The Echo Wife

by Sarah Gailey

  I hadn’t left because this was, ultimately, my fault.

  If I hadn’t been such a hornet (such a bitch, my memory helpfully echoed), Nathan would be alive now. If I hadn’t been so focused on my own research, he wouldn’t have been able to slip away from our marriage so easily. And without my research, Martine would never have existed for him to slip away to.

  I could leave the house and the blood and my fucking clone behind, but I would never be able to walk away from the truth: It was my fault that Nathan was dead.

  So I smiled at her.

  “Of course I’m still here,” I said. “I wouldn’t make you do this alone.”

  I watched Martine believe me—believe the best of me, believe in my kindness. I made myself memorize the trust in her eyes, and then I turned away. I grabbed Nathan by the ankles, lifted my hips, and gave an experimental tug.

  The floor was well polished.

  Dragging him across it wasn’t hard at all.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  My mother was a gardener.

  She spent hours in the garden, kneeling on a special pad that stood between her clothes and the soil. It wouldn’t do for her to have dirty clothes, any more than it would be acceptable for her to have an unkempt garden. She wore gloves to keep her hands soft and her fingernails clean. She moved carefully in the garden, directing the paths of wild-growing things with a kind of precise authority she never displayed elsewhere. Her fluttering hands grew steady as she gripped rosebush stems, slid them deftly between the blades of her shears, and cut them short.

  When I was young enough that I still wanted to understand her, I followed her into the garden and asked questions as she worked. Why did this plant get water, but that plant didn’t? Why did we hate snails but love praying mantises? The thing that perplexed me most was the pruning. Her grapevines and roses and rhododendrons all looked healthy, happy. They grew full and lush, their blooms and branches spreading wide. Why, I asked her, would you cut those off? Why would you ever cut the blooms off the rosebush?

  It was one of the only truly useful things she ever taught me: Stress stimulates growth. Sometimes, in order to make something develop in the right direction, you have to hurt it. She put the shears in my hand and pointed to a few places on a lilac plant. She showed me which flowers were fading. She told me that if I didn’t remove the still-pretty flowers now, there wouldn’t be any next year.

  She waited patiently for me to take action.

  I cut off every bloom she pointed to.

  I put them into a cup of water to give to my father when he got home. By the time he did, my mother had already arranged them in a vase. When I woke the next morning, the flowers were in the trash—the blooms had wilted in the night, and my mother had fluttered them into the garbage before my father could see.

  Martine’s garden was as beautiful as my mother’s had been. Birch trees, lavender shrubs, climbing grapes. A trellis with vines just starting to wrap their tendrils around the bottom few rungs of white-painted wood. Strawberries for ground cover. The entire thing was well-tended and precise. It was manicured rather than lush, careful rather than abundant. Everything was arranged to be pleasing, and so I was pleased, but there was nothing stirring about the fruits of Martine’s labor in that garden.

  My own labor in Martine’s garden was stirring, in a way. But there was no beauty in it.

  The rain that pattered the soil under my shoes that night was convenient, if uncomfortably cold. It was a fine rain, barely heavier than mist. The soil in Martine’s backyard was loosely packed, well tilled for gardening, and it was even easier to move the soil as it grew damp. Digging the pit wasn’t easy work by any stretch of the imagination, but I put the full force of my shoulders into the shovel, and it wasn’t long before I stopped noticing the gentle tap of falling water on my hair.

  A few feet away from me, the blanket wrapped around Nathan’s corpse collected the water, a soaking dew that would have ruined the quilt, even if it hadn’t been for the dead man leaking blood into the cotton.

  Inside the house, Martine was baptizing the kitchen floor with bleach. Turning Nathan over in the kitchen in order to roll him onto the blanket had been an ordeal. At the sight of his still-open eyes, Martine had raced to the bathroom to vomit. I hadn’t been ill, but it had been harder than I expected, seeing his empty stare. I knew better than to try lowering his eyelids, movie-hero style. They would simply open again, so he could stare unblinking at whatever was in front of him.

