Kostya is shaking his head, his bloodshot eyes without focus. “I’ll buy him his very own house before we move him here.”
“Buy his dad a house, Nick,” Phoebe says, voice rising. “But wait, can your garbageman job cover that?”
Nick grins and his lips are tight and instead of slapping the smug expression off Phoebe’s face he says, “Eat something.”
Kostya’s laughter is uneasy. He interrupts, invites Nick to come with him.
Nick follows Kostya upstairs, down the long wide carpeted hallway to the master bedroom. Kostya keeps running his hands over his hair, mumbling something to himself. When he raises his voice, he says, “See this.”
Opposite the unmade king-size bed is a walk-in closet. Hundreds of pairs of shoes are piled floor to ceiling.
“She is eBay shoe queen,” Kostya says, and moves past the shoes to a framed black-and-white photograph of a soldier. Nick studies the face, young and dirty, a cigarette hanging from cracked lips. It looks cold in the picture, dark, lifeless. But the soldier’s eyes are bright and there is the hint of a smile on his prematurely aging face. “Vladimir Savchenko, my father, in Dubai.”
Nick doesn’t get it. This is not Dubai, he thinks, studies the bare trees, the snow-covered landscape. When he looks up, Kostya has a black safe door pulled open. He removes something heavy wrapped in a white cloth. He hands it to Nick, who opens the cloth to reveal a gold slab. Imprinted on the face: a winged beast clutching a triangle flag, a swastika in the center of it. Nick stares at his brilliantly distorted reflection in the gold bar. He doesn’t know what to do or say. He sees in the shadowy mouth of the vault three stacks of identical slabs. Kostya’s blood-soaked safety net. He grabs it, clutches it with thick fingers and stubs, and stands too close to Nick. It’s rigged. The game is corrupted. It’s madness in the tight small space of haunted vaults and walk-in closets. It’s very late. It’s time to go home.
30
Nick takes his time walking home under a brilliant moon. The coyotes aren’t so much howling as they are laughing. The orange tent lies dark, and the canvas door ripples in the wind that feels hot and almost, somehow, electric. Serenos is folding in on itself, eating its own. Nick shivers and he’s hoarse and clears his throat as he studies his glowing phone and taps out a message to Mallory—helter skelter—that is ignored.
When he walks inside, Phoebe is on the sectional, bare feet propped on the glass coffee table, thumbing through images of Jackson on her iPhone. “Love this one,” she says absently, doesn’t show Nick.
“Did he go right down?” Nick says, chugging a glass of ice water. One childhood memory of his father before he died: watching him stand in the dark kitchen before going to bed, drunk again, guzzling large glasses of water.
“You don’t have him?” she says, looking up. “You left him?”
“What the fuck, Phoebe?”
“You walked out of the house without—” She stops, screams: “Fucking incompetent idiot!”
“I’ll get him,” Nick says coolly as he sends a text to Kostya, who responds immediately. “He’s sleeping,” Nick says, holds up a picture Kostya sent of Jackson asleep under a white sheet on the sectional.
“I’ll get him,” Phoebe says.
“I got it.” Nick raises his glass.
“Now, please.”
“Roger that!” He salutes with a middle finger.
“I can’t stomach you—”
“Slut,” he snaps.
“—when you drink.”
Silence. Nick starts to apologize, but Phoebe cuts him off.
“By the way, we’re getting the dog,” Nick says.
“Poor dog.”
“I’ll take care of it. You just do what you do. In fact, stay the fuck away from it.”
There is silence. Nick doesn’t care about the dog right now. Or even getting Jackson. Both can wait. He eyes her phone. “Show me your phone,” he says.
“Go.”
“Your texts from today, tonight. When you disappeared for half an hour and said you were in the bathroom.”
“Since when do you ask to check my phone?” She sighs. “It’s late. Go get our son, Nick.”
“I can leave,” he says. “I have cash.”
She thumbs through more pictures of Jackson. “Are you getting him or am I?” she says.
