Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

She puts Jackson down and they walk.

• •

Phoebe has moved on from woodworking. She’s gardening now. Growing amaranth, because unlike kale and spinach, it can thrive in the heat. Nick returns his attention to the thing between them, the reason she walked them to the woodworking studio.

“So,” she says. The white Adirondack chair is misshapen and awkward-looking.

“It’s the angle, maybe?” Nick says, and adjusts it, starts to sit down, to test it.

She grabs his arm. “You don’t want to do that. They want it out of here. It’s depressing people.”

“It’s abstract.”

“Like it’s about to collapse,” she says.

“Can we bring it home?” Nick says.

She says only if they can keep it in the backyard.

“Have you thought about the email I sent?”

She nods.

“Can you do it?”

“My bones feel like lead.” She rubs her left arm, then her right.

“Do you want to at least try it?”

She says she does and runs her hand lightly over the edge of the chair. The paint is still drying. She tries to brush the white from her fingertips. She sighs and says she’s more tired than she thought. “Tell me something we can’t handle, right? That’s what I keep saying to myself,” she says.

Nick pulls a small, neatly folded cotton T-shirt from his pocket, hands it to her. It’s Jackson’s. Nick brings one, unwashed, each visit. She brings it to her face, breathes it in.

Nick finishes his third beer and studies the dark shadowy hillside beyond the house, where the winds and the beast that devoured Blackjack came from. His gaze falls to the glowing pool and Phoebe’s patch of soil where she’ll try again. Out front, the orange tent is gone from Metzger’s lawn. Folded up and put away, Metzger said, because whatever deterrent effect it may have had is gone, given what happened to Phoebe in their house.

She’s been home for a month. The ninety days reduced by half when Phoebe and Nick decided it was time.

Nick passes the pool, its soothing chlorine scent, and the fresh topsoil Phoebe spread this morning. He slips through a parting in the hedges they recently planted, heading up the hill. He’s been doing this at night. He waits until she’s asleep because she’d tell him not to, that it’s dangerous and there’s no need. They’re fine, she’d say.

He climbs the hillside and gazes down from where it levels off. The homes on Carousel Court and identical tracts of houses stretch out until they become a blurry field of lights. Blazing. Who’s next? he wonders.

Nick throws empty Corona bottles at the moon from the hillside behind their house. Tonight he carries only a small knife. Tomorrow he may be empty-handed. The next night he may not come up here at all. In some of the houses he sees tonight are his former tenants, scared families whose money he took and spent on his own family. He stands on a hill with a small weapon and his family, somehow, intact.

Pieces of Phoebe are gone, ripped away and replaced by something new. He’s not entirely sure what. There is a depth to her eyes that wasn’t there, as though they’ve sunk. He won’t treat her like a patient, a martyr, or some kind of monster. Nick knows she is none of those things.

The secret he shares with no one because they’d never believe him. The reason he comes up here now, tonight, is this: He can hear Phoebe and Jackson. The cicadas have come and gone, their shells ground into dust, the air finally still and free of smoke, and the helicopters and sirens less frequent, which means for Nick, on nights like this, he’s sure when he closes his eyes and concentrates, he can hear them both as they sleep, his family, breathing.

The email that arrives is from JW’s email account. It’s dated April 1. Phoebe is in the new Serenos Whole Foods and staring at her iPhone and checking the day’s date and it’s the same as the one on the message.

And there’s an attachment, a PDF. She clicks the link and opens an invitation to a company retreat in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. The event is next week. You guessed it. Awash in Chilean sea bass and mint juleps. Come! As a wise man once said: all can be forgiven or at least momentarily forgotten.

When she gets home, she shows Nick the message on her phone, then deletes it.

• •

Walking the hillside later that night, he wonders if something was proved. Some grand test passed. Some crucible endured. The fire season is over. The talk on Carousel Court has shifted to the seasons ahead, new threats, rain and flooding and landslides. Someone moved into the house next to Metzger’s. They seem to have kids, a soccer ball on the lawn. As Nick sorts through the avalanche of unopened mail, he stops when he sees a bill from the window-and-door-replacement company addressed to the Maguire Family. For the first time he can recall, the term carries weight, feels significant, sobering and inspired at the same time. They are, for better or worse, the Maguire Family.

Phoebe leaves the water on for Nick’s shower. She’s drying off with a clean white towel. Nick is naked and brushes lightly against her when the towel drops. They linger there. He kisses the back of her neck. She reaches back, rests her hands on his legs, and closes her eyes.

“I’m excited,” he says.

“Me too.”

She feeds Jackson. Nick sets the ADT and turns on the sprinklers. She wears a yellow cotton dress; he’s in olive pants and a crisp blue button-down. Her silver bracelets, rings, and turquoise necklace are all new. She did her own nails last night with clear polish, and the reading glasses soften her further. Nick shaved and his haircut is conservative, sideburns trimmed. He has two cups of coffee already made, so no need to stop.

They arrive twenty minutes early, which is their intention. They want a few minutes to walk around, take in the surroundings, the vibe and energy of the place.

They sit in five tiny blue chairs. Nick, Phoebe, and Jackson. Tea and cake are served. They’re asked to talk about Jackson. Neither of them hesitates, but each pauses thoughtfully before responding to questions about Jackson and their priorities for him, their assessment of his personality. Nick and Phoebe each credit the other for Jackson’s most impressive personality traits; each takes responsibility, with self-deprecation, for areas that need work.

Two women sit across from them, jotting things down, asking Jackson gentle questions about stories he likes to be read and favorite foods. One of the women offers her hand and asks Jackson to walk with her around the classroom. The walls burst with color from student art, and sunlight floods the room.

As new parents, they’re asked to describe the greatest challenge they’ve encountered thus far. Something that none of the parenting books or the wise counsel of family prepared them for. Something they never saw coming.

An enormous orange sun is painted on the classroom floor. Jackson circles it. The women watch him. Around and around. Jackson is giggling as he picks up speed. He’s nearly running now. Is this a bad thing? Nick and Phoebe worry that Jackson may be blowing his chance with too much enthusiasm, not responding as he should to direction, lacking control over his instincts, unable to contain his exuberance.

“He’s a runner,” Phoebe says finally, laughing.

Admit him or not, they think. What the women here don’t understand, what no one else knows or could ever fully appreciate, is that wherever the resilience comes from, however perverse, it’s their own. Tell them no, dismiss or reject them, burn their house to the ground. They’ve put themselves through worse. Yet here they sit, perched on little plastic chairs, never more comfortable together, this crisp bright morning the beginning of something.