Page 42 of The Echo Wife
When I handed Martine a sanding block and told her to debride Zed’s knee, my dwindling contempt raised its nose to the wind, scenting for blood. She asked me what “debride” meant.
“Technically,” I answered, “it means the removal of dead tissue. Infected skin, scabs, that sort of thing.” I gestured to the perfect, unblemished knurl of Zed’s knee. “In this case, it means you’re going to re-create the injury that led to Nathan’s scar. Sand his skin away, like the asphalt did when he fell.” I outlined the area with a ballpoint pen, in case she couldn’t remember the exact location. “Take everything within that oval down to dermis, then a little beyond. It should bleed.”
Martine studied the rough oval I’d drawn on Zed’s kneecap, then looked at his face. I waited for her to falter.
“How deep is he under?” she asked, her voice muffled by her surgical mask. The mean cruel core of me crowed in triumph: she was scared to hurt him, I was right, she was weak, weak,weak. But then she turned to me and continued before I could answer: “Should we strap him down, in case he fights?”
I hadn’t expected that from her. I hadn’t expected that atall.
“He’s out,” I said. “He’s deep enough under that we’ll be able to yank his tooth this afternoon without trouble. I wouldn’t worry.”
“Good,” she replied, and then she descended on his knee. She held the skin taut with one gloved hand, and she swung the sanding block in great circles, scraping away healthy skin with every downstroke. “I figure,” she said, her eyes intent on her work, “the road only scraped him in one direction, so I shouldn’t go back and forth. Unless you disagree?”
I shook my head, then realized—she wasn’t looking at me.
She had asked my opinion, but she wasn’t watching me with fearful eyes to make sure that I approved of her choice. She hadn’t stopped her work to see if I was going to object. She wasn’t thinking of me at all.
“Yes, that sounds good,” I said. I watched her for a few more seconds, but it was obvious that my supervision wasn’t required. I turned away from her, walked to the autoclave to check that the dental instruments were ready for the afternoon’s work. When I looked over my shoulder, she was still bent over Zed’s knee, humming to herself as she swept away layer after layer of his skin.
After I had performed Zed’s tooth extraction, I asked Seyed to deal with the cleanup. I told him that I wanted to make sure Martine was feeling all right about the work she’d done that day. He would need to rinse Zed’s body of blood and saliva, would need to dry him and transfer him to a recovery bed for the night. He would need to wash down the autopsy table and dispose of the biowaste and autoclave the instruments. It was a two-person job, but Seyed didn’t so much as hesitate before agreeing to handle it.
“She’s probably wrecked,” he said, watching as Martine lathered her forearms with antimicrobial soap.
“Probably,” I murmured. I was watching her too. The firm, unhesitant motion of her hands. The angle of her neck over the sink, as she watched the soap run down the drain. The slight, satisfied lift at the corners of her mouth. “Don’t worry,” I added. “I’ll check in on her.”
But that night, when I asked Martine how she was doing, she smiled at me. She was absently rubbing the underside of her belly, pressing on a place where I suppose the baby was pressing back. Spirals of steam rose from her peppermint tea between us.
“I’m wonderful,” she said. “Just wonderful. How are you doing?”
“Are you sure?” I asked, squinting at her. “Because conditioning can be difficult to watch. Or to participate in.”
She shook her head and reached for her tea, lifted it to her lips to blow across the surface of it. Her lips nearly touched the edgeof the mug. “I don’t mind,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to set Nathan right.”
“Zed, you mean?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “Although I think we should start calling him Nathan soon.” She sipped her tea with her eyes closed. “So we get used to it, for when he wakes up. We want him to respond to the right name, don’t we?”
“Soon,” I said. “But not yet. Not until the conditioning is done. What did you mean, ‘set him right’?”
“We’re putting him back the way he’s supposed to be,” she said. “We’re making him into the man we loved.” The heel of her hand palpated her belly again, a long, firm press.
“Did you love him?” I asked. She nodded, her eyes still closed.
“Very much,” she whispered. “Did you?”
I hesitated, stared into my cooling tea. It was hard, after the year it had been, to remember the way I had loved Nathan when things had been good. Or when things had been bad, but still worth fighting for. It was hard to remember what that had felt like. “I think so,” I said. “Yes, for a long time. I loved him, when I loved him.”
“What about when he died? Did you still love him then?”
I looked up from my tea and found her staring at me, her gaze intent. “I don’t think I did,” I said after a moment. “I think that, by then, I hated him.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Me too. I hated him too.”
“At the end?” I asked.
“Every second.” She shook her head. Her eyes shone with tears. Belatedly, I recognized the restrained fury hidden in the set of her mouth. “I hated him every single second.”
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