He ignores her. “You know where I most want to go? It’s weird, because I never thought much about it. Too crowded and rainy. Maybe it’s all this fucking heat, but whatever it is, I’ve got this desire, this yearning, to go to Japan.” He’s shaking his head, his eyes avoiding Phoebe as he talks. “Yeah. Japan. Tokyo. From there, who knows? But start in Tokyo. A few days, a nice hotel suite, high-rise with views of the city. What do you think? Would you want to go?”
She says nothing, starts to leave.
“That’s right, go get the son you forgot. Maybe you should go to Japan,” he says.
Phoebe is now in the street. Nick is two strides behind her. She stops, wheels around, says, “Go home.”
“You wanted me to read that. Like you wanted me to read your email to him five goddamn years ago when you told him you loved him.” Nick laughs maniacally, too loud. Nearby, Metzger sits on a low lawn chair smoking a cigarette, his orange tent glowing from the lantern inside. Nick doesn’t care. He’s a few feet from his wife under a full, heavy moon. A murderer’s moon, he thinks. He can’t manage a deep breath in the thick warm air. “I can’t believe you even have him in your contacts. That’s relatively new. I remember when you got that thing. Right before we left Boston. We were at the UPS Store, and then we went to Dunkin’ Donuts and the Apple Store and you bought it on the spot. And I paid for it! What I did not pay for is you to stick that motherfucker in your contacts.”
He rushes to her side and grabs her arm. She rips it free.
“Japan. Wow. You don’t play around.” He spits the words. She’s got her head up, exaggerating good posture, that jaw jutting forward. “Are you crying? Oh, Jesus, Phoebe. Come on! You’re fucking crying? You’re going to Japan with your man and you’re crying.”
She stands in the middle of the street. The black asphalt is warm under Nick’s sneakers, and that’s when he notices: She’s barefoot. She’s wiping snot and tears from her face. She’s breathing too hard, exhaling too much, hyperventilating. She stumbles to the side, away from Nick, rights herself. “Japan,” Nick says, and turns away, heads home through a stiff hot wind, calls out to no one in particular, “And away we go again!”
• •
It was January, before the notion of the California move existed. Phoebe woke up before the alarm on a bitterly cold Boston morning. The bedroom windowpane was cracked from relentless arctic air. She had twelve appointments scheduled. The same bitter cold seeped through the vents of their Jetta, the heating system they couldn’t afford to replace. She should have come clean about the hundred thousand, said that it was from JW and not some dead relative, but she didn’t and never would.
By the end of the short gray winter day, all twelve appointments kept, the text from her manager asked her to drive to Medford to visit one more physician. In his fifties, large new practice, an easy target.
It was too late, though. She’d picked up Jackson.
Have son/reschedule
Medford—take u 20min
An hour at least to get there w/traffic. Then?? Have son. Can’t.
100+ scripts hotness. Go get ’em.
Have SON!
Figure it out, Phoebe.
Will schedule a dinner/drinks w/him next week
Sending someone else. They get commission and points.
Whatever
You’re trending down.
give me 30min
Good girl. Next time don’t me make push. Just do the job.
“Quick stop for Mommy. You’re going
to be my helper, okay?” She reached back and squeezed Jackson’s leg. She found her iPod and adapter, slid it in. She found “Zombie” by the Cranberries, a song she played on a loop in high school. Phoebe reached up and back and flicked on the overhead backseat light and dropped a Richard Scarry book onto Jackson’s lap and surveyed the traffic. It was so dark. All she could see was the blur of red and orange lights of traffic and the rear of the car in front of her and the glare of oncoming headlights and those in her rearview.
She got a text message from JW.
He was in Maui. He wrote Mahalo and attached a JPEG not of the black sand beaches nor a sunset but of her from a couple of years earlier, wearing her dark-framed glasses, his unbuttoned oxford shirt, and nothing else, sipping room service coffee and staring at a laptop screen.
Have you seen this woman?
She deleted it. Turned off her phone, tried not to think about two years ago. She changed lanes without signaling, accelerated.
