Page 63 of The Echo Wife
“I have a question about this plan,” Martine said as we worked. She waited for me to nod before she continued. “Won’t—when they find her, won’t they know she’s been dead for a long time? She looks okay on the outside, but as soon as anyone looks too close…”
I picked up a pair of scissors, eyed Martine’s newly short hair. As I started to comb and cut Laila’s hair, I nodded. “But no one is going to look too close. Nathan will panic. He’ll try to hide her. You’re illegal, remember? You aren’t supposed to exist. He’s not supposed to have you. He knows that, and since he doesn’t know that he’s ever killed one of you before, he wouldn’t know what it looks like when one of you dies. For all he knows, the instant a clone dies, it liquefies.”
Martine glanced back and forth between the loosely knotted rope in her hands and the scissors in mine. “I hope this works,” she murmured.
“It will.” I said it as though I could be certain.
We dressed Laila in Martine’s clothes. Martine stood with her hands under Laila’s armpits, lifting her to eye-level, and I reached my arms around from the front to fasten the hooks of a nursing bra behind the clone’s back. We put her in one of Martine’s nicer dresses, green with pale yellow flowers, because the sleeves were long enough and the neckline was high enough to cover the lividity where blood had pooled in her arms and back. She had been buried in her clothes; I didn’t foresee Nathan trying to strip her naked this time, either.
We pushed aside the coats that hung on the sturdy wooden dowel in the front-hall closet, pushed them all the way to the sides of the closet. We stood back-to-back in the middle of that closet, each of us pushing at the coats with both hands, crushing them as flat as we could.
Martine hung the noose, and I looped it around Laila’s neck. We lined it up until it matched that narrow ring of purple, tightened it hard so it would stay in place. Martine made a small, high sound when the rope dug deep into Laila’s skin.
For reasons I still don’t understand, that sound made me want to loosen the rope. Everything else, I had been able to stand—but that sound, that small aborted whimper, made me want to cut Laila free.
“This isn’t fair to her,” Martine said. “None of this is.”
“I know,” I said. The part of me that was willing to see Laila as a person—as a woman, as a part of a peculiar estranged family I’d never known I had—felt the terrible injustice of this. Laila had been born, hidden away, murdered, and buried, and she still wasn’t finished. She still wasn’t free.
I tried hard, so hard, to listen only to the part of me that saw her as a specimen. A specimen is born to serve a purpose. It dies when that function is fulfilled, or if it can’t do its job. What happens to it after it dies doesn’t matter, doesn’t carry moral weight.
But in that moment, with Laila on the floor in front of the coat closet?It doesn’t matterfelt less like an objective fact, and more like a thing I told myself to justify the life I led, the work I did. I couldn’t swallow back the way it felt wrong. I couldn’t tell Martine to let it go, to forget it, to just get the work done. Because we had dressed up a corpse that looked just like her, had dressed the body in her clothes, had used her shampoo to make sure that it smelled the way she did. Because that corpse had my genes.
Laila was dead, and Laila had our face, and Martine was right: It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair to any of us.
Martine hauled Laila upright. She wrapped her arms tight around the clone’s thighs and, panting, held her up high. I stood on a stepladder and tied the loose end of the rope to the dowel in the closet. One knot, then two, then three. As sturdy as I could make it.
Martine eased Laila down slowly, lowering her until the rope was taut. She was breathless, her forehead beaded with sweat. Iwasn’t sure if I could have lifted my own bodyweight the way she just had, not alone. Where had that strength come from?
Laila’s toes nearly brushed the floor.
The dowel creaked ominously, but it held, at least for now. If it broke, so be it—he would find her on the ground.
There was something dreamlike about seeing her there. Over the course of the months I worked with Martine to make Nathan, I had grown accustomed to seeing my own face wearing unfamiliar expressions. Sleeping, eating, vomiting. The corpses in the ground had been uniquely terrible, but they were wrong enough that I could separate myself from them.
But this—this was different. Laila looked so much like me, so much like Martine, and her face was peaceful, and she was unmistakably dead.
I told myself that there was no time for reflection, and I turned my back to her.
There was still so much left to do.
We threw Laila’s old clothes into a trash bag, swept up the dirt that Martine had tracked into the house before my arrival. We slipped out to the backyard, finished filling in the last open grave and the shallow, halfhearted holes in the lawn. We righted the rosebushes. We planted the apple trees over the graves, so that Nathan wouldn’t question the tilled part of the garden. We even watered them, so they would grow. We did it all as Martine would have done it, were she committed to completing every item on her itinerary before sending herself away into the dark.
It would have been an impressive afternoon’s work, all by itself. But the sun was low in the sky, and Nathan was already late getting home, and there was no time left to admire our handiwork.
“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to go. Are you ready?”
Martine stared at me, then walked into the house. She came back out a few minutes later with Violet wrapped tight against her chest, the box of yellow notebooks in her arms.
“Oh,” I said, because I had forgotten. How could I have forgotten? But of course I had—I focused on the work, and I paid attention to my goal, and I forgot about the baby.
“Martine,” I said, looking at Violet and wishing she would figure it out on her own. But she didn’t, and I had to tell her. There was no time to soften it. There was no time to hesitate and flutter and be gentle. Still, I tried to be kind. I tried to tell her without cruelty. “Martine. We can’t take Violet with us.”
She looked at me blankly. “What?”
“We can’t take her,” I said, and I remember it like I remember the deep achingcrackof my wrist breaking when I was a child. That moment, when Martine’s face fell as I told her that she would need to leave her baby behind—that was the moment when I began to hate myself. Not before, not even when I’d been cruel to her, not even when I’d broken her for my own convenience.
When I told her that we had to leave Violet behind, it was obvious to me that she didn’t understand yet why the baby had to stay behind. She looked sad and confused and a little angry. But she didn’t look surprised. She didn’t know why we couldn’t bring her child with us, but she didn’t seem surprised that I would tell her something so painful and, to her, unnecessary.
