Page 53 of The Echo Wife
From that moment, I was the only one who knew what I truly was. I was the only one who knew what I had done.
To be alone with that knowledge was the most dreadful thing I had ever felt. It was a vast, deep, terrible kind of understanding. I knew, finally, how my mother had felt in the minutes before she had heard my sock feet padding down the stairs in the night. I knew that I had done what I had to do, and I knew that I could never tell a soul. I knew that there was a part of me that would never be not-alone again.
My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again—to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted. I had wondered for so long why she stopped there, why she didn’t spread like a climbing vine, devouring the void he left behind. I spent my adolescencenurturing a quiet disdain for the way she failed to become a monster in his absence.
Nathan had, of course, fed that disdain. He had recognized a vulnerability in it, a weakness in the way I loathed the parts of me that mirrored my mother. The fear, the fluttering, the impulse to hide and apologize and placate. I was horrified by her willingness to accept her circumstances, by her failure to imagine that her reach could extend beyond her grasp. I tried to root out any part of me that might accept less than what I was capable of, and I dug deep, and still Nathan never let me feel like I’d dug deep enough.
Something felt different in Martine’s absence. I was alone the way my mother had been alone. She’d had me around the same way I had my new lab assistants around—I was present, and I needed to be managed, but I wasn’t with her, not really. That night, when she stood breathless in the living room, she carved out a hole in the world. She and the thing she had done were all that would fit there. She climbed inside of that space in the fabric of reality, and from then on, she was alone with what she had done.
That was the kind of solitude I came to understand. It took up space, the space I’d always sneered at my mother for failing to claim as her own. It was in the room with me, always, that lonely knowledge of all the things I could never tell anyone about. It curled up next to me in my bed at night, the soles of its feet pressed against my calves, and breathed my air. It looped its arm through mine and walked beside me.
I could never tell a soul about what had changed me, and if I never told anyone, then no one would ever know. No one would guess, just from looking at me, even if they came to know the person I was in the aftermath of making a new Nathan. No one would look at the seams that held me together and guess that they were scars.
Of course my mother decided to stop growing. Of course she decided that it was enough to simply be the person who she was without fear.
I still scolded myself at the moments when I resembled her. When I caught myself at the threshold of an apology, or when I twisted a napkin between my fingers, or when I realized my eyes were darting around a room, looking to see where everyone was. Every time I wanted to shrink myself down, I revisited the bitterness of her fluttering at the police, telling them how thankful she was for their kind words.
I still thought of her as a coward.
But I stopped fighting the knowledge that I could be the same kind of coward she had been.
There was a comfort there, in being hidden. I’d always known it. Being so alone was, in a way, safe. I wrapped myself up in it, burrowed down into the cool quiet decay of my secret.
Of course my mother had decided to stay where she was. Of course she had expanded only to fit the boundaries of her container. The appeal was deep and irresistible. It was the childhood sense of victory that came with fitting into an impossibly small space, tucking myself away into the dark.They’ll never find me here.
By accepting the isolation that came along with my secret, I could rest assured that no matter what, I would always be at least a little hidden. No one would ever know me, not fully, because no one would ever know what had happened.
There was a piece of me now that no one would ever be able to reach.
My life developed a steady rhythm. I worked at a mechanical pace, delivering progress in my research and avoiding conversations about the future of my lab. I ran through laboratory assistants at a reliable clip. I ate salads for dinner, prepackaged pasta. I drank wine. I walked around in my new neighborhood every few nights, aimless, trying to keep myself from becoming a recluse. I took out my recycling once a week.
I settled into the new way things were. I was doing well enough. Not flourishing, maybe, but there was nothingwrong.
For those four months, I had peace.
And then, in September, Martine called.
Their house looked the same as it had when the original Nathan was still alive.
There were small changes—Martine had planted bright chrysanthemums along the path that led to the house, and a wreath of red and orange leaves hung from the front door. But it still looked like the home that Nathan had wanted for his new life. A place for Martine to work hard at keeping nice. A place to raise a baby. The porch swing and the picture window were still there, just the same as they’d been on that crisp, surreal night when I walked across the lawn practicing the speech I would make to Martine about boundaries.
Nothing about the house looked different. Nothing about the house betrayed the blood that had spilled inside it.
On the night Nathan died, Martine had opened the door before I could land a single knock. Not this time, though. This time, I pounded away at the door, watching the leaves on the wreath shake.
It took her long enough to answer that I grew uneasy.
She’d sounded frantic on the phone, more panicked than I’d ever heard her.Please, you have to come to the house, something’s happened, I can’t talk about it on the phone, please, you have to come now.
I spent the drive to her house quietly praying that she hadn’t killed him again, deciding that I couldn’t save her a second time. But when she didn’t answer the door, I started to worry. Maybe she’d called for some worse reason, maybe shecouldn’tanswer the door, and what if we’d programmed the new Nathan wrong? What if we hadn’t softened him? What if we’d made him brittle, mutable, dangerous? What if we’d poured the foundation of him wrong, and he’d turned out even worse than the original?
Maybe that’s why, when Martine finally did answer the door, the thing I registered was relief. I sank with it, the weight ofknowing that she was all right. It was a strange way to feel after so long.
She looked past me as though there might be someone with me. “You’re alone?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said. I looked at her, then, not just at the fact of her whole and present, but at the details of her.
She was different. Of course she was different. Not pregnant anymore, for one thing. Slim, slimmer than me, her features winnowed down to sharp planes that I didn’t recognize from my own face. Her eyes weren’t quite sunken, but there was fatigue etched into her, the deep kind of fatigue that I suppose must come with a new baby.