“Fuck it.” She whipped her head around to meet her son’s wide brown eyes: “Want to go to a restaurant with Mommy?” She switched the music back to the World Playground CD for her son, but the volume spiked. Jackson flinched. Phoebe clicked it off, changed lanes because the white box truck in front of them had its hazards on. She reached back for Jackson’s leg again, some delayed impulse to comfort him after he’d flinched. She swerved back into the right lane. “Let’s get dinner together, just the two of us.” She wrapped her hand around Jackson’s soft, cool calf.
She missed something, a signal or a flashing red light or a turn. She didn’t know because the car seemed to float, almost fly, shot from a cannon, bursts of bright light and grotesque sounds: torn metal, exploding glass, shrill hissing and wailing. Gagging on thick, salty bloodied mucous and more lights, orange, blue, red, and white flashing. Urgent voices and bitter wind, and in her mind Phoebe sat on a white porch swing, holding Jackson on her lap. Someone was promising her something if she’d only stop screaming. Someone was losing patience with her. She needed to stop kicking. “Where is he?” is all she kept screaming. The last thing she heard before the black: a helicopter, landing.
• •
Jackson slept on his back. They positioned pillows in a way that would keep him from being able to flip over. Not because the doctors advised this but because the blue contusion on Jackson’s forehead over his right eye was the size of a golf ball and had a slit in it that was wide and deep. It glistened with a swatch of Dermabond that made it look like some kind of grotesque special effect. Nick burst into tears when he first saw it. They’d succeeded in the two years and two months since their son’s birth in never once dropping him, never once allowing him to fall from the sofa or their bed. Now his head looked like it might burst. They were convinced he’d lose something vital: sight, cognitive abilities, language. They spent a night in the ICU for observation. He was wired up. Beeping and flashing like some sort of fleshy plastic explosive. Nick wanted him to sleep through it all. But Nick was also terrified every time his son’s eyes closed: They’d never open. Stay awake. Rest. Look at me. Sleep. He sang to him and blew gently on his face when his eyes grew heavy. X-rays and a CT scan were negative. He didn’t vomit. They ruled out a severe concussion. It was mild at worst. He’d be fine.
But they were wrong, had to be. The doctors were overworked and just wanted the hospital bed for the next patient. Nick and Phoebe were convinced they’d missed something. At home, despite the pain and swelling from her own injuries, she fed Jackson every meal slowly, carefully. She limited him to soft foods, though it wasn’t necessary. Mashed bananas, yogurt, warm apple-cinnamon oatmeal. He was fragile and vulnerable. She inspected his bowel movements for blood. Phoebe sat alone in the glow of her laptop as Jackson slept, Googling the worst.
So Nick and Phoebe stayed awake, watching their sliced and swollen son, restless, waking up, crying out, producing odd high-pitched whines they’d never heard him make in his two years of life, which terrified them. The same fears gripped them both.
“Call the doctor.”
“Take him to the emergency room.”
“No, he’s not fine.”
“You’re holding him too tight.”
“How much did you give him? It’s clearly not enough.”
“He’s not breathing right. Listen to him. Feel his chest? It’s not right!”
“You have no idea what to do, do you?”
And the truth she couldn’t find words for lay on the bottom of her black leather Coach bag beneath the compacts and work ID and Altoid tins and validated parking tickets and loose change and gummy bears: the brown plastic prescription bottles, mostly empty, the reason her son may die.
• •
Phoebe messages Marina that she’s at the front door. She rings the bell. The oldest is at the door but not opening it. Phoebe tells him who it is and that she’s here for Jackson. The porch light is too bright, buzzing. Phoebe looks over her shoulder toward the empty street, the flaps of Metzger’s tent zipped closed. A pale light glows inside it.
“My parents say there’s a crazy lady running around stealing babies and I’m not supposed to open the door.”
“I was just here, Titan! I live three doors down. Jackson’s mom.” Something pops. Phoebe flinches. “Can you get your parents?”
“Dad’s not here. Mom’s giving my sister a bath.”
“I just texted her. Tell her it’s me.” Phoebe sends Marina another message. The door unlocks, the alarm beeps twice as the door swings open.
