Mr Peanut - Adam Ross [78]
David would keep this picture of his wife’s face in his mind the following year, when she miscarried again. As before, and despite the blood thinners, she could only carry the child to nineteen weeks. She was riding the train to work and felt contractions, got off in Harlem, called an ambulance, and delivered another boy en route.
Two years later and seventy-five pounds heavier, her blood pressure reaching dangerous levels while on the highest dosage of medication she could take, she lost their third child in the middle of the night. She’d gone twenty weeks. This too was a boy.
“I’m done,” she told him in the hospital.
She quit her job at Trinity midyear.
“Rich kids,” she said. “Helicopter parents. None of these people need me.”
Why should he begrudge her relief? He could take care of them—made plenty of money, more than he’d ever dreamed of—and could protect her until she was well. The gaming business was exploding.
She was hospitalized later that month with depression. She came home after several weeks of treatment, only to spend the next five months in bed.
She emerged, though when she did it was as if they’d slipped into a long dream: a Mobius strip of now.
Three years passed, or was it a millisecond?
Secretly, David began writing a book. It had started as a treatment for a video game, but the description soon became a narrative and then grew from there. Both were forms of making, of creative acts, but he needed an expression beyond games. God forbid Alice should ever read the things he’d written. It had started with his dreams. She died in airplane crashes, carjackings, in burglaries gone bad. Muggings where she resisted her assailants. She suffered shark attacks, pit bull and bear maulings. Freak accidents at zoos. Car and train wrecks. Or during her commute, while she sat reading, the clot that had formed silently in her leg drifted to her heart or lung; or, like a firework, rose to her brain and detonated—and he was free. He needed to disguise these fantasies, some aliases for himself, an art that was oblique but provided a directness of experience, veiled autobiography that let him investigate with his own eyes. He had a breakthrough after the first chapter. Leave it to a gamer. He would create avatars.
Like a magic trick, right before his eyes, Alice became fat.
“Mr. Pepin,” the policeman said, “I have some terrible news about your wife.”
He woke.
God forbid his wife knew what he’d written, that she knew his mind, but most of all God forbid she knew what he’d thought on that spectacular morning over Mount Waialeale. The clouds parted. At the summit was a small lake, which in that brief moment of clearing, of sunlight, winked like a shining eye.
“Are you strapped in?” the pilot said.
“Yes,” Alice answered.
“Go ahead,” he said. She opened the door, and the wind blew the flower from her hair. The pilot hovered, holding their position. She turned the urn over and loosed the ashes, which under the spill of the rotor blades disappeared immediately. Watching this, David suddenly saw everything that had brought them here on a continuum: from the idea of a child, to the talk of making one, to conception; from ultrasound to stillbirth to cremation; the boy’s progress from idea, to being, to dust. Because at that moment David suffered the knowledge of something he’d kept hidden, from Harold, from Alice, but most of all from himself: that it was only when he saw his son’s ashes poured out, saw his remains become part of that lake, mountain, and sky, that he believed the boy was real.
When Detective Sheppard’s wife was being killed, he was fast asleep and dreaming. He had passed out on their daybed at the foot of the stairs, where he often napped,