Page 66 of The Echo Wife
He held Violet wrong.
I didn’t know how to hold her correctly either—I couldn’t have held her any better than he was, to be certain—but I could tell that he was doing it wrong. She squirmed and cried in his arms, twisting her body, wormlike. She wore one sock, the other foot bare and fat and strangely smooth on the bottom. Her toes curled and stretched, and her face was snarled up into a red knot, and her misery was a palpable thing.
The lines of Nathan’s face spoke to profound exhaustion. He cupped her neck in one hand, gently but with obvious discomfort. He didn’t seem to like touching her, this baby that he had killed a dozen clones and destroyed a marriage—destroyed our life together—in order to get his hands on.
I watched him more closely than I had ever watched my own husband. The man in front of me moved and spoke like an adult, but he was just a handful of months old. There were so many things he had never seen or experienced, things he only thought he knew. He had no idea that he wasn’t the man he thought himself to be.
He was treading water far out of his depth, and he thought he was just a few feet from shore. Martine and I were the only ones who knew exactly how lost he was.
He sat down at the dining-room table as I boiled water for tea, sat as though he’d never been off his feet before. This edition of Nathan was weary. Remembering Martine’s sleepless nights and napless days, I could not bring myself to pity him. He looked as out of place as if he’d walked through my front door and somehow found himself standing on the surface of the moon. He glanced around, taking in my kitchen, patting Violet’s back ineffectually.
I watched him taking it in: my mugs and wineglasses in the drying rack by the sink, my dish towel hung on the handle of the oven door, my magnetless refrigerator. After an awkward minute, his brow furrowed.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but I can’t remember what our old kitchen looked like.”
“Mmm,” I said, hoping he would impose a suitable meaning on the noise. Of course he couldn’t remember that—it wasn’t a memory I’d handed him. It hadn’t felt important, when we were mired in the programming process, that he remember what our home had looked like. It had never occurred to me that he would have cause to remember, that he would ever be in a position to draw a comparison between the rooms we decorated together and the rooms I decorated on my own. “It’s good to see you,” I added.
And it was good. I was glad to see this version of Nathan,this slightly simpler, slightly better man who looked like my ex-husband. Some part of me had been sad at the knowledge that I couldn’t observe him, couldn’t watch his development as it progressed. But here he was, and I could see the way that he was settling into himself. He moved like the old Nathan had, spoke with much of his same inflection. It was like meeting an old friend at a high school reunion: he was different, but also, he was exactly the same. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I couldn’t help feeling obscurely happy to see him. Familiarity, is all. Familiarity and the satisfaction of my own curiosity.
“I have to share some… unfortunate news,” he said, shifting the baby’s weight from one arm to the other.
“Oh?” I brought him a cup of tea, a licorice blend that the original Nathan hadn’t liked. I had always wondered if hereallydidn’t like it, or if he was pretending to dislike it to be ornery. It was a petty indulgence, but I intended to have an answer one way or another.
He took a sip. He did not shudder or grimace or narrow his eyes. I counted myself victorious: he liked it.I knew it.Then he set his mug down, looking at it curiously—perhaps “liked it” was too strong a sentiment—and cleared his throat.
“It’s about Martine,” he said.
And then he told me.
He told me about how he’d come home and found her dead. A month ago, he said. Natural causes, he said. She’d had a heart condition. The lie flowed out of him as smooth as cream. He held my eyes as he told me his story, as he gently criticized himself for the flaws he’d given her. He spun a tale of himself heroically trying to handle the baby on his own for an entire month before breaking down and coming to me, and he didn’t trip over a single word of it.
He lied to me with ease, and as he did, I saw the weave of the cloth he’d been cut from. This was the man I knew, after all.
I interrupted him before he could go into further detail about the “heart condition.” I didn’t want to make him dance for me,didn’t want to see the routine he’d been practicing. I just wanted it to be over. “What do you need?” I asked, the words coming out sharp and abrupt. I didn’t intend it to be cruel but it was, it was terribly cruel, and I saw how it hurt him.
“I don’t know how to do this,” he whispered. “I don’t—I don’t know anything about babies. I thought I did, but since Violet was born I’ve been learning it all fresh. Like this,” he said, shifting the baby’s weight between his arms again. “I don’t know how to hold her right. I’ve been trying to figure it out all month, I even looked it up on—on my phone.” He laughed. “Can you believe we don’t have a computer in the house? I didn’t even think about it, I always just use the one at work, but there’s no computer in the house. Isn’t that crazy?”
It took an effort to swallow the sip of tea that was in my mouth. It went down like an overlarge pill. Of course there was no computer in the house. The original Nathan wouldn’t have wanted Martine to be able to use the internet, to learn about the way her life could be. He hadn’t even given her books to read, and it wasn’t out of neglect the way I’d assumed it was. He’d walled her up in a tower. The door wasn’t locked, but he’d kept her trapped in her ignorance. It was by design.
This Nathan didn’t know that—couldn’t know. But the boundary between the original Nathan and the new one blurred together in my mind for a brief, furious moment, and I forgot that he truly had no idea.He’s lying again,I thought,pretending he didn’t do this to her on purpose,and I felt a buzzing rage deep in my bones and I knew that the original Nathan had been right about me.A hornet,he’d called me, full of hate and venom, and he’d been right because I looked across the table at the new Nathan and all I wanted to do was sting, sting, sting until he fell down swollen and dead.
I hadn’t intended to be cruel when I asked this new Nathan what he needed from me. I hadn’t intended to hurt him then. But I wanted to hurt him now. “Don’t you have any friends you can ask?” I spread some butter on the “any,” made it heavy.
It hit him exactly as I’d hoped it would. He looked down into his tea, took another sip, grimaced. “No one with kids,” he said, lying again, lying the way he always had. He would tell me truths that were trueenough,that weren’t quite lies, and here he was, unwilling to confess his isolation to me.
Inside, I was smiling like a cat. I knew precisely how weak he was, knew the taste of his misery—but just at that moment, Violet let out a noise like the legs of a dining-room chair scraping against the floor, and reality clicked back into place. This was not the old Nathan. This was a new man, one who didn’t deserve to be hurting, any more than he’d deserved to die when Martine wanted to kill him.
I’d put him there, after all. I’d made him into the man he was, and I’d put him into that house. It wasn’t fair of me to be so callous. It wasn’t fair of me to want him to hurt like this.
I tried to listen to him, this Nathan who had never been my husband. I tried not to interrupt, not to press. It was so hard, looking at this man who thought he had betrayed me, who thought he had ever loved me enough to stop loving me. Watching him hold his impossible baby the wrong way. I tried, but everything was fogged over by the shape of his mouth, the rise of his knuckles, the dip of his throat.
Everything about him was Nathan, and everything about me was a hornet, and I could not keep myself from hating him.
“Anyway,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m doing, and I need help. I know you never wanted children, but… I’m on my own, Evelyn. I can’t do this on my own.”
I shrugged. “Make another one,” I said. “You did it right on the first try. Well, almost right, except for the heart condition.” He only looked away from me at the last two words. Those were the only ones he knew to be untrue.
“No,” he said slowly. “No, I can’t make another one. I’ll understand if this seems impossible to you, but… I loved Martine. I can’t just replace her.”
