Patchwork dolls, p.11
Patchwork Dolls, page 11
* * *
TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD HERB TUGS AT her shirt, kisses her on the neck. So sudden is this unexpected eroticism she finds herself glazed with sweat, both anxious and excited. But she is also tired and her bones ache. She pulls away.
“Sorry, am I doing something wrong?” he asks.
She goes to brush her teeth, her gaze lingering on the dark liver spots on her hands. In the bathroom mirror, she sees the reflection of Herb’s body draped over the bed. His muscles expand generously as he breathes.
“When you get older, your limbs harden into themselves,” she remembers him saying in the hospital bed, just before he died for the first time. “You double down on yourself. Your bones and everything shrinks.”
“At least we’re both old,” she had said and laughed then. “We get to look at each other’s ugly old faces all day.”
In the morning, when twenty-one-year-old Herb showers and then comes out onto the porch, she tries not to notice how he moves like a clone, how each fiber of his hair reflects the sun, how his teeth are so strong and straight. The light dries the water on his skin all at once, not in patches. He looks at her curiously.
“Do we have kids?”
* * *
THERE WAS A PERIOD in their lives when he had had issues: a midlife crisis, depression.
She knew he was going to therapy often and had difficulty expressing himself. He was always either tense or sleeping. What she didn’t know was that he had also signed up for the program and had made duplicates of himself at different ages. Now, she can never predict which one she will get, but it has been emotionally-abusive-forty-five-year-old-Herb one out of three times. Only once did she see seventy-five-year-old Herb again, and he only lasted two weeks.
They spent most of that time sitting on the porch, drinking hot toddies and wrapping themselves in the quilt they had bought somewhere upstate, when they were both in their early twenties and thought eighty dollars was a lot of money. “I thought you wouldn’t want me like this again,” he said. She told him not to talk so much, and he smiled and rested his head on her shoulder. The next day, she woke up and found nothing but mist beside her, the air two degrees cooler where he had been.
* * *
NOT LONG AFTER HERB died and the clones started showing up, back when she still had her driver’s license, she had driven all the way to the middle of the country and barged into a program clinic.
“I’m sorry, it’s out of our hands,” the receptionist said firmly as she threw papers around, sobbed, threatened to sue. “Everything that your husband did with us is legal, and we have all the authorized paperwork.”
“But I didn’t see any of it,” she cried. “He didn’t tell me. Don’t you have any ethical policies? Do these people know what they’re doing?” She gestured to the walls of posters, the people sitting in the waiting area, the tiny paper water cups. The receptionist did not call security right then, but the blank look in her eyes made it clear she would.
When she got home, emotionally-abusive-forty-five-year-old-Herb was sitting on the couch, waiting.
“Are you making dinner? Or do we have to order in again?”
“I just drove for three hours,” she muttered, wincing as she bent to unlace her shoes. “And I’m sixty-nine years old. Make your own fucking dinner.”
* * *
SHE ASKED THE SEVENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD Herb clone: “Why?”
“I know you don’t like being alone,” he said. “And I love you.”
He told her the seventy-five-year-old one was meant to be a safety, recommended by the clinic, in case the others all died too quickly. He had misread a lot of the fine print. He did not know the clones came randomly, out of order. He could not remember how many he had made.
“I’m sorry, honey, this must be so confusing for you,” he said. He had become so compassionate, so kind in his later years. Especially after her chemo, after the surgeries, after Caroline died. All things twenty-one-year-old Herb had no idea about, and forty-five-year-old Herb didn’t have the courage to face yet.
* * *
ONCE, HERB ASKED HER after their thirtieth anniversary if people could change. “It’s a clichéd question, I know,” he laughed. “But what do you think?”
“I think the fact you’re asking that question means that you can change,” she answered.
“How did you know I was talking about myself?” he said, kissing her on the face. That week, he took five days off work, and they stayed in eating leftovers from their party, watching reruns of their favorite shows, and responding to belated congratulatory messages. Can’t believe it’s been thirty years! an old friend messaged. Sorry John and I couldn’t make it. We had to drive Elise up to campus early for pre-orientation. They grow up so fast!
When she had stared too long at that message on her phone, Herb suggested they take a walk outside. She remembered then how nice that felt: to be guided instead of the one always guiding.
“Come on,” he had said. “It’ll be good to get some fresh air.”
* * *
HE MUST HAVE LEFT a note, she had thought at one point when it started happening. She looked everywhere. In all the boxes, in friends’ houses, in the walls of their bedroom.
But there was nothing. Not a brief explanation, not a statement. She would have even settled for a factual I made ten clones each at age 21, 45, 55, and 60. At least she could prepare herself. Nobody told her she would have to grieve multiple times, in multiple ways.
