Carousel Court Read Online Free PDF

barren hillsides; not the dry brush in the wind. A crowbar, bolt cutters, a multi-tool, and a short blade. He was some kind of benevolent failure. Or madman. He was a thirty-two-year-old college-educated father drowning his family in debt but energized by a simple prospect: proving to Phoebe that he alone, not a New York banker or some handsome young physician, was the winning play still.

4
    P hoebe can barely hear the music coming from next door over the incessant chorus of cicadas as she walks around the house with Jackson held to her chest, turning on all the lights. Nick left for work an hour ago, his third night this week. The last two words from him as she closed and locked the door behind him and set the ADT were “Lights on.”
    She carries Jackson and his clean laundry upstairs to his room. A CD of international children’s songs plays from his Bose box. Jackson fills a Tonka truck with Matchbox cars while Phoebe hums along to his songs. She folds his size-2T shirts and shorts and places them neatly in his blue three-drawer dresser. The blinds are closed and the ceiling fan turns slowly as she arranges his books neatly on the shelf. She straightens a framed illustration from Where the Wild Things Are that hangs over his crib. She turns on the light and dims it. The room is bathed in orange light and peaceful as she sits on the plush beige carpeting with Jackson. Downstairs, the refrigerator hums, churns: a fresh batch of ice cubes. The LG stainless steel behemoth is restocked with organic raspberries, blueberries, kiwi, mangoes, and strawberries. Thick slices of bruschetta brushed with olive oil. She’ll eat both,one side rubbed with a cut garlic clove while it’s still hot, the way JW showed her once when he took her to a long lunch three months after she was hired at twenty-four, a perk and a leg up that she surely hadn’t earned yet.
    All good? comes the text from Nick.
    Fine
    Is he sleeping?
    Just now
    You should see this place—insane
    She doesn’t respond. She has nothing to say about whatever he encounters on the other side of the door, all these rotting five-bedroom corpses and their Bermuda grass, yellow from neglect.
    â€¢ •
    Before Nick left the house, he had her by the jaw. Something he’s done since their first weeks together, when he held it in bed, perched over her. “There’s something about you,” he’d say. It had a calming effect on her until recently, because now they’re thirty-two with a son and debt and tumbling down the face of something they never anticipated and the gesture sends all the wrong signals, draws attention to his limitations. Like a grandfather doing the same lame magic trick for the grandchild, who is a teenager now and bored, because that’s all he’s got. Tonight, when Nick was lacing up his boots, giving her instructions, she knew he was feeling guilty about leaving them alone again.
    â€œKostya and Marina are home.” The neighbors, who might be considered friends, were also in their early thirties, with two sons and a daughter, all somehow named after pickup trucks, Titan, Tundra, and she always forgot the third. “Call them, obviously . . .” Nick trailed off. “If anything happens.” His back to her, he sat on the stairs in the clean marble foyer. His voice echoed when he called out: “It’s Loma Linda. Maybe an hour from here.”
    But Phoebe didn’t hear Nick because Jackson was awake again and wailing. He hadn’t slept through the night all summer, since they arrived in June. He knew something Nick and Phoebe only suspected. His fitfulness was an alarm they’d heed if they could. Phoebe was at the top of the double-ascending Couture by Sutton buttercream-carpetedspiral staircase. She was headed to their son’s powder-blue bedroom with its crown molding and accents of textured glow-in-the-dark galaxies of stars and moons. She turned and studied