“He’s watching SpongeBob,” the kid says, and disappears.
The living room is dark and it takes a moment for Phoebe’s eyes to adjust. The huge room has high ceilings and an enormous L-shaped leather sectional that takes up most of the space. A fireplace with a fake fire and a sweeping wall-mounted flat-screen television provide the only light. Sitting alone in the middle of the sectional, the images from the television flickering on him like some kind of strobe light, Jackson appears hypnotized, sucks his pacifier.
“Jacks?” she calls out as she moves toward him. He looks so small and lonely in this giant room, his little head and body on the oversize piece of furniture, like some kind of massive sea creature about to swallow him. Phoebe says her son’s name again. He doesn’t hear her. He doesn’t seem to sense that she’s there; even when she sits down next to him, he doesn’t turn his head. He won’t look away from the images flashing in high definition. She looks up at the screen: It’s not SpongeBob. Two bloody men fight in a cage, pummel each other. How long has he been alone in here, staring at this? She grabs him and tries to stand but loses her balance and they fall back onto the couch together. She might vomit. She swallows hard.
“Honey, honey,” she says into his ear as she stands. “Let’s go home.” His body gives out. He’s instantly asleep, head heavy against her chest.
She sends Marina another text: I have Jackson.
She leaves the house. Before she pulls the front door closed, she feels it being pushed hard against her, forcing her out, probably Titan, and the dead bolt clicks and then another lock and the chirp of the alarm being set and the string of white lights in the tall skinny palm is coming undone, dangling, whipping in the wind like the skinny bright tail of a dark beast she can’t see. But it’s okay, she tells herself, squeezing her son to her chest, walking fast along the deserted asphalt street.
The only sound is her bare feet slapping the warm pavement. And Jackson’s breathing, made raspy from the dry hot air.
The shadows in the orange-lit street like misshapen dogs are three coyotes, and they freeze, not scared, more poised. A fourth appears and their yellow eyes glow like embers. Phoebe stops. The animals are blocking her path to the house. If she turns and goes back to Kostya and Marina’s, she’s sure they’ll chase her. If there weren’t four of them, she would have thought they were Kostya’s pair of German shepherds. God, she wishes they w
ere Kostya’s dogs. The largest animal turns away from Phoebe first, disinterested, but the other three keep their eyes trained on her. They take a few cautious steps toward her. The click of their claws against the asphalt is the only sound. They don’t want her, though.
She hears it: a low moan. They’re growling, hungry. They want Jackson. She’s placed her son only feet from the animals. She deserves what comes. Her legs are weak. The animals are so close she can smell them—pungent, like something decomposed. A hush. One of the animals, the smallest, looks like a pup. It has large triangle ears that are too big for its little head. The pup eyes Jackson, tilts its head ever so slightly, seems to sense a kindred spirit.
The shots explode and the echo reverberates around the cul-de-sac, ricocheting off the terra-cotta walls of the houses. Jackson is stunned, silenced by shock. The wailing is the animal sprawled out along the street in pieces. The shots are from the orange tent, Metzger. He killed one, for sure. Another tries to limp away. Another shot rings out, sending the wounded animal into the side of a recycling bin, knocking it over. Right, right, Phoebe is thinking. She makes herself small, clutching Jackson, whose screaming is pained, too tight. Right, right. Okay, okay, she keeps thinking. Inside, sweetie. Let’s go inside. Everything’s all right. Doors are opening, figures cautiously emerging from the few well-lit houses that remain on Carousel Court. Kostya and Marina. Mai and her husband. Phoebe watches their front door, now jogging toward it, sure it will swing open and Nick will appear, shirtless and ready.
31
In the bright sunlight, Phoebe stares at blotches of faded blood on the asphalt from the coyotes Metzger shot last night. The text that arrives is from Marina: He toss them in his backyard empty pool. Skin them. Eat them??
Phoebe responds: I was holding Jackson when he fired the gun.
Sorry honey I’d have done same thing.
In our direction?
They’re savages. Lucky he sit out there and watch for all of us.
Carousel Court Page 14