Page 50 of The Echo Wife
Martine pulled her head back just enough that she could look at me. Her gaze darted between my eyes.
From behind the curtain, Nathan called her name. Martine and I turned to look in the same moment, our eyes on the cloth that separated us from the man we had made.
“Just a minute, love,” Martine said. “I’ll be right there.” Then she looked at me, her chin set firm, and nodded. “A killswitch,” she said softly, so softly it was like a sigh. “Whatever that is—you’ll tell me later, yes? For now, let’s get it over with.” She smiled, her eyes slipping back to the curtain. “Let’s finish this.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
The day my cast was removed was also the last day I would see my father. My mother brought me home from the doctor and sent me upstairs to wash the sour cast-bound smell from my arm. I stayed in my bedroom for the afternoon, reading on my bed with my feet kicked up behind me as the square patch of sun that shone through my window parallaxed across the floor.
I used to spend whole days like that, tucked away in my bedroom, creeping downstairs for food every few hours or whenever I heard the dull thud of the study door closing. Some days, my mother would leave snacks and water on a tray outside my bedroom door.
She was always better at the stairs than I was—I never heard her come or go. I just opened the door to see a stack of cookies or a wax paper–wrapped sandwich tucked close against the doorframe, where someone who wasn’t looking wouldn’t spot it right away.
Not that day, though. Not the day my father went missing.
That afternoon, I had heard the dull thud of the study door, and it sounded to me like an opportunity. I eased the door to my room open, turning the knob all the way so the latch wouldn’t make a sound. I crept out into the hall on sock feet and padded down the stairs as silently as I knew how. The bottom floor of the house was mostly dark, with the curtains drawn, lit only by the flickering glow of a dying fire in the living-room hearth.
When I was halfway between my bedroom door and the front door, I became aware of a strange, rhythmic sound. A sawing,ragged noise, like when the vacuum cleaner got stuck on something.
By the time I was at the foot of the stairs, the noise had resolved itself into two separate sounds.
I could recognize both as labored breathing—one strand of steady, panting gasps, met by a counterpoint harmony of uneven wheezes, wet and gnarled, choking.
Halting.
Slowing.
I wanted to run, but I didn’t. I knew better than to run in the house.
I walked softly, instead, and I poked my head around the corner of a hallway wall, leaning just far enough that I could see the back of the living-room couch. That couch was between me and the sounds. I could see my mother from the waist up. She was wearing a dress with a Peter Pan collar, buttoned to the throat. The collar was white and starched and flecked with something dark, a shadow that also crept across the sliver of her face that I could see from my odd angle. She stood, breathing heavily, looking down at something on the floor, the firelight gleaming off of her hair.
The congested inhalations that formed the topnote of the melody I’d heard from the stairs—those were coming from something I couldn’t see, something on the floor at her feet.
A shadow stretched underneath the couch, huge and distorted in the firelight.
My mother turned her head just a little, that familiar, warning arc to her neck. Just enough to let me know that she’d heard me, but not so far that she could see me. Just enough to let me know that I should sneak back to my bed. This, I understood, was not the time for me to be downstairs.
The next morning, she sat at the foot of my bed, the mattress dipping just below the place where my feet ended. I pretended to have been sleeping. I pushed myself up onto my elbows andrubbed my eyes. I nodded silently as she told me that she didn’t know where my father was, that he hadn’t come home the night before. Her eyes bored into mine as she spoke. She wasn’t blinking.
There was a right answer. I knew there was.
I did my best to find it, and present it to her, the way I knew she wanted me to.
“All right,” I said, taking care to not clench fistfuls of my bedsheets. It seemed very important, in that moment, to keep my hands still and relaxed. “Should we call the police?” At the sight of her face, I quickly added, “To tell them that he didn’t come home?”
She blinked then, and her face relaxed into a smile. She patted my foot under the covers. Her hands were soft, scrubbed, but one of her fingernails had a deep split in it, and the damp scent of the garden clung to her. “That’s a very good idea,” she said. “Yes. We’ll tell the police that your father didn’t come home, and that we’re worried.”
She looked at me for a long moment, not saying the thing that she was thinking. I looked back at her, not saying the thing that I was thinking. She reached forward and tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear, loam-smell drifting off her in eddies.
“Get dressed, now, so you’re presentable when they arrive.”
When the police got to our house, my mother fluttered her clean hands at them, fidgeted, apologized over and over and over for the inconvenience. They told her that she was worrying too much—that my father had probably stayed at his office overnight, would be home any minute. They traded he’s-having-an-affair glances, so obvious that even I could read the subtext. I stood beside my mother with my hands in my pockets, and when one of the officers squatted down to look me in the eyes, I let myself look scared.
He told me not to worry. He told me that my old man would be home any minute now.
My mother’s hand rested on my shoulder, light as a fallen leaf, and she told the officers that she would call them again if my father wasn’t home soon.
