Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [38]
“In sickness and in health, hah!”
“Darling, please.”
“As if I haven’t been alone, either. But you can’t be alone, can you?”
“That’s not true.”
“Who is she? What’s her name?”
“There is no she!” But he couldn’t help himself. Thinking of the other Hannah, he felt himself grin.
“You’re smiling!” she said.
He could play bad cop with the most hardened criminals, could poker-face a confession from the worst trash, but try to lie to his wife and his tell was as obvious as a boner in pajamas. “I’m not,” he whined. He was, in fact, on the verge of laughter.
“Is she going to take care of everything I don’t? Are you going to gut her too? Withhold everything, you impenetrable fuck?”
And then Hannah slumped into bed again and wept.
“Oh, enough with you,” he said. He turned to leave and then turned around, watching her back shake as if she were cold, and he went to touch her shoulder. Though whether he did it to caress it or do something else entirely, he didn’t remember later, but she whirled on him and smacked his hand away.
“Don’t!” she screamed.
The blow knocked him against their bedside table. Her water glass fell to the floor and shattered. He felt a zinging up his arm: her diamond ring had sliced open his palm.
And in the dark Hastroll went blind with rage. He took the pillow and pressed it over her face. “Enough with you,” he groaned. It was delicious to use all his strength, to push down on her face with the force of every punch she’d ever asked for that he’d pulled, to punch the center of the pillow again and again and again without the recoil of shame. (Incest wasn’t a man’s first taboo; it was hitting a girl.) She bucked under him, trying to bridge from her neck, and as her arms flailed at him heedlessly, Hastroll became aware—not now but in the horrendous hours later—that in murder there is a crucial midpoint, a gap one can cross only with discipline and determination, and that, like any task previously untried (like learning a sport or writing a novel), doesn’t disclose the details of its unfolding or the necessities of its accomplishment or the actual time it requires (in seconds, minutes, or years) until the act itself is perpetrated. He had to press his knee to her chest while her nails dug into his palms where he gripped the pillow; his teeth, when she shoved her fingers up his nose and into his mouth, bit through flesh to pebble-hard bone. In a last surge of adrenaline, she managed to separate the pillow from her face and gasp, “Ward, please … ” But he pressed the pillow down again. The storm had broken over the city, the thunder, lightning, and rain spraying their windowpanes, washing down the brick and feeding his roses, funneling through gutters and roaring through sewers in torrents—all that channeled force part of the energy he used to seal the pillow over her nose and mouth and muffle her screams. And soon her blows became drunken and soft and, as all strength left her, almost sensual. Until finally she fell motionless, like someone who’d just slipped off to sleep.
He backed off of her, off the bed, and then looked.
Her head was a pillow, the sheets around her legs. Her slip, in the dark, was impossible to distinguish from the covers. She’d become part of the bed.
Now he had to dispose of her body.
This would be the effect of shock, he realized later, the disconnect brought on by trauma, and in the bathroom, after thinking through other crime scenes and searching the apartment for the tools, after wrapping his feet in Ziploc bags and his hands in latex gloves and his head in Hannah’s shower cap, he turned on the shower, deposited her corpse into the tub (why did the dead feel lighter alive?), then sawed off her arms at the shoulders, her legs at the hips, her head at the neck. The blade produced a horrid smell; it was like a dentist’s drill to tooth. He ran the shower to drain the blood while he worked, her torso limbless at its sockets and perfect where still intact like some ancient Greek sculpture fashioned of meat. Her limbs landed loudly in the tub as he severed