Carousel Court

by Joe McGinniss

  17

  She wakes up on the floor in her son’s bedroom under a white down comforter. Nick keeps the house cold. “I just don’t want to go,” Phoebe says to him when he picks up. It’s seven fifteen. Next to her, unaware that she’s there, Jackson is talking to himself in his crib. Phoebe doesn’t know where Nick is and doesn’t ask.

  “So don’t. Go to the beach. Dig for shells,” Nick says. “He loves watching the surfers.” She can hear the lift in his voice that happens when he talks about things that make Jackson happy. “Get breakfast and just take the day,” he adds.

  “It’s Tuesday.”

  “Wednesday,” he corrects her. “It’s a Mai day.”

  “Every day is a Mai day,” she says, and sighs, content.

  A measure of relief: no more Bouncin’ Babies, waking Jackson from sleep, the anxiety around getting there in time at the end of the day, through traffic. Mai is coming. Mai walks three houses up Carousel Court and rings the bell. Phoebe lets her in, and after good mornings, Phoebe smiles and watches her ascend the stairs to Jackson’s bedroom, where she coos and laughs and sings and changes and dresses him, carries him down to the kitchen and feeds him breakfast then straps him into his stroller and says good-bye and jogs away, guiding the stroller along the smooth asphalt, singing as she moves.

  Nick messages to say he won’t be home before Jackson leaves because he has a rush job, a small condo in Whittier.

  Do you work this weekend? she texts back. Of course.

  He messages back: She should sleep in the bed. At night. She should set a routine. She should change out of her work clothes at night.

  Sleeping on the couch in your skirt and blouse. Not a healthy pattern.

  She doesn’t message back. She will. She has already resolved to make those improvements, adjustments that will steady her. She will sleep in a bed. She will remove her clothes first. She will consume half to a whole milligram less of Klonopin daily and continue weaning herself off of it until her use is situational, not habitual.

  It’s just after eight P.M. Phoebe scrambled eggs for Jackson’s dinner. They watched Thomas & Friends. She gave him a bubble bath. Nick isn’t home. Jackson’s room is cool and dark and smells floral, like his after-bath lotion. A soft green night-light glows in the far corner. His little body is facedown, arms and legs spread out wide, reaching, scaling rock-climbing walls in his dreams. She falls asleep with her hand wrapped loosely around the leg of his crib.

  • •

  In the morning, the only message on her iPhone is from a client. Nothing from JW.

  The client is an older primary-care physician she met Monday in El Segundo because he’s new to the GSK roster and brought with him seventy-seven patients from his other practice, and Phoebe needs him to prescribe the Advair and Levitra to as many of them as he can. She gave him her cell number the first time they met, written in red ink on the back of her business card. The text message, in which he asks to see her panties, on or off, preferably on, reads like a seventh-grader wrote it. Most of them do. And all of them send her immediately, ruthlessly, back to Boston, the blur of days and highways and cold drizzle and the red glare of taillights before the accident, when she nearly killed their son.

  Driven into her and every other new hire during a two-week orientation for sales reps six years ago, using mojito-fueled raucous late-night role-playing sessions at the Hyatt Regency in Boston, was a very simple and absolutely nonnegotiable edict: A HAPPY doctor with a LARGE practice will prescribe YOUR products to his patients and that’s YOUR job. A happy doc is a happy rep. Make them happy. How goddamn hard is that?

  Again she checks the display: still nothing from JW.

  • •

  He liked to call her late. Three years ago he called after midnight. He was traveling and had been drinking. He said it lightly: “You realize how many people I could call when I’m feeling like this? And I’m calling you, Phoebe Vero Maguire.” After a while he said, “Get dressed. Get in the car and drive.”

  He was drunk.

  She dropped the call. He texted: You owe me that much. I miss us. Don’t you miss us?

  Not really

  You’ve got such balls. Why I love love love you.

  I’m somehow different from all the rest?

  You were the first person I called tonight

  He’s sleeping next to me. The bed is warm. Life is good. I have no desire to be anywhere else.

  Have you started trying?

  I’m seven weeks.

  Well well. Congrats.

  Thank you.

  That donation should come in handy

  You should sleep it off, JWonderful.

  He must feel the weight of the world on him.

  He doesn’t know.

  She immediately regretted the disclosure.

  It’s the Regency Hotel on Park. No expectations. I’ll check out, give you the suite if you want. I just want to see your face. He won’t even know. Only we’ll know.

  She had no response. She wanted him to stop, get tired, bored, fall asleep, go another year or so without contact.

  There’s room in your life.

  There’s not.

  Make some.

  The bathroom door didn’t close completely and she couldn’t turn the light on without the fan coming on too and it was broken and made this horrible grinding sound that would wake Nick so she sat on the small step stool in the cold dark bathroom for nearly an hour, trying to find an answer: What was wrong with her that she was even considering this? She was numb and then tingling. Adrenaline coursed through her until she was convinced the sound of her own breathing would wake Nick. She found herself standing, opening the vanity, filling her purse with essentials for a weekend away. It was insane. She was insane. She glimpsed her shadowy visage in the angled mirror from the vanity she didn’t fully close. The reality: She was doing it. Packing and leaving for two days in New York. Even now. After everything. There was no logic to it. She wasn’t just crossing some line. She had located the fault line in their foundation and was about to obliterate it.

