My gut twisted with something that was a cousin to grief, and it took me a moment to recognize it as guilt. It had been there, dull and aching and low enough to ignore, but the naked gratitude on Martine’s face honed it to a razor’s edge and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore.
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.