Carousel Court (38 page)

“Do you want this on?” Nick finally says. A small television bolted to the wall is turned up too loud. She doesn't respond, so he turns it off and she says nothing. “Are you thirsty?”

Nick's eyes move from her feet, one in a white slipper and the other wrapped in gauze, to the handprint around her neck, to the purplish bruise under her right eye, which is swollen. She wears a plastic name tag around her wrist. He reaches first for her hand, then notices the cuts and considers her hair or face, but she's propped up and it would be awkward, so he wraps his hand lightly around her left forearm, which is warm from the sunlight that glances off her waxy-looking skin and white sheets.

Nick explains what he knows about who came to the house and why. None of it seems to come as a surprise to Phoebe. None of it matters.

“I shot at them, Nick. I fired a gun. Inside our house.”

The words
inside our house
wash over Nick, somehow release tension from his burning shoulders. Something in the way he hears Phoebe refer to their house feels cathartic.

She was leaving, he suddenly thinks. She was gone. She was leaving their house, their son, behind. He slides forward in his chair, then pushes it back, farther from her bed. “You were going to leave him. You were gone.”

She closes her eyes again. She says her head hurts. Nick touches her thigh and she flinches. “Don't,” she says.

She's been here for twenty-two hours. The next fifty hours are mandatory because of what they found in her system, the trespassing charges, and driving under the influence. Where she goes from here is an open question.

Nick has her forearm now, and she has her eyes on the grated window.

• •

The next time he speaks, the sun has set behind the skyline, the ocean somewhere just out of sight. Nick wears leather sandals and feels the sand between his toes from the hour he spent with Jackson chasing seagulls on the beach.

“Do you want to see him?” She doesn't move and Nick continues, “He won't know the difference.”

Finally, she shakes her head and tells him no.

• •

From the hallway, Nick calls the house and speaks to Jackson. He's in bed and Gloria, the new nanny, has read him three stories. He says he built a castle with these giant multicolored foam blocks Nick bought for him last week.

“And then what?” Nick asks.

Since he brought the blocks home, Nick and Jackson have built and destroyed too many castles to count, so his son knows exactly how to respond to his father's cue.

“Knocked it down!”

89

N
ick comes to see her again. It's the second full day. The seventy-­two hours are almost over. It's a bright clear morning, and she sees him standing in the doorway with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. He's unshaven and sunburned. She keeps her eyes nearly closed so he'll think she's asleep. She wants to see him as he is in his natural state. Not reacting to her gaze, her glare, her expression of disdain or disappointment.

And what she sees is extraordinary. He looks strong. His arms are thick, and the bright white T-shirt is stretched from a physique he lost and regained since Boston. He's here today for someone else, she thinks. He's passing through. He's full of pity for her, yet somehow he's decent enough to keep it to himself, to wait at least until the bruises fade.

Later, he's still there, sitting on the edge of a metal chair, his hands wrapped around her foot, watching her. This may be the closest she's felt to him since they left Boston.

90

S
he sits on the edge of the steel-framed bed, dressed in the clothes Nick brought from home: faded jeans and a white T-shirt and sandals. She asks where Jackson is. She's ready to go. Nick doesn't respond.

“Can we go now?”

Nick says nothing, pulls the folding chair around, sits down, and faces her. He says the decision is hers. She can go home if she wants to go home.

“But you won't be there. Jackson won't be there.”

Nick says nothing. The day is clear, the sky crystalline blue. The room is so bright, he draws the curtains closed so they can see each other's eyes without squinting.

“You can't take him from me,” she says. “I mean permanently, you can't.”

“Yes, I can,” he says. “Right now, at least.”

“So that's it.”

“You have options.”

“Apparently not.”

“I can take you somewhere.”

These are the words that make her eyes close tightly, her head turn in the direction of the grated window, the drawn curtain. Her feet twitch and she pinches her nose between her eyes, her neck and ears bright pink. She's not breathing.

