Carousel Court (12 page)

“She was a teacher in Vietnam,” Marina is telling Phoebe, just out of earshot from Mai. Marina is smoking a long, thin cigarette. “She was best nanny for us. Clean. Good core.” Marina taps her breastbone. “She work weekend, too, for you?”

“Monday through Friday.”

“She cook, too,” Marina adds. “Better than me.”

“She steams broccoli and this Vietnamese soup and sticky rice.”

“It's called
pfo
.”

Nick says, “I see her jogging down the street, pushing that monster stroller and singing.”

“And the notes,” Phoebe says. “I love the notes.” The daily handwritten reports of their activities by the hour. “A godsend,” she adds, her eyelids heavy.

Phoebe watches Mai apply sunscreen to Jackson's shirtless little body. Mai and her husband are in their fifties and say very little, but she smiles a lot and wears white sneakers and khakis. Phoebe closes her eyes; Nick is talking, but she's not listening. She wonders how much better off she'd be if Mai had been around when she was nine and thirteen and seventeen. How many rough edges smoothed over with that kind of nurturing. Jackson deserves that much. She wants to bring Mai home with her tonight and keep her there and make everything better.

She finishes her drink. Nick is smiling stupidly at her or the kids launching themselves into the pool, and now he has Jackson, is stroking his head, and says something about next weekend and a trip to the beach and Phoebe closes her eyes again and everything around her spins so violently that she's forced to open them and when she does Nick and Jackson are gone.

• •

Kostya hoists his son over his head and roars. The child screams with laughter. Kostya throws him into the pool. The child comes up
laughing. Kostya grabs his other son, tosses him in, then his daughter, leaps in after them.

“They're zoo people,” Marina says. “Belong in zoos to hump in public.” She lies back and takes a drag off her cigarette. She's complaining about the men at the car wash, who are always staring at her tits.

“At least there's something worth looking at,” Phoebe says, and her eyes close as she massages her temples.

“You too skinny, bitch. Still have your boobs.”

Phoebe is lounging next to Marina by the pool, still saying yes every time she's offered another daiquiri. Phoebe reaches for Marina's cigarette, takes a drag, and surveys the property. The blue wooden playhouse with white shutters; the thick oleander bushes that obscure the eight-foot pine fencing surrounding the entire perimeter. A rectangular sandbox, a bar with stools, tiki torches, and a cabana, and still a generous amount of open space, a thick green lawn for the kids and dogs to roll around on.

“I like your house,” Phoebe says flatly.

“I like your ass.” Marina reaches over and smacks Phoebe's rear end, her short shorts showing off tan, toned thighs. “Fuck you, girl. No cellulites. You got work?”

“We'll have people over,” Phoebe says, and sighs.

“What
we,
white woman?” Nick snaps.

“We'll host next time,” Phoebe says without conviction. Jackson now sits on a blue towel spread out between Nick's and Phoebe's chairs.

“Would you like anything, Marina?” Nick stands over the women, stares at Marina's breasts spilling out of her white bikini top as he finishes off a beer, his third.

“No, darling.” She lights another cigarette. “But if you see my husband, tell him he need to light torches.”

“Gorgeous? Another daiquiri?”

Phoebe doesn't answer. Marina punches her shoulder.

Nick grins. “She's cranky. Needs a nap.”

Phoebe's not smiling, though.

“I blame your daiquiris.” Nick leans in close to Phoebe, his warm
breath in her ear. He says nothing. He runs his free hand along the back of her head, then grabs it. His words slow and thick, he says, “It's all my fault. And it always will be.” He looks down at their son, rubs his head, and walks away.

“Finally, we agree on something,” she calls out.

“Father of the year!” he yells, not looking back.

• •

The only other source of calm here tonight, aside from Mai, the daiquiris, and the benzos, is Kostya, with his thick frame, long black hair, and reassuring voice. Phoebe watches him hoist a keg over his head while explaining to his daughter how to set the DVR to record some movie she doesn't want to miss and reminding Metzger, who is working both grills, to flip the steaks.

