Mr. Peanut (23 page)

She nodded again. Her arms were trembling.

“On three,” he said.

He counted aloud, pressing his left palm and left cheek to the rock, twisting the ball of his left foot into the trail, bracing his left thigh against the cliff. He flexed his knees, the other half of his weight distributed on the outside of his right foot, which he positioned just beside the edge of her pack. He slid the fingers of his right hand gently around her wrist, his fingertips touching lightly at first, and once he was sure she wasn’t startled by the pressure he squeezed as hard as he could.

“Three,” he said.

She grabbed his wrist. It was a choice. She could’ve abandoned him, could have launched herself
out
to spite him or save him, to insure that only she would die, or she could’ve yanked him forward and killed them both. But she didn’t. She grabbed his wrist while he held hers and tried to do what he’d told her to.

Her whole weight ran up his hand, from forearm to bicep to shoulder, her life filling his whole right side. He lifted her straight up with all of the strength he had, but as she got her right foot underneath her, he felt her lean forward. She had to. Because of her pack, there was nowhere else for her body to go. His eyes were closed with the effort, with fear, and as she stood—the outside of her right foot braced on the outside of his—he felt her whole body drift out over the edge, her torso leaning forward, her head beyond her feet, like a ski jumper riding the air. She swung her left arm in circles for balance, whirling it counterclockwise again and again. She’d managed to stand, but when he opened his eyes he saw that for a split second he was the only thing suspending her weight and she was the only thing keeping him from tumbling forward. In that split second, they were each pulling with full strength from the other, making a kind of arch. Finally, she was able to lean back—these last inches were gentle—and get her feet underneath her again; and then she stood up straight.

“Have you got it?” he said.

He held her hand; she held his. Her chin was still pointed up. All she could see, he imagined, was sky. And then she sobbed once, a clear, single cry that sounded like relief.

“I’ve got it,” she said.

She was still facing the sea, her pack leaning against the cliff. She took a deep breath, then exhaled. Their hands, still gripping each other’s, were shaking. A helicopter flew toward them, the tremendous noise from its engine rending the moment. She watched it bank left and pass overhead; then she turned to face him.

That
picture of his wife’s face: her expression well beyond exhaustion and grief and elation, in a state of having been saved and having saved herself. The picture of her
relief
. Of having seen something terrible through. He wondered, was that what a woman looked like after she gave birth? Did she have that same expression of amazement and pain, of loss and gain? So much risk in the making, David thought. Making life could utterly break your heart. It was an expression as mysterious as the Mona Lisa’s, one that disclosed everything about her he couldn’t and wouldn’t ever know. And it was an image he tried to keep, but it finally disappeared, and once it was gone he could never recapture all the sadness and joy of their marriage. It was the picture he kept in mind over the next several days and the day before they left the island for home. Alice said there was one more thing she had to do: scatter their child’s ashes. She knew exactly where, and when she told him, he called Harold to set it up.

“Has she forgiven you?” he asked.

“I think so,” David said.

“Well, be sure to forgive yourself.”

David thanked him for everything, then said good-bye. Harold booked them a helicopter tour of the island out of Princeville airport, with one special stop. Alice wore a new dress she’d bought—a white dress with red lilies—and wore a red lily in her hair. She told the pilot what she wanted to do, though he’d already been told. This helicopter ride: so much force, so much lift above your head that it was like being dangled by the scruff of your neck thousands of feet in the air. Through the windows, the views were worth any amount of money. Descriptions of Kauai would always fail; it was simply a place you had to see. They headed southwest first, came around the Na Pali coast, and passed over Kalalau Beach—“It would’ve been nice if we’d stayed there,” Alice said—before turning due east, running the gauntlet of Waimea Canyon, then climbing above Mount Waialeale. “That’s nearly fifty-two hundred feet,” the pilot said. “You’re looking at the wettest spot on earth.” The summit was cloud-covered and it
was raining, as if on cue. “If we stick around for a while it might break,” he said. So they circled.

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.

W
hen 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, and what roused him was Marilyn shouting his name. Though for a dreadful moment he paused, unsure of where he was or whether she’d shouted at all—he even considered slipping back to sleep—until she cried out his name again. And later he would remember the dream as vividly as the night’s events, and couldn’t tell the difference between them, memory leveling images from both—a fact that tortured him to this day.