* * *
THE CLONES ARE MORE biologically complex, delicate, and prone to organ failure—especially when under duress. Some die after a few days. Winter is hard for them to adapt to. At first, she had tried to make them comfortable, tried to be the same person she had been before: willing, able, accommodating. When the first twenty-one-year-old clone died, she thought it had been her fault after giving him a cup of water that was too hot. But then she noticed they inevitably ended up in deadly situations. Forty-five-year-old Herb, in particular, was prone to physically imploding when facing any kind of emotional discomfort. Yet he keeps finding everything wrong, keeps fixating on problems when there are none. His guilt starts to eat away at him earlier and earlier. One time, she arrives home from the doctor’s to find twenty cases of beer blocking the driveway.
Keeping them alive is exhausting. She does it because she feels it is her duty. But if he could change, why can’t she? She thinks about this as she watches the Herbs die, their bodies dissolving into vapor as if there had been nothing there at all.
* * *
FORTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD HERB CLONE IS yelling at her. He is yelling at her in their old house, where she has moved to after trying to escape from him three times. Eventually, she gives in and meticulously replaces all the furniture with their own and arranges all their photographs and books to look almost exactly like it did when they still lived there. She hates herself for this.
She walks to the beach, and he follows and walks behind her, still yelling, now crying too, asking her to forgive him. “What happened to Caroline,” he keeps saying. “That was my fault, wasn’t it?”
I already forgave you, she thinks to herself. I’m tired of always being the one giving. When do I get peace?
Someone has left a bucket and a plastic starfish on the beach. She starts to build a sandcastle by herself while Herb works himself into a heart attack.
She feels guilty that she does not feel guilty at all. He will return, eventually.
In a few hours, the body has disappeared, and twenty-one-year-old Herb arrives and takes her home.
“Sorry I’m late,” he says. “I was washing my hair.”
* * *
SHE SWEARS THEY ARE becoming less and less human. Or is it her that is feeling her mortality challenged after so many years of living with the Herbs?
* * *
SHE SEES THE PROGRAM advertised on the bus, on billboards, on her television screen. “Be your best self—for your loved ones!” The wording irks her. She wonders if the tagline has changed recently. She cannot imagine forty-five-year-old Herb being lured in by this language. But then again, she knew so little of him in those years. If she had listened, hadn’t ignored him and thrown herself into work, she could have seen how truly lost he was and perhaps predicted how he, after nine beers, thought it reasonable to get behind the wheel of a car at the exact same time their daughter was walking home, alone, in the dark, after having waited a full hour for her father to come and pick her up. How when he woke up in the hospital, he refused for days to believe that their daughter had died and threatened to sue the hospital staff for misinformation. It was always someone else’s fault, until it was his.
* * *
CAROLINE, CAROLINE, CAROLINE. THE clones say it in their sleep, repeat it with such force that she cannot help but cry alongside them, again. It is one thing that she still has no control over. At least Herb was right: No one else could understand this special type of grief. And so, in this, she is not truly alone.
* * *
TO HER SURPRISE, THE twenty-one-year-old Herb clone is still alive. Perhaps it is because she has been careless from the beginning; she has grown tired of accommodating their needs, protecting them. When he asks her about children, she tells him they had a daughter, but she died after his car collided with her on the street. She tells him he was terrible in the aftermath, and several times both of them tried to end the marriage. If the clone is curious about how much therapy and time it took to recover, she tells him the exact cost, the number of sessions, the AA meetings, and lifelong follow-ups. She does not hide her mastectomy scars. She does not cook for him or clean his clothes. She puts up the old photographs of their trips to Hawaii, France, India, and when he asks if they can go, she looks at him and laughs.
Only then does she feel slightly cruel as his face crumples. Twenty-one-year-old Herb did not ask for this, did not sign up for any of the resentment, the bitterness, the life already lived. He deserves more. But then she looks at him again and remembers he is still just a clone.
* * *
IT IS STRANGE TO celebrate their wedding anniversary, but they do so anyway. For twenty-one-year-old Herb, they are celebrating their first anniversary. For her, it is their sixty-first. She tells him where to buy flowers, shows him how to make ravioli the way he learned after that one summer in Italy. She takes out a bottle of red wine from storage and makes a crass joke that Herb is finally of legal drinking age before immediately remembering his later problem with alcohol. He laughs alongside her, but she ends up feeling awkward—maternal, almost, which only makes her pain more isolating.
After dinner, they look over their wedding photos. “Remember the man at the flower stall? The day we got married?” he asks her. Out of all the things, this she does not recall. “You told him you wanted some expensive roses, and he looked at us like we wouldn’t know what to do with them.”
“Well,” she says. “Maybe he was right. I was sixteen, after all.”
Her high school friend Marcia had been the witness, and they had borrowed—without permission—her father’s Kodak camera to document the signing at city hall. None of them really knew how to use it, and the photographs are blurry. When they look at the decades-old photo album, she can tell that the clone is trying not to reveal how disturbed he is by the yellowed edges, the fact that he is only a year older while the images have aged significantly.
“So beautiful,” he says, his fingers resting on a picture of her in a pinned blue dress, the roses in her hand. She looks at him then, and notices that he is staring very hard at the photo, as if he wants to enter it. In that moment, she sees that he carries his own grief. He has missed her entire life—their entire life— together. Just as she can never have her seventy-five-year-old Herb back, he can never have her sixteen-year-old self back, will never know this feeling of growing old together, will never make his own mistakes or learn from them.
