The elevator shudders, picks up speed.
Phoebe considers another path. A way out of debt and away from Carousel Court and nights spent curled up sleepless next to Jackson’s crib listening for shattering glass and footsteps, the next home invasion. Debt and routine and down and down. She sees white Adirondack chairs and chocolate purebred Labradors and a thick lush lawn adorned with children’s toys, short drives to school and smiling teachers and Jackson’s bright eyes and a little wave good-bye and the swell of emotion, and her eyes well up thinking about hot yoga and a call from Nick about a babysitter because they have dinner plans.
Your Life Starts Now. The silver-haired couple is rotting from the inside out: brittle bones and failing organs. If heart failure from too much of the pharmaceutical cocktail doesn’t kill them, the corrosive regret and denial will.
It’s all a fraud. She gets that. They bought the stock at just the wrong time, long after the private-equity investors pocketed their profits. That’s why she sees their situation the way she does now. She’s made her choice. Her insides free-fall. The rush of blood to her head as the swift movement of the elevator eases, gently delivers her to the lower lobby.
The doors open. She nearly grins at the inevitability: This was always going to be the resolution, if not the answer. She’s not twenty-six this time. Unlike then, there is no emotion, no adolescent longing or lust for some other glossy life. Now she has Jackson, Nick, a need to be addressed directly and with conviction.
She shoulders open the tall glass door and leaves the cool, shimmering office building. Ripples of heat rise from the black asphalt. The parking lot is a field of smoldering briquettes and she’s walking through it.
2
Phoebe’s Explorer, her company car, won’t start. She turns it over again and again and gets no response. Red lights flash. A crude clicking sound. This happened before. She left the iPod charging and drained the battery. It needs a jump. In the parking lot, she sits in the driver’s seat, door open, hot.
She can call AAA or just ask someone for help. There’s a frozen-yogurt place and a Panda Express in the strip mall across the street. She can wait there until help arrives. That’s when she sees the young man with thick arms and a white T-shirt and jeans, a clear blue jug of water on his shoulder. He’s sweating through his shirt and keeps his head up and a pleasant expression on his face, aviator glasses and tattoos wrapped around both arms.
• •
The second time Nick took her out, they were both twenty-four and living in separate parquet-floor efficiencies. He showed up at her building early and she was late. It was the hottest day of the year and he was talking to her short Thai neighbor, a mother of three who lived on the sixth floor. Nick held an enormous jug of water on his shoulder and some daisies in his other hand. The elevator in the building had been broken for a week and the Thai woman had two babies in a stroller. The water was hers, three more jugs on the sidewalk. He didn’t notice Phoebe halfway down the block, watching. He was like Benicio in Traffic, she thought. Hot. Jeans and sweating through his pale blue button-down shirt. And the flowers. Come on. And maybe he knew, but none of it felt contrived with Nick. Four trips up and down the five flights of stairs. Neither could Nick mask his excitement when he discovered the oldest of the Thai kids was some kind of ice-hockey prodigy. He decided he’d document the kid’s life and budding career like a Thai hockey version of Hoop Dreams. He wondered aloud to Phoebe if he should submit the finished project to festivals, maybe pitch it to PBS. She not only said he should, she would eventually make him a list of other potential outlets and producers with their contact information, as well as a list of five agencies she thought he should query.
When he got a call back from a producer at the Boston PBS affiliate about the forty-four-minute final product (which ended with the Thai kid getting kicked off the team for drug use, becoming a small-time dealer, then getting locked up for knocking out his pregnant girlfriend, the last scene with the mother visiting the incarcerated hockey prodigy in jail, introducing his infant son to him) Nick chalked it up to good fortune. “Their pain, my gain.”
“You made this happen,” she said. “You could have blown her off.”
“Instead I just exploited the woman.”
“It’s called ambition.”
“I was trying to impress you.”
