Page 61 of The Echo Wife
She stared at me, holding the shovel in a loose, slack grip, as though she’d nearly forgotten it. After a moment, she turned and started reburying the third body. She was moving more slowlynow, less frantic. She wasn’t burning off panic; she was tidying up. It seemed somehow reflexive, self-soothing. This time, I didn’t stop her from her work.
“I don’t think you want me to answer that,” she said. “Not really. I think you’re hoping you’ll change my mind, but I don’t think you want me to answer your question.”
I shoved my dirty hands into my pockets, feeling clumsy. She was right, which was bad. I could feel the situation slipping away from me. She had my motives pinned down, and she knew what button to press to derail me.
I didn’t care for that feeling at all.
Worse, it was going to work. I knew what she was doing, but I couldn’t fight it. “Tell me the answer,” I said, knowing that hearing the answer would only make things feel more wrong.
She hesitated, then shrugged, still shoveling soil over the third body. “I don’t think you’re different from him,” she said. “I think you make people and you dispose of them when it suits you, just like he did. I think that if this had all taken place inside a lab, and if his victims didn’t look just like you? You wouldn’t be conflicted about it at all. You wouldn’t think he’d done anything wrong.”
She used the back of her shovel to tamp down the earth over the body, then turned around and began working on the fourth. I didn’t have an answer for her, didn’t have an argument. She kept saying things that were true and I hated her for it, hated her with the reflexive venom of a child who’s been tattled on. But there was nothing I could say. She knew me better than I knew her. She knew me so much more than I wanted her to.
Since there was nothing for me to say, I went to the garden shed, and I grabbed the second shovel, the small one Martine had used to help me bury Nathan. I got to work on the fifth body, and then we buried the sixth together, and then the seventh. We didn’t speak until we were at the eleventh. I stepped carefully, trying not to let my feet land too close to the last, most-exposed corpse.
“If you think we shouldn’t kill him,” Martine said evenly, “thenyou must have a better idea. He’ll be home in, what, four hours? And I can’t stay here with him tonight. I’ll do what I have to do, but I won’t sleep next to him again.”
I paused in my shoveling, because I didn’t have a better idea. I didn’t have a solution that could beat out murder for permanence and efficiency. She knew that, just like she knew everything else.
I was so tired of arguing that part of me thought maybe weshouldjust kill the new Nathan. I could pretend to be stopping by for some reason, act like I found him, cold. I could tuck Martine and the baby away while the police took away the body. I didn’t know what would happen to the house, but—
“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” I said, and I was flooded with relief, because it was so much more clear than I’d been telling myself it was.
It was selfish, but it was clear.
And I knew how to be selfish. I knew how to protect my own interests, how to treat myself as my own chief priority. This thing with Martine, it didn’t have to be a moral dilemma. It didn’t have to be a struggle between her opinion of me and my opinion of myself. It didn’t have to be about right or wrong.
I drank that clarity down like cold champagne. It didn’t have to be about right or wrong. I didn’t have to figure out what was right.
I just had to make it about me.
“I haven’t done anything wrong either,” Martine replied coolly. “But this still—”
“No, you don’t understand,” I interrupted. “We pulled off something impossible, making him. We shouldn’t have succeeded at this. It was such a long shot, such a reach, and itworked. We did it. I might not ever be able to publish a paper on it, I might not ever be able to tell anyone, but I won’t let you kill him. He’s my best work.”
She laughed, a sudden brittle laugh. “Your best work,” she said, incredulous, almost giddy. “Of course. What was I thinking? We can’t possibly undermine your progress that way.”
“I mean it,” I said, tossing a shovelful of earth over the lifeless, slack-skinned face of Nathan’s eleventh attempt.Katrina,my memory whispered.Her name was Katrina.“He’s the pinnacle of—stop laughing.” I used the back of my shovel to tamp down the loose soil of the grave. Martine moved toward the twelfth corpse, Laila, the one that still had eyes and lips, uneaten by the beetles and worms whose work it would have been to work away at the softest parts of her. I moved in front of her, stood in her way so she had to stop. I leveled a stare at her that I usually reserved for lab assistants I was about to fire. Cold, logical, direct, merciless.That’s the way.
“You’re serious,” she said. She folded her arms across her chest, but there was only so much fight in her.
If I pushed just a little harder, I knew she would topple.
“I gutted myself making this version of Nathan for you,” I said, trying to summon the cold, ruthless certainty with which my father had eyed the cast on my wrist. “I’ll never be able to tell anyone about him, and I’ll never win an award for him,” I said, “but I will not let you destroy him the way you destroyed everything else I’ve spent my life building.” Then, lower, letting her hear that note of quiet danger I’d used to keep her from leaping out of my car: “This isn’t up for any further debate. I’m not asking you, Martine. I’m telling you.”
It was enough to break her budding defiance. She kept her arms crossed, but her shoulders rose into a protective hunch. I felt a sense of cold satisfaction. I’d won. I’d crushed her just enough to remind her of the person she’d been before she met me, before she’d killed her husband, before she’d learned the details of how she was made.
It was power. I had given her that independence, and I could take it back.
Guilt came fast on the heels of that rush of power, but it wasn’t the time. I pushed the shame into my cheek so I could talk around it. I could feel remorse later. For now: victory. That was all that mattered.
She looked past me to the last unburied body. Laila. Her facewas turned away from us, one cheek resting on the inside of that plastic bag. I was thankful that I didn’t have to look at her empty eyes. I couldn’t avoid seeing the narrow collar of bruising that ringed her throat, though. It was stark and purple, set high. The place where the bottom of the bag had been, where she’d struggled against it as she suffocated.
“We should finish,” Martine murmured. “We should bury her before he gets home. If I’m going to have to stay with him, I don’t want to have to answer questions from him about this. I need that, at least.”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, and the guilt was there, I couldn’t dodge it, but there was something else there too.
An idea.
