Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [183]
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,