  I had left Martine the work of cleaning up the blood, telling myself it was an easier task than digging. If I thought too much about it, I wouldn’t have been able to decide which job was actually easier. I knew which I preferred, though, and I’d decided it was selfless to give her the indoor cleanup. A simple job, straightforward, with an obvious endpoint: Make the floor look like it did before Nathan spilled his life out onto it.

  I leaned the shovel against the side of the hole and shook out my hands, willing some warmth into my stiff fingers. I was only halfway done with the hole and my hands were already sore. In a way, it was gratifying: a physical manifestation of penance. I tried to tell myself that I had not a single thing to repent, beyond my cruel words to Martine—still some grim part of me was satisfied by the pain. I was hip-deep in dirt and my shoulders were screaming and I was freezing and drenched, and it was fine.

  It’s fine, it’s fine. I kept repeating it to myself, but as I dug I couldn’t help pressing the bruise of my guilt over and over again. The fact that Martine existed at all was a direct expression of all my failures, all the ways Nathan had decided that our relationship wasn’t enough. All the ways he’d decided that I wasn’t enough.

  I used the back of one wrist to push a hank of wet hair out of my eyes, and I bit down hard on the blame until it foamed through me like a poison. He’s dead because you couldn’t make yourself give him a baby, I told myself. He’s dead because you were selfish. It’s your fault, all your fault. If you had just been the wife he wanted—

  “How deep are you going to go?”

  I looked toward the house. Martine stood under the tiny overhang that projected past the back door, arms wrapped around a bundle of pink-tinged fabric. I recognized the gingham check of a sleeve: Nathan’s dress shirts. A shock of respect jolted me as I realized the practicality of what Martine had done, using Nathan’s shirts to clean up the bleach and blood from the kitchen floor. No rags would be wasted in service of eliminating the evidence. The shirts would need to be disposed of anyway, eventually. There was a terrible, tidy efficiency in it.

  My mother’s voice drifted up from my memory. Waste not, want not.

  “I think I’m about there,” I said. I was chin-deep in the pit now. It was an ugly ellipse, uneven at the edges with a ragged slope to the center. But it didn’t need to be pretty. It just needed to hold a body.

  Martine peered over the edge, then opened her arms and let the blood-soaked dress shirts fall into the hole. It was an oddly childlike gesture: there was something innocent in the way she held her arms out straight, elbows stiff, and watched the shirts slap into the damp soil. Then she knelt in the earth at the edge of the hole and held an arm toward me. A fog of bleach-stink rose off her. Her fingers were white with cold, pruned from scrubbing the kitchen floor. I stared at them blankly for a few seconds before coming to my senses and gripping Martine’s wrist. My shoes scrabbled at the dirt as my clone hauled me out of the grave I’d made.

  Nathan was not heavy, not with the two of us lifting together, but it was tricky to maneuver his deadweight with the wet blanket wrapped around him. Neither of us suggested removing the blanket, though. It was better to have him covered up and awkward to handle than to see his bare, blank face staring into the rain.

  I did not pause to look at him after we dumped him in on top of his ruined shirts. I didn’t want to see him, small and still in the bottom of the hole. But when I went to grab the shovel to start the process of burying him, Martine asked me
to wait.

  “What is it?” I asked. Martine held up a hand, looking down into the grave, and I suppressed a spark of irritation. If she wanted a moment with him, she should have taken it before I arrived, before his body cooled. I couldn’t help but think that she should have thought of “goodbye” before she murdered him.

  This was no time for sentiment. The work needed to be done.

  I tried to figure out how to tell Martine to hurry up her farewell without sounding like a pitiless monster—but before I could say a word, Martine jumped into the grave. The motion was graceless, foreign, and it struck me as strange that she would even think to do such a thing. I asked what she thought she was doing, whispering as loudly as I could, but either she couldn’t hear me or she chose to ignore me.

