Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

“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.

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.

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.