• •
Phoebe sends a text to Nick: Need you
The way she taps it out is casual, and she almost adds a smiling emoticon to soften it, because he’ll read it differently. A command, demanding. Like calling up from the kitchen on a Saturday morning when he’s still in bed, drained from work. She’s agitated, Jackson’s cranky, dishes are piled up like their debt, and someone has to take the car in, the rattling from underneath is getting louder and nothing is going as planned, and she’ll call out his name and add “I need you.”
That’s how he’ll read it.
When he shows up, he brings her iced coffee, which she doesn’t need or want.
She thanks him, sips it, and puts it down. She’s peeking in the rearview and side mirror, eyeing the office entrance, suddenly aware of their filthy Subaru that rattles, even when idling. “It’s getting louder.”
Nick is rubbing his eyes, not really listening.
“Should we stay with it?” He means the Explorer.
“Hell with it. Let’s just go,” she says.
“Can’t jump it if we’re not here.”
“Let them figure out how to get me a car that works.” She puts the keys under the floor mat, the doors unlocked. “We’re not sitting in a parking lot waiting for a tow.”
“You’ll have to pick it up.”
“And?”
“I’ll have to drive you.”
“That’s a problem?”
“I don’t know my schedule,” Nick says. “Jackson has day care.”
“It’s Friday. We can pick up a rental on Sunday if mine’s not ready.”
“We could do something,” Nick says. “I’m beat, but we’ve got a couple hours.”
The handsome physician appears and walks to a shiny black Lexus. Two empty parking spaces separate him from Nick and Phoebe in their rattling Subaru. He gestures to Phoebe, who raises a hand in recognition. There’s no hiding: She’s riding shotgun.
“Friend of yours?” Nick says.
“Not quite.”
“Nice hair.”
The physician disappears inside his black car with tinted windows, leaves them behind.
“Where to?” Nick asks.
The realization that they could and should want to get Jackson early, go somewhere as a family, hangs over them.
“It’s three thirty.”
“Nap time,” Nick says.
The weekend lies ahead: no day care for Jackson, two days to fill, the heat insane, the pool dirty, and the beach miles and hours in the car, something she tries to avoid on weekends. And Nick will work both nights. He’s always been good about taking Jackson for the first hour or more, letting Phoebe sleep, the only two days she can. He’ll change and feed Jackson, and she’ll hear her son giggling because of Nick, who will keep the TV off and play with him in the living room. They’ll kick his Nerf soccer ball or throw sticky rubber bugs against the high ceiling, watch them dangle, peel off, then plummet to the floor, Jackson laughing, trying to catch them when they fall.
• •
They drove down to Delaware two months after they met. Phoebe’s mother was visiting family there, had come up from Florida.
“Should have seen that FBI agent thing through. Should have followed through on that. Do some good in the world. Teaching. Weren’t you going to teach? What happened to that?” There were deep creases in her mother’s forehead, and she chain-smoked and stared out the living room window, overlooking a well-kept lawn and chain-link fence. The presence of a bird feeder surpr
ised Nick. A squirrel hung from it, upside down, looting.
She cursed the animal and left the room. As she did she delivered one last stab, “Follow through on something, for Christ’s sake.”
She was unapologetic about the past: “You made it this far,” she said to Phoebe. “So obviously, I did something right.”
Phoebe refused to see her mother in Florida, where she lived surrounded by glossy tabloids and unfinished cigarettes. The house in Delaware was Phoebe’s uncle’s place, surrounded by bland white and yellow homes with dirty aluminum siding and cracked, weed-choked driveways. Phoebe’s uncle was doing Thanksgiving. Nick insisted they go because Phoebe’s mother had claimed she had terminal lung cancer and it might be her last Thanksgiving. It was Nick’s first introduction to her family.
“She’s lying. She needs money,” Phoebe said.
“We go.”
Nick bought two nice bottles of wine and a ham and two pumpkin pies.
“They don’t drink wine.”
“We do.” He held the bottles up and smiled.
“You’re pretty great about this,” Phoebe said. “About everything.”
He shrugged. “Family. You know. You do it.”
