Page 24 of The Echo Wife
He twisted his ski mask again. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
I could hear Martine’s breathing, slow and deep, and I realized that I was unconsciously synchronizing my own breathing to hers. Did Nathan program her to handle situations like this one, to soothe his anger that was so much like mine? Or did she learn how to do it over the year that she and Nathan had together?
Had he known that he needed someone who could calm him down, before the first time she did it? Or did he feel that cool hand on his arm, feel himself breathing slower, and recognize his own fury for what it was?
I could feel my own heartbeat pounding behind my eyes, but I breathed with Martine, and I was able to look at Seyed without succumbing to the overwhelming urge to slap him. He must have felt me looking at him, because he finally lifted his eyes to meet mine.
That’s when he looked at Martine for the first time. He had noticed her before, but he had been so focused on me, so unwilling to look up at me, that he hadn’t really seen her. Not yet.
He looked from her face to mine, then back again. He stared at her, his lips parted, darting glances at me. Comparing our features. Realizing.
Predictable and unstoppable as coastal erosion, his gaze dropped to her belly. I watched his expression shift from amazement to alarm to guarded neutrality. He managed to snap on a mask of professional calm—but not before his eyes met mine in an instant of stark horror.
“Who is this?” he asked.
“This,” I answered through gritted teeth, “is Martine.”
Seyed had lasted so much longer in my lab than I ever could have predicted. Longer than any of his predecessors had. To tell the truth, I hadn’t expected him to stick around for more than a few months. My assistants rarely lingered longer than that.
My expectations for him were, of course, high. The position turned over rapidly enough that I’d stopped interviewingcandidates—I kept a pile of résumés on my desk and hired whoever was at the top of the pile when my assistants inevitably quit. But Seyed was different. I hand-picked him, rescued him from Nathan’s dead-end postdoc program and brought him into the bright and brilliant light of real research. I saw great intellectual potential in him, and I decided that potential was worth nurturing.
When I told him to come work for me, I was taking a chance on him. I had a fight with Nathan because of it, a ridiculous fight about whether it had been right for me to “steal” Seyed from him. I told him, of course, that you can’t “steal” a person, short of kidnapping them, which I hadn’t even come close to. It was a stupid, pointless fight, but still—it was a fight, and my marriage never could afford more of those. I dealt with that so that Seyed could have a chance at becoming the thing he was meant to be.
When I brought him into the lab, I expected him to be bright but naïve, still damp-eared and wobbly-legged under his too-crisp lab coat. I expected him to be just as flinching and nervous and overeager as all the others. I expected him to tumble around underfoot, getting in my way and wheedling me for mentorship. Irritating me until he decided that he needed to find a different lab, one that was less demanding.
But Seyed was nothing like what I expected. He showed up ready to work, and he absorbed information seemingly by proximity. He listened when I explained things to him, even when they were things he already knew, even when I was only explaining to fill the air with enough noise to cover my own doubt. He asked the right questions. He disposed of his pipette tips properly. He didn’t have to be told to double-layer his gloves to keep frequent changes easy, and he never left them around or, for God’s sake, tried to reuse them.
He didn’t ever try to attend to myfeelings.
He knew what was important, and he knew what wasn’t.
Seyed’s judgment was impeccable, and he always seemed to make the same decisions that I would have, given the information available. My fight with Nathan faded in the wake of all the otherfights we had, and I was left with nothing but a sense of deep satisfaction. I had been right about Seyed. I hadn’t wasted my time on him, I thought at the time. He was exactly as proficient as I had hoped he would be, and getting better every day.
It made sense, then, that after he had been in my lab for six months—outlasting the previously held record for assistant longevity—I started to trust him with a brace of unsupervised tasks. He adjusted to the increased workload without hesitation. He seemed to flourish under the added responsibility. We fell into an easy rhythm.
I hadn’t felt something so close to professional partnership since Nathan left the lab. I trusted Seyed. I learned how to lean on him. I let him become an integral part of my laboratory, which was always more of a home than home was.
He was the best assistant I ever had.
“She can’t be pregnant,” Seyed stammered, pointing at Martine, his eyes wide. “That’s impossible. That’s—”
“I know,” I interrupted, not wanting to rehash the fight that had turned Martine into a murderer.
“Evelyn, what did youdo?”
I realize now that I could have tried to lie to him. I could have told him that Martine was my twin sister. She was unconditioned, so we looked just different enough that maybe he would have bought it. Maybe he would have believed me, and things would have gone differently. I could have fired him on the spot and done the rest of my work alone, and then maybe I could have washed my hands of the whole thing once the work was complete.
But it didn’t occur to me to lie to him. Even faced with immediate evidence of his deception, I still trusted him enough to tell him the truth. After all, on the scale of lies I had recently uncovered, stealing my lab equipment wasn’t exactly dire.
And maybe I wasn’t ready to lose the only person left in my life who I trusted. When I left Nathan, I decided not to forgivehim. I chose to cut a deep crease into our relationship, a line that divided our life together into the time when I knew him and the time when I didn’t. That choice scooped out the center of me.
I didn’t have it in me to make that decision again, with Seyed. There are only so many excisions a body can handle. I wasn’t ready to carry both of those betrayals as irreparable.
So instead of lying to him, I told him everything.
Martine cleaned up the spilled lab supplies without being asked, making more noise than she needed to. Giving us the space to talk without being heard. I told Seyed who Martine was, andwhatshe was, and what she had done. I told him about Nathan the adulterer. I told him about Nathan the corpse.
I held his gaze the entire time, trying to read his reactions to what I was telling him. Trying to see if he understood the second chance I was giving him. He glanced between me and Martine several times, but he didn’t say anything. He just listened.
