Page 29 of The Echo Wife
I studied the outline of it: the way Martine’s shoulders and hips formed brackets at either end of her spine, the way her vertebrae stuck out at the base of her neck. Her hair was spread across my pillow, the blond bright in the vague wash of moonlight that grayed the room.
She looked so small. Her breath came slow and shallow. One of her hands, the left one, was curled tightly into a fist on the pillow beside her face, the thumb tucked in under the fingers. Her other hand was draped across her navel.
It was a protective posture, guarded.
I had never watched a specimen sleep before. I had seen them unconscious, coiled fetal in their tanks, or splayed out on a table for examination. I had seen them sedated for conditioning. I had seen them dead, their chests thrust skyward by the foam block Seyed put between their shoulder blades to make them easier to dissect.
But I had never watched one sleep.
Did Martine lie down like that because of the way she was programmed, or because of the way her body was shaped? Did she sleep on that side of the bed because Nathan preferred the otherside, or was it the one she would have chosen for herself? Did she tuck her thumb in due to some trick of long-term conditioning, or because of a deep-seated instinct?
I wrapped my own fingers over my thumbs and squeezed gently, remembered my father telling me to keep my thumbs outside of my fists if I ever needed to punch someone. He told me to keep my thumbs out, so I wouldn’t break them. I remembered the way he had folded my hands in his, the way he had crushed my fingers shut until I could feel the knuckle in my thumb straining. “See how much that hurts?” he’d said. “Now imagine if you were hitting something, how fast that same compression would happen. Your thumb would snap like a twig.”
I’d nodded, biting my lip to keep from making a sound. If I did, I knew, he would squeeze just a little harder. Just for a second, to make sure I learned what he was trying to teach me.
If he hadn’t taught me, would I have learned to sleep with my thumbs tucked in, like Martine?
I climbed into the bed with all of my clothes on, the fleecy blanket from the couch still wrapped around my shoulders. I turned my back to Martine so our spines faced each other. I tucked my legs up, let the soles of my feet brush against hers. She didn’t stir.
As I listened to Martine’s steady breathing, I let my right hand drift up to my pillow. It curled into a loose fist, close enough to my mouth that my breath warmed my wrist. I traced the contour of my index finger with the pad of my thumb as I waited for sleep, feeling the calluses that bordered each of my knuckles—tiny rough patches that I had earned over a lifetime of using that hand. They were mine.
I brushed my thumb across those calluses, feeling the places where I was my own, and I waited for sleep.
It was a long time coming.
The worst injury I ever received as a child was a broken wrist. My mother was the one who spotted the way I was hiding my arm,the way I was trying to do everything one-handed. She grabbed my arm from behind my back, her fingers wrapping around my wrist tight enough to make me want to cry out.
It was a narrow thing, my silence.
She made a small surprised sound, studied my face to read the pain. She held a finger to my lips and helped me ease my shoes on in silence so we could go to the hospital, the faraway one where my father didn’t work.
She didn’t ask me what happened.
I remember the doctor showing me the X-ray, pointing out the spiral fracture in my ulna. “Your bones are young, and this is a stable fracture,” he said, “so you’ll heal up fast. Did you fall off the monkey bars?”
I shook my head, and he repeated himself slowly. “You fell, didn’t you? Off the monkey bars, right?” He was staring at me with urgent intensity, not blinking, and he only broke his gaze away from me when I nodded. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and that’s when I first remember thinking that doctors and scientists must all know each other.
I’d stared at the fracture in fascination. There it was: evidence of the pain I’d been hiding for the better part of a day. My father rolled his eyes at the bright-blue cast, but that night in his study, he showed me a diagram of the human skeleton. I asked him what the doctor had meant about my bones being young, and in response, my father taught me about growth plates. I showed him the location of the fracture. He told me that I was lucky: in an adult, a spiral fracture might require surgery. He told me about the pins the surgeons might insert into the bones to try to fix them. He showed me a scar on his own leg, let me feel the bump on his ankle where a pin had been sized wrong.
When the cast came off, my arm was strange and damp and white, like the underbelly of one of the frogs I often found in my mother’s garden. I touched it gently, feeling the ridges of my fingertips on the hypersensitive skin of my wrist. I knew that I was different than I had been six weeks before, that my body waschanged forever, in ways that would be visible when I’d died and my flesh had sifted away from my bones. I knew that something inside me had been permanently altered.
I wondered at the power people had over each other, to make lasting changes like that.
I never got the chance to talk about it with my father. By the time my arm had returned to its normal color, he was gone.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
When I woke the next morning, I was alone again.
The other side of the bed—Martine’s side, although I didn’t want to think of it that way—was smoothed over, the pillow fluffed, the bed linens flat. I was still hunched up under the living-room blanket with my shoulders around my ears. I was just barely too cold to fall back asleep. The dusty smell of the heater had subsided, replaced by something kinder. Something sweeter. A faint note of vanilla, and the vague, humid scent of hot water.
I left the blanket in the bedroom, embarrassed to have been seen with it wrapped around my shoulders. I didn’t like knowing that she’d seen me clinging to a blanket like a toddler. In fact, now that the crushing fatigue had subsided, I didn’t like the idea that Martine was in my house at all. I tried to think of what else she might have seen in my home while I’d been sleeping.
When I got downstairs, I discovered things were even worse than I’d feared.
My entire living room was unpacked. My books were unboxed, nestled on my previously empty shelves. Lamps were assembled and lit. A tidy pile of folded throw blankets was on one end of the couch, and a candle I’d forgotten I owned was burning in the center of the coffee table—that must have been the vanilla scent I’d noticed. The room was warm and welcoming, arranged with more thought than I ever would have afforded it.
