Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [182]
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