Mr. Peanut, page 42
“I’m not okay,” he said, “no.”
“Then let’s get out of the rain. Let’s go get something warm to drink.”
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can.”
“I need to get back upstairs.”
“David, you can talk to me without it having to mean something.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.”
“I need you to promise not to do this again.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“It’s mine to waste.”
He thought of Schrôdinger’s cat. In another universe, he and Georgine went to a diner, warmed up and dried off, and he left with her for good. But in this one he couldn’t be sure that the lure of such an escape wasn’t a function of everything else that was going wrong. “I have to go,” he said.
He walked past the doorman into his building and saw himself in the bank of monitors, coming straight toward the screens and then going away. He left a puddle beneath him in the elevator. The apartment was dark. He looked at his watch. Just past nine. Alice would be asleep. Down the hallway, their bedroom was flickering, the television light much like the storm outside, the worst of which had passed, the thunder spent. In the bathroom, he took off his wet clothes and then saw himself, not in the mirror but reflected in the bedroom window, standing in the lit rectangle of the door: how fat he’d become, how flabby and out of shape. He was disgusted. It was like he’d failed his own soul. He turned off the light and, naked, entered their bedroom, where Alice was asleep under the covers except for her arm. She was still holding the remote. When he took it from her hand and turned off the television, she opened her eyes uncomprehendingly for a moment—why was it that silence could wake a person?—and then went back to sleep. He stood looking at her in the darkness, feeling like a criminal who’d stumbled onto a new opportunity for crime. If he were to leave her now, when she was in this vulnerable a state, he was sure it would kill her. But at the same time, their alienation from each other was so complete he felt he could disappear and it wouldn’t matter, and these competing fears were the horror of this place where they’d arrived.
There had to be an exit.
• • •
Hastroll sat bolt upright, awaking from a dream.
“I know how he did it!”
“Wha?” Hannah said, startled. They’d slid their beds together into what Hastroll called “a poor man’s king.” If they drifted too close to the middle, the gap between the two mattresses widened slightly and threatened to suck them down, so they kept to their own sides—which was fine with him. Hannah, deep into her second trimester, gave off body heat like an oven, was an oven, and it was baking their loaf of love.
He called Sheppard, who took care of the search warrant.
They arrived at Pepin’s apartment the next morning.
“Who is it?” a woman said from behind the door.
The detectives, recognizing her voice, looked at one another astonished.
“It’s the police,” Hastroll said.
“Don’t let them in!” Pepin said, farther away.
“Open the door,” Hastroll said. When there was no response, he kicked it in.
Georgine Darcy stood there wearing a robe and holding a cup of coffee, which she dropped when she saw their drawn pistols.
“Where is he?” Hastroll said.
Her eyes glanced toward the bedroom.
Hastroll ran, with Sheppard right behind, but it was too late. When they came into the bedroom, Pepin, also in a robe, emerged from the bathroom, his hair buzzed to the scalp. He was thinner, leaner, more muscular, gone from chubby to cut. The toilet was gargling at the end of its flush.
Hastroll raised his gun. “Step away from the door,” he said.
Inside, the medicine cabinet was still open. Along the top row were all of Alice’s medications, Wellbutrin and Prozac among others, the bottles empty, the caps off.
“You son of a bitch,” Hastroll said when he stepped back into the room, holding up an empty bottle. “They were a placebo. That’s why Mobius broke in, wasn’t it? That’s all he took—her pills. She wasn’t taking anything, was she? You poisoned her by omission, you sick fuck. You brought her right to the edge.”
“Me,” Pepin said, “or him?”
Georgine appeared at the door, leaned against the jamb, and crossed her arms. “What’s he talking about?” she said.
Pepin looked at Georgine, then at Hastroll.
“How’d you push her over?” Hastroll said. “How’d you get her to do it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pepin said.
Hastroll pulled back the hammer. “Are you sure?”
“Come on now, Detective. Are you going to shoot me? This isn’t a game.”
“Maybe it is. Maybe it’s bang, you’re dead.”
“There are real bullets in that gun,” Pepin said.
Sheppard put his hand gently on Hastroll’s arm. “Ease it down,” he said.
Hastroll held the gun on Pepin. The only sound in the room was his breath.
“He’s guilty,” Sheppard said. “But there’s nothing to bring him in on anymore.”
Here’s how David wished the book had ended:
She lost the weight. There were plastic surgeries to nip and tuck her stretched skin; there were complications, especially related to her gastric bypass, including acute vitamin deficiencies; and there was a dangerous period when her doctors feared she’d have to permanently absorb nutrients intravenously. But she and David came through this time awake to each other, transformed without realizing it, and now here was Alice, 133 pounds, the before having shifted to the ineluctable after, restored to him a different person and yet the same, and without a second’s hesitation—once they were certain that her weight was stable for good—they decided to adopt.
