Page 30 of The Echo Wife
There wasn’t a box in sight. It looked like a place where someone might actuallylive.
A clatter from the kitchen, a soft exclamation. I crossed theliving room on quiet feet and stood in the door to the kitchen. Martine was standing on a chair, a dish towel over her shoulder, stacking a pile of plates in the cupboard. Her arm arched up toward a high shelf, the soft curve of her elbow belying the strength it surely required for her to lift that stack of dishes at such a precarious angle. Her hair was secured under a kerchief. It looked like the same one she’d used to tie her hair back when we buried Nathan, and I wondered if she kept it with her all the time, ready to unpack a house or organize a garage or bury a body.
“You didn’t have to do all of this,” I said. I didn’t mean to be sharp but I didn’t mean to be soft, either. I didn’t keep my voice down, but she didn’t startle, didn’t react to my sudden presence. I thought of the way she always seemed to be listening, waiting. I realized that she’d almost certainly heard me—my uncautious footfalls creaking around upstairs, walking slowly through the living room, pausing in the doorway.
Martine had known I was there. And so she knew she was being watched. It didn’t seem to bother her.
She was probably used to it.
“What else was I going to do?” she said, sliding a final plate onto the stack. She turned to me, wiping her brow with the back of one wrist. “I wake up at six o’clock, remember? I couldn’t just sit there staring at the wall until you woke up too.”
“You could have… I don’t know. Read a book, or watched something on television, or… something.” My voice was a little stiffer than I intended it to be, but I couldn’t seem to make it gentle. “You didn’t have to do all this work.”
She shook her head. “There’s no mending or anything for me to do.” Seeing my face, she clarified. “If I want to watch television, I need to be working on something at the same time. I can’t just sit. It makes me itch. And besides, once I opened a box of books, the shelf was right there. It was no trouble, really.”
I felt a strange, sick kind of anger.It was no trouble,she said, about a task I’d been unable to bring myself to even begin. I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth about it being no trouble, or if she wastrying to remind me that I’d been putting off something that should have been easy. I couldn’t tell what she meant when she said that she couldn’t just sit, either—was it that she got restless, or had Nathan programmed her to be physically incapable of resting? Was there any difference between the two? Was there any way for me to ask?
Did it matter?
A vision of my mother’s disapproving face flashed through my mind. I could almost hear her voice:Someone just did you a favor, Evelyn.
“Thank you, Martine,” I said, and I meant it, in spite of myself. “This was very helpful of you. I shouldn’t have left so much for you to deal with.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “Really. It’swhat I’m for.”
There it was again—a note of bitterness, a sharp edge. She climbed down from the kitchen chair and pushed it back under the tiny table in the dining nook before turning to me with a smile. “Besides, I’m all done. With the kitchen and the living room, at least. I can’t speak for the rest of the house.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds. I was bristling, but I didn’t understand why. I felt as though I’d just been scolded, as though I’d lost some small battle. Something in the way shecouldn’t speak for the rest of the housefelt like a threat. I was in a corner, and I didn’t know how I’d gotten there.
Of course, I was being needlessly defensive.
It was one of the things Nathan had been right about during our fights, when he would tell me about the person he considered me to be—my need to control situations, the way I got irrationally angry when it felt like someone was implying that I didn’t know what I was doing. “You can be a real bitch when you think you’re not in charge,” he’d muttered more than once, usually when I’d been trying to start a conversation about the household budget.
All right, if I’m honest: when I was trying to start afightabout the household budget. It was one of the tasks we divided over the course of our marriage: Nathan structured the budget and ran it,and I made sure that the bills got paid on time. It made sense at the time. It made good use of my ability to follow up on tasks, his passion for steady logistical planning.
It also meant that I didn’t notice when money started disappearing to pay for Nathan’s private lab space, the one I didn’t know about. The one where he had been able to grow himself a new wife. When I did notice money missing—when I tried to confront him about it, tried to ask why our bank account balance seemed lower than it ought to be—he inevitably countered with a completely accurate assessment of the reason I was upset.
“You’re just pissed because I’m not letting you supervise me,” Nathan would say, and he would be right. I didn’t like that he never told me the details of our finances. I didn’t like having to trust his judgment.
The worst part of it is that I was right. I’ve always known that my need to control things to a minute level of detail is unhelpful, bordering on unhealthy. I try to keep it in check as much as I can. But then if I don’t stay vigilant, my husband uses our money to grow a new wife, and my lab assistant uses my grant to support his side hustle, and I wonder why I bother trying.
There’s no winning. Either I’m a bitch who needs to control everything, or I’m an easy mark.
Martine wasn’t just a manifestation of my failure to create a foolproof cloning model. She wasn’t just a symbol of my failure to hang on to a man who had been good when I met him. Before he married me.
She was also a consequence of my failure to keep a handle on things.
And now she was standing in my kitchen, and I didn’t know where she’d put my cutlery, and she was hitting me hard with that cool, flat stare. Assessing me.
That was it, that was the thing I was bristling against.How dare she,I thought, and the thought was loud and sudden because Martine was daring to judge me, just because she had done something without being asked, something I hadn’t even wanted her to do.She had come into my life uninvited, and then she had come into my home and she had interfered with my belongings as though she had any right at all.Howdareshe?
I was filled with a strange, roiling fury. It swept through me, violent and threatening, rising. It was dark and cruel and familiar, and it nearly choked me to swallow it back, but I did. I decided to meet her on her level: kindness and manners. I decided that I would not be beaten at this game, not in my own home.
I smiled. “Really, thank you.” My mother’s voice came out of my mouth, smooth and low and only a little angry, in that way that it was always at least a little angry. “So kind of you. I never would have expected, certainly never would have asked.”
“It’s no trouble,” she said again, her face placid.
“Would you like to wash up?” I asked. “I could loan you something of mine to wear, if you’d rather not wear something you slept in.”
