Page 14 of The Echo Wife
I wrapped her in a purple towel. She shivered in my arms, trembling under the terry cloth with her eyes squeezed shut tight.
“I do want this,” she was whispering. “More than anything. I just wanted to know if it was my choice. That’s all. I swear.”
“I know,” I murmured, using a foot to shove Martine’s blood-soaked clothes behind the toilet and out of sight. They left a faint pink smear across the tile. “I believe you.”
“I swear,” she said again. “I swear.”
I left Martine sitting on the edge of her bed wrapped in the towel, staring at her hands. I needed to leave before the crying began. I could deal with a lot of things, but I didn’t have the patience for her tears.
Martine would need to weep alone.
When I got to the kitchen, Nathan was still dead.
I looked at his unmoving back, and I didn’t see the person I’d slept beside for the better part of a decade. So long as he was facedown, he could have been any corpse at all.
I stepped around the blood on the floor and took it in, the scene somehow absurdly small and simple: an onion next to the cutting board, stripped of its papery skin, waiting for a knife. A plastic-wrapped package of chicken thighs next to the stove. The knife block on its side, knocked over in what must have been Nathan’s haste to stab Martine. And then, of course, the blood.
When I’m training lab assistants on conditioning, I make them watch as I throw a vial of blood on the ground. Ten cc’s—less than a tablespoon—but when it’s on the floor, it looks catastrophic. I teach them not to freeze at what seems to be a high volume of blood. I teach them how much blood a specimen can lose during conditioning before they should start to worry. I inoculate them to the panic that comes naturally at the sight of blood spreading across cloth, across tile, across steel.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about blood volume in the course of my research. The numbers are always at the front of my mind. Nathan was an adult man: he had twelve pints in him, give or take. He was dead, not just unconscious. Dead, which meant that there were at least six pints on the kitchen floor. Maybe more.
I thought of the many nights we’d spent at our favorite dive bar in the early days of our relationship, downing pitchers of weak beer and playing darts and talking about the future we were going to shape together. The conversions came so reflexively that they were almost comforting: Six pints on the ground. Three and three-quarters pints in a pitcher. A little less than two pitchers of blood on the ground, then. It doesn’t seem like so much, put that way. Not even two full pitchers.
Still. He looked so small. He was so empty.
I looked at him, and at the blood, and I waited for grief to strike me down. I was sure that it would hit me at some point. For all that I was furious at him—for all that I hated what he’d done and who he’d become—he was still my husband. I had stood across from him on a Saturday afternoon, in front of all of our friends and all of his family, wearing a dress and the jewelry he’d given me. I had tied my life to his. I could smell my own grief, distant, like the first hint of smoke on the wind.
But it wasn’t on me yet. All I could see was his back, and his blood, and the only thing I needed to feel just then was the weight of the task ahead.
I couldn’t call the police. That much was obvious; the consequences would have been ruinous. At a minimum, my researchfunding would be frozen while an ethics committee investigated the fact that the impregnable clone model had been undermined. And I would be publicly humiliated. The scientific community would forget that I had ever been a luminary of the industry, a pioneer, a genius.
They would instead remember me as the woman whose husband had used her own research to make a better version of her.
Aside from that, there was the sheer impossibility of proving what had happened. If Martine decided to lie, there was no way for an investigation to show beyond a doubt that she was the one who had murdered Nathan. We had the same DNA.And who,a small voice in my mind asked,has the obvious motive to kill him? Who took a car here? Which of you is crying because he’s dead, and which one is cleaning up?
No. Turning Martine over to the authorities simply wasn’t a viable option.
I threw the chicken into the trash—who knew how long it had been sitting out?—and returned the onion to the crisper drawer in the refrigerator, considering my options.
At the lab, specimens were cremated along with the medical waste, but oversight was too intense down in Disposals for me to toss in an extra corpse. I tried to remember things I’d seen in crime dramas on television, and the mistakes people made in novels, the drunken late-night conversations I’d had with friends about the best way to hide a body. People always brought up the idea of feeding the body to pigs, as though there were a pig farm on every goddamn corner.
I left him lying on his face as I discarded possible solutions. There was no reason to turn him over. Not until it was time. I was scrubbing the knife when Martine came in.
“You’re still here.” She stood in the doorway. Her hair was tucked under a kerchief. It made her look more like me. “I thought you’d gone.”
I blinked at her a few times. It hadn’t even occurred to me. She had called—I had answered. I was here.
My gut twisted with something that was a cousin to grief, and it took me a moment to recognize it as guilt. It had been there, dull and aching and low enough to ignore, but the naked gratitude on Martine’s face honed it to a razor’s edge and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore.
I hadn’t left because this was, ultimately, my fault.
If I hadn’t been such a hornet (such abitch,my memory helpfully echoed), Nathan would be alive now. If I hadn’t been so focused on my own research, he wouldn’t have been able to slip away from our marriage so easily. And without my research, Martine would never have existed for him to slip away to.
I could leave the house and the blood and my fucking clone behind, but I would never be able to walk away from the truth: It was my fault that Nathan was dead.
So I smiled at her.
“Of course I’m still here,” I said. “I wouldn’t make you do this alone.”
