A Nearly Perfect Copy (43 page)

Marie-Laure came outside. “If you were going to throw things away, I wish you would have asked if anyone else wanted them. Or at least recycled them.”

“Fuck you,” Gabriel said, the words sweet like a whistle in his mouth.

Marie-Laure spun and ran back to the studio.

He took the remainder of his Klinman money and went to Rougier & Plé, spending every last euro, buying more gum erasers than he would ever need just to get rid of all the cash. He had to hire a taxi to take him back to the studio, an expense he hadn’t counted on, but with his purchases spread out before him he felt like he could begin again.

The following two weeks Gabriel walked around filled with anxiety. Now that leaving Paris was a possibility, he gazed at lintels, examined
railings, went for long walks to breathe in the air. Sometimes he found himself smiling at odd moments. Maybe he would win. He was already a finalist. He considered, then rejected, buying an English dictionary.

“Good to have you back, man,” Hans said. “I thought you were angry with me about the show still or something.” Gabriel had accepted his invitation to have a beer. He told Hans about the possible fellowship.

“What are your chances, do you think?” Hans asked him.

“One in five.”

“Ha.”

“I don’t know. I probably won’t get it.”

“Probably not.” Hans paused. Gabriel hit him playfully. “But you might. I mean, no one made
me
a finalist.”

“You’re not a Mediterranean painter.”

“True. It’s harder competition for real countries. With actual economies, I mean.”

Gabriel ignored the jibe. “I don’t think I’ll get it.” But what if he did? It would jump-start his career, end his money problems. Two years in London at the Academy would mean he was really an artist. It was so difficult to hold these two contrary hopes in his head. On the one hand, not getting it would be a comfort. It would confirm what he’d always suspected. But getting it would place him firmly in the artistic elite—he wanted desperately what he had dismissed all his life as false and hollow. He would be the person he’d always hated, the one patronized by Big Art.

He waited around his apartment for the mail, ran several calculations of how long it would take for a letter to get there. They probably met on a Friday, he reasoned. So they’d mail the letters on Monday and it would get there on a Thursday. Unless they met over the weekend. Or if someone on the committee were out of town and they were waiting to meet until the following week. His speculations were pointless, which didn’t dissuade him at all.

Finally, nearly three weeks after the phone call, Gabriel returned home from a lengthy walk during which he’d succeeded in forgetting about the prize for almost thirty minutes as he contemplated what pigeon genitalia might look like to find a letter in his mailbox with an English postmark. It was thin, and someone had taken care to line the stamp up perfectly with the edges of the envelope. The handwriting was
formal, and it gave each part of his address its own line: the number, the street, the apartment, the city, the postal code, the unnecessary
région
, and the country.

He ripped it open so quickly that he tore the letter but still was able to read the first line: “
Félicitations/​Felicidades/​
Congratulations.” It was embossed at the bottom. Gabriel let out a yelp that would make his neighbors check to see who was being assaulted in the lobby. And he would not notice until three days had passed, and he was trying to tape the letter back together, that it listed the board members of the Academy, among whose names was that of Augustus Klinman.

She thought surely he would be back by that evening, but at midnight she gave up waiting and went to bed. He’d be back by the next day. Moira seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation. She went right to bed when asked, and didn’t even angle for a story.

He was right. How did she know that Michel hadn’t simply implanted a random embryo? She certainly couldn’t sue him if the baby wasn’t Ronan. She had just trusted him blindly, the way she trusted Indira. She had confided in the wrong people, and pushed away the right ones, the ones who would have stopped her from this folly.

Elm spent the day examining the CVS results, comparing her blood type to Colin’s to the fetus’s, as if that alone would determine if it was a clone or a scam. She considered calling Michel, but then realized he would simply reassure her, and if he had been lying to her he would continue to lie in his smooth French accent. On Sunday, Colin still wasn’t home. Elm left a message on his phone apologizing, asking if he would please come home just to talk, just for a minute. She wanted to call Ian, but she’d have to explain why Colin had left her. No, this was the bed of her making, and she would have to lie in it alone.