“I wanted smaller,” Kostya says to Phoebe. “Less house. All this is work and more work, more worry.” He hands her a Corona and she sits up, finishes off the last of her daiquiri, then takes a sip from the cold bottle, and Marina laughs. Phoebe makes a sound of approval.

“Strong, no?” Marina asks.

Phoebe smiles. Nick sits down next to her with Jackson. He leans in, his dry lips at her warm ear. “What if we both self-medicate? How would that work?” He's clenching his jaw.

“Nope,” she says, and resolves to switch back to daiquiris.

“More house, more can go wrong. But she want space and biggest house on block. What have you,” Kostya shrugs and runs a hand through his hair.

“What
ever
,”
Marina corrects Kostya. “Not
what have you
.”

“She and kids are home all day, so okay, we get bigger space.”

One of their kids sneaks up, squeezes between Kostya and Marina, and says something softly, shy but urgent. Kostya continues with Nick and Phoebe. “You have fires still next door?”

Nick nods.

“We talk to him.” Kostya nods; his unshaven face is red and acne-­scarred. A faded bluish-green tattoo on his neck, unidentifiable characters. “He running scared. Like Metzger in his tent.” He waves and
grins at Metzger, who is staring at them from across the yard. “Like this one.” He pinches Marina's soft, pale waist. She slaps his hand. Their skinny son is speaking fast Russian. Marina brushes him off. Kostya wheels, leans in to his son, stabs the boy's bare tan chest with a thick finger, says something. The child sulks, doesn't move.

“This one gets nervous.” Kostya is now affectionately rubbing his son's head while motioning toward his wife. “She hears things in the night. Sirens and noises from other houses, sounds she doesn't know what it is.”

“I don't like the vibrations,” Marina explains.

“
Vibes
,
” Kostya says, eager to correct her for once.

“Last week when all the lights go off,” she continues.

Kostya interrupts, gestures at the sky as he speaks. “All streetlights go off, and ours in the house were flicking on, off, on, off. She bring the kids into bed, all three, and kicks me out and tell me, ‘Go keep watch.' ”

“As you should,” she says, then, conspiratorially, “because tent man and his guns.”

“You have a gun.”

“I don't sleep on the yard.”

“You make me sleep on yard.” Kostya laughs.

“So how dangerous is he?” Nick asks, nodding in Metzger's direction. There's a pause. Marina looks at her husband, who shakes his head.

“What?” Phoebe asks. Nick looks at Kostya.

“Well,” Marina urges her husband. “They should know.”

“That is not the type of man to go quiet,” Kostya says, rubbing the right side of his face. He meets Nick's eyes and nods. “He will come to you soon for money. He ask us twice already.”

Nick says nothing.

“He say it's his duty to defend his home,” Kostya adds.

“How much did he ask for?” Phoebe asks.

Kostya and Marina exchange a quick look as she responds, “Too much.”

“But fate is fate,” Kostya says. “So now this one say it is my job to
protect her, us, the house. And it is the primary objective. As I say. Get through this time. This is home. But she has the gun!” He laughs too loudly and everyone else kind of smiles, unsure. “So there I am in living room, holding her pink pistol, watching for zombies. Watching the watchman.”

Nick takes Phoebe's hand, which surprises her. She checks, but he's not looking at her. His skin feels callused, and he has a piece of moleskin wrapped around the meaty part below the pinkie where he cut himself at work. She likes it when he takes her hand at unexpected times. She usually feels tension release. Not tonight, though. Not lately. She has rings on three fingers today and he's playing with them. He thumbs the sterling silver engagement and wedding bands, the small stone he admitted to spending eight hundred dollars on in a dimly lit shop in New Orleans on their first trip down there. He leans over and says something about wanting to take her home right now, lay her back on the buttercream stairs. “Let's go.” But she doesn't budge.

Kostya continues. “So who ends up sitting by window all night?” He slaps his chest. “Because now I freak out.” He shoots a look at Marina, who just shrugs. “You lie,” she says. He laughs.

“Home,” Nick whispers.

“And the dogs, they can't sleep, so they are pacing round and round because,” Kostya says, “there is so much goddamn
tenseness
in
this
house.” He grabs Marina by the waist with both hands and bites her long neck. “I eat her up.” She can't suppress her laughter. “She taste like oyster.”