91

T
he crackling sound was from the beige speaker in Phoebe's third-grade classroom. The voice was familiar and cold, that of the assistant principal, whose only job, it seemed, was to summon delinquents to the office. When “Phoebe Vero” rang out, her insides dropped and every head in the classroom turned and her eyes were wide and she left the hushed room, the gray tile floor seeming to give way beneath her.

She knew her father was taking her back. She hadn't known it would be that day, from school. She'd been with her mother in Cherry Hill for less than a year, and again it wasn't working out.

However, in the office waiting for Phoebe wasn't an unshaven man in yesterday's jeans, but her mother, radiant, holding wildflowers, laughing with the assistant principal. They were smiling for some reason. The assistant principal said something that seemed inappropriate for the moment: “Have fun.” Phoebe's mother smelled like she did on Thursday nights, when she would leave for bridge, or the nights when she didn't have to work the next day and left Phoebe with the neighbors. She took Phoebe's hand and led her from the office, out the side door of the redbrick school, and into the parking lot.

It was a bright, cool spring day and Phoebe's mother turned the radio on before answering the question: “I want to spend the day with my daughter. That's why.”

The Oldsmobile was clean and her mother smoked a long thin cigarette and, with bright red lipstick and her Coke-bottle sunglasses, looked like someone else entirely. She looked at ease and content and asked Phoebe to choose. There was a play in the city or they could go to the zoo.

Phoebe asked if they could do both.

They ate lunch in the city. Phoebe's mother ordered one martini. She asked Phoebe about summer and if there were camps she wanted to try, or maybe summer club at the school again, and Phoebe drank two Cokes with no ice and said she didn't know, and her mother stared at her for such unusually long stretches that Phoebe thought she'd done something wrong.

They stopped for manicures, and after the play, Phoebe said she wanted to be an actress. Maybe in the summer, her mother said, they could find a theater camp.

The traffic was backed up and they never did make it to the zoo. Her mother was sullen, somewhere else. The radio stayed off. Her mood had shifted.

“I don't want to go home,” Phoebe said. She was near tears. “I don't want to go to Dad's.” Her mother said Phoebe wasn't happy anywhere.

The next morning would come, which meant Tuesday would be gone, and her mother's lipstick would come off and Phoebe's nail polish would chip, a fading reminder of something rare and elusive. Her mother would work tomorrow and the next day and night and middle shifts and long weekends and she'd wait for the calls and checks that came from Phoebe's father with no regularity and every time after that Tuesday in May when the speaker in her classroom crackled, Phoebe's pulse quickened, though a little less each time until she felt nothing at all.

92

M
ost of the women here garden; they grow arugula, kale, snow peas. The only woman Phoebe speaks to with any regularity, Lucy, tried and failed at heirloom tomatoes, but her boyfriend bakes hashish into his chocolate chip oatmeal cookies; Phoebe has eaten a couple, gotten sick each time. She feels no need to avoid Lucy, though, or the other women here, because none of them poses a threat to Phoebe's sobriety. They asked her what she had in mind her first morning in the woodworking studio, and she said something comfortable that she could bring home, that provided some utility. Something her husband would appreciate, she said.

• •

The only time she cries is when she sees Jackson. The first time, Nick has him dressed up: little khakis and a white button-down shirt and his light-up sneakers. He keeps slapping the bottom of his shoes to show her, but it's too bright outside on the hillside to see anything. She pulls a tag from the left sleeve of Jackson's shirt, which Nick must have just bought for him. Jackson's fingers grip the back of her neck, and he drops his head and all of his body weight easily against her
chest. Nick sits forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, fingers at his mouth. Phoebe wears a white blouse and yoga pants and short chopped hair and no makeup. Forty minutes pass. She closes her eyes for most of the time, breathing in Jackson, whispering to him. He wraps and rewraps his fingers around her thumbs.

She asks if they're back home on Carousel Court and Nick shakes his head, says there's some straightening up that needs to be done. “And I think we need a new fridge,” he adds, laughing.

