Carousel Court

by Joe McGinniss

  She launched herself. Hurtled after him. Wind screamed in her ears. She heard nothing else. She’d catch him. The handlebars shook. She was going too fast. If she stopped, she’d crash. If she kept going, she’d lose control, get hit or hit something. Streetcars and taxis and motorcycles fed the intersection at the bottom. She screamed, but no one heard. He was gone. Turned off, left or right at the bottom, she didn’t know. She was doing this for him, but he wasn’t here to see it. At the edge of the small park with the fountains and pond, from the corner of her eye, she saw a flash of red, his bike, his hair. She screamed for him. He waved and she heard it, over the wind and her own panicked cries, “Che palle!”

  All at once a blast of light, sunlight, and she tucked her head low, like the motorcycle racers did, and steadied the handlebars, swerved, and slalomed, then braced herself as the tires hit the cross street at the bottom of Challenge Hill. She was rocked, stood upright by the impact, bounced twice, then steadied herself, tucked again, but loosened her grip and coasted, looking back over her shoulder to see her father closing in, beaming.

  • •

  When they returned to Delaware, the plan was to try again with her mother. She was better, or so they said. Chemical imbalances were corrected. But her mother couldn’t manage to get Phoebe to school on time with regularity or even at all—within four months she’d missed nineteen days—so it was decided that her father would take her. Again.

  He was back and living in a redbrick twin in Claymont, waking at six, smoking two cigarettes, wearing his tan pants and white polo shirt and work boots for another ten-hour shift at the Franklin Chemical warehouse, shipping and receiving, safety and oversight. She knew this only because she studied his laminated photo identification, its slick neon-green borders giving it a futuristic flair she couldn’t resist. She asked once anyway what he did for a living. Or maybe more than once. But the only instance that Phoebe recalled was the time he answered without hesitation: “I don’t do shit for a living.”

  On Thursday nights he’d come home too late, after ten. He’d have stopped somewhere to drink. He’d collect Phoebe from the neighbor’s, where she’d be woken up from the couch and walked home. If it was a really bad night, it would be midnight or later. When he drank too much, she locked her bedroom door, the dresser pushed up against it, because he’d start yelling, and she always hoped he was on the phone, maybe fighting with her mother or his girlfriend, just not himself, because that was the scariest. Work made monsters of men. He became something awful when he returned from Sardinia. Work without promise did horrible things. Ground him into dust. Silenced him. Confined him to dens and garages and dark bars and depression. An unsalvageable appendage. From her bedroom window, she watched her father rage on the patio and was filled with an unexpected calm. There were no good options, no safe harbor. Only the promise of something better, golden, made it bearable. She lay still and awake, became the cool jagged eye of the storm as she sank into the center of her bare mattress and somehow drew strength from the ruin around her.

  87

  The first few questions they pose here are direct and without nuance or emotion. Legal questions, technicalities, to get a handle on what they’re dealing with: Who is Phoebe Maguire? She is a married thirty-two-year-old mother of one. She is unemployed. She is from Boston by way of Claymont, Delaware. She has never been arrested. Her presence facedown in the backyard of a stranger’s house with a firearm is the reason she’s here. She knows this: She hurt no one, posed no threat. The chamber was empty. The door locked from the outside and the canvas straps they finally removed from her wrists, the bars on the window, are overkill. She peed in a cup. They stuck her with a syringe and took her blood. The larger issues are the ones that require more than the mandatory seventy-two-hour stay.

  A woman whose job it is to assess patients at this stage sits next to her bed, out of arm’s reach, asks if Phoebe wanted to hurt someone. When Phoebe doesn’t respond, the woman looks over her glasses at her and mentions Nick’s name. Then Jason’s.

  “Jackson,” Phoebe corrects her. “This is fucking ridiculous. I went to the wrong address. The wrong house.” She’s agitated and hasn’t slept longer than an hour since they brought her here. She gave them Nick’s cell phone number when they asked if there was family they could notify. She had to tell them yes, she had drugs in her system. No, she could not tell them how much, but she could list them all.

