Page 48 of The Echo Wife
“It’s fine,” Martine said. “I can handle it.”
I shook my head hard, hit the cycle button again. “No,” I said, “there has to be another way.”
“He knows that he has a wife,” she said.
“He could have meant either of us,” I said. “He might still thinkof me as his wife. I could—” But I cut myself off midsentence, because I couldn’t.
I knew my husband well enough, I thought. I knew that he hated all three of his suits. I knew that he had a good relationship with his father, and that he was smart enough to know never to ask about mine. I knew that he was stubborn when he was sick. I knew that he was gentle with children and animals, awkward around teenagers. I knew that the phrase “go big or go home” made him irrationally angry, and that any mention of his inability to grow facial hair would send him into a spiral of insecurity.
On our wedding day, I knew that he loved me, and I knew that I loved him, and I thought that no matter what else happened, we would be the one certain thing in each other’s lives.
“It’s fine,” Martine said again, her eyes sliding away from mine. “Send him home with me. We’ll just…” She hesitated. “We’ll pick back up where we left off.”
A tidal wave of horror rose up in me, overwhelming, too much all at once, flooding into all the places whereit’s finewanted to live.
It was sudden, the way I knew how I felt about Martine.
With most people, I knew how I felt about them within minutes of meeting them; I categorized them as useful, annoying, charming, friendly. With most people, I found a place where they fit and I put them there, and that was how I felt about them until they gave me a good reason to change my mind. They rarely did. But Martine—I had spent so much time trying to sort out the answer to the question of Martine. I’d spent months being irritated at her, resenting her limitations, admiring her growth, fearing her, learning to like her, struggling not to hate her. I had spent so much time unsettled by her, by the way I couldn’t figure out where she fit in my life and in my world.
But there in that airlock, all at once, I knew how I felt about her. It was, all of it, the exact same way I felt about myself.
All the same frustrations, all the same moments of affection.
Everything I felt toward Martine, I felt toward myself, too.
Of course, then, I wanted to find some way to protect her. And of course I resented her for it.
I couldn’t send her back to the life she’d been living. I couldn’t put her back into that house where she was constantly waiting for permission, where she was quiet and careful and uncurious. I couldn’t do that to her.
But I couldn’t take Nathan home, either. I couldn’t undo the last year. The way we had programmed him, he didn’t love me anymore. I’d gotten a little drunk with Seyed the night we implanted those emotional memories into Nathan’s brain. It had been surprisingly awful. I had refused to talk about it, had doubled down the next day on making sure that the new Nathan would know that he didn’t love me.
Not anymore.
His betrayal, our broken marriage—it was part of the geography of who he was. It was part of him. He didn’t recognize me in the context of the lab, not so fresh out of sedation, but he would recognize me soon enough, and he would see me as a woman he had stopped loving years ago.
I couldn’t make Martine take him. I couldn’t take him. But one of us had to take him.
I hit the button again, and the airlock cycle clicked back to life.
“He’ll hurt you,” I said.
“He won’t,” Martine replied. Her shoulders were set in a brave square. She looked me in the eye, right directly in the eye because we were the exact same height and her eyes could immediately find mine without searching. “We programmed him to be difficult, but not to be violent. He was never violent.”
I crossed my arms. “You know what I mean. He’ll hurt you the way he hurt you before.”
“I can handle it,” she said, and I was taken aback by the stubborn note in her voice. It was as strange as listening to a recording of myself for the first time.Is that how I sound?“I handled it before you came along, and I can handle it now.”
“No,” I said, “no, you don’t have to—”
“I do, actually,” she interrupted. “I do have to. Because Nathan made me for this. It’s what I’m for, remember?”
I flinched at the echo of my own cruel words from the tea shop, from that fight that felt like it had taken place in another reality. Martine rested her hands on her belly, which was enormous already, bigger than anyone could possibly overlook.
“I have to do this, Evelyn. I have an imperative. It’s who I was made to be.”
We argued for what seemed like ages, me hitting the airlock button once every couple of minutes, Martine digging her heels in with astonishing dedication. I tried a dozen different tactics, but in the end, it was an empty, hopeless argument, and she called me on it.
“You don’t have a solution.” She said it with flat finality. “You don’t have a solution because there isn’t one. You keep trying to convince me that I’m wrong, but you know we don’t have anywhere to go from there if I am, so why are we doing this? So you can make yourself feel better about it?”
