Page 58 of The Echo Wife
To agree with her goal was to admit that her aims were valid; to disagree was to admit that her very desire for self-realization was a threat to my entire body of work. If this was a contest of wills, then I had already lost.
She was being brave. I nodded to her, placed my own hand on the notebook beside hers. Our knuckles had the same topography, but her hands weren’t identical to mine. They had more calluses than I did, more tiny scars. Shorter fingernails. Our hands were a reflection of the time we each spent sowing our harvests—herin the garden, with her fists in the earth, and me in the lab, protected by gloves.
She was a thing that I could so easily have been. I couldn’t begrudge her the opportunity to find out who she was capable of becoming.
“Okay,” I said. “Let me know if you need help understanding any of it.”
She peeked under the fabric again. From my angle, leaning forward across the kitchen island, I could see the soft curl of the baby’s ear, her white-blond hair. Her scalp was laced with blue veins, visible through the thin layer of down.
“Finally,” Martine breathed. “She’s out.”
“Already?” I glanced at the clock on the oven, trying to remember what time it had been when I arrived. Martine had said, then, that we only had a few hours. How long had the baby been awake? How soon would Nathan be home?
“It’s like this in the afternoon,” she said. “She’s usually only awake for an hour or so between naps. She’ll wake up for longer later.” She began the work of unwrapping the fabric that held the baby to her chest. “Normally I’d just wear her around while she sleeps, but we should fix the yard, yes? I’ll put her down. It’ll only take a minute. She’ll cry a bit—she always does, when I put her down. But it’ll only take a minute and then she’ll be out again.”
She disappeared to the back of the house. I eyed the notebook on the counter and listened to the muffled sounds of Martine putting the baby into the crib, the wail that rose and then quickly fell again. I was seized by a powerful urge to destroy the notebook, to light all four of the burners on the gas stove and hold the pages over it until the climbing flames reached my too-soft fingertips. I gripped the edge of the counter to keep myself from doing it, reminded myself that it wasn’t my place to protect Martine from herself in this. She wasn’t my responsibility. She wasn’t even myrelative.
I didn’t bother thinking about the part of me that wanted thenotebook gone so I could protect myself, preserve my research. There was no profit in that level of honesty.
It didn’t matter what I wanted. Not now, not about this.
I had to let Martine choose.
I heard the door to the nursery open and shut, the latch muted. I knew Martine’s method precisely—the way she would grip the doorknob in her palm before letting her fingers fall onto the backside of it, the smooth, careful turn. The way she would ease the door shut all the way before slowly, so slowly, turning the knob back. No snaps or clicks, no sudden sounds to draw notice or wake a sleeper.
I had perfected the method while my father was alive, to protect myself. Martine had perfected it since the birth of her child, so that the baby would stay asleep. The air around me shivered with the sameness of her, and with the absolute difference of her.
She was padding down the hall, her footsteps soft on the carpet. I forced myself to breathe deep and slow. I forced that doorknob out of my mind. Now wasn’t the time to be thinking about my father, not with all those bodies in the garden.
Not that the bodies in the garden made it easy to stop thinking of my father.
Inhale four, exhale five, keep it together. Poise, Evelyn. That’s the way.
By the time she got to the kitchen, I’d collected myself. I tucked my father back where he belonged, let the roots of my breathing grow thick around him until he was safely out of sight and I could think straight.
“Okay,” I said as Martine entered the room, “how long do we have to get the garden back in order?”
She looked at me blankly. “As long as we want,” she said.
I remembered the last time I’d underestimated her intelligence in this kitchen, checked my impulse to think of her as stupid and slow. “Well,” I said carefully, “we had better get it done before Nathan gets home and, you know. Sees the bodies. He won’t have a memory of them, and he’ll probably freak out.”
Martine laughed, a lovely fluting laugh that didn’t have anythingto do with my own. “Oh, that!” She shook her head and smiled at me. “We don’t need to worry about that. We don’t need to worry about Nathan at all.”
“No?” I said, starting to smile a little too, unable to help myself, even though I didn’t quite understand why she was laughing. Her certainty was contagious.
“Of course not,” she said, reaching out to clasp my hands in hers. “Because the second he walks through that door, he’s going to die.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE
I looked between Martine’s fever-bright eyes, my heart sinking. I realized too late how badly I’d misread her. I’d thought she was handling things well, that her initial panic had given way to practicality. At worst, I had thought she was staying calm for the baby.
But that wasn’t it at all.
She was calm because she had already decided what to do about it all. She was calm because she had a solution in mind.
“We can’t. Martine. That’s not the right answer.” I said it slowly, trying to keep my voice clear enough to remind her that I was rational. That listening to me was a good idea. I needed to cut through her certainty, needed to undermine the comfort she was finding in the idea of killing Nathan. “We can’t just kill him.”
