”
She offered me an opportunity to repair the moment, acting as though I hadn’t said anything, trying to pick up the conversation where we had left off.
“As I said—”
But I cut her off. “It isn’t possible,” I repeated. I knew that I was speaking too loudly, but I couldn’t stop myself. I leaned across the table, gripped by feral disbelief. “You can’t get pregnant, you can’t, it’s not—” I cut myself off midsentence, lost in my own indignation.
Martine’s cheeks lifted into a Mona Lisa smile as she rested a palm on her solar plexus. “I am. So, I suppose that I can.”
I shook my head, staring openly at Martine’s midsection. “It’s impossible,” I whispered. “It’s impossible.” I ran numbers in my head, reviewed data, tried to find the place where I’d failed, but I couldn’t find the hole that had let this through. How? How? How?
Martine’s face didn’t harden, not exactly. It set, though, just like an egg yolk firming from easy to medium. She was still open, still welcoming, but I was spending her goodwill at a rapid pace, and it showed.
“I wanted to ask you some questions,” she started again, but I held up a hand. I couldn’t do questions. I couldn’t do anything until I figured out how this had happened—where my work had unraveled. How she had undermined it so thoroughly.
“You don’t understand,” I said, trying to buy time.
“I understand perfectly,” Martine said, her voice one degree above cool.
“No,” I snapped, as impatient with her as I ever got with the incompetent assistants I’d run through before Seyed. “You don’t understand. Nathan could go to prison. I could go to prison. This is—this is highly unethical, this is illegal, this is—”
“A miracle,” Martine said. Her smile was beatific. She was glowing. I wanted to incinerate her.
“No,” I hissed, looking around the room. “You can’t be pregnant. Clones can’t get pregnant.”
Martine smoothed her blouse over her belly again. “It would seem,” she said, her smile fading, “that we can.”
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The remainder of my tea date with Martine had not gone well. I’ve never liked the idea of “needing” a drink—it made me feel too much like my father—but if there was any time that felt like the right time to bend to “needing” a drink, it was now.
I jabbed a pair of scissors into the packing tape sealing a cardboard box, three layers of it. The scissors sank through the packing tape and into the tissue paper inside with a satisfying finality. There was something absolute in the sensation of driving the blade into the box, something primal and honest. I sliced through the tape, then yanked at the cardboard, tearing some of it with the strength of my grip. All around me, other boxes labeled KITCHEN were half-dissected, paper and bubble wrap streaming out of their open tops.
When it became clear that Nathan was going to stay with Martine, I had hired a service to pack up my things. The service was cheap, but it had labeled the boxes by room, which was useful. The movers hadn’t made any small talk, hadn’t asked any questions; they’d just come in and wrapped everything I owned in gray paper, sealed up the boxes with what seemed like too much tape, and taken a check from me without any fanfare at all.
I plunged my arm down into the nest of packing paper and felt the thrill of victory as my fingers met with cool, thick glass. Finally. I withdrew my arm, my fist clasped tight around the neck of a dark-green wine bottle. I twisted my elbow to read the label. It wasn’t a special bottle of wine, wasn’t one I’d been saving for any kind of occasion. It was just the first one I found in the mountain of still-packed kitchen things, which meant that it was perfect. Another dive into the same box surfaced a corkscrew with a folding knife attached to cut through the foil on the neck of the bottle, and I uncorked the wine with savage urgency.
In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever thought he wouldn’t choose her. She was perfect—everything he wanted. He made her that way. He must have thought he’d never have to decide between us, but when it came down to it, she was the thing he wanted.
It wasn’t just that Martine was pregnant. That was hard to take in, sure, but it would have been hard no matter what, even if she’d just been some woman Nathan had run off with. Even if she’d been a fling he’d had, the pregnancy would have stung—the permanence of it, the undeniable evidence of his betrayal.
But it wasn’t that.
Martine shouldn’t have been able to get pregnant.
It shouldn’t have been possible.
Nathan had somehow found a way to circumvent the sterility that was built in to the entire framework of duplicative cloning. It was one of the things that made my work legal and ethical: each duplicative clone was an island, incapable of reproduction, isolated and, ultimately, disposable. It was bedrock.
Clones don’t have families.
But somehow, Nathan—Nathan, the coward, the failure, who had abandoned industry for academia nearly a decade before, who shouldn’t have been able to even approach the level of work I was doing—somehow, Nathan had found a way to undermine that principle. To undermine my principles.
If only it could have just been those things. If it had just been those things, I could have kept my composure. If it had just been those things, I wouldn’t have said what I said.
But no. It was everything, all of it together, all at once. None of this was happening to me suddenly, but it still felt like a slap. I poured wine into the same mug I’d been hand-washing and reusing for the week prior. I didn’t bother putting the cork back into the bottle—I just sat down on the floor with the mug full of wine clutched in both hands.
I drank fast, not registering the taste. A text message to Seyed—not feeling well, be home the rest of today, see you tomorrow—and another drink, slower this time. I set my phone on the floor next to my knee, leaned my head back against the wall, and forced myself to look the thing right in the face.
What broke me ran deeper than the professional insult, deeper than the knowledge that Nathan had gotten Martine pregnant while we were still living under the same roof. What broke me was the knowledge that, as it turned out, he hadn’t just created Martine to exercise a fantasy. He hadn’t just created her to be an easier version of his wife, a version who had the time and patience for him that I didn’t have.
I’d known that part already, the part about how Martine was a more navigable rendition of me. I’d absorbed that blow months before, when I first found her, during the screaming sobbing fights that defined the end of my marriage. But now, this new facet: Apparently, Nathan had created Martine to do what I wouldn’t do for him. What I’d refused outright, what I’d gone to great lengths to prevent. What I thought he’d stopped wanting a long time ago, when I’d made it clear that I wasn’t going to budge.
Nathan had created Martine so that he could have a family.