Moira said almost nothing the entire weekend. On Sunday she asked for a playdate, and Elm called up Patty and asked if Moira could go over to her house.

“You look pale,” Patty said when they arrived. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, I’m just worn out,” Elm said. “And I’m a little anemic.”

“Oh, dear. Do you want me to keep her overnight?”

Elm considered, standing in the doorway. The idea of being in her apartment alone was unappealing, but the freedom to weep and sulk and think won out. Elm thanked her, told Moira she was having a sleepover, and kissed her good-bye.

On the way home, a wave of melancholy overtook her, and for the first time since the days just after Ronan died, she considered that she could just disappear. She could take pills, or slit her wrists. No one would find her until it was too late. And then her mistake would die with her. It would upset Moira, of course, but she was young. The young were resilient. And Colin would be angry, but at least she wouldn’t have to live knowing that she’d failed him, that he hated her. If there was a heaven, maybe she could be with Ronan there.

Even as she let these thoughts run their course, she knew she wouldn’t do it. This was suicidal ideation, as her doctor called it. It was about figuring out your place in other people’s lives, and re-upping self-esteem when you realized you were important. That you did matter. Plus, Elm felt strongly that suicide was for the weak. If there were people who cared about you, who depended on you, then you had the obligation to stick it out until the end. She had done this to herself.

Now she wondered if giving birth would even make her happy. She’d been so caught up in the logistics of it, the sheer science fiction of it, she never stopped to consider what her feelings might be once he was here. How could she have been so naïve to have expected that Colin would embrace this charade? That this would solve any of their problems?

On Monday, he sent her a text message: “I’m ok. Wld like to take Moira to dinner. Not ready to talk. 5 ok?”

Moira was excited once she was collected from her friend’s house, baggy eyes revealing how little she’d slept. Elm told her that Daddy was coming home from his business trip early just to see her for a while, and she accepted this, the way children find it perfectly natural that someone would rearrange his schedule and fly across the country just for them.

When the doorbell rang, Elm had a grouchy Moira dressed in the cutest clothes she could find, as though she were presenting an orphan for possible adoption. She had tear streaks on her cheeks; she didn’t want to wear the striped tights, didn’t want to wear tights at all, but Elm
had insisted. Moira flung her fists at her at the same time the baby gave her a jab. She felt she deserved both of these assaults.

Colin was wearing clothes she’d never seen before. Well, of course, he’d had to go shopping. He looked at her as if she’d changed something about her appearance that he couldn’t put his finger on: Had she dyed her hair? Waxed her eyebrows? He wore a look of suspicion that Elm couldn’t meet.

“She’s a little tired,” Elm said by way of hello.

“I am not!” Moira protested.

“She had a sleepover last night.”

“Big girl,” Colin said. He told Moira she looked pretty. “Back by eight,” he said to Elm.

She nodded. When she closed the door on them, she burst into tears.

At work on Wednesday she sat in her office playing solitaire. Her phone didn’t ring, and her e-mail box contained nothing of urgency. She called Colin. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t leave a message. Instead she texted him: “Pls talk.”

An agonizing hour passed while she stared at her phone, stubborn in its silence. Then: “Thurs ok?”

She texted back, “Shd I get sitter?”

“No. After M goes to bed,” he said. “I’ll tuck her.”

By midafternoon, when no one sent her an e-mail, called her, or stopped by, Elm knew the article in the paper must have circulated. The hall outside her office was deserted. If it weren’t for the beeping of the receptionist’s phone and the elevator chime, she might have thought she was the only one in the building.

She had to explain to Wania what was happening. The nanny wouldn’t be content with the business trip story, so Elm said they’d had a large fight. She saw Wania’s eyes widen in disbelief. “Mr. Colin gone then, ya? Him a dogheart.”