  Down in the hole, she knelt over Nathan’s corpse. It was just barely too dark for me to see what she was doing. I assumed that she was saying something to him, a final farewell—but then she straightened, and she had the rain-heavy blanket in her fists. She gave it a wrenching yank and it came free from Nathan, his corpse tumbling into the soil. She dropped the blanket next to him in a heap. Then, without my help, she climbed up out of the grave, digging her hands into the soil at the side of the hole and pulling herself up onto the edge. Muddied and panting, she strode across the yard to the garden shed.

  She pulled the doors open, leaving streaks of mud on the aluminum siding. The inside of the shed was dark, littered with bags and tools. Along one wall, white boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling.

  “This will help,” she said, not bothering to whisper as she returned with a white box in each hand. She handed one to me, her fingers leaving dark streaks along the sides of the box, and tore the lid of her own box open. I looked at the label on the box. Organic Gardening Lime.

  “Why do you have so much lime?” I asked, tearing my own box open and shaking the contents into the grave, absurdly reminded of feeding my classroom’s fish when I was in fourth grade.

  “The roses like an acidic environment,” Martine said, gesturing with her free hand to a row of four rosebushes under the kitchen window. She shook wide arcs of white over Nathan’s corpse. I looked pointedly at the shed, at the stacks of white boxes, more than anyone could possibly need to tend a half-dozen rosebushes. “The soil is very alkaline here,” Martine said placidly, throwing her empty box into the hole.

  I tossed mine in after it, then grabbed the shovel. The rain fell softly, steadily onto the lime, turning the white powder to a paste. As I tossed the first shovelful of soil over Nathan—aiming somewhat deliberately to cover his face—Martine returned to the garden shed.

  “Does it really work?” I called after Martine’s back. In the dying light, I could only just make out Martine’s answering shrug.

  She returned holding a second shovel, smaller than the one in my hands. “I don’t know if it works, but I saw it on a show once,” she said. “And it can’t hurt, right?”

  The idea of her watching television startled me. It shouldn’t have. She was a clone, not a robot. She didn’t just sit dormant whenever Nathan wasn’t looking at her. But it felt strange, somehow—the thought of her sitting and enjoying a show, something I might have watched on a bored weeknight, something with a hidden body and a virtuous-yet-troubled investigator. I pictured her with her feet tucked up, a blanket over her lap, a glass of wine. Nathan’s arm over her shoulder.

  We buried him together, in a silence that was enhanced by the cocoon of steady rainfall. By the time we were slapping our shovels over the last of the soil, the rain was coming down harder. Both of us were shivering, dripping, and we walked inside stiff and numb.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The air in the house was harsh with bleach; I caught myself reflexively taking shallow breaths. I pulled my limp hair off my neck and, turning, saw that Martine was doing the exact same thing—both our elbows angled up into the air as we gathered our hair away from ourselves, both our necks ranging forward to avoid the discomfort of a damp cling. It gave me a moment of vertigo, looking at a mirror image of myself out of the corner of my eye.

  I did not like knowing that she and I could fall into the same patterns. I did not like that at all.

  I looked away. “We should wash up,” I said, my voice strange and tight to my own ears.

  “You should take the hall bathroom,” Martine answered, slipping out of her mud-caked shoes. Her voice was soft and genial again, painfully courteous. “That shower is bigger. I’ll be fine in the master bath. I already took a shower today anyway.”

  I paused in the middle of taking off my own shoes. This was programming at work—Martine had been designed to be a perfect hostess, self-sacrificing and polite to a fault. Even now, after burying her husband, she was putting herself last.

  “Thanks,” I said, not arguing with Martine’s sacrifice, because I was not like her. I wanted the bigger shower. I wanted to be warm. I wanted to use that fragrant vanilla soap, wanted to wrap myself in a sage-green towel. I wanted it, and I did not care if she might also want it. I was going to have it.

  Nathan used to call me selfish. Maybe he was right.

  But, I thought as I closed the bathroom door and clicked the button-lock on the knob, whether or not he had been right was irrelevant now. It was that simple. His opinion stopped mattering the moment he stopped breathing.

