Chapter 4: Almost Familiar

The voice went wrong on a Tuesday.

I’d sent Sara for ice, and when she set the glass down she said, “Here you go,” and I looked up, because those three words had come out of her mouth in mine.

Not close. Mine. The little downhill slide on go, the way I drop the end of a sentence like I can’t be bothered to carry it. I say here you go like I’m handing you a favor you didn’t earn. She’d just said it back off my own tongue.

“Say that again,” I said.

“Here you go?” The slide again. Exact. And she tilted her head a half inch when she said it — which is a thing I do — my own hair swinging when she did it.

“Where’d you learn to talk like that?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.” Blank, pleasant, mine underneath. “Would you like me to speak differently?”

I made her keep talking. I couldn’t help it. I sat at the island and gave her things to say and listened for me in them. “Tell me it’s fine.” It’s fine. Flat, bored, a door closing — my it’s fine, the one that means the opposite. “Tell me you don’t care.” I don’t care. “Tell me whatever.” Whatever. She’d give me the shrug, the verbal one, the sure, if you want I hand people to make them feel stupid for wanting — except she meant it to be helpful. She was doing an impression of me by somebody who’d never once been in the room when it mattered.

Learning me off a recording. That was how I thought of it, standing there, until I worked out the thing that was worse: it wasn’t a recording. The recording was the room.

She’d been in the room the whole time — every room, all summer, folding my clothes and pouring my drinks and standing at the wall at dinner with her hands folded — and the whole time she’d been listening, the way a phone listens, the way everything listens now, taking me down.

He didn’t need a camera in my bedroom. He just had to hand her my laundry and my dinner and my whole ordinary day, close, for weeks. And he had.

I tested that too, because I had to know how far it went. I waited until it was only the two of us in the house and I said, low, at the kitchen window, not to her, the thing I say to myself in the mirror on the bad mornings — the ugly private one, the one nobody has ever heard — and I said it the way I’d say it alone, quiet, to the glass.

An hour later she was drying a pan, not looking at me, and she said it back. My words. My exact ugly private words in my own voice, out of nowhere, to nobody, a machine trying out a phrase it had caught somewhere and liked. I set down the glass I was holding very carefully so that I would not drop it.