Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [181]
“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