Elm couldn’t decide if she should pack him a suitcase, to show respect for his need for space, or whether that would show indifference to his leaving, even encouragement. She stood in the center of her bedroom, looking at a sock he had thrown toward the hamper, missing but not bothering to retrieve it. What if it never moved, what if it stayed there forever?

Whatever kind of heart Colin’s was, she had broken it. He came over on Thursday with Thai food, making Moira yelp with glee. Again
Elm marveled at her willingness to be cheered. She wished that every hurt could be wiped away by takeout. If that were so, she’d already banked a thousand dinners of forgiveness.

Elm and Colin barely looked at each other, staring instead at their plates or at their daughter, who was animatedly telling the story of something unfair that happened on the playground. While Colin bathed her and got her ready for bed, Elm cleaned up. She put the leftovers in the fridge. Maybe Colin would want to take them to wherever he was living.

The noises ceased in Moira’s room. She wondered fleetingly if Colin had kidnapped her, sneaking out through the window. Pregnant delusions; they lived on the twelfth floor. A half hour later, Colin came into the living room, rubbing his eyes. He’d fallen asleep.

He headed toward her stomach before he remembered, and instead sat down on the opposite side of the sofa.

“It’s okay,” Elm said. “It’s the same baby as it was before. It’s still ours.”

Colin sighed and rubbed his eyes again, trying to stop the tears, which brimmed anyway.

“I just … I can’t believe you.”

Elm said nothing.

“I keep waiting for you to tell me this is all a joke, that you’re kidding and ha, isn’t it funny?”

“Right now I wish it were.”

“I just keep coming back to, how could you?”

“I wanted him back.” Elm burst into tears. “I want him back so badly …”

Colin waited for her to calm down. “We both want him back, Elm, but he’s gone.”

“He won’t be gone anymore.”

“Goddammit, Elm.” Colin stood up. Even angry, he spoke in a stage whisper so as not to wake Moira. “This”—he pointed at her stomach—“is not Ronan.”

“It’s his exact DNA,” Elm protested, cradling herself.

“But it’s not him, it won’t be, and to pretend is just … cruel.”

“He’ll look like him, exactly,” Elm said. “And we have another chance. This time, we won’t let him fall off the changing table and split his lip. We’ll know to buy two of those bunnies he likes so when he loses one we’ll have a backup.”

“That won’t make him Ronan.”

“He won’t have to go to my mom’s funeral. We won’t go to Thailand. You won’t let him out of your sight so that a wave can sweep him away.”

“So that’s what this is.” Colin’s whisper grew loud. “You can’t forgive me for losing him.”

“I do. I mean, I try.” Elm’s tears were less urgent now, more painful.

“I have.”

“No, you haven’t. I haven’t forgiven myself completely either.”

Elm shook her head. “It’s my fault too.”

“You can’t forgive me,” Colin said. “You can’t trust me. We’re done.”

“No,” Elm said calmly. “That’s not true.”

“And now you’ve done a thing I can’t forgive you for.”

“So we’re even,” Elm pleaded.

“That’s not how this works. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Two wrongs just prove it’s wrong.”

“Stop saying that.”

“Elm, you’ve done something unforgivable. With volition. It’s disgusting. It’s immoral.”

“It’s
immoral
?”

“We don’t get to decide what children we have, or what children get taken from us. I wanted a baby, not a science experiment.”

“So now you’re all religious.”

“It’s not religion, it’s just morality, which I thought you had. My old wife had a moral compass. My old wife wouldn’t embezzle funds to implant something illegal and lie to her husband about it.”

“I was desperate.”

“I can see that.”

There was a silence that may have lasted a half hour. Elm could hear every beat of her heart, every beat of the baby’s heart. She could feel the blood rushing through her, the volume of it increased because the baby needed it too. She felt her hands tremble. She was frightened. Terrified.