On the recommendation of a friend, they went through the Catholic Charities and all the exhaustive prescreening processes, background checks, and preadoption classes. They were warned the wait could last for years. It was an arrogant notion, David thought, or a brand of Social Darwinian measure taking, really, but in class that first night, as he looked around and the other couples broke off into small activity groups and got to talking, he felt confident that when a kid became available they’d get the first shot at him. Or her. Or both. Bring ’em twins. Triplets. They were ready. The organization was firmly committed to open adoption, where the birth mother wasn’t anonymous but rather maintained a degree of contact throughout the process, starting right after delivery. He and Alice were fine with that too, along with all the other conditions.
Later, he could describe the initial lack of connection he felt to Grace (a name they chose together) when he first held her at the hospital, how in that moment he felt a kind of vertigo, as if her fragility demanded that he drop her just as the ledge whispered that he should jump; how he was scared of her, truth be told; and how it was otherwise no different from holding the daughter of an acquaintance, which he feared Grace herself could tell. But within weeks he could also describe the change that had somehow occurred, as all change secretly comes over us, and the feelings—often after he’d fed her and laid her swaddled lengthwise in his lap so she could face him, the baby then just a wrapped face—of love the likes of which he’d never known, love so inexhaustible and vulnerable that it was better and worse, in many respects, than the love he felt for Alice. Worse because he knew he could survive his wife’s death but not this child’s, and so he occasionally would snap at Alice for being careless, though that was the last thing she’d ever be with Grace. Better because of the patience it conferred during those first sleepless months of feeding and rocking and sleeping-rocking when the baby’s bray would come at the precise second he needed to collapse; because of the magnanimity it imparted, a generosity, a level of energy. The relief and the beauty, the joy of purely giving. He was always game. Always there. Present to the child, to anything she needed, and, by dint of this, to his wife. What he felt, more intensely than at any other time in his life, was a fusion between the two of them, a commonality of purpose, no questions asked. On many instances they didn’t even have to speak. “Yes,” he’d say, taking Grace from her arms, already knowing.
Knowing. Finally he’d arrived, he felt, at his own core, at something nourishing that was contained within the shell of his own being. He finally knew who he was. He was a father. They were a family. Nothing could shake this knowledge.
At the moment, David was sitting on the living room floor with Grace. It was late morning, brilliant outside, and Alice walked over to the window and stared out. On the rug David had spread Grace’s little mat, which she loved. It had an illustration of a meadow with a stream running through it, pastures, and a picket fence too. There was a mirror in which she’d study her face, and on soft little structures velcroed to the mat, cows and sheep and chickens and horses would stare back out. Grace would look at herself in the mirror, then at the menagerie, and raise her arms and legs with her toes pointing toward the ceiling and her fingers spread out like a puppeteer’s, a position that made her look as if she were skydiving. She giggled happily, which made him laugh.
“What have you two been doing?” Alice said.
He looked up at her happily. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”
Pepin woke, lying diagonally across their bed, and noticed when he sat up that he was naked. Alice had gone to work already, and the realization of this and the lateness—it was almost eight o’clock—made him dizzy with fear. He sat up in bed, though his belly gave him pause and the flab between his thighs and breasts made it an exercise unto itself. This reminded him of Alice at her heaviest, when he’d wake just as she was stirring and feel her enormity behind him, her radiant heat, as if he’d gone to sleep with a bear, her outline exceeding his, and how her getting out of bed required a move similar to his sit-up now. She’d prop herself on her left elbow and throw one leg across the other and shoot her right arm out like a punch, both limbs flung over the bed’s edge. There was a moment of equilibrium when she looked like a martial artist frozen midkick, then a slight rock back followed by a push off with her left arm; and like a ship righting herself, she did too. She had to rest for a second, her palms on the mattress, her feet on the floor, her back to him. “One day I won’t make it,” she said. “I’ll just lie there stuck.” Her words were snorkeled by her sleep apnea mask, the tube bisecting her scalp and running through her hair like a long braid, the plastic opaque and the color of a shrimp’s shell, and when she turned to look at him he realized how much the mask’s filters looked like the nostrils of a hog; and he thought of their flight to Hawaii, when all the oxygen masks sprung from the ceiling and the passengers, securing them in the rumble and pitch, looked around wildly at one another. A plane of pigs, Pepin had thought. A passel of swine. Who knew you looked like this before you died?
