Page 64 of The Echo Wife
I couldn’t blame her for expecting that from me.
“Nathan’s going to expect the baby to be there when he gets home,” I explained. It wasn’t possible to explain this to her in a way that wouldn’t hurt her more, because the more I explained, the more she would see that I was right. I walked toward her slowly, like she might spook and run off if I startled her. “Even if you’re dead,” I continued—then, seeing her face, I quickly amended that to “even if hethinksyou’re dead. When he finds Laila’s body, the first thing he’s going to do is run to check on the baby. If she’s not there, he’ll know that something doesn’t add up.”
Her eyes darted around the backyard as though she would be able to find something there that might prove me wrong. But, of course, there was nothing. I was right, and she knew it. The babyhad to stay behind. There was no reason for Violet to be gone, and there was no chance that Nathan would decide not to go looking for answers.
Our plan relied on him deciding not to look for answers. And, although I didn’t need to mention it to Martine, it struck me that leaving him to raise a baby on his own would help our cause. He would be exhausted and overwhelmed. He would decide it wasn’t worth his time to investigate what would look to him like a simple suicide.
I eased the box of yellow notebooks from Martine’s arms.
“You should put her back,” I said. “You should put her in her crib, and you should probably say goodbye. And then wehave to go.”
I will not try to describe the way her face crumpled before the first of her tears fell. I will not try to capture the way it felt, knowing that no matter what I did, some part of her would always blame me for this feeling.
I will not try to explain it.
I will never forget it, either.
I let her go into the house on her own. A minute or two after she walked inside, I heard Violet begin to cry. It was the same kind of wail as before, when Martine had put her baby into the crib as I stood in the kitchen and contemplated destroying the notebook that contained her blueprints.
But this time, the wail didn’t die down. It rose, siren-like. It seemed to grow in size and weight, and as Martine walked back through the door into the backyard, it became grating, panicked, oppressively loud.
It was almost loud enough to cover the sound of the garage door opening.
“I left her,” Martine said. Tears streamed down her cheeks continuously, and her voice was raw, but her face was placid. She wrapped her arms around herself and dug her fingernails into her skin, hard, deep, cruel. “I didn’t—I couldn’t stand it, I couldn’t stay in there and get her to go back to sleep, I couldn’t sing to her, I just had to—”
Inside the house, a door opened and then closed again. Just under the sound of Violet’s howls, I could make out Nathan calling a greeting to Martine.
We didn’t have much time. He was in the house, and it would only be a few seconds before he found Laila’s corpse.
“Martine, we have to go. We have to go now,” I said. She looked at me with wide, numb eyes. “He’s home,” I said, and she nodded slowly, and I knew that she wasn’t hearing me at all.
I grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her behind me to the side of the house, to the garden gate. We slipped out and I pulled her with me, down the block to where I had parked my car. I put her into the passenger seat and leaned across her to buckle her in. The whole time, I could still hear Violet crying, crying, crying.
Then, just as I opened the driver’s side door to get in, the crying stopped. He must have found the body, and then he must have gone to the baby. Violet was not alone anymore.
She was with him.
We drove away from that terrible sudden quiet, and Martine did not speak, and neither did I. There were too many things that we could never say, and so we stayed silent. We stayed silent the whole way home.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
It only took a week for him to come to me.
That week was hard, with Martine in the house. It was hard in ways that it never had been before. That first day, I couldn’t move her from the bed, couldn’t get a word out of her. I was frustrated that day by her silence, her immobility, her refusal to recover as quickly as I told myself I would have—but the rest of the week made me miss having her curled in on herself, crying silently and continuously into one of my pillows. She wandered aimlessly until I directed her, did as she was told with the listless apathy of a picked scab.
She haunted my house, filled the rooms with her grief until I thought I would suffocate. I found myself opening windows just to get air. I slept on the couch to avoid being next to her in the bed, as though her anguish could seep into me, poison me, leave me as broken as she was. But I couldn’t avoid her entirely. I went to work during the day and stayed as late as I could, but when I got home at the end of the day, the oppressive fog of Martine’s sorrow was always, always waiting for me.
I resented her more than I can say. I had rescued her. I had helped her get away with murder, and I had gotten her a clean escape from Nathan, and every time she drifted into a room I was occupying, with that lost look on her face, there was something in me that could only hiss the word “ungrateful” over and over again until I could think of a task to occupy her. It was as though she missed her baby too much to even see the magnitude of work I had taken on to help her, the amount of risk.
There was nowhere for me to send her, no boarding school I could stash her away in to rid myself of the constant reminder of the empty place in her life.
She was justthere,always, staring at the walls with tears dripping from her chin. I remembered wondering if Nathan had programmed her to be able to cry. After seven days of her grief, a vicious part of me wished he hadn’t.
I began to turn over the idea of telling Martine that she needed to find some other house to haunt. There was nowhere for her to go, of course—there was no one else sheknew,other than maybe Seyed, but I somehow doubted that she would turn to him in her hour of need. I didn’t savor the idea of putting her up in her own apartment, keeping her like a mistress, but it felt like the most humane option.
I will not pretend that it did not occur to me to kill her. I have wished, in the time since then, that there was any way for me to get credit for dismissing that notion out of hand.
