Page 60 of The Echo Wife
My face went numb at the thought of it. Of moving into this house with the new Nathan, knowing that the man his DNA had come from had planned to kill me, to plant me in this garden bed beside his other failures. “That’s different,” I said. It tasted dishonest before it even left my mouth.
Martine didn’t bother to argue with me. I think she knew that I knew the flavor of that particular lie just as well as I did. She let the shovel fall to the ground in front of her, and she sank her hands into the earth on either side of her knees. “You couldn’t do it. You couldn’t live with him, knowing what you know. And I can’t either,” she said.
“But this version of Nathan,” I said desperately, “he… he doesn’t evenknow. If we bury these bodies, and we put the rosebushes back, he’ll neverhaveto know. We didn’t program him to think of murder as a solution. He’s never killed anyone before.”
“But he has killed before,” she said. “On some level, he has. It’s stamped into him somewhere. It’s got to be.” She made fists, compressing palmfuls of soil and dropping them, scooping up more loose earth. “This kind of thing doesn’t just leave a person, even if you make a new version of them. He can’t just be fresh and clean. It’s not fair to them, is it? For him to get to keep going as if he didn’t do anything wrong?”
I shook my head, resisted the urge to reach out and brush dirt from the fabric of her skirt. “How is this different?”
“Different from what?”
I reminded myself again—and again, and again—that shewasn’t stupid. She wasn’t slow. Still, I could hear myself getting impatient, could see her registering the irritation in my voice. The more I spoke, the more I needed to speak, and the more I spoke, the more defensive the set of her mouth got. I couldn’t stop myself, though. I couldn’t hold it back.
And maybe I didn’t try very hard.
“How is this any different from the way it was before? Youknewhe was a murderer, you knew he wanted to kill you. You knew he wasawful. You can’t say that it’s just because he was awful to someone other than you, either, because you knew that part already too.” Anger, hot and biting, flooded the back of my throat like a bolus of morphine—because this at last was the real thing. This was the splinter lodged beneath my thumbnail. This was the thing I could not stand. “You knew that he was awful tome. So why is this different? Why does this suddenly make it so you can’t be here anymore?”
She clenched her fists in the soil a few more times before she answered me. She cocked her head, looking at me, her face hardening into grim lines I’d never seen her wear before. Finally, she let out a breath before saying, “Because they didn’t deserve it.”
I rocked back on my heels. “What?”
“None of them deserved what they got,” she said. She brushed her palms against each other, raining dirt. “They failed becausehefailed. But me and you, we failed all on our own, didn’t we? We failed on purpose.”
I wanted so badly to rage at her. I wanted to push her down onto the ground, wanted to grind her hair into the dirt and screamhow dare you how dare you how dare you—but I couldn’t, because hadn’t I thought the exact same thing a hundred times? Hadn’t I sat on the floor of my town house with an open bottle of wine, thinking that I’d let Nathan down just as much as I possibly could?
I couldn’t answer her with anger, because the anger died before I could even fully feel it. Instead, I tried to answer her the way I wished I could answer myself.
“No,” I said. “We failed him because there was no way not to. I would have broken myself if I tried to be the thing he wanted me to be. You would have broken yourself if you had kept on trying to ignore the things he wanted you to ignore.” She shook her head ruefully, but I kept going. “It’s not just that we didn’t deserve what he did. It’s—I think we would have been dead either way. Even if we were still breathing, even if we were still aboveground, we would have been dead.Iwould have been dead. And I’m pretty sure you would have too.”
Martine wilted. She lifted her hands as if to bury her face in them, then stopped with her palms a few inches from her face, seeming to notice for the first time how filthy they were. She let them drop again and hung her head.
She looked exhausted. I thought of her exacting sleep schedule, wondered how often the baby woke her in the night. There was no catching up, for her. This was just how tired she was going to have to be.
“I can’t even be what I was made for,” she said softly. “He put all that work in, and I still can’t be a thing that he would have been satisfied with. If I can’t even get that right, then what am Ifor?”
I didn’t know how to answer her. She wasn’t technically incorrect. She was a made thing, and she had failed to fulfill her purpose, but that was all wrong. She needed to hear something different. I couldn’t sort out why it felt backward, couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to say to her. It hit me afresh how absurd this situation was—I was comforting a specimen about the fact of its own existence. I was talking to Martine as if she were a person.
I had started to think of her as a person.
And I couldn’t stop.
I tried to tell myself otherwise. I reminded myself of the truth about every specimen I had to dispose of: it’s like a stopped watch, it’s like an apple with a worm in it, it’s no good and there’s no use for it the way it is. But Martine’s tears were making soft divots in the soil in front of her, and I wanted to reach for her,and it made me dizzy because she was just a thing, she was just abroken thing.But she was a broken thing that looked and sounded exactly like me.
“This Nathan doesn’t know that you’re a failure,” I said at last. Maybe I should have argued with her, told her that she wasn’t a failure, but it would have been a lie, and it didn’t matter, anyway. “He doesn’t know that there were ever any attempts before you. He doesn’t know about any of this. You can have a perfectly good life with him.”
“Or,” she said, “we can killswitch him, and it will look like he died of natural causes, and I can have a perfectly good life here with Violet.”
I couldn’t do this part anymore. I couldn’t sit and argue with her, couldn’t comfort her, couldn’t keep breathing in that loam-smell. It was suffocating, all of it, and it felt like my mouth and throat and lungs were slowly filling with rich, dark soil. It was going to kill me.
So I stood up, trying fruitlessly to brush the dirt from my legs. I held out my hands and she took them, pulling herself to her feet. “We can’t kill him,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked simply, stooping to grab the shovel.
I didn’t have a ready answer.Because murder is wrongdidn’t fit; by my own rationale, he was a clone just like any other. If he’d come out wrong, I wouldn’t have hesitated to encourage Martine to use the killswitch.Because he didn’t do anything wrongdidn’t work, either—Martine couldn’t hear that, wouldn’t accept that he wasn’t a murderer at the cellular level.
I tried for another angle that might work, one that would leave her feeling whole when she climbed into their bed next to him at the end of the day.
“If we kill him,” I said slowly, “how are we any different from the original Nathan?”