  She was tiptoeing around the cold, creaky bedroom of the seventh-­floor apartment they’d shared for five years. In the dark, she tried not to wake Nick. She moved with precision, slid a few things into her shoulder bag. She was a very responsible lunatic.

  She found herself on a train, chewing spearmint Life Savers and sending text messages to Nick and lying, for the second time in their relationship, about JW. She mentioned her mother, said she was melting down again and was in the hospital and there was a six A.M. flight to Orlando and she’d call when she landed. She was twenty-eight years old, hadn’t seen JW in two years, since the hundred-­thousand-dollar check cleared. The hotel valet took her keys, the hum of Manhattan looming all around her; she moved with a surge of self-confidence through the golden lobby of the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue, the center of the world. Only when she arrived at the bank of elevators did she feel flushed, her fingertips damp, an impression left on the cool gold surface as she pressed the up button.

  In the reflection of the elevator doors, she saw a girl immediately familiar and entirely unrecognizable, split down the middle. A young woman carried by the currents, not powerless to swim against them but giving herself over to them because of the tightness of her throat, the rush of it all. The gold doors opened. She should stop, let the doors close before she set foot inside. Simply turn around. She should get a cab back to Penn Station, get the next train back to Boston. Nick would never know. This never happened.

  Phoebe stepped inside. This wasn’t an elevator that stalled, that skipped floors, or required constant maintenance like the one she and Nick took multiple times a day at home. This was an elevator for men with a second wife and a daughter and a son and everything to lose who wanted to spend some time with Phoebe. She was doing something right, it occurred to her, the moment
the elevator launched her skyward. The only reason she was there, stepping onto that elevator, she told herself, was because her certainty about Nick and the life they were building allowed it.

  It was only later, when it made less sense, when there was no ­rational explanation or justification, in the quiet of the steam-filled marble bathroom, that the cold rush of truth hit her like a wave crashing: Her entire life with Nick was bookended with JW. From the start of the relationship to this point, expecting their first child together, as she stood nude with the bathroom door open on the thirty-third floor of the Regency in Manhattan, the taste of him lining her gums like battery acid.

  Phoebe knew Nick would come after her. He’d figure out where she was and come find her. She knew Nick wouldn’t wait for a train, would drive instead. She could see him behind the wheel, staying left the whole way, flashing the high beams until the lane cleared and he saw Manhattan looming in the distance.

  He called and told her where he was. She begged him to stop, to turn around, to go home. JW was gone. He told her she could stay another night, two, as long as she wanted. If it were up to him, he said, he’d keep her there indefinitely.

  “You want me to go home? Whose home? Our home?” Nick said he knew she was in New York. He’d checked her search history and found the website for the hotel. “Looks expensive,” he said. “Can I crash there, too? I promise not to get in the way.”

  “Come get me,” she said, and she was dizzy. She leaned all of her weight against the window.

  “You’re not serious. You’re not well.”

  She tapped her forehead against the cool glass. Harder and harder. “Please. Just come get me.” She was a mess and she knew he was broken.

  “We’ve never spent a year together, nine months, six, a week, without this—” He stopped. “You left your emails to him open for me to read. Why would you do that? Why am I bothering with you? How fucked is this?”

  He told her that he’d stopped driving, pulled off 95. She pictured him standing next to his car and screaming into his cell amid the polluted marshes and refineries around him. “You’re killing me,” he screamed into the phone over and over. “You’re killing me.” If she were on a bridge, she’d have jumped. She could have walked the stairwell up to the roof, seventy-seven floors. She pleaded with him. She didn’t know what she was doing. She was powerless. She’d walk into traffic.

  “There’s no answer,” he said.

  “There is,” she insisted.

  “We have to end this . . . whatever this is.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re there. Why are you there?”

  She said nothing. She paced. She chewed her lower lip, stopped, fingered the sharp edge of the soft leather-bound room service menu.

  She met him downstairs, outside. He’d refused to set foot in the hotel. The wide concrete and din of the city threatened to drown them both out.

  “I’m not doing this,” he said. “Not doing this. Not—”

  She tried lamely to take his hand, and he spat on the sidewalk. It was bitterly cold and he was out there on Park Avenue with an unzipped hoodie, no hat, black jeans, raw and red-faced.

  He walked away. Then jogged. Never once did he look back to see if she was following.

  • •

  Together back in Boston, in stride somehow, they idled in the car. Nick turned off the ignition. Sat behind the cracked windshield they couldn’t afford to replace. Phoebe told Nick she was pregnant, then posed an impossible question. “Tell me what to do.”

  “About what?” Nick asked, exasperated.

  “Him.”

  Nick punched the steering wheel with a closed fist, over and over, the horn blaring each time. Phoebe grabbed his shoulder, his forearm, tried to make him stop. “Tell me,” she said.

  “You can’t seriously be asking me this! Tell you what to do?”

