Carousel Court (36 page)

She opens the refrigerator. She'll scramble eggs. The container is empty except for one egg. She can't scramble one egg. That's not enough for him. Is he even hungry? “Are you hungry?” she calls out. He doesn't respond. One egg is not enough. She reaches for it and curses herself. She grabs a bowl and a fork and cracks the egg, but it's a mess, with too many bits of eggshell in it, and she's trying to focus, to pick the little white bits of shell from the yellow, and she hears a thud and Jackson cries out. In one motion she whips the bowl of egg across the granite island and shatters the wineglass and bowl and the sticky shards of yolk and shell coat the cool kitchen floor. A burst of heat surges from her abdomen. She rushes to the patio door, slides it open, staggers outside, breathing away the nausea.

Back inside, she hears his cries, which are somehow simultaneously muffled and piercing. Jackson's head is wedged between the two disconnected pieces of the sectional Nick promised to reconnect but never did. He's bawling. Snot and tears cover his face. The television volume is too loud and so is the music she's playing, and they blend together and it's some form of sleep deprivation torture for her son and she's the veiled monster holding the blade to his neck.

• •

Only when they're lying together, lights dimmed, television off, music turned nearly all the way down, does she relax her grip on Jackson. He's finally sleeping. Her eyes are heavy. The cicada buzzes from perch to perch, dining room table to the top of the television screen to the rock-climbing wall, where her gaze locates it on a red rock near the top. She studies it, doubts its existence, questions whether she's really seeing it, whether it's there at all, until her eyes give out, lids close, and blackness comes.

78

T
he house glows like a monstrous Japanese lantern. A Ford Escort is parked haphazardly in the driveway. Metzger's tent and house and all the others are dark. Nick scoops up plastic bottles and trash and stands up the trash bin, wheels it to the side of the house.

She didn't change the locks. He eases the front door open and it catches on the pile of mail in the foyer. The lights are all on, as is the television, and there is music coming from the Bose box, which has been moved to the dining room table. There are pillows on the floor and papers spread across the desk and coffee table. A warm draft is coming from somewhere. Nick finds Phoebe curled under a white sheet on the sectional with Jackson's stuffed black dog, a bottle of wine, and her iPhone and a bag of potato chips at her feet. A series of numbers, dollar signs, phone numbers, and names are scrawled in red marker on construction paper. She has written Nick's cell, social security number, and birthday along with his middle name. She drew a picture of Jackson inside a giant sun.

Nick is at the foot of the stairs when he notices: The sliding door that leads from the kitchen to the patio and pool is open. The warm air
is coming from outside. The noise he hears when he reaches the door is Jackson, some high-pitched blend of laughter and surprise.

Nick rushes outside, calls his son's name in the darkness. In the glow from the dirty pool lights, he sees his son's silhouette. Jackson is on the opposite side of the pool, inches from the deep drop into the thick sludge. When Nick reaches him, Jackson is poking something with his little finger. It's a cicada, trapped and squirming, buzzing loudly, working to free itself from a deep poolside crack.

Inside, with his son watching him from the bedroom floor, Nick empties all of Jackson's clothes from his drawers into a small suitcase. Downstairs, Nick stops at the living room sectional, picks up Jackson's stuffed black dog, and says nothing to Phoebe before they leave.

79

T
he arched front door of the house on Juniper Street is thick white oak with a wrought-iron knocker. The greenery that surrounds the cottage is lush from the steady cool breeze off the ocean. The house is a foreclosure in Redondo. It took them forty minutes to get here through light traffic. Nick signed a six-month lease with Bank of the West just after Halloween. Jackson is asleep and doesn't see the glistening white lights Nick strung up on the short palms and eucalyptus trees that line the sidewalk and the front of the house. Jackson doesn't see the soft orange recessed light inside or the yellow leather Formula One race-car bed Nick claimed from a miniature mansion during an initial assessment in Calabasas (two days after Phoebe left and didn't return home for three nights). He doesn't see the billowing sheer curtain or smell the cool fragrant wind or the fresh sky-blue paint on the walls. He opens his eyes only when Nick draws the blanket over him. He asks if he can have a story. Nick says it's late, but then he picks up
Harry the Dirty Dog
from the nightstand, and before he turns the second page, Jackson is sleeping again.

