Page 56 of The Echo Wife
It was the one room I hadn’t seen, the night I helped Martine bury Nathan’s own, freshly dead body. It had made sense for me to see the rest of the house, with all that had to be done, but there had been no reason for her to show me the nursery, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. If I’d thought about it at all, of course, I would have known that there was a nursery in the house—but I had figured that the picture I had of Martine’s home was thorough enough. It was sufficient.
I thought I’d seen enough to understand.
But there it was, on the other side of a white door: the nursery. The room that represented the things Nathan wanted, the things Martine wanted, the life they had worked to build together. The walls were washed green with white wainscoting, a hand-painted trim of dark boughs flecked with tiny purple flowers. Two layers of curtains hung across a small, high-set window—one layer thick, the other sheer, both closed tight to keep the room dark. A mobile hung above the crib, bumblebees and felt flowers. The carpet was thick, and there was a rocking chair in one corner, and I could see Martine’s hand in all of it, every color, every corner, every detail.
“This is lovely,” I said, and I meant it. I truly did.
“His desk is still in the dining nook,” she answered, “but some of his files are in the closet.” I slid the closet door open, and there they were: a half closet’s worth of banker’s boxes, stacked up underneath a double row of hung onesies on impossibly small hangers. I searched the boxes as Martine changed the baby. She murmured as she did it, small sweet noises that didn’t quiet the baby, but that seemed to shift the tenor of her cries to something less emergent.
“What’s her name?” I asked, opening the first box, flipping through tax returns.
“Violet,” Martine said. “After Nathan’s grandmother.” On the changing table, Violet wailed, her limbs flailing in the same jerky motions as a freshly dry specimen.
I found the records I wanted in the third box I investigated. I opened it just as the crying stopped. I looked over my shoulder, the lid of the box in my hand, just in time to see Martine settle back in the rocking chair with the baby at her nipple. I felt a strange flush of embarrassment, not at the sight of her breast, but at the contentment on her face.
That wasn’t meant for my eyes.
It wasn’t meant for anyone’s eyes. It was a moment in which, I realized, she wasn’t calibrating her expression to any purpose. She wasn’t trying to make anyone else feel happy, or important, or safe, or guilty. She’d been created and molded to think constantly of what her face and voice and body might incite in others. She’d been made to manage the emotions of people around her. She’d been made to be careful.
But in that moment, her contentment belonged to her, and to her alone. She had made something, and she owned it entirely, and no one could take it from her.
It wasn’t a feeling I would ever have. The idea of holding an infant to my breast made me feel faintly ill, the same way I felt whenever conditioning a specimen required the removal of a fingernail. But I could never begrudge her the privacy of it—the ownership of that moment. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was intruding upon it, just by existing.
I wasn’t supposed to be here.
I confirmed that feeling as fact when I opened the box labeledHEALTH INSURANCEand found a stack of yellow notebooks inside. Thirteen of them, the same kind of notebooks we had used as graduate students. They were labeled in Nathan’s spiky, uneven hand, thick black marker in the center of each yellow cover.
Agatha. Bethany. Corinne. Dinah. Edith. Faith. Genevieve. Helen. Ingrid. Jacqueline. Katrina. Laila.
Martine.
They were filled with notes on Nathan’s progress, his methods. Each of the first dozen ended with a full-page black X, a marker of the day he’d given up on the specimens. The dates began tooverlap—he was preparing new attempts before the old ones had failed, refining his methods.
Martine’s notebook ended with a reflection, a page-long journal-style entry. It was dated only a couple of weeks before I had confronted him with proof of his infidelity.
The entry described his certainty that he had finally succeeded. He was relieved. He was elated. He could finally have the life he wanted.
The only thing left to decide, he said, was what to do about me.
I stared at the words with a strange sense of distance.The only thing left to decide is what to do about Evelyn.Having seen what he did about the first dozen iterations of Martine, I had a feeling that I knew what his approach to dealing with me was going to be.
“What is it?” Martine whispered.
I looked up and realized that I’d been sitting on the floor, reading silently, surrounded by notebooks, for much more time than I’d noticed. Martine was still in the chair, cradling Violet in her arms, rocking at a steady rhythm. I couldn’t tell if the baby was asleep or just quiet.
I kept my voice low and steady. I showed Martine the covers, the names, the dates. I didn’t share the details of each failure with her, but I gave her the broad strokes of my understanding: Nathan had rushed, extrapolated, experimented, and failed over and over again. Every time one of his attempts to clone me—to improve me—failed, he killed the clone, buried it, and started over again. All told, it seemed to have taken him barely eighteen months to successfully reproduce my results. At least, that was what he’d recorded. Three years in all between his first failure and his final one.
I couldn’t read Martine’s face when I told her that she was his success. That she was the pinnacle of his accomplishments. “You were a real triumph,” I said, and she looked away, her lips white.
“He was going to kill you,” she murmured. In her arms, Violet made a soft, high noise.
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
“He was going to kill you,” she said. “So that he could be with me. And then he was going to kill me, because he thought he had failed again. That was his solution to both of us.”
I put the lid back on the box. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, that about sums it up. He would have killed both of us, and buried us in the garden, just like he did with all of the… women.” I swallowed hard around that word.
They weren’t women. They weren’tpeople. They weren’tme.
