Carousel Court (24 page)

Jackson waves and they leave.

• •

The Monday before they were scheduled to leave Boston, they went to brunch. College Hunks Hauling Junk came and left a week before, took what wouldn't fit in the Forester. Nick and Phoebe slept on the air mattress for six nights, Jackson between them. Phoebe stopped working on Friday. That Monday morning she didn't take Jackson to day care, and this pissed Nick off. He expected, needed, it to be just the two of them, no distractions. It was overcast and humid; Nick's T-shirt stuck to his back. At the restaurant they sat outside with Jackson in a wooden high chair, with crayons and a paper place mat. They should have sat inside, cooler and less crowded. Jackson scribbled madly. Nick looked past his son, past Phoebe, at traffic that didn't move. The air was filled with exhaust and the day felt nothing like late spring, more like the dead of summer.

“There's no job,” he said. “They emailed yesterday and called today. They're very sorry, though.” Nick watched a stalled bus spew black smoke from the rear. “They're very sorry. I mean, so, so sorry.” He drifted off, couldn't meet Phoebe's eyes.

Jackson dropped some crayons. Neither parent moved.

Phoebe wasn't hearing him, not processing. “You're not serious.”

“They're very sorry,” Nick said again, finally looking at his wife. He'd promised himself after he hung up on them that morning, after he found himself pleading for part-time, or for independent contractor status, or for severance, for recommendations for other work, that he'd project confidence with Phoebe, reassurance.

“Nick,” she said. “Come on.”

“Unprecedented times. That's what they told me.”

Phoebe was scooping up crayons from the floor. “It's kind of funny. I guess.” She handed the crayons to Jackson. “But not really. I mean, if you had no job, we would have—What would we have?”

Silence. Nick stared at Phoebe. He did this: He met her eyes and
wouldn't look away when he was serious. He'd say nothing and would just stare into her green eyes until she got it. When he asked her to marry him; when he told her that his father had died; when he promised she'd be okay during the cesarean; when he told her she deserved time to be a mother.

“You have an offer.”

He nodded.

“You accepted—come on. Enough.” She smiled.

“I'll find work. I'm already talking to people.” That was a lie, but now he didn't look away.

“You're serious,” she said, swallowed. She hummed to herself and said, “Okay, okay,” under her breath. She sat back and squeezed her eyes shut tightly. She was processing. She pressed two fingers to her forehead. She seemed in pain. “We have—We both quit our jobs, Nick,” she said.

“I know.”

“This is—” She stopped. Her lips disappeared inside her mouth. Her face was flush. “We have the house. A mortgage. Payments. We have those now.”

Nick stared at her.

“Stop staring at me and say something.”

“We're fine.”

She exhaled and lost all pretense of holding up, keeping a brave face. She deflated. “I needed time with him, Nick. More than anything. Now there's no time.”

“I can fix this,” he said lamely. “We'll still come out ahead on the flip. I'll find something. We go. We go.”

“I thought you were going to tell me something—” She stopped. She was going to bring it up this morning if he didn't, but for some reason that day she was convinced he was going to say it: They should try to get pregnant again. That there was no better time. That pieces were finally falling into place, a new phase was beginning, their adult life was coming together, and was there a more beautiful way to commemorate that golden time in your life than conceiving a child?

“We go, Phoebe. We just roll with it. It works out.”

“I quit my job, Nick. I quit my job.”

“I never insisted you quit. Look, we just do it differently for a while. There are other jobs. We're still doing it. You realize,” he said, more to convince himself, “how many people wish they had the balls to do what we're doing? How easy it would be to just accept what we have and inch along, another fucking Boston winter? Another year and another and the next. No, we're doing this, and guess what? We're doing it right.”

Nick scratched at the paper place mat where it was cold and soggy from his glass. Phoebe stared, dazed, at her son and tried to swallow, but her dry throat was tight and wouldn't let her.

Nick waited.