80

W
here is he?”

“With his nanny.”

“Mai's in Houston,” she snaps.

“His new nanny.”

“I'd like to know where my son is.”

“He's with me.”

“And where are you?” she presses.

“Gone.”

“You're not taking him from me.”

Nick is thumbing through the countless images of his son stored on his iPhone until he finds the picture he's looking for: Mallory. “You're asking where
he
was last night? I'll tell you where the hell he was—”

“I'm not letting you take him.”

“—when you were passed out at one o'clock in the morning—”

“You won't get him. You'll never get him. I will never let you have him.”

“—our son was on the verge of falling into the goddamn pool!”

81

I
f she could sleep in Jackson's crib without breaking it or feeling insane, she would. Instead she curls up next to it as she has in the past, since they arrived here, and pretends he's in it. She hums a couple of the songs she used to sing to him and keeps one arm raised, her fingers between the smooth wooden slats.

“Where are you?”

“It doesn't matter,” Nick says.

“I'm going to find you.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come home,” she says after a long pause.

“You're high,” Nick says. “I can hear it.”

“Bring him home.”

“Are you scared now? Now that you realize how unnecessary you are?”

“Nothing scares me,” she says.

“You know what I just realized? You're alone. In that house on Carousel Court. No husband. No son. No dog.”

“I'm fine.”

“No benefactor. No one,” he says.

“I'm just getting started. I don't need a thing.”

“You don't even have a job. You're neck-deep.”

“I'll find you,” she says.

“Do him a favor: Keep your distance.”

“He needs his mother.”

“He has what he needs.”

82

T
he pounding is the front door. The chiming is the doorbell. The noise is simultaneous, and when she sits up, she hears it: laughter. She peers out the window and sees five vehicles: an SUV, three motorcycles, and a Nissan Maxima. She calls 911. She's put on hold. The house shakes from whatever bursts through the front door and lands on the floor downstairs. Seconds later it reaches her: a putrid egglike stench, and she sees the thick blue haze of smoke when she moves through Jackson's doorway to the hall. From the top of the stairs Phoebe sees the white masks: three, four? The head of a sledgehammer comes down on the coffee table, splitting and splintering the oak.

“Moving day!” a voice announces from under one mask.

From the top of the stairs, she rushes the men. Four of them. “No. No,” she's saying, her voice rising. “No!” She's cursing and pushing and hears laughter. She kicks and she's pushed and she staggers back, collides hard with the head of the banister. She screams and charges again and swings wildly until a gloved hand grips her neck, tosses her aside, flips her over the sectional.

Another explosion, the sickening cracking sound of the sledgehammers on the living room furniture. Two men stomp upstairs. There
is so much noise. Phoebe is covering her ears. The front door. She could walk or crawl to it, leave the house. Furniture is tossed over the winding staircase, crashing on the floor. Jackson's dresser, rocking chair, lamps. Two other men haul the stuff out the front door and toss it on the lawn.

That's when she feels it. The cold metal tip of something pressing into her neck. A thick hand around her mouth. The smells of latex and stale cigarette smoke. The man is breathing through his nose, pressing his mouth to her ear, behind her. He says nothing. The hand drops to her breast, over and then inside her dress.

The sectional is in pieces; foam and springs spill out like guts. A masked man takes a chainsaw to the ottoman, rips through it, pauses only to look at Phoebe and the man with his hands on her, then continues.

The man forces her to the floor. His knee and body weight grind her face into the carpet. She's flipped over and two men pull duct tape forcefully across her mouth. Her arms are ripped behind her back and wrists bound. The house is suddenly hushed.

Two other men watch as the two who have hold of her hoist her to her feet. One of the men has Phoebe by the jaw. She is still. He squeezes too hard. She tries to wrest herself free. Her white sundress is lifted over her underwear, then torn from her body.

She gags. The nausea is a wave. A surge she can't swallow. The vomit has nowhere to go. The tape forces it back down. She's flailing, vomit burning as it passes through her sinuses and out of her nostrils. She kicks violently until a fist lands on the side of her head, which hits the wall, where she collapses.

