Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [180]
“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.