Page 16 of The Echo Wife
I tried to figure out how to tell Martine to hurry up her farewellwithout sounding like a pitiless monster—but before I could say a word, Martine jumped into the grave. The motion was graceless, foreign, and it struck me as strange that she would even think to do such a thing. I asked what she thought she was doing, whispering as loudly as I could, but either she couldn’t hear me or she chose to ignore me.
Down in the hole, she knelt over Nathan’s corpse. It was just barely too dark for me to see what she was doing. I assumed that she was saying something to him, a final farewell—but then she straightened, and she had the rain-heavy blanket in her fists. She gave it a wrenching yank and it came free from Nathan, his corpse tumbling into the soil. She dropped the blanket next to him in a heap. Then, without my help, she climbed up out of the grave, digging her hands into the soil at the side of the hole and pulling herself up onto the edge. Muddied and panting, she strode across the yard to the garden shed.
She pulled the doors open, leaving streaks of mud on the aluminum siding. The inside of the shed was dark, littered with bags and tools. Along one wall, white boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling.
“This will help,” she said, not bothering to whisper as she returned with a white box in each hand. She handed one to me, her fingers leaving dark streaks along the sides of the box, and tore the lid of her own box open. I looked at the label on the box.Organic Gardening Lime.
“Why do you have so much lime?” I asked, tearing my own box open and shaking the contents into the grave, absurdly reminded of feeding my classroom’s fish when I was in fourth grade.
“The roses like an acidic environment,” Martine said, gesturing with her free hand to a row of four rosebushes under the kitchen window. She shook wide arcs of white over Nathan’s corpse. I looked pointedly at the shed, at the stacks of white boxes, more than anyone could possibly need to tend a half-dozen rosebushes. “The soil is very alkaline here,” Martine said placidly, throwing her empty box into the hole.
I tossed mine in after it, then grabbed the shovel. The rain fell softly, steadily onto the lime, turning the white powder to a paste. As I tossed the first shovelful of soil over Nathan—aiming somewhat deliberately to cover his face—Martine returned to the garden shed.
“Does it really work?” I called after Martine’s back. In the dying light, I could only just make out Martine’s answering shrug.
She returned holding a second shovel, smaller than the one in my hands. “I don’t know if it works, but I saw it on a show once,” she said. “And it can’t hurt, right?”
The idea of her watching television startled me. It shouldn’t have. She was a clone, not a robot. She didn’t just sit dormant whenever Nathan wasn’t looking at her. But it felt strange, somehow—the thought of her sitting and enjoying a show, something I might have watched on a bored weeknight, something with a hidden body and a virtuous-yet-troubled investigator. I pictured her with her feet tucked up, a blanket over her lap, a glass of wine. Nathan’s arm over her shoulder.
We buried him together, in a silence that was enhanced by the cocoon of steady rainfall. By the time we were slapping our shovels over the last of the soil, the rain was coming down harder. Both of us were shivering, dripping, and we walked inside stiff and numb.
CHAPTER
TEN
The air in the house was harsh with bleach; I caught myself reflexively taking shallow breaths. I pulled my limp hair off my neck and, turning, saw that Martine was doing the exact same thing—both our elbows angled up into the air as we gathered our hair away from ourselves, both our necks ranging forward to avoid the discomfort of a damp cling. It gave me a moment of vertigo, looking at a mirror image of myself out of the corner of my eye.
I did not like knowing that she and I could fall into the same patterns. I did not like that at all.
I looked away. “We should wash up,” I said, my voice strange and tight to my own ears.
“You should take the hall bathroom,” Martine answered, slipping out of her mud-caked shoes. Her voice was soft and genial again, painfully courteous. “That shower is bigger. I’ll be fine in the master bath. I already took a shower today anyway.”
I paused in the middle of taking off my own shoes. This was programming at work—Martine had been designed to be a perfect hostess, self-sacrificing and polite to a fault. Even now, after burying her husband, she was putting herself last.
“Thanks,” I said, not arguing with Martine’s sacrifice, because I was not like her. I wanted the bigger shower. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to use that fragrant vanilla soap, wanted to wrap myself in a sage-green towel. I wanted it, and I did not care if she might also want it. I was going to have it.
Nathan used to call me selfish. Maybe he was right.
But, I thought as I closed the bathroom door and clicked the button-lock on the knob, whether or not he had been right was irrelevant now. It was that simple. His opinion stopped mattering the moment he stopped breathing.
Disposable.
Just like any specimen.
That’s what I told myself, over and over, willing myself to believe it.
I tucked my hands under my arms, waiting for them to stop shaking.
It was the cold, I told myself, breathing slowly. That, and fatigue. Digging the grave had been hard work. It had been a long day. I was just tired. A shower and a good night’s sleep, that was all I needed, and then this whole thing would be behind me for good.
I turned on the water. I didn’t climb under it until the steam was too thick for me to see my reflection in the tap. I closed my eyes and leaned into the spray, and I let the water scald me until I was numb.
Never apologize.
Never look back.
Forward, Evelyn. Forward. That’s the way.
