Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

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?”

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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.