Page 59 of The Echo Wife
“Yes, wecan,” she said, squeezing my hands in hers as if she were giving me a much-needed pep talk. She was still smiling that serene smile, the one that said not to worry, it would all be okay. “We installed the killswitch, remember? We installed it for something just like this. All I have to do is say the trigger phrase, and it’ll all be fixed. Right?”
“No, that’s—we installed the killswitch in case he tried to hurt you.” She sounded so reasonable, so certain, that I found myself scrambling for a foothold in my own reality. That’s why we installed the killswitch, just to keep Martine safe,I reminded myself frantically.She’s wrong. This is all wrong.“We installed it in case you were in danger.”
“We installed the killswitch in case I was in danger.” Shedropped my hands. “Well, I’m in danger. He’s a murderer. He’s a… a murderer, he’s aserial killer!” She took a step back from me and pointed toward the backyard. She wasn’t shouting, not yet, but panic was starting to boil in her voice. “Or didn’t you notice all the corpses in the yard?”
“Please be sensible about this,” I said, folding my arms.
She shook her head. The finger that pointed to the yard began to tremble. “No,” she said, “no, don’t tell me to be sensible, don’t tell me to be reasonable, don’t tell me I’mcrazy,I’m not—those are bodies! Those are bodies and they look likeme,he’s a murderer, he tried to—” Her voice broke, and she lowered her hand, wrapped her arms around herself. “He tried to murderme.”
She looked around the kitchen, her eyes brimming, her lips white. I could imagine what she was seeing:There is the knife block, there is the place where I was cutting the onions, there is the place where he put his hands around my throat and tried to squeeze the words right out of me. There is the place where I stabbed him the first time, and the second, and the third.
There is the place where he died, and it was probably the place where some of them died, and it could have been the place where I died.
“It wasn’t him,” I whispered. I stepped toward Martine, and she stepped back, away from me. Her grip on her own arms was merciless. There would be bruises later, I was sure.
“It was,” she said. She was still staring at the kitchen floor. There was no bloodstain, but I don’t doubt that she remembered the contours of the pool as well as I did.
“It wasn’t.” I ducked my head to try to catch her eyes. “It wasn’t him. It was the original. We can’t kill this one for something he didn’t do. Please,” I repeated, “besensible.”
She was breathing hard and fast through her nose. There was a scream building in her, I could see it—but she didn’t let it loose into the room. Instead, she spun on her heel and strode out of the kitchen, her steps so fast that she may as well have been running. I said her name, but she didn’t turn back, didn’t answer. I heard the back door open and close, and then I was alone in the housewith the faint music that came from behind the closed door of the nursery.
By the time I got to the backyard, Martine already had the shovel in her hands. She was flinging soil hard and fast, covering the most-exposed corpse, the one with the helixed mandible. She finished burying that one briskly, stepped over it with one decisive stride, and got to work on the next. I stood on the back porch, watching her toss shovelfuls of earth over the second body.
It had been the worst wrong thing to say. Even then, I could understand that much. Asking her to be sensible was a mistake. It was the thing she least wanted to hear in her moment of terror—that her fear was baseless.
But itwasbaseless. The Nathan who would be home from work in just a few hours wasn’t the same monster that had killed Martine’s predecessors. As far as he knew, he was a man who had been dissatisfied with his wife, and had proven himself a brilliant scientist, and had successfully made himself a new partner. He thought he had someone better this time, someone who wanted a baby and a nice house with a lovely garden. A second chance.
He thought he loved her. He thought she loved him.
That was who Martine and I had thought the original Nathan was, and so that was who this new Nathan thought he was.
But Martine couldn’t seem to see that.
I could understand, objectively. Her position was an exceptionally difficult one. But now was not the time for her to indulge in fear and irrationality. We just didn’t have time for this.
When she started burying the third body, I crossed the garden to join her. I breathed through my mouth, shallow as I could, but the smell of turned earth was invasive, inescapable. I forced myself to wade through it.Forward, Evelyn,I told myself.Always forward.
“You don’t care,” she said, as soon as I was within earshot. “He’s a murderer and you don’t care at all.” She dug the shovel into the loose soil once every few seconds, and the patter of falling earthpunctuated her words. “You’re probably glad. He’ll take care of all your problems if you just wait long enough, right?”
I bit back irritation, reminded myself that these weren’t just the hysterical antics of a petulant child. The original Nathandidtry to kill her, after all. That had obviously traumatized her in ways that I hadn’t considered after that first night. She had never processed any of it, not that she’d told me.
She had a right to be upset. I told myself that as if the telling could make me believe it too.
“You know I don’t feel that way,” I said. I reached out and grabbed the shovel. She didn’t let go of it at first. She tugged hard, nearly toppled me over—but we were matched for strength, and after a tense few seconds, her shoulders went slack. She sagged to the ground, still clutching the shovel. I let it go. It fell across her lap as she sat, hard, between two of the still-open graves.
“I know you don’t feel that way,” she agreed. She looked up at me, her face as broken as a dropped egg. “But it’s stilltrue,isn’t it? The first Nathan was a murderer. I lived with him for two and a half years, I trusted him, I—” Her grip on the shovel tightened. “I slept with him. I got pregnant with his baby. And the whole time, they were out here.” She waved her hands broadly enough to indicate the whole yard, not just the graves. There were other holes scattered through the yard, shallow ones, and I realized that she must have been searching for the boundaries of her discovery—trying to see if her entire garden was planted on a necropolis. “They were out here and he was ready, all along. All that time, he was ready to put me out here too.”
I looked down at her, kneeling there in the soil with the shovel across her thighs like a penitent. There was some comfort that I was supposed to offer her, some way I was supposed to absolve her of this terrible knowledge. She was looking up at me as though I could possibly understand what she was going through, and I didn’t want to understand, I didn’t want to join her down there.
But I did.
I knelt beside her, felt the dirt embed itself in the fabric ofmy pants the instant my knees touched the ground. The word “ruined” glowed bright in my mind. I told myself that it didn’t matter.
Things get ruined sometimes. That’s just how it is.
“I know,” I said. “I know how you feel. He was going to kill me, too. Remember?”
She slumped forward over the shovel. Then, quiet as a dying breath, she asked, “And would you be able to live with him, now? Knowing that?”