  “Please.”

  “There’s nothing to do! What is there to do? Do nothing!” He slammed his head against the window. He was the madman.

  “Stop,” she said. “Don’t.”

  He would shatter the glass. The windows fogged over. He stopped. “I need to run screaming from you,” he said, stared off into traffic.

  Out her window, three bald blue men stared from a poster on the back of a bus. Mind Blast was written under three sets of eyes that looked shocked open.

  “I just don’t get the appeal,” Nick said. He hadn’t heard her. “They’re fucking blue. And?” He kicked open the door. Phoebe tried to grab him. He kept going.

  • •

  The next few days Phoebe brought flowers home, replaced them when they wilted. The apartment was always fragrant. She knew little touches sent a clear signal to Nick: She had made her decision. She made coffee before he woke up even though she drank tea, filled the gas tank in his car, went down on him.

  Nick passed her in the living room, stopped, exhaled, and fell back against the wall, slid to the floor. He held his head in his hands as if someone had kicked him.

  Phoebe recounted the events for herself: She went to New York, spent the night in a Park Avenue hotel suite with JW, informed Nick that she was pregnant. And the night before, she left the email for Nick to find, the message to JW before seeing him, proclaiming her love for Nick, as complicated and dysfunctional as it seemed. And she was back in Boston now, asking Nick what to do.

  They sat on the floor across the room from each other. It was late, after midnight. They were sober and tired and hadn’t eaten in hours. What did she know about him? His tired, bloodshot eyes, the drawn face, pale and unshaven, the same blue and white rugby shirt he’d worn for two days. She was terrified that he could never fully satisfy her. And knew he would never leave her.

  She gave him all the power. Or pretended to. And she knew he hated her for it. He’d driven to Manhattan to bring her home. She’d read online that pregnancy triggered severe hormonal imbalances. Brain chemistry was affected. Balance needed to be restored. Yet consumption of SSRIs or benzos impaired the developing brain of the fetus. Madness, temporary or not, must be tolerated. She emailed the article to Nick. He wrote back: Why didn’t you cc JW?

  But something lay ahead, looming around a blind curve in the road they were careening down. And this kind of shit had to be reconciled before they hit it.

  “Are you this weak?”

  “No.”

  “Now, Phoebe? Have the decency to fuck us up when we’re not about to have a child. What do you expect me to do now?”

  “Tell me what to do. Tell me to leave. Tell me to tell him to never contact me again.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  “I did. I made decisions. I’ve been decisive. Every time.”

  “Then do it again.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “For me.”

  “How in the hell can I decide this for you? What is there to even decide?”

  “I need to hear it. I need to know.”

  “How does this make sense to you? I’ll never understand it.”

  She was still. There were no tears. No pleading. Just stillness.

  Nick turned to her. “I’m not leaving a child of ours. If you want to make that decision when the time comes, then you fucking leave.” He stopped. “No.” He stood up and walked from the main room of the apartment, across the creaky hardwood floor. “No, no, no, no,” he said, and quietly closed the bedroom door behind him.

  • •

  Jackson is covered in white suds, the bathtub filled with toys, a giant rubber shark lurking near the surface. Phoebe sits on a step stool, legs crossed, taps out an email to JW:

  If not D&C then something like it. Something at that level. Help offset all the hell I’ll catch when Nick learns how it happened. Has to be LA (or Maui). Consulting to financial services firms because I wan
t to travel (international would be awesome) and not junior or associate but manager. Salary around 100k + bonus. I’m being direct because isn’t that what you drilled into me for three years? Produce, produce, produce. Results matter. Nothing else. Exceed expectations. Is the offer you’re making me, JW, of the quality that exceeds my expectations? If not, I can’t justify it. There are other factors, obviously, that could complicate things. You asked me if this was a path I’m prepared to take. I’ve asked and answered the question, applied to this: not another gift from you, but THE gift. And all its associated potential complications and drama. But it’s workable. Everything is. And I’m running out of options, patience, time, energy. This house is killing us, ok, too much??? So I can and will manage this if the price is right. Period. So I guess it’s your turn to produce.

  In bed, a remix of Moby’s “Sweet Apocalypse” drifts from her headphones as she taps out one more message, this one for Nick:

  I think somebody’s dead and floating in the pool.

  Nick responds: ??

  Sorry. Autocorrect. Something’s dead.

  Saw that. Will fish it out when I get home.

  18

  In the dream she drives with the windows down, Jackson strapped into his car seat and sucking his pacifier. Blistering sunlight and clutches of date palms and looming green signs until they reach the Salton Sea, and she’s wearing her yellow sundress with a small tear on the hem and aviator glasses and JW’s watch dangles around her thin wrist, Jackson in her arms, his floppy fishing hat pulled low over his soft forehead. He’s slathered in sunscreen. He keeps slipping from her arms. But he’s warm and happy with just his mother and sunlight. Jackson gets hotter and hotter until he’s raving, inconsolable, and the small tear in her yellow dress is crimson now and growing. She’s trying to nurse her son, blood from the dress smeared across his face, and he’s sucking and pulling and insane with frustration when she produces nothing.