“Phoebe keeps a knife under her side of the mattress,” Nick says loudly. “How scared should I be?” He's turning on her.

She stands as though leaving.

“It's a long one, too,” Nick says. “Huge blade.”

“You gave it to me!” Phoebe pantomimes a gun with her fingers and fires a round at Nick.

“Found it in a foreclosed Spanish revival in Yorba Linda . . .” Nick trails off.

Before she slips inside the house through the sliding patio door, Phoebe waits until Nick's eyes find her, and when they do, she stares,
her sunglasses still on, and he blows her a kiss and she stands perfectly still and if he were within earshot she'd tell him what she thinks of him, the first thing that comes to mind as she looks at him sitting on the low chair in the shadows with their son. She'd tell him explicitly, so there was no confusion: He's failing.

17

S
he wakes up on the floor in her son's bedroom under a white down comforter. Nick keeps the house cold. “I just don't want to go,” Phoebe says to him when he picks up. It's seven fifteen. Next to her, unaware that she's there, Jackson is talking to himself in his crib. Phoebe doesn't know where Nick is and doesn't ask.

“So don't. Go to the beach. Dig for shells,” Nick says. “He loves watching the surfers.” She can hear the lift in his voice that happens when he talks about things that make Jackson happy. “Get breakfast and just take the day,” he adds.

“It's Tuesday.”

“Wednesday,” he corrects her. “It's a Mai day.”

“Every day is a Mai day,” she says, and sighs, content.

A measure of relief: no more Bouncin' Babies, waking Jackson from sleep, the anxiety around getting there in time at the end of the day, through traffic. Mai is coming. Mai walks three houses up Carousel Court and rings the bell. Phoebe lets her in, and after good mornings, Phoebe smiles and watches her ascend the stairs to Jackson's bedroom, where she coos and laughs and sings and changes
and dresses him, carries him down to the kitchen and feeds him breakfast then straps him into his stroller and says good-bye and jogs away, guiding the stroller along the smooth asphalt, singing as she moves.

Nick messages to say he won't be home before Jackson leaves because he has a rush job, a small condo in Whittier.

Do you work this weekend?
she texts back.
Of course
.

He messages back: She should sleep in the bed. At night. She should set a routine. She should change out of her work clothes at night.

Sleeping on the couch in your skirt and blouse. Not a healthy pattern
.

She doesn't message back. She will. She has already resolved to make those improvements, adjustments that will steady her. She will sleep in a bed. She will remove her clothes first. She will consume half to a whole milligram less of Klonopin daily and continue weaning herself off of it until her use is situational, not habitual.

It's just after eight
P.M.
Phoebe scrambled eggs for Jackson's dinner. They watched
Thomas & Friends.
She gave him a bubble bath. Nick isn't home. Jackson's room is cool and dark and smells floral, like his after-bath lotion. A soft green night-light glows in the far corner. His little body is facedown, arms and legs spread out wide, reaching, scaling rock-climbing walls in his dreams. She falls asleep with her hand wrapped loosely around the leg of his crib.

• •

In the morning, the only message on her iPhone is from a client. Nothing from JW.

The client is an older primary-care physician she met Monday in El Segundo because he's new to the GSK roster and brought with him seventy-seven patients from his other practice, and Phoebe needs him to prescribe the Advair and Levitra to as many of them as he can. She gave him her cell number the first time they met, written in red ink on the back of her business card. The text message, in which he asks
to see her panties, on or off, preferably on, reads like a seventh-grader wrote it. Most of them do. And all of them send her immediately, ruthlessly, back to Boston, the blur of days and highways and cold drizzle and the red glare of taillights before the accident, when she nearly killed their son.

Driven into her and every other new hire during a two-week orientation for sales reps six years ago, using mojito-fueled raucous late-night role-playing sessions at the Hyatt Regency in Boston, was a very simple and absolutely nonnegotiable edict: A HAPPY doctor with a LARGE practice will prescribe YOUR products to his patients and that's YOUR job. A happy doc is a happy rep. Make them happy. How goddamn hard is that?