Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

• •

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?”