The Perfect Wife

He means, you’re an accurate copy of the painting, you realize, not the other way around. They must have used a scan of it to construct you.

Is the woman in the painting really you? She seems too self-possessed, somehow, too cool. And too confident. You look at the signature, a dramatic squiggle in the lower left corner. Abbie Cullen.

“You didn’t usually work in oils,” he adds. “It was your wedding gift to me. It took you months.”

“Wow…What did you give me?”

“The beach house,” he says matter-of-factly. “I had it built for you as a surprise. There’s a big garage there you used as your main studio—you needed space for your projects.” As he speaks he’s opening another door, directly opposite the master bedroom. “But you worked in here when we were in the city. This is where you painted that self-portrait.”

The floorboards in this little room are flecked with paint. On a trestle table are jars of dried-out paintbrushes and tubes of solidified acrylics. And a silver pen in a stand. You go and pick it up. The barrel is inscribed ABBIE. ALWAYS AND ALWAYS. TIM.

“The ink will have dried by now, I expect,” he says. “I’ll get some more. I’d better start a list.”

Numbly, you pull at the hospital gown you’re still wearing. “I’d like to get dressed.”

“Of course. Your clothes are in the closet.”

He shows you the closet, a walk-in off the main bedroom. The dresses hanging there are lovely—boho-chic, casual, but made from beautiful materials in bold, bright colors. You glance at the labels. Stella McCartney, Marc Jacobs, Céline. You had good taste, you think. And a good budget, thanks to Tim.

You pick out a loose Indian-styled dress, something easy to wear. “I’ll leave you to it,” he says tactfully, stepping out.

Remembering that hideous plastic skull, you avert your eyes from the mirror as you pull the gown off, but then you can’t help looking. Your body hasn’t been this toned for years, you catch yourself thinking: not since you gave birth to Danny—

But this isn’t a body. Those limbs were put together in an engineering bay, your skin color sprayed on in a paint booth. And below the waist you simply fade into smoothness, as blank and sexless as a doll. With a shudder, you pull the dress over your head.

There’s a sudden crash from downstairs, the front door slamming open. Feet pound the stairs.

“Danny, don’t run,” a female voice says.

“Don’t wrun!” a small voice mumbles. “Wrunning!” The running feet don’t slow down.

Danny. Spinning around, you catch a glimpse of dark hair, deep-set eyes, a taut elfin face, as he hurtles down the landing. Maternal love sluices through you. You can’t believe how big he is! But of course, he must be almost ten. You’ve missed half his life.

You follow him to his room. He’s already pulled an armful of toy trains from under his bed. “Line them up. Line them uuuuup,” he mutters feverishly as he sorts them, biggest to smallest, placing them precisely against the baseboard.

“Danny?” you say. He doesn’t respond.

“Danny, looking,” the woman’s voice prompts firmly behind you. Danny does look up then, his gaze passing blankly over yours. There’s nothing in it, no hint of recognition that you’re even a person, let alone his mother.

“Great looking. Good job.” The woman steps past you and crouches next to Danny. She’s in her twenties, blond and cheerful, her hair tied back in a ponytail. “High five, Danny!”

“Sian, this is—” Tim begins.

“I know what it is,” Sian says, giving you a look even blanker than the one Danny just did. “High five, Danny!” she repeats.

Without lifting his eyes from his trains, Danny flaps his hand in her direction. She moves her own hand so he makes contact with it. “Good looking, good high-fiving,” she says encouragingly, “but now we’re going to go back and walk upstairs properly. Then you’ll get extra time with Thomas.” She holds out her hand. When he doesn’t respond, she says clearly, “Stand up and hold my hand, Danny.”

Reluctantly, he gets up and takes it. “Well done! Good standing,” she says as she leads him away.

“She’s a very good therapist,” Tim says when they’re out of earshot. “When she joined us, Danny wasn’t engaging with anything except food and his trains. Now we’re getting about a dozen exchanges a day.”

“That’s great,” you say, although that it still stings. “I’m so proud of you both.”

You say it, but you remember your excitement when the two of you first discovered applied behavior analysis, this way of teaching children with autism that, according to some studies, was even capable of curing them, or at least making them indistinguishable from other kids. If you’d known then that five years later, Danny would still be working on eye contact, would you have had the energy to keep going?

You push the thought aside. Of course you would. Any gains, however hard-won, are better than none.

Danny stamps up the stairs again, more slowly this time, with Sian at his heels. When he reaches his bedroom she produces a blue train. “Good walking, Danny. Here’s Thomas.”

“Here’s Thomas,” Danny echoes as he flops down and aligns the train with the others. Then, without warning, his troubled eyes flick up to yours.

“Moh,” he says. “Moh-moh.” He laughs.

“Did he just call me Mommy?” you say, amazed.

Tim’s already weeping with joy. You would be, too, if you could cry.

TWO

It was a couple of weeks after Tim’s announcement before Abbie Cullen actually showed up. Finishing a commission, we speculated, or maybe having second thoughts about working with us at all. We didn’t get many visitors—our backers were paranoid about security, and our location had been chosen for its low cost per foot rather than its potential for social activities. So to say that Abbie made quite an entrance probably says less about her than it does about the smallness and focus of our lives.

Even before Tim’s cry of “Listen up, people!” most of us had spotted her in reception—and if we hadn’t, we’d certainly seen the way Tim himself hurried over to greet her. She was tall, for one thing, almost six feet, with ripped skinny jeans and knee-high Cuban-heel boots that, along with the coil of reddish-brown braids piled atop her head, made her seem even taller. A black, inky tattoo—a Hawaiian design, someone said later, or maybe Maori or Celtic—sprawled from her neck all the way down her left arm. But the thing that struck us most was how young she seemed. In an industry like ours, where you could be a veteran in your twenties, she had a freshness about her, an innocence, that marked her out as not one of us.

“Abbie Cullen, everyone. Our first artist-in-residence,” Tim said, escorting her into the open-plan area. “Her work’s amazing, so look it up online. She’ll be here for six months, working on some projects.”

“What kind of projects?” someone asked.

It was Abbie who answered. “I haven’t decided yet. I hope it’ll be informed by what you guys are doing.” Her voice had a twang of the South in it, and her smile lit up the room.

Whether someone deliberately activated it we couldn’t say, but one of the shopbots chose that moment to approach her. “Hi, how’re you doing today?” it said brightly. “This jacket I’m modeling would look really great on you.” Needless to say, it wasn’t actually wearing a jacket—that was just a sample pitch we’d coded into the prototype. “Shall we go around the store together, and I’ll pick out some things for you to try? You’re about a size eight, right?”

“You got me,” Abbie said, laughing, and for some reason, even though it wasn’t particularly funny, we all laughed along with her. It was like our child had said something inappropriate but cute to a visiting VIP.

Tim laughed, too, the high-pitched boyish giggle that was one of the few geeky things about him.

“Abbie will be based in K-three,” he said, naming one of our meeting rooms, but she stopped him.

“I’d rather have a desk out here, where I can get a feel for what’s going on. If that’s okay by you.”

“Whatever you like,” he said, shrugging. “People, give her every cooperation. And learn from her. Asset-strip her brain. Reverse-engineer her creativity. Remember, she’s here for your benefit, not hers.”

Which, when we thought about it later, was not the friendliest way he could have welcomed her. But that was Tim for you.

6

It’ll take three weeks, Tim predicts. Three weeks for you to adjust to this new reality.