Page 52 of The Echo Wife
It was true. I couldn’t think of anyone Nathan had been close with, not truly close. He’d had colleagues, old college friends, distant family, people he occasionally spent time with—but none of them had been interleaved with our life. None of them had followed up with me after I left him. I remembered, in the weeks after I moved out of our house, how my triumph had been punctuated by guilt, knowing that there was no one who I could be certain he would lean on. I’d been too angry with him to let that guilt change my own trajectory, but still—it had been there. The knowledge that I’d left him alone.
Well. Alone except for Martine.
I wondered, then, sitting across from Martine, if I was any different. It seemed that no one was noticing the differences in the new Nathan. No one had detected the ways we’d softened him just a little, the tiny details we’d shifted or overlooked or even gotten entirely wrong. I wondered if I was close enough with anyone that they would have seen the same differences in me. If I had been replaced with a reasonable facsimile of the person I’d been, would anyone notice?
Martine, I thought. Martine would notice. She was close enough to me, had spent enough time with me, had seen me in a raw enough state—she knew the marrow of me. If someone took me away and replaced me with a thing that moved like me and talked like me and had my memories, Martine would be able to spot the stitches that held it together.
In those strange months of solitude—those four months of peace—I often wondered whether Nathan would have seen it. The original Nathan, the one that I had divorced, and the one that Martine had killed. Would he have noticed if I went away and came back just a little wrong? Or had he only been able to see the parts of me that he wanted to fix?
Had we ever seen each other clearly enough for that?
After the first month, Martine and I shared a last cup of tea at my house, and then she left with a promise to call me if anything went wrong.
She eased herself up out of her chair, bracing her hands on her back in a parody of pregnancy. She was just a week from her due date by then. Our farewell that day felt strangely professional, transactional: we’d done what we set out to do, and our business was concluded.
I wondered if I should hug her goodbye.
I didn’t.
I hired a new lab assistant.
Seyed had sent me a formal letter of resignation, citing a desire to live in closer proximity to his family, thanking me for the years of mentorship and growth he’d received in my employ. We had a tacit understanding, one we’d never discussed explicitly, but one that was necessary for both of our survival: he wouldn’t tell anyone about Nathan and Martine, and I would accept his resignation without reporting the thefts, and provide a letter of reference should the need arise.
I sent him a brief message acknowledging the letter, so he’d know I understood. Our ties were severed. He didn’t reply to it, but the word “read” appeared beneath it less than a minute after I hit send. It was enough. We were square.
HR processed his resignation as soon as I gave them notice. There was a fresh pile of résumés waiting for me the next morning.
My new lab assistant, Seyed’s replacement, lasted for about a month. The one after that hung on a little longer, six weeks. I suspect she was hoping to get fired so that she could collect severance, but in the end, she broke before I did. She rotated out of my lab, and I was reviewing the next résumé in the pile before the airlock finished cycling behind her.
In my weaker moments, I missed Seyed. Not just the way we’d worked together, the easy rhythm, the implicit trust I had in his competence. I missedhim. Seyed had been the kind of person who I thought might have been able to see the differences in me, if I went away and came back. I had plenty of colleagues, plenty of peers, but almost nofriends. I had colleagues. I had Lorna, vaguely, in the periphery of my life. But Seyed—he had been something like a friend.
The pain of what Seyed had done—his betrayal of me, my work, my marriage—it never really calcified into anger, the way it had with Nathan. I waited for the resentment to come, to sweep away the confused ache of his deceptions. I waited to feel glad that he was gone, waited for the moment when I would be able to tint all my memories of him with bitterness. I longed for that release.
It didn’t come. I couldn’t make myself overwrite the way it had felt to be understood by him—the way it had felt to trust him. I kept my new assistants at a polite distance. I told them that they could call me Dr. Caldwell, and if they slipped up and called me Evelyn, I didn’t acknowledge that they’d spoken at all. I kept things courteous with my other colleagues. I swallowed my occasional flashes of anger at the fact that none of them, not one, had noticed the strain I’d been under for the three months it took to make the new Nathan.
None of them had noticed the months that preceded the entire crisis, either. The awful weeks between realizing that something was wrong, finding out about his affair, seeing Martine, confronting him, moving out, filing for divorce. The sleepless nights and the fury and the sadness and the strange fog of everything suddenly being all wrong.
None of my colleagues had known about all that turmoil. No one except Seyed.
My anger at my colleagues was, of course, profoundly unfair. If anyone had noticed that something was wrong with me, I would have resented them; if they had commented on my state,I would have been livid, embarrassed, outraged at them for prying, indignant at any implication of trespass into my personal life. I was overwhelmed by the way my life fell into disparate pieces to be examined and recategorized—but I never would have confessed to that. I would never have admitted to struggling under the weight of the project Martine and Seyed and I had tangled ourselves up in.
It was unfair. It was unreasonable. Still, part of me was furious that my colleagues, who I hardly knew, had never cottoned on to the fact that something waswrong.
None of them had noticed me changing.
I found myself watching them more closely. Strangers, too—at the store, on the street. I watched the way they looked at each other, the way they avoided looking. The way people carefully dodged each other’s attention, half lifting their hands to politely acknowledge and preserve the space between them.
I wondered how many of them had people in their lives who would notice. If they went missing and came back different; if they lost night after night of sleep to endless fights; if their eyes were raw from crying alone in the empty rooms of an unfamiliar home. If they were distracted by the all-encompassing fear of Getting Caught, or aglow with triumph at having accomplished something so secret that they’d never be able to tell anyone what they’d pulled off.
If they were trapped in a home with a monster who’d made them to suit his awful, practical, deeply limited specifications.
Anyone who noticed would care. But who would notice? Who would pay close enough attention?
For the first time in my life, I had no distractions at all. There was nothing to pull my attention away from my work—and yet, obscenely, my work suffered. I stopped pushing myself. Still, the only person who seemed to notice my failure to innovate was my lab director, who pointed out that I hadn’t given him my expenditures report when I said I would. I moved that meeting back,back, back, and his requests for data grew more and more impatient. My funding for the next year wasn’t guaranteed, and I couldn’t even apply for it until I sat down with the lab director to hammer out the details.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I moved through my days with the knowledge, concrete and immovable, that there was not a single person in my life who knew me. No one knew the person I’d been before. No one knew the person I was, after. No one would have been able to spot the unsubtle wounds inflicted by the interval between my moment of glory at the Neufmann Banquet, when I received the greatest honor of my career, and my moment of glory at the flank of a green-and-white taxicab in the wee hours of an April morning, when I let my greatest accomplishment out into the world.
When the new Nathan went home with Martine, I became an alone-thing, more alone than I had ever been before. More alone, even, than I had been that first night in a town house full of packed boxes.