This last thought now sent him scrambling to his computer. Mobius had said to keep away from him, and that was just the thing to do: take Alice and go far away, somewhere the little freak couldn’t follow them to, somewhere safe where she could get right, where they could, even if that meant halfway around the world. He had a conversation in his mind akin to the one he and Alice had before she’d disappeared, about the Great Barrier Reef, and it was a sign of his own narrow curiosities that he had no idea where in Australia this wonder might be. So he Googled away. It was in Queensland, off the continent’s northeast coast, and it was, he read in Wikipedia, the world’s biggest single structure made by living organisms, billions of tiny coral polyps, and it supported a wide diversity of life. A place teeming with life, Pepin thought, that could support them! That’s what he wanted: to be a part of life’s team! He was on Expedia in a flash, two tickets purchased for tonight out of JFK to Brisbane, a red-eye through LAX. The world had been made virtual, and if you had the means it was like a video game. You could pick anywhere on the globe, click a mouse, hit a few buttons, and you’d be there within hours.
He dressed, grabbed their passports, and left.
It was an against-the-flow commute up to the school where Alice taught, and he drove like a madman up the West Side Highway, the Henry Hudson, and then the Saw Mill, though once in Hawthorne and on the campus itself he drove slowly, organizing his thoughts, his story, his pitch. It was a state-run school for disturbed and abused teens, its buildings fashioned of cinder block, the green and gray halls washed out with fluorescent light. Why had his wife been drawn to this place? Because these children needed endless mothering? Or because like her they were fundamentally stuck?
Ahead, in the parking lot, several school buses were loading up. He saw Alice ferrying kids inside, taking roll as the boys and girls stepped on board, but when she caught sight of him she froze, unsure what to make of his presence, and in this moment of stillness he considered her transformation utterly remarkable. She was so thin now—skinnier even than when they’d first met—and her cheeks so prominent it made her lips seem larger, fuller, her hair, still beautiful, framing her face. He would take this picture and add it to the dated Polaroids on their refrigerator door. Something about this new beauty, coupled with her depression, scared him as much as it warmed him. Like sickness, beauty could destabilize the beholder. Just two nights ago, after a fight in which he’d begged her to see her doctor immediately, he stood by her in the bathroom and handed her a glass of water. “I want to see you take these,” he said, holding up her medications. “Now open your mouth,” he’d said after she swallowed. “They’re not helping,” she said, crying. “They will,” he said, holding her until she freed herself and pushed past him to their bed. She cried there afterward for, by his watch, a remarkable two hours and thirty-eight minutes. Depression, with its endless reserves, was as voracious as her greatest appetites, and it tricked him every time into thinking he could love it out of her.
“What are you doing here?” she said.
“I need to talk with you.”
“I’m busy.”
“It’s important.”
“It has to be quick.”
Her eyes were red, already liquid, as if his very presence had lit a fuse in her. He could feel them both tensing for the blast. Finally, she handed her clipboard to another teacher and led him inside the building to her classroom.
“I want you to relax for a second,” he said. “Just hear me out. Last year you talked about us leaving. Walking away. Purpose without procedure. So I’m game now. I bought us tickets. You and me, tonight. Australia. We just go.”
Her arms were crossed. She looked up at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about not even packing. I’m talking about going, right now, you and me, no questions asked.”
“You’re crazy,” she said, and turned to walk out.
He grabbed her arm, more angrily than he meant to. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”
She looked at his hand. “You’re hurting me.”
“You don’t get to just let loose and not let me say something. I get to speak too.”
“Then speak.”
“Come with me. Right now.”
She waited until he let go. “You’re always late,” she said. “You know that?”
“Maybe I—”
“These things, these ideas, they come from me”—she stabbed her chest—“and never from you”—she stabbed his—“so when you finally come around, it makes me feel like you’re doing it out of pity.”
“That was probably right before but not anymore. This is me now.”
“And this is me saying no. I’m not just leaving with you, dropping everything to discover after a few weeks in the Outback or wherever that you don’t want to be there. I’m not going through that again.” She was crying now, trembling.
“Please,” he said. She looked up at him and seemed to soften for a moment. He gently took her arms. “You have to trust me here. We have to go.”
She shook her head. “The kids are waiting for me.”
She went out to the bus and he grabbed his hair in his fist and followed her without speaking and got into his car. Furious, he saw a cell phone sitting on the passenger seat. And then it rang.
“What are you doing?” Mobius said.
“Trying to keep her away from you.”
“You’ll get hurt.”
“We’ll see.”
“You know what you don’t realize?” Mobius said. “There are two moves you can make here, continue straight or swerve, and they both lead to the same thing. No matter what you do. In game theory it’s called Hawk-Dove. Also known as Chicken.”
“What about what Alice does?”
“I have an ace up my sleeve there.”
“What’s that?”
“The end.”
“Goddamn you,” Pepin said, “I don’t want the end.”
“Yes you do, but you won’t do it. That’s why I am.” He hung up.
Pepin screamed at the phone and shook it, then got out of the car and looked around as if he expected Mobius to be nearby, as if their phones were connected by string, he wasn’t sure why. Alice’s bus, followed by another, pulled out of the parking lot. The last remaining bus had almost finished boarding.
