Page 46 of The Echo Wife
“Do you?” I asked.
“Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe I’m just programmed to think I understand. Maybe it’s a reflex. Maybe I can see both sides of things because it’s the best way to make sure I never get angry. But even if that’s true, I still understand. I can see why it’s necessary.”
I reached for her hand. She let me take it, and I looked at her, and she nodded.
“I know,” she said. “You don’t have to say it.”
I should have said it anyway. But, like a coward, I accepted the pardon with gratitude. I held Martine’s hand as I finished my wine, and she poured me more, and I did not apologize.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
The last time I saw my father alive, we were in his study.
I was due to have my wrist cast removed the next day. I was asking him to explain body fluids to me. I was confused by the different systems. I didn’t understand the difference between lymph and plasma, couldn’t sort out why they needed to be separate. We talked for an hour, and when the hour was up, he reached as always across the desk to shake my hand.
I aimed the webbing between my thumb and forefinger at his, just like he’d taught me. I gripped his palm, firm but not tight, and I pumped his arm twice.Three times,he’d told me,makes you look nervous.He gave me an approving nod—I’d gotten it right—and then he let me leave.
Our meeting was over.
I was nine years old.
I didn’t miss him, precisely, once he was gone. I thought about his disappearance often—the circumstances that surrounded it, the things that were not to be discussed—but that was hardly the same as missing him. The place in our lives where my father had been was raw and strange. It was like the crater left behind by a pulled tooth, one that had been abscessed and throbbing for years. That emptiness was something to notice, something to run my tongue across constantly, bothering the wound until the gap in my gum closed. It was the taste of blood, clean and sharp and somehow comforting.
But the hole where my father had been healed over with surprising speed, and my mother and I fell into an uneasy routine.There were things we didn’t talk about, not ever, and there was part of the garden I didn’t help her with anymore. We never bothered to clean out his study—just closed the door and pretended that the house was one room smaller than it had always been. After a few years, I went away to boarding school, and the silence around his absence became even easier to maintain. It was all simple enough.
I didn’t miss my father until I found myself at his alma mater, attending classes that he had taken decades before. Even then, walking halls that he’d walked, I suppose that it wasn’thimthat I missed. Whenever I found myself struggling with a professor’s lecturing style, or with a tricky bit of theory, or with a complex lab, I longed for my weekly hour in his study. I would sit in my dormitory with some seemingly unsolvable problem before me, and I would think wistfully of those easy answers. I would remember my feet kicking at the legs of the armchair that was mine to sit in, the big carriage clock behind his desk ticking away, the low rumble of his voice explaining things until I understood them.
And whenever I finished untangling my problems on my own—whenever I sorted out the professor’s shorthand, or found the root of the theory, or completed a titration successfully—I missed that handshake. I missed the grown-up feeling of having successfully completed a maneuver that existed solely to prove that both parties knew what they were doing.
I missed knowing without a doubt that I had done the thing right.
Seyed wasn’t at the lab when we arrived the next morning. I was relieved that he wasn’t there for me to deal with. It was time to wake the subject.
I rummaged through a drawer, pulled out an old stack of résumés, and flipped through it. After a moment, I dropped it into the recycling bin. The résumés I had were too old to be of anyvalue. I would need to ask Human Resources to siphon me some fresh ones.
Martine and I got set up, prepared ourselves to talk to Zed. Not Zed, rather—he was Nathan, now. Martine and I had agreed to start calling him that to each other as well as to his face, so we wouldn’t slip up and confuse him.
Nathan.
He was laid out in his recovery bed with an IV in one arm, the long snake of a catheter winding out from under his bedsheets. His vitals beeped along merrily on a monitor at his bedside, their steady rhythm a constant reminder that things were going just fine. His wounds were nearly healed already, a benefit of how new he was. His tissues were childlike, pliant, malleable. That healing factor wouldn’t last, of course, but it was useful in these early stages, when he needed to mend quickly enough to scar.
He looked almost exactly like the man I remembered. His thick brown hair was already growing out of the short cut that Seyed had given him on his first day out of the tank. His eyelashes fell across his cheeks, light but startlingly long. His mouth hung the slightest bit open. His lips—thin, wide, perpetually curled up at the corners—still shone with the layer of lanolin that Seyed would have smeared across them the night before, to keep them from drying and chapping and cracking.
Martine and I stared at him for a long time. There was nothing to be said, no reason to say it. I knew what she was thinking, and I’m sure she knew what I was thinking too.
This was Nathan.
I would be lying if I pretended that I was never tempted to change him. I had complete control over the person he was going to become. And I could have built this Nathan differently, could have tried to turn him into someone I could spend a life with. Someone who had a little more courage, who paid more attention to detail. Someone who could keep up with me, who wasn’t threatened when he couldn’t.
I could have made him into someone who still loved me, wholoved me again. And then, when he was finished, I could have made a public display of taking him back, repairing our marriage, reconciling. I could have given myself a brilliant, docile, grateful man who no one would question my relationship to.
But that person I would have made—he wouldn’t have beenNathan. Anyone who met him would have known that something was wrong. It was always in his essential nature to fall just short of what I needed him to be. I could finally see that. He was never going to be good enough; the original Nathan was born to be a disappointment to me at every turn, all the way down to his marrow.
I couldn’t extract that from him. Not without making him someone entirely new. Someone I could never have fallen in love with in the first place.
So I didn’t.
