Page 65 of The Echo Wife
I couldn’t have killed her, any more than I could have turned her out of the house. Any more than I could have shouted at her for crying. All of it occurred to me—again and again, during that week, I had to swallow my father’s voice to keep it from rising up out of my mouth. He was close to the surface in those days, bubbling under my skin like a blister. The taste of turned earth, the roses digging their roots into grave mud, the house flooded wall-to-wall with things that couldn’t be said—it was too familiar, and Martine was endlessly fluttering her hands and drifting silently down the stairs, and a marrow-deep part of me knew my role. She made a space for a thing the shape of my father to fit into, and the gravity of that space was so, so powerful.
But I didn’t. I didn’t do it. I didn’t shout at her, or level cold cruelty at her to bend her spine, or demand her silent obedience.
I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her, and there is no one in the world left who could ever tell me that it was an admirable thing for me to let her live.
I was turning the problem of Martine over in my head, trying to decide how I might go about telling her that we needed to find a different set of walls for her grief to drain into, when my doorbell rang. By the time my hand touched the front door, she had hidden herself away upstairs. That was a habit she’d developed during the spring she spent with me, or maybe one she’d developed during her time with Nathan and brought with her—going into the bedroom when the doorbell rang, just in case. I told her again and again that it was absurd: we went outside together, had been seen in public, in my car and in the lab and at the store. I wanted her hidden, but it was easy enough to hide her in the places where people didn’t bother to look, in the eye contact people didn’t want to make. But something about being home made her afraid, and I couldn’t stop her from running off.
This time, I was relieved by her caution. Because this time, when I opened the door, Nathan was standing on my front step.
He had Violet in his arms, and his face was desperate.
After he left, I picked up my phone and dialed a number that I wasn’t sure was still in service. I had to check it three times as I punched the numbers into my phone. I chewed on the pad of my thumb as it rang, a habit I’d broken in my first week at boarding school, and I waited, half hoping I’d have to leave a voicemail.
But she picked up.
I didn’t bother with many pleasantries, after thehelloand theso nice to hear from youand theyes, it’s been a while, longer than usual.She was almost always the one to call me, and she was plainly jarred by this reversal.
I could hear in her voice that she was trying to figure out a way to get off the line. It was a mercy to both of us when I told her that I wouldn’t waste her time.
“I need the house,” I said.
“Oh.”
That’s all my mother said, the same sound she’d made when Ishowed her my first lost tooth, told her about my first kiss on a dare, failed to conceal my swollen arm.
“I assume you haven’t sold it?” I said. “I need it. I’ll buy it from you, if you—”
“No,” she said, “no, that won’t be necessary. It would go to you anyway, if I died, and it’s probably silly for it to be empty until then.”
“Good.” I sank my teeth into my thumb, too hard. Normally, I would have hissed at the pain—but my mother’s voice was in my ear, and her voice always did make me default to silence.
She was quiet for a moment. I heard soft clinking noises on the other end of the line—her fidgeting with something, no doubt, clicking her fingernails against a glass or running the pendant of a necklace up and down the chain.A human fucking twitch,my father had sometimes called her, and as I remembered that phrase I experienced a vicious spasm of something that directly opposed nostalgia. It was a hatred for everything that had ever passed between my parents, for the people they had been together, for the way they had trapped me with their fear and their anger and their desperate need for everyone in the world to think that they were fine, that I was fine, that the walls of our house were built on steady ground. The fact that I could never forget that place, that life—it was so bitter that I very nearly spat to get the poison of it off my tongue.
“Well, good, then,” she said. “I’ll mail you the key, and I suppose that’s all you need.”
I thanked her, checked to be sure she had the right address for me. That’s how simple it was. We said goodbye, and I hung up, and I went upstairs to let Martine out of the bedroom. Halfway up the stairs, I paused, looked down.
The side of my foot was pressed flush to the wall.
With immense deliberation, I lifted it, set it down again in the center of the step I was standing on. The step gave a soft creak under my foot. A few seconds later, the bedroom door at the top of the stairs opened.
“Come downstairs,” I said to the sliver of Martine’s face that peeked around the door. “We need to talk.”
There were still two teacups on the table, and a little puddle of spilled milk from where Nathan had fumbled Violet’s bottle. Martine sat in her usual chair and drew a finger through the milk. “I never bought a pump,” she murmured.
I cleared away the cups, threw a dish towel onto the table to soak up the milk. “You what?”
“I never bought a breast pump,” she said. “He must be using formula now.” She pressed the heel of one hand to the place where her left breast met her sternum, massaged it hard. “I hadn’t planned on weaning her so fast. I’ve been expressing manually for the last few days, but I suppose I should stop soon, or I’ll never dry up. The books said it would hurt—”
“Yeah,” I said, impatient. “Do you need anything for that?”
Her eyes lifted to mine slowly, as though they were weighted at the bottoms. “No,” she said. “Sorry. I’m fine. What did you want to talk to me about?”
I swiped the dish towel across the table a few times, threw it into the sink. She flinched at the clatter the teacups made when it struck them. I forced myself to smile at her, a close-lipped attempt at offering her comfort. I sat down across from her and folded my hands on top of the little dining table.
I waited for her to smile back.
When she did, I began to tell her what Nathan had asked of me.