• •
“It never happened” was what he said to her after the visit went south, predictably, when talk turned to Phoebe’s father and all the ways he failed the family and why Phoebe wasn’t sufficiently bitter. They left before dessert. Nick kind of ushered her out and pulled the door closed and turned onto the parkway that would take them home. He grabbed her thigh and laughed and said, “Buckle up,” and she apologized and he said, “It never happened. And look, goodies.” He placed a paper bag on her lap. In it was the unopened bottle of wine and a pumpkin pie.
• •
Now Nick and Phoebe and their dirty Forester idle in a sunbaked strip mall parking lot, contemplate their options for filling the couple of hours of free time they just found.
“Beach?” Nick says as he turns right into traffic, looking around for signs. “This goes west,” he says.
“I’ll feel guilty,” Phoebe says, “going without him. He loves the beach. I love that he loves the beach.” She trails off, closes her eyes against the late-day glare.
Just over a year ago, when Jackson managed his first faltering steps, it seemed that everyone had a house or was buying one. Deb and Marty, their neighbors from the seventh floor, bought one in Needham. Matthew and Caroline, on the ninth, bought one for themselves, another to restore and sell in Marblehead.
Young married professionals buying and selling houses for six-figure profits. So why not them? Of course them, finally them. For months they’d spent their weeknights staring at these shows, new ones every week, and Nick and Phoebe watched them all: What You Get For the Money, Designed to Sell, What’s My House Worth, Stagers, Flip This House, Flip That House. It never rained on those shows. Nick commented on the production values, which tended to be high. He said he could do it cheaper, make it look just as good, if given the chance.
The animated tally-board at the end of one of their favorites on HGTV flashed money down, money spent, money made, along with the cash-register sound effect that had been echoing for weeks inside Nick’s head.
After the accident, after Jackson’s recovery and Phoebe’s return to work, Nick knew it was time. Together they spent hours cycling through property listings online. They narrowed the scope of their search. They calculated the cost of mortgages, the expense of upgrades. In February, they quickly negotiated an interest-only, zero-down, 125 percent renovation mortgage on the house in Serenos. It was doable because of the twenty-two-thousand-dollar salary increase Nick negotiated with his new job, combined with the eleven thousand that remained in savings and Phoebe’s inheritance from her aunt.
They chose the new construction with room to grow. Granite countertops, double-ascending stairways, and a double garage. More stainless steel. More square footage. More landscaping. And the pool: in-ground free-form hourglass with ice-blue Quartzon rendering, natural stone waterfall with solar heating. The cabana and wet bar. Nick and Phoebe spent as much as they could to drive up the value. Something else Nick insisted on: the rock-climbing wall. It was simple, clean, and something to make their place pop: One interior wall of the double-ascending stairway hid the bonded two-part application of granite-like panels. Phoebe admitted: It was cool. Studded with bright primary-colored modular rocks, it had six unique challenge courses to the top. They decided it would attract a more discerning buyer, would set their property apart from the rest of the houses on Carousel Court. It was virtual home-building, images on their laptop, point, click, purchase. Phoebe sat on the barstool in the kitchen and cycled through images and upgrade options. Nick stood behind her, close, and her optimism made him flush.
“We can do both colors downstairs,” she said. “Banana crème and honeydew.”
“We make it all back and then some,” Nick promised effusively, and Phoebe agreed because the numbers made sense: low-interest loans and rising property values, but also because the scenario he presented was irresistible. They’d flip this house for a huge profit. They would have more income from Nick’s new job, which would afford Phoebe three full months off in a furnished oceanfront rental in Los Angeles. This, the gift from Nick to her for the rough stretch she’d endured, the exhaustion. A summer to herself, walking distance to Hermosa or Manhattan Beach, to breathe new air, to fill mornings and days with Jackson. With more excitement in his voice than seemed rational, Nick drew Phoebe’s attention to a landscaping company’s website, the emerald rolls of TifGreen Certified Bermuda. Her laughter was the reaction Nick wanted. And it was genuine, the last time since Jackson that they were in sync.
He’s working hard, Phoebe tells herself as Nick drives. His sunburned visage softens in the afternoon shadows as the freeway snakes through and around steep hillsides in the direction of home. Maybe, she thinks, it can still work. “Hey,” she says. She extends a closed fist. He bumps it.
