Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

Jackson is restless and she tells herself it’s all the noise from the wind or because he’s overtired, but as she makes small circles on his back, she knows he senses what’s happening — his father is gone.

There’s four hundred dollars between her checking and savings accounts. Her mother calls back. Phoebe lets it go to voicemail. Her mother tells her she always knew Nick was a prick. She says Phoebe should take him to court. She says that her new boyfriend is ten years younger and is taking her to Atlantic City for the weekend. In the message, she asks Phoebe if there are any numbers she wants her to put money on at the roulette table. Phoebe doesn’t call her back.

She can’t sleep, and according to her phone, it’s 2:29 A.M. She opens the blinds in Jackson’s room and sees Metzger’s orange tent, dark inside, and the trash spread out over Carousel Court is hers, the plastic bins on their sides from the wind or coyotes or Kostya’s dogs. She pulls the string, slows Jackson’s ceiling fan. She refills his humidifier and closes his bedroom door until it clicks. Her closet is a mess. She pulls dirty clothes from the floor and the hooks and throws them on the bed until the pile tips and spills. The black box is from Dolce & Gabbana. She removes the pink gun, cold and heavy in her hand, and gently flicks at the base of the handle, tries to remove the chamber. She checks the safety switch and turns it off and then on again. She slaps the base and feels it unlock. The chamber slides out easily. She holds the smooth steel thing and studies it. She marvels at the tip of each bullet as she empties the chamber into her palm. In the glow from the face of her cell phone, she reads the word Winchester and 40 S&W as she rolls the cold copper thing between her thumb and forefinger. She places the single bullet in the empty chamber and slaps the chamber back into the butt of the gun, where it clicks. She cocks it. She releases the safety. She closes her eyes and exhales but can’t manage a deep breath. The cracks in her skull are real. The spiderwebs of shattered bone are the nerve endings crying out for chemicals. She’s wincing from the pain. She holds her head in her hands and rocks on the bed until she falls back on the pile of dirty clothes. The gun is in her hand. The disease is in her head, scraping the paper-thin layer of bone and scalp until it escapes. She’ll blast it back in with overwhelming force. She screams so loud and long that her throat burns and she’s no longer on the bed when she finishes. She’s slumped on the floor with her head between her knees. She wakes Jackson. She hears him crying out for her. She lifts him carefully, clutches him tightly to her chest, managing to keep the nose of the gun, which she holds by her side, toward the ground as she shushes her son.

I changed my mind,” she says when she calls her mother. Her mother asks about what. Phoebe pauses, watches a cicada bouncing wildly against the inside of the wineglass, struggling. Phoebe trapped it on the kitchen island and hasn’t decided what to do with it. Her mother says her name, her tone nurturing and filling Phoebe with nostalgia. She wants to be lying on her mother’s bed, watching her mother’s hands massage her thin little-girl feet. She wants to feel her mother’s fingertips massaging her scalp, warm hands breaking an egg over her head until she’s somewhere safe. She drops the call and turns off her phone. There is nothing anyone can say to her now. The cicada is frozen. Its swollen red eyes see nothing.

“Look at it.” She holds Jackson in her arms. All the lights are on in the kitchen and living room. The cicada remains trapped, buzzing loudly. Jackson is confused, sleepy, unable to process the details: upside-down wineglass, cicada, his mother’s voice with an unnerving edge to it. All he likely knows is that it’s not time to be awake. “Isn’t it amazing?”

Phoebe turns music on, hers and not Jackson’s, so the vibe is off, too loud and rough for the hour, for any hour with Jackson. She turns the television on and props Jackson up in a small throne of throw pillows on the sectional. She puts on a cartoon, but she’s unable to focus on any one task longer than a minute, her heart racing, and she’s reacting to the meds because she took too much too fast, and she drank too much wine and gulped the last of it to empty the glass she used to trap the cicada.

She opens the refrigerator. She’ll scramble eggs. The container is empty except for one egg. She can’t scramble one egg. That’s not enough for him. Is he even hungry? “Are you hungry?” she calls out. He doesn’t respond. One egg is not enough. She reaches for it and curses herself. She grabs a bowl and a fork and cracks the egg, but it’s a mess, with too many bits of eggshell in it, and she’s trying to focus, to pick the little white bits of shell from the yellow, and she hears a thud and Jackson cries out. In one motion she whips the bowl of egg across the granite island and shatters the wineglass and bowl and the sticky shards of yolk and shell coat the cool kitchen floor. A burst of heat surges from her abdomen. She rushes to the patio door, slides it open, staggers outside, breathing away the nausea.

Back inside, she hears his cries, which are somehow simultaneously muffled and piercing. Jackson’s head is wedged between the two disconnected pieces of the sectional Nick promised to reconnect but never did. He’s bawling. Snot and tears cover his face. The television volume is too loud and so is the music she’s playing, and they blend together and it’s some form of sleep deprivation torture for her son and she’s the veiled monster holding the blade to his neck.

• •

Only when they’re lying together, lights dimmed, television off, music turned nearly all the way down, does she relax her grip on Jackson. He’s finally sleeping. Her eyes are heavy. The cicada buzzes from perch to perch, dining room table to the top of the television screen to the rock-climbing wall, where her gaze locates it on a red rock near the top. She studies it, doubts its existence, questions whether she’s really seeing it, whether it’s there at all, until her eyes give out, lids close, and blackness comes.

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.