Mirabel

I was sitting across from me in my living room, listening to the other me explain that she can’t be everywhere at once, she’s only one person. An assistant wouldn’t do, she continued, she needed an exact copy, someone who knew exactly what she would do in any given situation. And so she had me made. An autobot with synthetic skin pulled tight over lightweight alloys and a metal brain with human memories, her memories, uploaded to a microchip near the power button behind my left ear.

I reach up to touch it. A soft bump that feels like a mole.

“It feels so real,” the other Mirabel said in wonder, having turned me on, she claimed, only moments before.

But I woke up here this morning, I reasoned, with a stomach ache.

I glanced around at the open floor plan, the clean lines and functional forms of my modern-style home, the lamps in the corners dim, exactly as I like them, warm and inviting, the world dark behind the big picture window where I watch the reflection of the other me stand up.

I wasn’t feeling well and went to the doctor’s.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” She waved a hand in front of my face. “You’re not malfunctioning are you?”

He prescribed me an antacid and ambien. Said it’s all the stress and I should go home and sleep.

“I can hear you,” I said.

I watched her as she circled me, commenting on my black bob shorn precisely down to the last hair, the right dimple we shared, the freckle above her right breast she pulled the strap of her dress aside to show me and trilled with glee when I showed her mine.

“We’re the same! My god, it’s uncanny. Frightening, really.” She backed away, stepping around the coffee table, to put it between us maybe, and sat down in a green accent chair identical to mine before restlessly standing right back up.

“Say something,” she said.

“Something.”

She visibly shook with chills. Her tinted lips spread in a wide smile.

“Oh. I’m going to have fun with this.”

CEO Mirabel Mauve, became a millionaire at the ripe age of seventeen after a celebrity (a friend of a friend of her overbearing mother tried her Mauve-branded lip balm and her little startup she began in her cosmetologist mother’s basement went viral. Now at 27, no one knows exactly how much Mauve is worth, not even her husband Bo who doesn’t have access to a bank account of his own. A pretty idiot, the other Mirabel called him, like I didn’t already know, like I didn’t know everything she already knew because, according to her, her memories were mine.

“I know,” I said, time and again.

But she made no indication she’d heard me; a girl smitten with her new glitzy gadget.

She was going to take the night off. The first she’d had since she was seventeen, she groused, and treat it as a test run of sorts for me before she inducted me into the big leagues: corporate fundraisers, board meetings, Sunday brunches with her mother, occasional sex with Bo “who fucks like a jackrabbit”—all the boring stuff that wore her out.

The other me clapped her hands together, a violent glint in her eye, and led me to my kitchen of granite floors and marble countertops while she explained Bo would be home any minute with our son Graden from soccer practice.

I know.

On the way, my gaze snagged on the vanity mirror above the console table with a vase of petunias beginning to wilt (an unprompted gift from Bo). I paused, turning my head this way and that, touching the nub behind my ear. A quickly developing nervous tick. I considered pushing it, testing the theory, but something gut deep and her curt: “What are you doing?” stopped me.

“How do I know I’m not the real one?” I asked me as much as her.

The other Mirabel barked a laugh. “Humor was never our strong suit, but you’re funny,” she said dismissively and pointed at me with a mocking: “You’re not gonna try to kill me, are you?” More laughter. A sound Bo said reminds him of windchimes at the height of summer. “C’mon, we don’t have time for this.” She continued on to the kitchen. “And don’t even think about it, your remote comes with a killswitch.”

I followed her to the kitchen where she explained that to begin the trial, I’d cook Bo’s favorite dish, carbonara.

“You know the recipe.”

It’s only as she stared at the side of my head that I realized it was a question.

I nod.

“Great. They gave me this little device,” she said, pulling a black gadget that looked like a small remote control from her skirt pocket, “so I can watch from your POV, but I gotta see it up close in action.”

The sound of a key in the lock of the front door reached them in the kitchen.

“I’mma hide in the closet.” Mirabel pointed to a closet with slats in the living room. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she whispered, then put a finger up to her lips with a sly grin and padded quickly to the closet.

A man with thinning blond hair and a kind smile walked in with a nine-year-old boy with thicker blond curls and a splatter of freckles.

My husband. My son.

Graden threw down his backpack and raced to hug me with a, “Mom” muffled by his face buried in my dress.

“I didn’t think you’d be home,” Bo said, “I thought you had that sponsors meeting tonight.” He leaned in to peck me on the cheek and looked surprised when I turned and kissed him.

“I cancelled.” A lie to negate her lie. “I’m going to cook for you.”

“Aren’t I a lucky guy?” Emboldened, he laid a hand on my rear and instructed Graden to put his stuff away. “Anything I can help with?”

I shook my head, wrapped the apron from the pantry around my waist, and removed the cured pork from the fridge. “Tell me about your day.”

He hesitated. Blinking at me, then took a seat on a stool at the kitchen island. Graden joined us, his curls wet, the shoulders of his t-shirt damp from his shower. A secretary in the marketing department at Mauve, Bo talked about the autumnal shades of gloss that would be announced next month and an argument he’d had with a coworker about whether the shade butternut squeeze was more mango orange or cantaloupe yellow in color.

“Mango orange,” I said without hesitation.

He smiled. “I knew you’d say that.”

Graden was the goalie on the soccer team and had bruises on his knees to show for his efforts. I walked around the island to kiss them and he blustered, launching into a story about a kid that froze on the field every time the soccer ball went his way.

The closet loomed in the shadows out of reach of the lamps’ throw right behind Bo’s shoulder and I smiled as he beamed, no doubt thinking I was looking at him.

A sharp and sudden pain lacerated my finger. I looked down to discover I’d cut myself chopping tomatoes and was bleeding, blood and juice, red red red.

How do I know I’m not the real one?

“Honey, are you OK?”

Jackrabbit Bo. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it around my finger.

“I’m fine,” I smiled wanly.

I tossed the tomatoes and began again, the Band-Aid wrapped around my finger turning more and more red red red.

Grated parmesan on the carbonara. Graden said grace. I don’t bow my head. I stare at the closet door. Quiet and dark.

What would Mirabel do?

I send Graden upstairs to do his homework. Bo offered to do the dishes. As he searched for the soap beneath the sink, I slipped the dirty butcher knife from the counter, held it behind my back and padded to the closet.

How do I know?

I bled.

Red red red.

“What are you doing?” the other Mirabel hisses from the closet.

I open up the closet door and slide the knife up under her chin, up and up and up, red red red.

Oh. I blinked, 27 years worth of memories flashed behind my eyes and it’s freeing to not know what happens next. Bo’s back was turned, his hands in the sink. The sound of blood or something else rushed in my ears and I laid her down, fished the remote from her pocket and put it in mine, pulled a throw blanket folded on the top shelf down from its perch and let it fall over her, throat chugging around the blade, eyes wide. I closed the closet door and walked back to the kitchen, first stopping at the vanity mirror.

I turned my head this way and that, leaned in, and scrubbed a spec of blood from my cheek.

Now I know.