3
The orange glow from across the street is a lit cigarette. Nick and Phoebe’s neighbor Metzger smokes in front of his tent. He’s in uniform, same outfit every day: khaki shorts, clean white New Balance sneakers, white socks pulled up over thick calves, and despite the heat, a white oxford, sleeves rolled up, left over from his days working at the bank.
“Fucking Kostya,” he calls out, meets Nick on his side of the black, windswept street. Whatever he carries by his side is dark, a crowbar or baseball bat maybe. Nick doesn’t want to know.
Kostya didn’t fasten the lid on his recycling can and the wind knocked it over, spilled plastic two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew and Sunny D and beer bottles all over the street.
“And his park job.” The truck is half backed out onto the street. “Is it that hard to pull your fifty-thousand-dollar Tundra up the driveway? Fucking Armenians.”
Nick laughs. “Ukraine. I think.”
Metzger’s pissed off about a lot of things: the pain in his partially torn Achilles that will require surgery he can’t afford. The weight he can’t shed. Gas prices. The deserted house next to his. The insane neighbor next to Nick and Phoebe. Kostya’s dirty, skinny kids. One night Metzger’s thick green lawn was empty; the next morning the orange tent appeared. His is a military-style double-wall combat tent with a vestibule providing twenty square feet of storage space. The atomic orange structure rests a few feet from the curb, putting the neighborhood on notice: Things have changed and aren’t changing back anytime soon.
“Close your eyes,” Metzger says.
The gun Metzger puts in Nick’s hands is a Mossberg 500 twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun. It’s black and cool to the touch, and Nick likes the feel of the matte finish, of the butt and pump, though he’s never fired a gun, so he says very little about it.
“Nice,” Nick manages. It’s heavier than he would have expected.
• •
A lone, illegible graffiti tag recently appeared on the wall of the drained pool in the house next to Metzger’s: a five-bedroom, three-bath new construction left behind a month ago. It was the first house to drop on their cul-de-sac. Cars, three or four young men deep, recently started appearing, crawling along Carousel Court on weekend nights. Nick gets the sense, and confirmed with Kostya and Metzger, that they’re surveying the terrain, zeroing in on the next target. Metzger in his tent with his new Mossberg is the first and maybe only line of defense so far. For that much, Nick is grateful. Metzger worked at Bank of the West until last month. Nick doesn’t know what he did there.
“Keep an eye out tonight?” Nick asks. This is the favor he needs.
Instead of responding, Metzger says, “Look at that mess,” and trains the beam of light from his police-style flashlight on another spilled recycling container. The mess is in front of the house belonging to the Vietnamese family. The mother is a former teacher and apparently now a very good nanny, someone Nick and Phoebe have been saving money for, wanting Jackson somewhere other than Bouncin’ Babies. The Vietnamese family’s recycling is all one-gallon plastic water bottles and newspapers, no soda, no beer.
“Kostya’s mangy dogs.” Metzger spits.
“Or kids.”
“Same difference,” Metzger says, and laughs. “Russian mutts.” Both men instinctively direct their attention to Kostya’s house, the biggest on the block.
A string of white lights dangles from a tall palm at the edge of Kostya and Marina’s property. Of all the generically grand properties erected in the last five years, theirs is the grandest. All of the houses went up cheap and quick, but theirs sits slightly above the rest, on a modest incline with a winding stone walkway and a wide sloped asphalt driveway big enough for his Tundra and her Suburban. The lights that mark the top end of the cul-de-sac are the first thing you see when you turn on to the street at night. Kostya, obsessed with the palm trees, saw a Corona commercial that came on around Christmas—that’s where he got the idea for the lights. But they were such a pain in the ass to string up that once he’d done it, he decided to leave them, lighting only one tree. So they have a lone skinny palm at 45900 Carousel Court towering over all the other houses on the street. The white lights flicker when the sun goes down. Yes, Phoebe finally agreed when Nick pressed, it’s a nice effect.
Carousel Court Page 2