Page 17 of The Echo Wife
When I walked into the kitchen, my hair dripping onto the shoulders of the shirt I’d borrowed from Martine’s closet, an open bottle of wine was waiting on the counter next to a single glass. A chardonnay, the name of the winery debossed in gold lettering onto the cream label. Condensation frosted the thick green glass, but did not dew enough to drip onto the countertop.
I filled the wineglass well past the point of a single measure.
Martine was waiting for me in the living room. She was sitting on the blue couch that Nathan had claimed in the separation, her back to the door. A low chignon was perched at the nape of her neck, just a breath away from the top of her pajama collar.Her head turned slightly as I approached, as though she’d been listening for footfalls.
I felt nine years old again, like I’d snuck out of bed to discover my mother waiting up for my father in the wee hours. She never went to bed before he was home, and on the nights when his work kept him out until dawn, she stayed awake. My mother was a woman in a perpetual state of waiting.
On those late nights that bled into early mornings, she’d hear my sock feet padding on the hardwood, just as quiet as I could tread, and she’d turn her head just like that—enough to let me know that she’d heard me, but not so far that she could see me. Just enough to let me know that I should sneak back to my bed.
My ears rang with how similar the movement was. I felt a flash of childish rebellion: Martine couldn’t make me go back to bed. She couldn’t make me go anywhere. It was absurd, of course—she’d left a glass out for me, she’d been waiting for me to join her.
Still.
I perched on the arm of the couch, feeling aggressive and somehow in the way. It was strange to see that couch in this living room—the feeling was a close cousin to the sensation of running into an elementary school teacher at the grocery store. The context of the thing was all wrong, and it was unnerving in a way I was ill-prepared to process.
That couch was the first thing Nathan and I bought together. It followed us from our first tiny studio apartment, to our first place with doors, to our house. It was a part of our life, part of our home. It was where we fought and ate and laughed for years. It was where I slept when Nathan was too angry at me to let me into the bedroom, when the fights were bad, before he gave up and took to pretending things were fine while he built this new life for himself.
In this place it was almost unrecognizable. It wasn’t the couch where I slept anymore. Now, it was the couch onto which Martine tucked her feet up while she was watching a television show that taught her to bury a body with lime.
All at once I hated that couch, hated it with a sudden desperate venom. It had betrayed me by seeing my marriage disintegrate, by being here in this house. I wanted to watch it burn. I wanted to hose away the ashes of it with a pressure washer and watch them disappear into the earth.
“I’m surprised you’re still awake,” I said.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” Martine replied softly. She was cupping a glass of water in her hands, staring at the lipstick smudge on the rim of the glass. I wondered if she always put on makeup before bed, or if she’d done it because she had a guest. “I go to sleep at nine thirty. If I go now, I’ll lie there awake until it’s time.”
“Oh,” I said, awkward in the face of this quiet, soft woman who looked like I would have looked if my life had been entirely, catastrophically different from what it was. “I thought it was later.”
I was uncomfortable, furious and sad and exhausted. Everything was too much. All of the things I felt seemed summarized by the lipstick on the rim of Martine’s glass. She saw me staring at the smear, and she ran her thumb over it. It didn’t solve the problem, though: now, there was lipstick on her thumb. She held that thumb carefully to keep lipstick from getting onto anything else.
I wanted more than anything to grab her never-broken wrist and wipe her unfamiliar hand on that blue couch. I wanted to ruin the upholstery. I wanted to makeherruin it.
“Why can’t I ever fall asleep before nine thirty?” Martine asked the water glass.
I couldn’t tell if she knew she’d spoken aloud until she looked up at me with wide, dazed eyes. “No matter how hard I try. I’m so tired all the time, with the baby and all. I can wake up any time in the night, but I can’t take naps. I can’t sleep. I can never sleep. Not until nine thirty, and not past six in the morning. Why?”
I drank my wine, winced at the sound of myself swallowing. “It’s your programming, probably. He must have given you a noncircadian rhythm. It’s—that’s an early method, one we stopped using a couple of years ago.”
“Can you fix it?” Martine whispered.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“Why don’t you know? You stopped using that method. You must know how to undo it.” There was a note of desperation in her voice, high and wavering. Her grip on her cup of water was so tight that I heard the glass creak under her fingers.
“I don’t have any remaining specimens from that generation.” Martine’s eyes tightened at the corners when I said the wordspecimens. “I’ll look into it, though. I can look into it.”
Martine set her water glass onto a coaster on the coffee table and stood. “I should make up the guest bedroom for you,” she said smoothly. “You must be so tired, after the day you’ve had.” Before I could say anything, she disappeared into the back of the house.
I drank my wine and waited. I ran my fingers over the piping on the edge of the arm of the couch. I dug my fingernails under the edge of that piping, squeezed until it hurt, didn’t let go until I heard the softpop-pop-popof stitches giving way.
I pulled my hand away fast. I told myself that I was letting go to avoid doing more damage, but the truth is that I was satisfied by that tiny, invisible bit of harm I’d caused. A furious, animal part of me—a part I didn’t want to think about or look at too closely—hoped that, in a few months, the piping would come free altogether. I hoped Martine would blame herself, never knowing that I’d been the one to pull the seam loose in the first place.
I wanted her to feel that bewilderment, the sudden fear that comes with something falling apart that had seemed so secure. I wanted her to wonder what else she’d neglected. I wanted her to wonder what else would fall away beneath her without warning.
It wasn’t fair of me. Martine wasn’t her own fault. She hadn’t been the one to ruin my marriage. But I wanted her to hurt anyway.
Nathan was too dead to hurt anymore, and I wanted someone other than me to bear the weight of what had happened to my life.
I moved away from the arm of the couch, distancing myselffrom the piping. I tried hard to occupy myself by setting my mind to the problem of reprogramming a clone—fixing the problem, instead of just disposing of the specimen and starting over. It had occurred to me before as an obvious next step in my research, and there was no reason not to pursue it, but I could never seem to focus on it as a problem that needed solving. Specimens were always disposable. Trying to hang on to them felt foolish, indulgent. I had never been able to think of a reason to bother.
