Page 20 of The Echo Wife
Martine bolted the door behind me, shaking her head. “I don’t know where he keeps it.”
“Where’s his desk?” I asked, and she showed me to the little dining nook off the kitchen. There was Nathan’s old rolltop, an antique we’d found together one weekend in the first year of our marriage. Back when we still went out adventuring on the weekends, when we still found things together, when we still got excited about furniture. I opened the left-side drawer and pulled out one of the black notebooks Nathan used to track his appointments. “Here.” I handed it to her. “Go through there and find the appointments he’s made. Find out what he’s going to miss. Call people and tell them…”
“What?” Martine asked.
I stared at her blankly. I hadn’t thought that far. Get the schedule, find the appointments, cancel the appointments.
But what excuse would cover the breadth of those cancellations? And what would we do later, when the expiration date on that excuse came and went? Each excuse would only last for so long. What then? Would we report him missing? Would someone else? And when the police came to investigate the missing Nathan—when they saw pregnant Martine—would they know what they were looking at?
She didn’t even have an identity, as far as the law was concerned. She didn’t exist. But given how easy she had been for me to find, it seemed obvious that even the most perfunctory police investigation into Nathan’s disappearance would land them right where I was standing.
There was no keeping Martine hidden, if we didn’t figure out how to prevent anyone from looking for Nathan. And there was no protecting my research—my legacy—if she was discovered.
“Shit,” I whispered. “This isn’t going to work.”
“What isn’t going to work? Why not?” Martine asked.
Reflexive fury swam under my skin at her questions. I breathed deep, forced it down. “We can’t just cancel his plans. We needa longer-term solution.” Martine stared at me, waiting for me to tell her what to do.
I closed my eyes, overcome by fury. I didn’t begrudge her that instinctive submission, that obedience. She was waiting for instructions because she’d been programmed to be docile. But when I pushed down the flash of anger I felt at her questions, at her inability to come up with her own answers, something deeper had surfaced.
Fucking Nathan.
Martine couldn’t do this on her own because of his cowardly programming. I couldn’t abandon her or turn her in, because his baby, if discovered, would annihilate my career. All of this was his mess, and it was left to me to clean it up, and no matter what happened, I would bear the consequences.
It was just the same as it had always been. The years we worked in the lab together, before the pregnancy and the fight and the ring and his escape to stability—they’d been marked by similar disappointments. He’d always cut corners, always accepted easy answers. Our shared research was pocked with fights about his sloppy techniques, his inability to question his own results if he happened to like the answers he got. He called me a nag, accused me of micromanaging his data, but if I hadn’t been there to check his numbers, he would have dragged me down with him.
Just like he was now. I hadn’t been there to babysit his lab work when he made Martine, and now I was dealing with the results. More work for me, as always. Because of Nathan.
I allowed myself a few seconds of unadulterated rage. When I opened my eyes, Martine was still watching me, still waiting. I spoke to her with what felt like an absurd measure of patience.
“Martine. Did Nathan ever…” I stopped just short of the phraseuse you for. “Did Nathan everask you to help withbrainstorming?”
“All the time,” she said easily. “I’m good at it.”
Of course she was. Nathan couldn’t handle a wife who wassmarter than him, but one who would help him whittle his own ideas into useful shapes? He would have needed that.
“Open a bottle of wine,” I said. She started toward the kitchen immediately, and I felt a shameful flare of satisfaction at the speed of her obedience. “We’ve got some thinking to do.”
In the end, Martine turned out to be a valuable thought-partner. It is with great reluctance that I will credit Nathan that far: He crafted himself an excellent assistant. We talked through the angles of the problem at hand—talked for hours, drifting from the living room to the kitchen, Martine interrupting to point out holes in my logic or connections that were underpinning my ideas. She didn’t voice her own opinion until dawn.
“We need Nathan,” she said.
I lifted my head from my hands, felt the ghost of my lifeline imprinted on my brow. “We don’t need him,” I said. “We’re smart enough to figure this out on our own.”
Martine shook her head at me. She picked up my long-empty wineglass, took it to the sink, and started to wash it with a soapy sponge. She scrubbed the glass in a smooth, steady rhythm, her wrists rolling under the water. “No. We don’t need him in order to find the solution to this. We need himasthe solution.”
I threw my hands up in a caricature of exasperation. This woman, this clone of mine, whose brain should have been shaped precisely like mine, who had all the same potential that I had at birth—I couldn’t believe that she had come out of her tube this stupid. This useless. “Well, yes, Martine,” I said, my tone keen-edged, “it would be very useful to have Nathan. It would, in fact, solve all of our problems. If only Nathan wasn’t acorpse,we wouldn’t be in this pickle.”
Martine didn’t flinch at the acid in my voice. She turned off the running water in the sink. She grabbed a dish towel and began to dry my glass, turning a slow half-circle toward me. “Yes,” she said. “If only there was a way for us to obtain a living Nathan.”
She held the glass up to the light for an inspection. I realize now that she was taking her time deliberately, waiting for me to understand. Waiting for me to catch up. At the time, I wanted to throttle her. As she rubbed a nonexistent smudge from the lip of the glass, her idea came into focus at last.
My initial response was one of horror and disbelief. “No.”
“All right,” Martine replied mildly, folding her dish towel with immense care.
“We can’t,” I said, my palms flat on the table.