A bell chimes. Phoebe glances at the white hillside cottage with pale blue shutters. Other women, all in white blouses and yoga pants and slippers, make their way up the grassy slope along winding cobblestone pathways to the building.

“This is so good. Okay?” he says, looking around. “See it through.”

“Why don't you answer my question?”

He says nothing.

“What is your inclination?” She draws out the last word of her question.

“Not now. I don't know what's best. Finish this and we'll figure it out.”

“Oh, fuck that,” she says, her voice rising. She closes her eyes. She stands and kisses Jackson's forehead and hands him to Nick and walks away.

93

T
he path to the beach is narrow. She looks over her shoulder once. The lights are bright in the main cottage; her bungalow is dark. She's alone and burning up. The wind off the water makes the wet cotton gown feel cold as it sticks to her sweaty thighs and chest. She chews her fingernails raw, digs her pulpy fingertips into her abdomen, which is tight and quivering.

She shares a bright-white-and-honeydew room with a stranger. She is sweating through a blue cotton gown because her cells and nerves and vital organs crave chemicals. They're greedy, expect more of the same if not better, a new high, more, always more.

The staff here helps her with the process of weaning. They try to help with expectations and perspective. Stay in the moment, all that Zen shit. The moment is the reason she may just walk to the end of the driveway instead of the beach, find the main road, and walk until someone picks her up and drives her home or wherever Nick has him now.

Instead she's barefoot on a stretch of beach staring at the black water, buried up to her chest in cold, wet sand. Let the tide come in, she thinks. Let nature do what it does. Who is she to resist?

94

T
hree weeks have passed. Nick is holding a Tupperware container of cookies. “Some woman named Lucy gave these to me.” They're close to a ledge; the ocean wind is cool. Sunlight burns off the last of a thin gray mist. Phoebe leans in to Jackson and says sternly that he cannot eat these. “They're poison,” she says. “Let's be superheroes and save the day.” And one by one Phoebe and Jackson start chucking the cookies over the cliff.

Her eyes are fierce, Nick thinks, as she whips the things out over the water. She's barefoot and, without makeup, looks pale and raw.

“So you delivered,” she says, glancing sidelong at Nick, barely suppressing a half-smile. “The regenerative time you promised when we came out here.” She hands Jackson the last cookie and compliments his throw. She hands the empty container to Nick.

“When you're done here,” he says, “just come home.”

Her hair has grown back. Nick says he likes it short. With her finger, she twists a long curl in Jackson's hair. “I like this.”

“He needs a cut,” Nick says as they walk.

“Let it grow,” she says.

“Are you sleeping?”

She holds her hands out in front of her, spreads her fingers. She studies them, says nothing. “I slept for twenty-two hours. Then I was awake for three days.” The fevers, she says, come when she sleeps. In her dreams she throws herself over the cliffs into the crashing surf for relief. One night, she admits, she sneaked down to the beach in her nightgown and stripped naked, buried herself in the sand for relief.

“This is costing a fortune,” she says.

Nick doesn't respond. They can afford it for now. But not much longer.

There's a moment when they're finished throwing cookies into the surf and Phoebe is holding Jackson and they're all standing too close to the gravelly edge and Nick is tense, the drop at least forty feet, his hands clenched into fists and inching closer to her, wondering if there's something in her eyes, some distorted fun-house-mirror version of her own purpose in this moment, or some bleak morass of a life she can't possibly slog through, that might make her consider the edge.

Nick grabs her arm. “Can we walk a little?”

She laughs. “I'm not jumping.”

“That would be a huge waste of money.”

She puts Jackson down and they walk.

• •

Phoebe has moved on from woodworking. She's gardening now. Growing amaranth, because unlike kale and spinach, it can thrive in the heat. Nick returns his attention to the thing between them, the reason she walked them to the woodworking studio.

“So,” she says. The white Adirondack chair is misshapen and awkward-­looking.

“It's the angle, maybe?” Nick says, and adjusts it, starts to sit down, to test it.