“We have nothing,” she said, halting. “We have to be out of our place, Nick. You don't have a job?” She pushed her chair back and stood and it fell. Phoebe weaved through busboys and hostesses toward the bathroom inside the restaurant. A cloud drifted away from the sun, and its glare in the boy's eyes was blinding. His vulnerability was startling. Without sunscreen, he'd burn. Without a watchful eye and precise cuts, he'd choke on his food. Wasps would sting him, send him into shock.

Nick stood up, opened a large green umbrella over the table, moved Jackson from the glare and into the shade. They sat alone in the stillness. Crayons and ice water. Nick was numb. The two of them alone, just a father and son. Phoebe reappeared. She was back. Face clean and clear, no evidence that she'd been crying. No sign of distress. She was remarkable that way. She could pull her hair back in a ponytail, splash water on her face, adjust her bra or top, and like that, she was poised, sharp and stunning.

“Okay,” she said resolutely. “Does he have sunscreen on?”

“Yes.”

She unfolded her cloth napkin and placed it on her lap. “Okay.” She exhaled. “We go.”

Nick tried for her hand. This time she let him. His palm was wet. His grip awkward and uncertain, a hand wrapped around hers when their fingers should have been interlaced.

“We're okay.”

“I know.” She sipped her ice water.

In the bathroom, the text message Phoebe sent was to JW. The SOS he responded to so many months later.

Come save me in L.A.

• •

In the morning, Nick is awake before seven and walks outside. He turns off the power to the filtration system, shuts off the water-fill valve. It takes him twenty minutes of kicking through brush and dead mice to find the clean-out port. He connects one end of a cracked rubber hose to it, the other to a submersible pump that looks like a dirty bomb. He drops it in the deep end of the pool, and the splash is cool against his legs, the shadows stretching across the backyard.

Slowly, the water drains. It'll take a day at most.

“Why?” Phoebe asks him as he leaves the house with Jackson, on his way to Mai's, then on to three houses to collect cashier's checks.

“Because you're not paying attention.”

47

N
ick is climbing the wall again. Blackjack is in his crate, in the corner of the living room, watching Nick ascend.

At the front door, Phoebe runs her hand along the black iron bars and wire that give the new security door the feel of something from a medieval castle. “It doesn't mean anything,” she calls up to him from the front door. “Do you think this does anything?”

He laughs too loud, mostly because of the exertion, clutching hard rubber, tendons and muscle fibers straining. “You know how many homes I've put people in?” he says, looking up, grasping the next red rubber rock. “How many families are sleeping tonight because of me? You're welcome, by the way. Who's looking out for your ass?”

“I thought you were leaving me,” she says with mock disappointment.

“And I thought you were gaming your benefactor. Isn't he staking you?”

“You'll see.”

“Not if we leave you,” Nick says.

• •

He's on his fourth or fifth ascent on the wall. He watches Phoebe pace, transform, a beautifully vicious caged animal. Disappearing for three days! His mind is this choked freeway of half-thoughts as he nears the top of the climbing wall, his last attempt at the silver and gold rubber rocks that mark the top. He'll do it without them, no witnesses, but he'll know. And he's shirtless and sweating and the seventh Corona didn't put him over the edge and there's too much anger, agitation, coursing through him when what's required is poise, calm, clarity in thinking.

He's racing, but there's no clock. His breath is shallow and he feels vibrations, his pulse. Is the water running? It's one o'clock in the morning and she's taking a goddamn bath. Beads of perspiration drop from the bridge of his nose and chin. “She's gone. One foot out the fucking—” The slip is quick, the moment a flash of white, like black ice. The distance between the ceiling, where he was within arm's reach, and the ground, is twenty-two feet. A single thought, an instinct he picked up from soccer, basketball, all the camps and teams and drills: Don't reach out to break the fall. That's how your wrists snap, compound fractures, bloody shards of bone that require multiple surgeries, pins, rehab. So he does one thing: keeps his arms at his sides and braces. They're turning on each other. His throat tightens and he gags, the convulsion like a seizure, dry-heaves until he's coughing, hacking up bloody mucous. He bit his tongue. It may have come off. He's running his hands across the thick cool carpet feeling for his tongue, which he's not sure is still in his mouth. He looks up. From where he lies, he can see her shadow. She's in the hallway, around the corner, just out of sight. And he's convinced he can hear her saying to herself, “Fall, Daddy, fall.”