She touches his shoulder, and he wilts at the contact. As mortal as anyone.
* * *
IN THE MIDDLE OF the night, she wakes with an idea. She writes it down in a note, then when the sun rises, she goes out for a long, slow walk on the beach. When she gets back, he is waiting at the kitchen counter, coffee already brewed, soft-boiled eggs under a basket of foil. She does not recall any of the other clones being able to make breakfast for her. Herb himself did not do this until he was in his fifties.
“I read your note,” he says. They look at each other, her hand still on the doorknob. She does not realize how tight she has been gripping it until he says, “Yes, okay,” and she finally releases, the blood streaming back into her fingers.
* * *
HE DRIVES HER THE three hours to the clinic and insists on waiting in the parking lot, although his nearby presence makes her nervous. She notices that there is a new receptionist. It has been years since she was last here.
When the program doctor asks who the clone should attach itself to, she hesitates before giving a name. There is typing on a computer. She waits, skin palpitating. But the doctor does not disagree, does not tell her that this is not possible, does not look at her with the scorn and pity she had imagined in the car ride over.
“What age? And how many?” he asks. “You can only clone a version of yourself in the past, not in the future. Your clone will contain all the memories you had up until that age.”
She gives him the information, signs all the papers, gives them her DNA, and walks back to the car where Herb is waiting anxiously. “Did it work?”
“They don’t know about our plan, if that’s what you mean,” she says. “They think I’m just an old lady looking out for her husband.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I’m doing this for me,” she replies, looking at the paperwork before stuffing it into her bag. When she glances at him, however, she notices he is smiling a little.
* * *
AT HOME, THEY WAIT. She has not told him when, and he is scared to ask. She takes her time preparing everything: her will, her money, the house. She asks the clone to clean as if they are expecting a special guest. He takes pleasure, she can tell, in vacuuming the grout lines, fixing table legs, planting new rosebushes. Herb always liked to feel useful.
“You’ll have to find a job,” she says. “We used most of the money joining the program. And please try to stay alive.”
“You and me both,” he responds, a familiar teasing gleam in his eye. She looks at him, suddenly seeing seventy-five-year-old Herb again, and wonders when she had moved from the desperate, blood-out-of-body kind of grieving into the quieter, heavier kind.
He helps her categorize all of their things, and they donate the clothing and smaller furniture to charity stores. The logical side of her knows they must also remove all traces of Caroline from the house—it would be unfair—but she cannot bear to throw away the Mother’s Day cards, the music certificates, the photo albums. She decides to take them with her, along with the last photograph she has of herself and Herb, when he was already in the hospital.
“Okay,” she tells him, finally. It has been a month since she signed the papers. “I’m ready.”
* * *
WHEN SHE HAD WOKEN up that night, the plan had not been transparent. She had simply realized that she no longer felt the desire to stay, to do more. Herb, the original Herb, had been dead for years now; they had no grandchildren, no living relatives. All her friends were gone.
But she also could not leave twenty-one-year-old Herb alone, prematurely widowed. She had wondered, briefly, if it would be moral to kill him, and how she, a seventy-seven-year-old woman, could do it. They had been living together for over a year now, and it seemed that every day he was gaining in strength, in resilience.
When she happened upon the alternative option, she had brushed it aside at first, but then she kept returning to it in the dark. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. What if they could start over? What if she and Herb could do it all again, in a different timeline, in a different world? In mist-formed bodies that longed to be visible, that longed to live?
* * *
ALONE NOW, AT THE beach, she worries about twenty-one-year-old Herb, wonders how he will cope while he waits. The doctor had told her the seventeen-year-old clone could take up to five days to arrive after her death. It’s strange, she thinks, how in the end he did give her something. When they had looked together at that photograph of her in the blue dress, he had shown her what loneliness was. What she had was not that. What she had was a bag of photographs, of memories on her back, and her unending grief, her love, was testament that she had not been and would never be alone.
“I only wish you could have been here,” she says now to long-gone Herb, to Caroline.
The water is cold, the waves slippery and full, but she does not mind. As she melts into the sea with her bag of memories, she thinks of her daughter, she thinks of Herb, and how it feels so pleasant, so painful, this sharpness, the fullness and emptiness, the tide and the sand.
The In-Between
Ads and bags and paper cups of water, the phone ringing every few minutes, its shrill noise bubbling through the wire. A busy office on a busy Wednesday afternoon in London.
The woman sitting on the sofa glanced over at the stack of psychology magazines. There was one with a photograph of a Labrador retriever on its cover. “Alternative Medicine for Your Pets,” the headline read. She did not have any animals in her home. Turning to the pages of the feature, she coldly observed the images of soft, roly-poly dogs on their backs and in their owners’ laps. There was a photograph of one having its teeth cleaned. She ran her finger over the pink, glossy bulges of its gums.
