Mr. Peanut (52 page)

He let the back of his head slump against the couch.

“I was
there
this morning,” she said.

The narcissism of depression, Pepin thought. He’d have to tease the most basic of basics out of her.
“Where?”

“That accident.”

“Which one?”

“The
crane.”

He lifted his head. “On Ninety-first?”

“Yes.”

He sat forward.

“On my run this morning,” she said, “I was jogging toward it—I mean the building they were working on—and looked up as I got close. And I swear it was only a second before I got under it that I heard these two pops, like charges going off, and I thought I saw puffs of smoke on the tower itself. And suddenly the crane’s tipping, falling toward me, but I wasn’t sure, like when you look up at a skyscraper and because of the clouds there’s that illusion that the building’s collapsing. It was so slow at first, then people started screaming and I ran down the block as fast as I could. And when it hit, the impact blew me off my feet.” She shivered. “It barely missed me,” she said.

It was an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime eyewitness near miss. At work he’d been watching the live feed on his computer all day. Bizarrely, he’d even thought of calling Alice to make sure she was all right. He didn’t, though. That would mean they’d have to talk. “But it doesn’t mean someone tried to kill you,” he said.

“That wasn’t the only thing that happened,” she said glumly.

Then she told him about the train, the subway ride to Grand Central during her commute. Two boys were rough-housing on the edge of the platform, and when the train came barreling into the station there was an accidental push. Alice spun round, doing a crazy backstroke over the void. “I just barely caught my balance,” she said.

“But that doesn’t mean those kids were trying to kill you,” Pepin said, his heart racing. He was terrified, furious. He wanted to laugh and cry.

“It wasn’t the kids. There was … ” She looked down, her hands trembling as she wiped her eyes. “There was this man too. This little man. He pushed them. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to break them up or push them toward me. And then, after I got my balance, he was gone.”

He stared at her, speechless.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“It’s the man who broke into our house,” she said. “I know it.”

“No,” he said, though not to her.

“I see him everywhere. Out of the corner of my eye. In my dreams. He’s like the little doll in that Karen Black movie.”

“Trilogy of Terror,”
Pepin said, amazed. He’d just been thinking of it.

“Yes.”

“But you’re—”

“I know,” she snapped, nodding, angry now. “I’m just
imagining
it.”

“No,” he said.

“No, fine,
all right!
You don’t want to hear it. You don’t want to hear anything I have to say.”

She stormed into their bedroom as, out the window, the low clouds pulsed with white flutters of electricity. Pepin grabbed his cell phone and raced downstairs.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. He was on the street, pacing.

“What did
I
do?” Mobius said.

“Enough. Off. Game over, okay?” Pepin said. “Abort, do you understand?”

“Abort
what?”

“I’m not going to say.”

“Abort what,
exactly?”

“Why did you take the end of my book?”

“It’s my book now.”

“Oh no it’s not.”

“Oh yes it is.”

“Fuck you.”

“The first ending’s too sappy. The second’s too neat. Me, I prefer to end with a
bang.”

“What do I need to do to fucking end this?”

“Keep away from me,” Mobius said, and he hung up.

Pepin threw his phone down so hard that it disintegrated on the sidewalk.

It began to rain, so instantaneously and heavily it was like a Charlie Brown cloudburst that didn’t seem to start until it was directly over Pepin’s head. He stood staring at his feet, seeing nothing, listening to the wind tearing through the trees, to his own labored breathing, to the downpour hissing along the curb.

“David?”

He looked up. It was Georgine.

She was as soaked as he was, unprepared for the rain in her jeans and sweatshirt. She’d emerged from the gated entryway of a nearby brownstone as if she’d been hiding in the shadows beneath the steps leading up to the front door.

“What are you doing here?” Pepin said.

“I needed to see you. I was going to call but then you … just appeared.”

She smiled, and he couldn’t look at her. She came to him and lifted his face, his wet beard, up to hers and searched his eyes, and involuntarily he felt himself lean against her palm in relief. He hadn’t realized that he’d missed her so much, so consumed had he been by Alice’s return, the relief of their reunion, and her subsequent spiral. He’d been so sure things would be different. Georgine’s blond hair was in ringlets from the rain, curly and heavy with water. He thought: our children would have terrible hair. Then he thought: what are you thinking?

“I’ve been worried about you,” she said.

He nodded.

“You haven’t been yourself.”

He shook his head.

“I know we agreed not to talk at work, but I can’t stand seeing you like this. And I can’t stand not talking to you.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me what it is. Tell me you’re okay.”

She kissed him, and the taste of her wet lips was salvation. He rested his forehead against hers and looked at her, at her mouth and eyes, flooded suddenly by memories of their pleasure together, how it was of another order from what he knew with Alice, neither greater nor lesser but wonderfully different. She was strong in ways Alice was not. In spite of this recognition, he was terrified of expressing his own feelings about anything, and possibly of showing any woman any signs of weakness. He couldn’t say whether or not this had been a function of his marriage, a deformation of his character because he didn’t believe Alice was capable of handling it, or if he’d sought out someone as needy as she was because it protected him from ever needing such comfort. In any case, Georgine’s offer was as tremendous as it was frightening, and it seemed to bring him to a fundamental choice. It occurred to Pepin that you could be married to any number of people, that you were simply trading on what you were willing to give and take, on whatever good came with the bad. And it was also a sad truth that you might not be equipped for certain kinds of ease or happiness. Why, because
that might set you free? Because nothing, then, was determined? That everything was wide open? Was that the source of the fear?

“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.