  Disposable.

  Just like any specimen.

  That’s what I told myself, over and over, willing myself to believe it.

  I tucked my hands under my arms, waiting for them to stop shaking.

  It was the cold, I told myself, breathing slowly. That, and fatigue. Digging the grave had been hard work. It had been a long day. I was just tired. A shower and a good night’s sleep, that was all I needed, and then this whole thing would be behind me for good.

  I turned on the water. I didn’t climb under it until the steam was too thick for me to see my reflection in the tap. I closed my eyes and leaned into the spray, and I let the water scald me until I was numb.

  Never apologize.

  Never look back.

  Forward, Evelyn. Forward. That’s the way.

  * * *

  When I walked into the kitchen, my hair dripping onto the shoulders of the shirt I’d borrowed from Martine’s closet, an open bottle of wine was waiting on the counter next to a single glass. A chardonnay, the name of the winery debossed in gold lettering onto the cream label. Condensation frosted the thick green glass, but did not dew enough to drip onto the countertop.

  I filled the wineglass well past the point of a single measure.

  Martine was waiting for me in the living room. She was sitting on the blue couch that Nathan had claimed in the separation, her back to the door. A low chignon was perched at the nape of her neck, just a breath away from the top of her pajama collar. Her head turned slightly as I approached, as though she’d been listening for footfalls.

  I felt nine years old again, like I’d snuck out of bed to discover my mother waiting up for my father in the wee hours. She never went to bed before he was home, and on the nights when his work kept him out until dawn, she stayed awake. My mother was a woman in a perpetual state of waiting.

  On those late nights that bled into early mornings, she’d hear my sock feet padding on the hardwood, just as quiet as I could tread, and she’d turn her head just like that—enough to let me know that she’d heard me, but not so far that she could see me. Just enough to let me know that I should sneak back to my bed.

  My ears rang with how similar the movement was. I felt a flash of childish rebellion: Martine couldn’t make me go back to bed. She couldn’t make me go anywhere. It was absurd, of course—she’d left a glass out for me, she’d been waiting for me to join her.

  Still.

  I perched on the arm of the couch, feeling aggressive and somehow in the way. It was strange to see that couch in this living room—the feeling was a close cousin to the sensation of running into an elementary school tea
cher at the grocery store. The context of the thing was all wrong, and it was unnerving in a way I was ill-prepared to process.

  That couch was the first thing Nathan and I bought together. It followed us from our first tiny studio apartment, to our first place with doors, to our house. It was a part of our life, part of our home. It was where we fought and ate and laughed for years. It was where I slept when Nathan was too angry at me to let me into the bedroom, when the fights were bad, before he gave up and took to pretending things were fine while he built this new life for himself.

  In this place it was almost unrecognizable. It wasn’t the couch where I slept anymore. Now, it was the couch onto which Martine tucked her feet up while she was watching a television show that taught her to bury a body with lime.

  All at once I hated that couch, hated it with a sudden desperate venom. It had betrayed me by seeing my marriage disintegrate, by being here in this house. I wanted to watch it burn. I wanted to hose away the ashes of it with a pressure washer and watch them disappear into the earth.

  “I’m surprised you’re still awake,” I said.

  “It’s only eight o’clock,” Martine replied softly. She was cupping a glass of water in her hands, staring at the lipstick smudge on the rim of the glass. I wondered if she always put on makeup before bed, or if she’d done it because she had a guest. “I go to sleep at nine thirty. If I go now, I’ll lie there awake until it’s time.”

  “Oh,” I said, awkward in the face of this quiet, soft woman who looked like I would have looked if my life had been entirely, catastrophically different from what it was. “I thought it was later.”

  I was uncomfortable, furious and sad and exhausted. Everything was too much. All of the things I felt seemed summarized by the lipstick on the rim of Martine’s glass. She saw me staring at the smear, and she ran her thumb over it. It didn’t solve the problem, though: now, there was lipstick on her thumb. She held that thumb carefully to keep lipstick from getting onto anything else.