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She sleeps facing away, just like she’s always done. I’m used to it now, used to the warmth of a body nearby I barely want to touch at the best of times. I wake up twitching away from her in my sleep, when our bodies drift closer, and sometimes I lay awake late into the night, eyes on her back, the curve of her neck.
To call her beautiful would be lying. She’s like a mirror, like my reflection climbed out of a mirror while I was distracted and grew a voice. But she’s why I’m here, now, in my parents’ house. She tends a garden with parameters, teaches Violet how to water her roses and avoid the northwest corner. We count the weeks and make it work
At the end of each month, I pack Violet’s bag the night before our drive to the city, and leave it on the counter for Martine to repack in the morning. She always adds extra toys, as if Nathan doesn’t still have most of Violet’s toys from before. I don’t remind her, and I try not to snap when she fusses over Violet’s car seat. I do, though, sometimes; I’m eager to continue my work, to have our week alone.
It’s easy to forget how similar we are, sometimes. Violet is always still, always staring when I hold her, but Martine’s shadow falls like my mother’s silhouette, and in it Violet blooms. In the kitchen, her aprons are a perfect fit, and her hands, so often ink-stained and hungry for knowledge, hold Violet with a care I can’t remember in my mother’s fingers. Somehow she knows her mother, in a way I no longer know mine, and I try not to hold it against her.
My work plods slowly; when Violet is at her father’s, Martine gives me samples, prepares slides, even samples soporifics that I develop specifically for her. Things like narcotics work as expected, but leave us both with a bad taste; an addiction wouldn’t serve her, and they’re expensive to synthesis. Still, the first time she tests one before bed, she wakes up at ten AM the next day with the look of someone who has finally known rest.
When Nathan asks about how my work is going, I smile tightly and keep my mouth shut. I’ve learnt my lesson about trusting people too readily, especially him. The trees in the backyard flower on the bodies of my dead sisters, and though he doesn’t realize I know about them, any trust that existed between us died the first day I saw Martine’s face. He gives me a basket of apples when I come to retrieve Violet, small, green things from the trees in the graveyard backyard, and when I leave I ‘accidentally’ leave them on the countertop with Violet’s empty bottle.
It would make sense, me being scared of Nathan. After what he’d done, it would make sense if his face made my skin crawl. But he’s here in the city, where I’ve left him, where for a few weeks a year he struggles through the difficulty he’d begged and eventually forced me to provide: the difficulty of being a parent. I wonder what will happen when Violet goes to school, when Violet wants a job. Without telling either Martine or Nathan, I begin to research birth certificates.
There are photos of Violet in the shed I’ve transformed into my lab. We hung them from necessity, so that when Martine gets to missing her daughter, she can reassure herself without leaving the lab to smell her blankets or hold her toys. I grow used to them, like the requisite photo of Nathan I kept on my lab desk for so many years, and after awhile I stop noticing when Martine goes quite with missing her while we work.
Martine flourishes. She stops looking to me for approval, for permission in her daily tasks. She develops a taste for food that I find far too spicy, and for nail polish and home maintenance. It’s needed, I suppose. In the thirty years or more since anyone has lived in this house, things have begun to fail, and the termites in the walls have begun to make themselves known.
Maybe once a week, Martine hands me Violet and asks me to take her for a walk in the stroller, because she’s going to repair the leak in the roof, or re-stain a bit of floor that has water damage. We can’t call repair people without some planning on which of us will work with them under my name, so Martine uses my library card and the computer in the den to figure out what tools and supplies she needs make the house her home.
She’s growing, learning lab safety and complex vocabulary and techniques I didn’t touch till I was in graduate school. Like a child I received half-raised, Martine quickly becomes someone who no longer looks like me, with her own opinions and dislikes and preferences. Our appointments become debates, become requests for deeper research and a comparing of notes. Gradually, she becomes an equal to me in a way few have ever been.
One night I wake up with her hands on me, and when I open my eyes to her face peering down at me it takes a moment for my struggle to stop. Her face, my own face above me, it echoes behind my eyelids, reiterated in countless pallid, lifeless replicas, covered in grave dirt and lime. As I return fully to consciousness, I realize I can count them, I have counted them. Twelve of us, food for the apples on Nathan’s counter.
It takes several minutes for me to understand that Martine isn’t covered in dirt. That Martine is crouched in my bed, trying to wake me, that she is talking, reassuring me as if I were Violet jerking awake in the night.
When I can sit and breathe without sobbing, I leave the bed. I tell her not to wait up, and I go out to the garden.
Missing my father does not mean I want him back. Missing our appointments does not prevent me from opening my textbooks or completing my research. Still, in the garden I stand and face the back wall of the house for a long time, and I think.
The sky is gray with dawn before I slip from my reverie, and inside the house I can hear Martine comforting Violet, singing to her. Preparing her for another morning.
The sound twists something in me, grows sour in my throat. In that moment I would do anything to be here alone, to be unknown, to have left Violet behind with Nathan and Martine in that empty house she had unpacked so diligently for me. I can’t stand the sound of their easy love, in the house of my childhood, so I turn and walk deeper into the woods. By the time the sky is pink I’ve left the house far behind, and I wander deeper till I know Martine will be wondering where I’ve gone.
Let her wonder, I think. I spend the morning in the woods, yawning back exhaustion and contemplating the trees. “You’ve probably never been cloned,” I tell one beech, touching its rough bark. A mosquito stings my neck, and I laugh. Deep in the woods here, sunlight filtering through the trees like so much amber, I feel for the dead insects John Hammond disturbed; but, I know, even that isn’t necessary for a reproductive clone.
The door to my shed is open when I return. I approach slowly, listening, and from inside I catch a few words— “..not a toy… and this is for sample collection…” – and the sound of Violet’s exuberant babble.
I go back into the house, change my clothes, take a shower. I don’t speak to Martine until lunch, and then I don’t tell her what happened, where I went. We don’t talk about the nightmare, and she tells me that Violet never touched a thing in my shed. Good, I think. “Of course,” I say. We move on.
That night, when I climb into bed, she climbs in on the other side, slips under the covers, curls up facing away. After a moment, she edges closer, till our backs touch, and stays there.
I think about our shared pseudo-sisters, buried in Nathan’s back yard, strangers all to the three of us who survived. I think about the nights of takeout with Sayed, about the sapphire necklace Nathan gave me on our wedding day.
I think about Martine, in scrubs, carefully conditioning Nathan into a husband she’d hoped, like me, to keep. I think about her focus, the focus on her face as she gave Nathan road rash for a second time.
I let her stay there. When I wake in the small hours, our breathing has synced, and I cannot hear her at all.