Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [39]
He woke.
It was dark in the apartment and the telephone was in his lap.
He went to their bedroom and saw that Hannah was sleeping. She looked peaceful lying there, and while at once grateful beyond measure at the same time he felt the bitter hangover from their fight, so he wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed with her like he used to when they were young and say, “I had a nightmare.” She would ask, “What did you dream?” And though he’d never been more than a detective and never would be, in that moment he felt himself to be the richest man alive. They would lace their arms and legs through each other’s and fall asleep. But tonight, soaked in sweat, he went to the bathroom and ran the tap and splashed his face, burying it in the towel. Then he looked up at his reflection, and it horrified him.
He saw the man he’d become since Hannah had gone to bed. His suit and shirt were wrinkled, his tie pushed out from under his jacket, a dishevelment only the chronically distracted could effect. His hair, gone gray during these past five months, made him look ten years older than thirty-five. His mouth, on a face slack with extra weight, looked permanently turned down. Worse, he seemed as impassive as some of the killers he’d interrogated. That more than anything was what struck him. Men who killed serially suffered a unique lack of affect. You felt this in advance, a physical pressure before they entered a room. There was something impenetrable and thick behind their eyes, a gaze that was shark-dumb. They were people, Hastroll thought, who could not be touched by love.
He put his head on his arms and wept bitterly that their life had become this.
He wept because he was alone in a secret corner of his apartment weeping.
He wept so forcefully that it almost sounded like someone gasping with laughter.
He wept until he became nothing but this sound.
Then Hannah appeared at the door.
She appeared from out of the apartment’s darkness as if emerging from a black pool. And the sight of her—the unexpectedness of her appearance—terrified him. She looked half-asleep, mishmashed, like a child gathered from bed. She stood for a moment in the light, squinting, a little wobbly in the legs. Then she reached out and rubbed his neck and leaned on him at the same time. “There,” she said. “There, there.” Her hand when it touched him carried a static charge, and he winced. She was the witch who’d conjured his misery, who could lift the spell to save him, and she’d now arrived to welcome him to this pit where she lived. And seeing her standing before him, limitlessly powerful because of this dual nature, Hastroll was even more afraid.
“What is it?” she said.
“I can’t stand it,” he whispered.
She took a step closer to him and he covered up.
“Can’t stand what, baby?”
“It’s like you don’t exist.”
Gently, she slid her arm over his shoulder and leaned down to him, pressing her forehead to his ear and then nuzzling it with her nose. She wore a sweet-smelling perfume, but her breath was rank. “Now,” she said, “you finally understand.”
Detectives Hastroll and Sheppard were in the Time Warner building, sitting in the coffee shop in Borders, staking out the phone booth—“Maybe the only one left in Manhattan,” Sheppard had observed—by the bathrooms where the calls to Pepin