  What about her? she is asked. Did she want to hurt herself last night? Is she responsible for the cuts on her wrist? She didn’t know they were there. She holds up her thin wrist, draws a finger lightly along two dark red slits. “I had a gun. Why would I slit my wrists?”

  She is reminded that it was empty.

  “Only after I fired it five times.”

  But why bring the gun to the house? the woman is asking. She doesn’t like Phoebe. She resents her, Phoebe thinks. The woman is heavy, and Phoebe can see her alone in an apartment on weekends, watching movies and wondering if she should post another image of her cats on her profile page. Phoebe can picture the woman studying the adoption agency websites. She’ll do it only if the kid is white, Phoebe thinks, or Russian.

  “Nick and Jackson?” the woman asks. “You weren’t going to hurt them?”

  “You’re taking this far too seriously. I had a rough night.”

  She is asked to lower her voice. A large man in burgundy scrubs appears in the doorway.

  “We got this,” Phoebe says, and waves him off. She apologizes and returns to lightly touching the area of her face that feels as though a hammer were brought down on it with full force. The gun, she says, had everything to do with the men dragging her by the hair up the stairs of her house. The ones who ripped the dress from her body. “There’s something about near-death experiences that can trigger irrational behavior. Okay? PTSD. Write that in your tablet and let me go the fuck home.”

  Her levels, she is told, are off the charts. For a woman so slight to have so much in her system and manage to put one foot in front of the other, much less get behind the wheel and drive, is remarkable.

  Phoebe brings her hands together, touches her fingertips to her dry lips. She stares at her toes, the foot wrapped in so much blue, white, and yellow gauze that it looks like some kind of piñata. Her toes move when she wiggles them, but they feel cold or numb, she can’t tell the difference. “I feel nothing,” she says.

  You must feel something, she is told. What about Jason?

  “Jackson.”

  She is asked if it is her intention to drift through her son’s childhood feeling nothing. Missing the whole thing.

  “I miss nothing.”

  “You’re missing something right now,” the social worker says, staring at her pointedly.

  • •

  Later, when they bring her orange juice she doesn’t drink, she asks how long she’ll be here. She is reminded that this is a seventy-two-hour mandatory detention. What lies ahead for her is to be determined.

  “By who?” she asks. “Nick?”

  No answer is given.

  The skyline visible through her barred window shimmers through in the twilight. She is twenty-two stories up, alone in a spare, cold room, watching the sun drop from the sky. She is no one’s wife or mother. She’s a patient surrounded by strangers. She is Room 7B. She is elevated levels and dependency and withdrawal and emotional and psychiatric assessments. She is hungry and malnourished, and as the last light fades and the glint of sunlight off the steel and concrete becomes glistening lights set against a violet haze, she pulls the stitches from the bottom of her swollen left foot, staining the white sheets with blood.

  • •

  “I want to go home,” she says to the woman with the glasses.

  She is told that her husband said differently, that she was moving to New York.

  “What am I obligated to do after this? After I leave?”

&n
bsp; Nothing, she is told.

  “So there’s nothing required of me?”

  In forty-eight hours, she is told, she is free to go.

  She wants to watch Jackson wake up. She wants to hear him laugh and wrap him in a soft towel and smell his clean hair after a bath. She wants to go home but doesn’t know where or even what that is anymore.

  88

  Nick stands in the doorway, staring at his wife. Her feet stick out from under a white sheet. A plastic cup and a box of tissues and a small light rest on a bedside table. The room is gray and white with two metal folding chairs and a large window that has been sealed shut. Her eyes are closed, and with her hair pulled back and the sheet under her chin, she looks like a twelve-year-old girl. He saw her like this once before, after the accident in Boston. But now, unlike then, he is the reason.

  “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

  Nick 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

  She 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

  The 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

  Most 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.