48

G
o to your mother's,” he says to her in the morning. His mouth feels like it's stuffed with cotton, and his tongue burns. He may need stitches. His movement is slowed despite the eight hundred milligrams of Advil he took an hour ago. He can't draw a deep breath.

Phoebe wasn't supposed to be here this morning and wouldn't have been if he hadn't fallen. They agreed to avoid each other until further notice.

She's nude and so thin, and without makeup or her hair done, she manages to look at once like a teenager and an old woman, depending on the angle and shadows. It isn't healthy, Nick thinks.

“Take a week. Take as long as you need. I mean it. Go. Please.”

She steps into the shower. Nick walks to the bedroom window, twists the blinds. Metzger's orange tent has collapsed in the winds, coyote blood still smeared, fainter now, on the asphalt.

Nick pisses and spits into the bowl, doesn't flush. Phoebe would usually remind him but doesn't this morning. The water shuts off. She slides the glass door open, steam floods the room. “Go somewhere,” he says. “Go suck him off again.”

Maybe it's the transformative effect of water and steam on a woman's body, or maybe it's because he swallowed two Vicodin on an empty stomach, but Nick is caught off guard by the raw beauty of his wife: the angular physique, the dark eyes, the cheekbones, and that jaw, and he wonders if they'll ever fuck again. But as the steam clears, he sees how skinny she is, the collarbones as sharp as her hips. “You should eat,” he says. “Go somewhere. Get some room service and figure it out.”

“There's nothing to figure out.”

“Decide if you want to come back and why.”

She's bending over, brushing her hair. “Let's drive somewhere this weekend,” she says. “Maybe the beach.”

He punches the bathroom mirror. An instant spiderweb of split glass. His eyes are closed and he grips the vanity, deep-breathing, riding her out. She's prodding him, sticking him, until he snaps and gets it over with.

“So what?” she says, staring at Nick's red face in the shattered glass. “It means nothing. There are opportunities and he can help me, which helps us. But I'm not going to explain it to you like you're fourteen. You understand. So get over it. Someone needs to man up and save this fucking thing.”

• •

He's in the kitchen. Harsh sunlight pours through the windows. It's too hot. His head throbs from the fall. Even with the thermostat lowered to sixty-seven, the house can't get cool enough. Phoebe perches on a stool, thumbs through her phone while she talks.

“I'd have more respect for you if you were afraid. Fear can be noble. Fear shows maturity. Fear would show you're thinking, maybe even about someone else, your son, what's best for him. About us, what's best for your family.”

“You need to stop.”

“Then again, if you were fearless, you'd show some confidence,” she says.

The knife he removes from the sink is for show. He's looking for something to slice.

“Do I scare you?” she says.

He finds an apple.

“There's no fear in you at all. But there's so little confidence. So what is it?” she asks.

The apples have been sitting on the windowsill since yesterday. They're hard and green, crisp.

“It's not stupidity. You're not an idiot. You have a heart.”

“You do realize I'm not participating? This is just you pushing me, and I'm not taking the bait, Phoebe.”

He brings the blade down with force. The apple splits. Juice spills onto the knife handle, blade, and counter. He cuts faster, with more force, at first to intimidate, then without forethought, simply reactive.

“Failure, Nick. Some people have special skill sets, talents, gifts. Most don't, though. Maybe that's it. You're a worker. You're a bill-payer. If you apply yourself, and push, and really put your balls on the line, you'll meet expectations. Maybe a pat on the head for effort. Nick will show up, do the job, clock out at five thirty, catch the bus, home by six to surf the net. Watch
SportsCenter
.”

The apple is all wedges now. Juice and pulpy bits spray the granite countertop. He stabs one of the larger pieces, turns to Phoebe, pops the wedge in his mouth, and chews. He turns away, gathers up the apple wedges. Does she want him to drive the knife into her thigh? Her shoulder or chest?