Page 68 of The Echo Wife

Past the orchard, the road narrows even further. It turns sharply left, then right, and then we’re there.

We’re home.

Violet almost always wakes when the car begins to crunch over the gravel of the long driveway. I drive over it slowly, passing between roses. Some of them are old and tangled, the bushes that my mother tended, but they’ve grown stubborn and leggy in her absence. Some of them are new, Martine’s, grown from cuttings she asked me to bring her.

I try to bring her whatever she asks for, within reason.

Violet is always awake by the time I park the car, all the way at the end of the driveway. She doesn’t cry right away, just makes little snuffling noises, soft vocalizations, like practice for talking. Once I lift her out of her car seat, she quiets, goes silent and watchful the way she always does in my arms. I carry her on one side, carry my handbag on the other.

I’m better at holding her than Nathan is.

It’s the same every time I bring her back from one of her visits with the man who thinks he’s her father. I park the car, and I get the baby from the backseat, and by the time the car is locked again, the front door to the house is open. Martine stands silhouetted there, waiting for us, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. She waits as we walk up the path to the door, white-knuckled, eager.

I give Violet to her right away. Regardless of what it isconvenient for Nathan to think, I am not eager to spend more time holding the baby than necessary. And Martine can hardly stand to be apart from Violet for an entire week; she frets and frays the entire time the baby is gone. It’s better for everyone this way. I hand her the baby, and she smiles, occasionally cries a little.

Then we go inside, and we close the front door behind us, and we are alone together, the three of us.

Martine has made the house into a place I can bear to live. It’s nice, the things she’s done with it. I brought her here a month ahead of my own move, let her settle in and get the place ready while I wrapped things up at home and negotiated my transition at work. It was a relief, really, unburdening myself of incompetent assistants and nagging oversight and labyrinthine ethical reviews.

I used the same service to pack up my house that I had used a year before. They remembered me.

By the time I moved to the house fifty miles outside the city, Martine had turned it into something like a home. She’d uncovered all the furniture, rearranged most of it, beaten out the carpets and divested the rafters of cobwebs. She’d even gotten into the garden a bit. I warned her to leave the northwest corner alone, the part of the garden that came closest to the walls of the house, and she didn’t ask me why. She just listened.

She doesn’t touch that part of the garden, and she doesn’t touch the study.

When I get home, I give her Violet. This is the bargain Martine and I have struck: While the baby is home, they can spend as much time together as Martine wants to take. Whenever Violet is awake, they’re together, and I don’t interfere, not much. I have my work to attend to, anyway.

And when Violet is asleep, or at her father’s house, Martine’s time is mine. That’s what I proposed to her, when I found myself in a position to deny Nathan my help. “No more fugue state nonsense,” I told her. “You’ll snap out of this Havisham shit. You’ll be a real person again, yes?”

She’d nodded, her brow knit, her fingers twisting together so tight that I looked away. “Yes, of course, anything,” she said.

I’d folded my hands in front of me, because that was the word I’d wanted to hear.Anything.And it’s worked out beautifully for everyone. Violet gets to be around her mother for weeks at a time, and Martine gets to see her baby. I get a tireless research assistant and a cooperative research subject all in one.

I’m going to figure out how Martine happened. I’m going to figure out how Nathan made a fertile clone, and I’m going to figure out how she broke her programming. We’re already making great strides.

I walk through the bottom of the house while they greet each other. I listen to the soft noises they make at each other, the low conversation Martine has with the baby she thought she would never get back after leaving Nathan behind. The house smells like food, usually—Martine cooks while I drive to the city and back. She likes to have dinner ready by the time I get home, likes to have a fire lit.

The old couch in the living room is gone. There’s a new one, a couch that I bought. There isn’t a single memory attached to it. I don’t think about it at all, and the not-thinking-about-it is a relief I cannot begin to describe.

I get home, and I walk through the bottom story of the house I grew up in, the one Martine has turned into a place for the three of us. At night, I walk up the stairs, planting my feet in the center of each step, and go to our bedroom to sleep. The baby is in my childhood bedroom, now a nursery, decorated to Martine’s tastes. Martine and I are in my parent’s old bedroom, a new mattress on an old bedframe, and at night, we sleep with our backs to each other. Sometimes I wake up in the night and hear her breathing; more often, I wake up and can’t hear her breathing at all. I can’t hear it because it’s too perfectly synced with my own.

Between coming home and going to bed, though, I need to work. There’s so much to do, so much to learn. I’m working onsetting up an actual lab in the backyard shed—it won’t be nearly the same quality as the one I fought so hard for, but it’s mine, just mine, and it will have to do. Some of the hacked-together qualities of it remind me of my grad school days, the rickety old equipment and hand-me-down machines. It’s romantic, really.

While I get the lab into shape, though, and while Martine and Violet are cooing at each other, there’s still work to do. So much work. And so, once Martine has the baby in her arms, I proceed directly to my study.

I sit behind the desk, now, not in front of it. I’ve removed my father’s things, replaced them with my own. His pens and notepads and paperweights sit in a box in the corner of the room—I’ll sort through them later, when there’s time. When more pressing matters have been dealt with.

I sit in my study, and I close the door. Martine knows not to disturb me while I’m working, unless it’s to bring me dinner. I try not to work through dinner too often—we sit at the dining table, eat together like a family should. But sometimes, I have no other choice, and Martine brings me a warm plate to keep me going as I work. She knows to be quiet while I’m working, too, and to keep the baby as quiet as she can. She knows I need to be able to concentrate.

There is one exception to this rule. Once a week—every week, no matter what—Martine puts the baby down for the night, then knocks on the door to my study. I tell her to come in, and she does, and she sits in the chair on the other side of my desk. She brings a notepad with her. It’s filled with questions, every time. Questions about things she’s been reading, things she doesn’t understand or hasn’t quite put together yet, things I’ve done to her in the course of my research.

This time, once a week, is her time to ask those questions. I answer her as best I can. My father’s hourglass is in the box in the corner. I have no need of the hourglass, because Martine gets more than an hour from me. I answer her questions until the answering’s done, or until the baby wakes.

I’m not a monster.

It’s a good life we’ve made here. I have my work, and my space. Martine has Violet. We may not know many people, but it’s all right. We’re happy here, in this home we’ve made.

It’s better this way. We’re better this way. We have everything we need.

The more I think about it, the more I’m sure that there’s no reason at all why things should ever have to change.