Carousel Court

by Joe McGinniss

  78

  The 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

  The 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

  Where 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

  If 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

  The 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

  Nick’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

  The 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.

  • •

  She doesn’t try the front door. Instead she walks around to the side, scales the waist-high wrought-iron gate, stumbles to the ground. She stands and follows a stone path to the back, where she can see the soft white glow from the microwave-oven light in the kitchen. She gazes up at the second floor; the bedroom windows are open and dark. It’s difficult for her to focus. She’s dizzy, so she’ll sit for a moment, she tells herself. She’ll rest and she’ll wait for it to pass. She’ll make a plan. There is momentum now. She faced the wind and turned it. She is not some woman trudging listlessly through the vapors. She is the vapors.

  She’ll pick up a small stone and toss it at the window. She’ll do that until a light comes on, because Nick refuses to respond to her messages.

  The modest weathered house, temporary as it is for them, seems an ideal place for father and son to ride out the storm. Even now, at their worst, Nick is providing safe harbor for their son, while she is half-dressed and bleeding in the dry grass.

  I’m here, she wrote. I found you. Please let me in. I just want to rest and tomorrow wake up together.

  Her eyelids feel heavy, her eyes burn, and she drops her right hand to the thick dry grass of the backyard and eases her grip on the handle and trigger of the gun. She’ll sit and rest. She drifts off to the steady, throbbing rhythm of her sliced-open foot, familiar, like Jackson’s heartbeat.

  85

  The owners found her in the backyard of their pale yellow Craftsman house on Livingston Street in Calabasas. They called the police and reported a woman with a gun, facedown in the grass, motionless and bleeding.

  86

  Her father watched the motorcycle races Saturday afternoons on the only channel they had out of Rome on a small color set that came with the house. He’d taken Phoebe to a couple of live races since she’d arrived, but the noise from the engines made her cry the first time because they’d stood so close to the serpentine track and she was sure they’d be killed. But the colors, brilliant reds and forest greens, golden yellows and majestic blues, thrilled her, and from her father’s muscular shoulders, she was mesmerized by the spectacle.

  “How do they keep from tipping over?”

  “Practice,” he said.

  “How fast are they going?”

  “Faster than a cheetah,” he told her.

  “What happens if they crash? Do they die?”

  “Depends.”

  “Che palle!” She grinned when she delivered the phrase she’d learned on the beach one night, out late alone with friends again. What balls!

  He didn’t react. He never reacted anymore. His time in Sardinia was over. His two-year contract not renewed. It was time to leave. He would return to the States—to Claymont, Delaware—to face his old life: work, Phoebe’s mother, debt, and no way back here or anywhere like it.

  And Phoebe’s adventure, like his, was complete: a two-year vacation with her father at his best.

  In the last month she’d followed an eleven-year-old boy named Paolo one night to the beach, where they kissed and shared his cigarette and there was a bonfire and older kids who gave them wine. She routinely stayed out after eleven, even though she was only ten. She didn’t worry because she knew her father wouldn’t be home, and if he were, he�
��d have had two bottles already and be passed out.

  It hadn’t always been like this. She’d watched Tom Petty on a humid day in Philadelphia from his shoulders. He’d grilled chorizos outside for just the two of them and he’d played his records and let her sip his beer. When she was seven and spent ten days in the hospital because her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and her platelets were all screwy and she dreamed of angels visiting her, she’d fall asleep to her father’s voice telling her stories and wake up to find him wide awake in the same chair. She asked if her mother had come or planned to, and the response was the same as it had been the night before and the night before that. His expression gave her the answer she expected.

  “Why doesn’t she see a doctor, too?”

  “She’s trying, princess.”

  It had always been the promise of something better that fueled him. He was a young man with energy who knew there was still time to make things happen for himself, to see the world, to “breathe new air,” he used to say. And he had been right. The assignment he’d pitched himself for, pursued on and off for years, came in: two years diving for the Merchant Marines in Sardinia. They knew it would end. But the finality and the realization of what lay ahead were deadening: work without adventure or the promise of it.

  Most mornings were clear and breezy, and when they were, the two of them rode their bikes together over cracked hillside streets through the bright sunlight, a cooling wind off the ocean. She tried to keep pace. He took turns too fast. He lost her once at a fish market near the docks. Then again at the monastery. She always caught up to his bright red ten-speed. They reached Challenge Hill. He smoked a cigarette and stared off through aviator glasses at short palms and the small village of shops and small cars that lined the streets to the shoreline. She was sweating through her Rolling Stones tank top. She saw her father, head down, cigarette still between his lips, careen down the hillside without her.