In the dream, he was holding their second child in his hands. Marilyn was four months pregnant, but in the dream their little girl had been born and he held her swaddled, staring into her face. He was kneeling on the beach of their house, the one on Lake Erie; this was back in the days before he’d fled to New York, a lifetime ago, when he lived in Ohio. Marilyn stood in the water and watched them, the waves lapping her feet. In their child’s face, he could make out aspects of both of them, Marilyn’s high cheekbones and hazel eyes and his own thick lips recombined into something so beautiful and new he could neither have imagined it nor been able to describe it if asked. He smiled at her, and she smiled back, and this reaction, either in imitation of his own moon features or in response to his joy, irradiated his heart with love. And then he heard his wife scream his name.

He rolled off the daybed and took the first three steps to their bedroom in a single bound. He thought Marilyn might be convulsing—she’d suffered uterine spasms during her first pregnancy—and ran through medical procedures while pulling himself up along the banister. Their room was at the top of the stairs. He felt the breeze blowing in off the lake through the open windows, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, his momentum carrying him through the doorway. He saw a form …

He felt a blow at the back of his neck. His knees gave out, his eyes filling with black water. And one last time before he lost consciousness, he heard Marilyn cry his name.

Mobius—for that was the only name he gave—refused to talk to Hastroll. It was Sheppard he wanted—Sheppard only. Hastroll could torture him, he
said, inject him with truth serum or strip him naked and spank him until he was black and blue, but he demanded to speak with the doctor alone.

“You mean the detective,” Hastroll said.

“I mean bring him now.”

Hastroll, peering at Mobius through the cell’s bars, shook his head. “I don’t make deals.”

“Fine,” Mobius said. “Then I’m going to kill myself.”

Hastroll stared impassively at the wee man and, in a rare moment of levity, grabbed his sides and laughed.

In response Mobius pinched his nose with his right hand and covered his mouth with his left, which was bandaged. He swung his little legs freely while sitting—his knees were bandaged also—and Hastroll watched, mesmerized, while his legs slowed with each passing second, until finally his face turned blue.

“Hmm,” Hastroll grunted.

Then Mobius fell over unconscious.

Sheppard came to see him the next day.

When he stepped into view, the man beamed. “Dr. Sam Sheppard, it’s a
pleasure.”

Sheppard lit his pipe, took two puffs. “I’m not a doctor anymore,” he said.

“True,” Mobius said, “but you’ll always be Dr. Sam to me!”

The guard brought Sheppard a chair, and he sat down across the bars from the midget.

“That’s better,” Mobius said. “Let me get a look at you. Why, you haven’t aged a bit. Still fit as a
fiddle
. Still a
handsome
dog. Do you know that for years I’ve been obsessed with your case?”

Sheppard looked at his watch, then put his pipe back in his mouth and puffed, Mobius appearing for a moment to live in a world of thick, white smoke.

“You know,” he said, “you may be the only man in America to be both guilty and
not
guilty of killing his wife. Convicted
and
exonerated. Did he, didn’t he? He didn’t, he did! They
still
don’t know. And the fascination with your story … it never ends. They made
The Fugitive
television series about you and then they made that into a movie. There’ve been books written about you. You even
wrote
a book! Yes, of course I read
Endure and Conquer
. It was terrible! The description of your first trial entered the lexicon. A ‘carnival atmosphere’ is what they called the O. J. trial, but that’s the exact expression Justice Tom Clark coined to describe
yours.”

“I’ve tried to put all that behind me,” Sheppard said.

Mobius smiled. “It’s pretty to think you could.”

Sheppard puffed some more on his pipe.

“So,” Mobius said.

“So?”

“Quid pro quo.”

“Go on.”

“In exchange for the whole truth about Alice Pepin, I get two things.”

“I’m listening.”

“First I want to hear from your lips everything that happened on the last day of your wife’s life.”

For a moment Sheppard remembered Marilyn’s smashed face turned toward him where she lay on the bed, her forehead covered in crescent-shaped gashes, her upper incisor ripped out, her pajama top pushed above her breasts and her panties pulled down, her pubis moist and glistening, her legs pinned under the bed’s crossbar, blood whipped across the walls of the whole room as if a wet dog had shaken itself out right there, haloing outward over her bed and his, covering the walls, even flecking the ceiling. Around her whole head, like a lacquer-thick nimbus, there was blood as well. Sheppard kneeled on her mattress to check for a pulse. Nothing.

“What’s number two?”

“I want to read David’s novel.”

“Why?”

Mobius laughed. “To see how I came out.”

Sheppard tapped his pipe clean.

“All right,” he said.

Mobius clapped his hands together, then rubbed them. “Shall we get started?” he said.