Page 28 of The Echo Wife
I sighed and let guilt and weariness crash through me, knocking my defenses flat.Fine.“Would you like to stay with me?” I asked, then quickly added a hopeful caveat. “If you’d prefer to be alone, obviously that’s okay too, I just thought—”
“Please, yes,” she said. Her voice was taut with exhaustion. “I would prefer not to be in that house at all today, much less by myself.”
“My place is a mess,” I warned her, turning onto my street. “I’m barely even unpacked.”
“It’s fine,” she said with a faint note of irritation. It was the first time I could recall hearing her sound anything but placid. “I don’t mind,” she added, a bit more gently—but I clung to the contrast. She had sounded annoyed.
She had very nearlyargued.
It was a relief, for reasons I couldn’t quite get a grasp on. She wasn’t completely pliant. There was something in there that felt familiar to me—a hint of the hornet Nathan had always accused me of being.
Maybe, I thought, Martine wasn’tentirelydifferent from me.
Maybe she wasn’t entirely better.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
I woke up on my new couch in the middle of the night with no recollection of how I’d gotten there. The fabric still smelled like the showroom. I was under a fleece throw blanket, one I’d purchased the week before, when the prospect of unpacking enough boxes to find my blankets had nearly crushed me. I’d gone to the store in a kind of manic rage, indignant at the idea that I needed to open boxes to find the things that would comfort me. This was Nathan’s fault, I’d thought savagely.
Hedeservedto be dead for the way I’d been unable to find a fitted sheet after an hour of searching.
The blanket I’d bought that day was soft and thick, and it imposed a kind of artificial coziness on the mostly bare living room. Even though I was the one who chose it, I resented it for being so comforting. It felt like a blatant manipulation, like an inadequate consolation. I hated it for being a thing I needed. I hated myself for clinging to it.
I gathered it around myself in the darkness of my living room as I tried to reconstruct how I’d gotten onto the couch. I remembered pulling onto my street. There was a vague fog in my mind where parking the car and entering my home should have been—and then a long gap of darkness, the thick dark velvet of deep sleep.
Wrapping the blanket around my shoulders, I padded into the hall on silent feet. The heater wasn’t on. I suppressed a shiver as I tapped the button to activate the heat for the first time since I’d moved in. Something deep in the walls of the house clicked and hummed, and the smell of dust filled the air.
Martine hadn’t thought to turn the heat on, though it was certainly cold enough for it. Was it that she hadn’t been able to figure out the thermostat? Was she afraid I wouldn’t want her to change the temperature? I thought back to the way she’d stood in the rain over Nathan’s grave, the way it had taken her so much longer than me to start shivering. Maybe she just didn’t notice the cold as much as I did.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs that led up to my bedroom and my office.
When I was four years old, my mother taught me how to use the stairs in our house if I needed to move around at night.
My father had been out at a dinner at the time, gone for hours, sure to come home smelling like juniper and cigarette smoke. My mother walked me up and down the stairs again and again, showing me how to roll each footstep through the balls of my feet. She pointed to the place where each step met the wall, taught me to set my feet there so as to avoid making the wood creak. She made me memorize the boards that groaned or clicked underfoot.
We practiced for what felt like hours, walking up and down the stairs again and again until I could do it as silently as she could.
Once she thought I was ready, she positioned me at the top of the staircase. Then, she waited at the bottom of the steps with her back turned and her hands over her eyes. I remember watching her fingertips tremble against the top of her hairline. “Walk past me without me noticing,” she said. “Touch the front door without me hearing you.”
I got it right on the first try. When my fingertips touched the white-painted wood of our front door, I shouted in triumph, and she scooped me up into a tight hug, laughing into my hair.
I said that I couldn’t wait to show my father what I’d learned, but she shook her head. “We don’t show him this trick,” she said. “This one is just ours.” Her eyes were so serious.
I remember nodding solemnly, satisfied that I had a conspiracy to share with her. Knowing already that I should only use my newfound stealth when my father wasn’t looking.
I didn’t know thewhyof any of it. I didn’t understand, yet, what would have made my mother learn how to walk through our home without detection—but it was enough for me, at the time, to know that she and I had a secret.
I thought of her as I walked up the dark stairs of my little townhouse.
I walked on the balls of my feet, each step pressed to the place where the stair met the wall.
I didn’t make a sound.
My bedroom door was open just a sliver. It swung into the room under my touch, the hinges quiet.
Martine was curled onto her left side, still fully dressed atop the covers. I was gripped by a surreal certainty that I was someone else, a stranger in this room, watching myself sleep. Her body faced away from me, and it struck me that I now knew, for the first time, what my back looked like when I slept.