From the floor, the blur of faint yellow light is the glow from the pool. She tries to sit up. Shadows close in. They drag her through the kitchen, where two more men—she has counted five so far—stop using crowbars to pry loose the granite countertops and watch the other two pick her up and press her too hard against the sliding glass door. One of them slaps her ass. She's nude, cut, and bleeding.

A decision is made. They drag Phoebe from the kitchen, through the smoke, up the stairs. The question that forces its way through the vapors is this: What are you fighting for? The answer is instinctive
and comes as they lift her body from the floor: Jackson. At once she is weightless and free.

Someone says,
Enough
. Someone else says,
Go
. She is dropped. She is deadweight. She slides down, awkwardly, along the winding staircase until she comes to a stop against the wall. She is stepped on by one of the men on his way down to join the rest, who convene in the foyer.

She frees her wrists and ankles and moves quickly up the stairs. In the bedroom closet she is reaching for and loading Marina's gun. It feels heavy and cold in her trembling hands, and at the top of the stairs she's lying on her stomach and squeezing the trigger. The earsplitting blasts ring out, and with each round, a shock of white light until there is nothing but a thinning bluish haze of smoke, echoes, and stillness.

• •

The ringing in her ears from the rounds fired and the blows she's taken begins to fade as she moves through the hushed house without thinking, her hands brushing lightly along broken pieces of furniture, the wires jutting out like severed tendons from where the flat-screen hung. She's pulling a loose piece of plaster from the wall where the head of a sledgehammer punched through. Then another piece and another until the hole is gaping. She moves to the kitchen, and the granite is cracked and loose atop the island, so she grips the edges and wrenches it free and the slab crashes to the floor. She opens the refrigerator and freezer doors and, one after the other, top to bottom, rips the shelves out, jars shattering at her feet, and she's still nearly nude except for the underwear, which is torn, and a loose oversize flannel shirt she pulled from the back of an overturned chair. In the half-light from the refrigerator, she sees the floor and the shards of glass, knows that a step in any direction will slit her feet open. She is stuck in the punishing glare of her own nightmare.

The shard of glass she steps on is from a shattered wine bottle, and slices open the heel of her right foot like soft fruit. An artery is punctured, which is why the foot bleeds as much as it does, but after she pulls the glass from her foot, which takes more effort than it should, the shard hooked and catching somehow on flesh, she grabs her keys
and phone and the address she finds next to the laptop, which she assumes is where Nick took Jackson, and she leaves a trail of blood from the kitchen, across the living room carpet, to the foyer, where she left the gun. She tells herself the address in her hand is where they have to be. She can't stay here, in this house, alone. The front door swings open wildly and she tries only once to pull it closed behind her but doesn't. The sky is translucent black and feels so low that if she punched the air, it would wrap itself around her fist and pull her through to some other place. The car starts and she wipes the sweaty, sticky hair from her face and drives, outrunning the darkening skies toward something luminous.

83

N
ick's feet hang over the edge of Jackson's yellow race-car bed, but it doesn't matter because Nick is curled up around his son as he sleeps.
Blood is red, the sky is blue,
Nick's voice is hushed,
the clouds are high and the heart is full.
Jackson's breathing is easy and Nick's head is heavy, becomes one with the pillow as his voice fades, and the scent of his freshly bathed son is enough to make him dream of bright mornings and full days of laughter and games, stories and tricks and birthday parties, and the two of them making one seamless golden life together.

84

T
he ranch-style house is dark and sits well back from the street. A soft orange patio light seems brighter than the streetlights on the deserted narrow strip of winding asphalt she's been on for a mile or more. She doesn't see the Subaru in the empty driveway. She idles and grabs the slip of paper Nick wrote on, and checks the number and street name against the numbers painted on the edge of the concrete patio, and they match. The bottom of her right foot is sticky and wet with blood when she touches it. She drove here for many reasons, some of them sound, though now she can remember only one: Jackson. She's here for him. What she does now is for him. She sent Nick a text from a red light on the way here:
He can't have a mother he's ashamed of. I won't do that to him ever
.