Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

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.

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.

She asks if they’re back home on Carousel Court and Nick shakes his head, says there’s some straightening up that needs to be done. “And I think we need a new fridge,” he adds, laughing.

A bell chimes. Phoebe glances at the white hillside cottage with pale blue shutters. Other women, all in white blouses and yoga pants and slippers, make their way up the grassy slope along winding cobblestone pathways to the building.

“This is so good. Okay?” he says, looking around. “See it through.”

“Why don’t you answer my question?”

He says nothing.

“What is your inclination?” She draws out the last word of her question.

“Not now. I don’t know what’s best. Finish this and we’ll figure it out.”

“Oh, fuck that,” she says, her voice rising. She closes her eyes. She stands and kisses Jackson’s forehead and hands him to Nick and walks away.

The path to the beach is narrow. She looks over her shoulder once. The lights are bright in the main cottage; her bungalow is dark. She’s alone and burning up. The wind off the water makes the wet cotton gown feel cold as it sticks to her sweaty thighs and chest. She chews her fingernails raw, digs her pulpy fingertips into her abdomen, which is tight and quivering.

She shares a bright-white-and-honeydew room with a stranger. She is sweating through a blue cotton gown because her cells and nerves and vital organs crave chemicals. They’re greedy, expect more of the same if not better, a new high, more, always more.

The staff here helps her with the process of weaning. They try to help with expectations and perspective. Stay in the moment, all that Zen shit. The moment is the reason she may just walk to the end of the driveway instead of the beach, find the main road, and walk until someone picks her up and drives her home or wherever Nick has him now.

Instead she’s barefoot on a stretch of beach staring at the black water, buried up to her chest in cold, wet sand. Let the tide come in, she thinks. Let nature do what it does. Who is she to resist?

Three weeks have passed. Nick is holding a Tupperware container of cookies. “Some woman named Lucy gave these to me.” They’re close to a ledge; the ocean wind is cool. Sunlight burns off the last of a thin gray mist. Phoebe leans in to Jackson and says sternly that he cannot eat these. “They’re poison,” she says. “Let’s be superheroes and save the day.” And one by one Phoebe and Jackson start chucking the cookies over the cliff.

Her eyes are fierce, Nick thinks, as she whips the things out over the water. She’s barefoot and, without makeup, looks pale and raw.

“So you delivered,” she says, glancing sidelong at Nick, barely suppressing a half-smile. “The regenerative time you promised when we came out here.” She hands Jackson the last cookie and compliments his throw. She hands the empty container to Nick.

“When you’re done here,” he says, “just come home.”

Her hair has grown back. Nick says he likes it short. With her finger, she twists a long curl in Jackson’s hair. “I like this.”

“He needs a cut,” Nick says as they walk.

“Let it grow,” she says.

“Are you sleeping?”

She holds her hands out in front of her, spreads her fingers. She studies them, says nothing. “I slept for twenty-two hours. Then I was awake for three days.” The fevers, she says, come when she sleeps. In her dreams she throws herself over the cliffs into the crashing surf for relief. One night, she admits, she sneaked down to the beach in her nightgown and stripped naked, buried herself in the sand for relief.

“This is costing a fortune,” she says.

Nick doesn’t respond. They can afford it for now. But not much longer.

There’s a moment when they’re finished throwing cookies into the surf and Phoebe is holding Jackson and they’re all standing too close to the gravelly edge and Nick is tense, the drop at least forty feet, his hands clenched into fists and inching closer to her, wondering if there’s something in her eyes, some distorted fun-house-mirror version of her own purpose in this moment, or some bleak morass of a life she can’t possibly slog through, that might make her consider the edge.

Nick grabs her arm. “Can we walk a little?”

She laughs. “I’m not jumping.”

“That would be a huge waste of money.”