Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [26]
“What?”
“What’s for dinner?”
Hastroll stood up straight and stared out the window. “You’re on your own.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, how about some water?”
“I’m busy,” he said. “Why don’t you get up and get it yourself?”
“Oh, well,” she said and slumped against the headboard.
Hastroll took himself out for Chinese.
Four days into this new strategy, Hannah’s face looked gaunt. Hastroll could see the ribs above her breasts. Seven days, and Hastroll was suffering for her, though he remained determined. He kept close tabs on their garbage for signs of takeout. Zero. She hadn’t eaten a thing. He asked the doorman if he’d seen Hannah leave the building. “To be honest,” Alan said, “I haven’t seen Mrs. Hastroll in so long, I’ve been wondering if she died.” When Hannah said goodnight that night, Hastroll noticed white spittle at the edges of her mouth.
He turned off the bedside lamp and snuck a glance at her in the light from the TV. “What are you watching?” he asked.
“I Shouldn’t Be Alive,” she said.
On the ninth day, she reached for a book on the bedside table, fainted, and landed on the floor.
Hastroll, terrified, revived her with a few slaps, then put her back into bed. “Hannah?” he said. “Hannah, please say something!”
“Water,” she said.
He brought her a glass that she emptied in huge gulps. “Pizza,” she said four glasses later.
He ordered a large pie with pepperoni and extra cheese. She ate six slices without pausing, then sat back, wiped the red stain of sauce from the corners of her mouth and, sleepy with so many carbohydrates, lay back and turned on the TV.
“You still don’t get it,” she said and almost immediately passed out asleep.
“Why, Alice was wonderful with the students,” said Jesslyn Fax, fifty-four, an art teacher at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls School for emotionally disturbed and sexually abused teens. “The kids adored her.” A small, dumpy woman, Fax wore a brown dress with a white sweater draped over her shoulders. She had hearing aids in both ears and spoke loudly and cheerily—the permanent optimism, Hastroll thought, of the moderately talented. On her classroom walls were prints of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Picasso’s Guernica, some Monet and Manet, Rothko and Rembrandt, Munch and Mondrian, an Escher or two, all the posters sharing space with charcoals by students, still lifes of fruit and self-portraits, all of them mediocre to bad, the interspersed classics grim reminders of everything the children’s works were not and never would be. There were rows of easels stacked in a corner and barnacled with oil paint, and a large, abstract clay sculpture in the corner of the classroom. “We had a memorial service for her in the gymnasium to help the kids cope with the loss, and Benny Bartlett—you see that dark-haired boy out there?”
Hastroll looked. Bartlett, a heavy-set kid no more than fourteen, was playing basketball with another kid on the court outside. The net on the hoop was made of chain link.
“Why, he spoke about her just beautifully at the service,” she said. “He told everyone the story of how Ms. Pepin taught him how to tell time on a regular clock.”
Hastroll watched the boy for a moment. His own father, a fat, unathletic man, had never played sports with him, and he’d always vowed that when he had a child, he’d be sure to. “Why’s Benny at school here?” Hastroll asked.
“Oh, he’s terribly sick. He’s been badly abused all his life. His uncle molested him for years. His mother’s a crack addict. His father got addicted to meth and flew the coop when he was three. The boy has a third-grader’s IQ. And he raped his sister.”
“I see.”
“But he’s very sweet. That other young man out there, the handsome one, Ralph Smiley?”
He turned to look again. Smiley stole the ball from Bartlett, then stepped to the top of the key, turned around, and shot a basket.
“He was very close to Alice too. She helped him do a very ambitious social studies project on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. You should ask him about that.”
“Why’s Ralph at the school?”
“Since he was a little boy he’s demonstrated sociopathic