Carousel Court (3 page)

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

T
he 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.

Nick hears music, too loud, coming from the house next door.

“Believe this shit?” Metzger glares at the new construction identical to Nick's. “What goddamn time is it?” He shines the flashlight on the house.

“Late,” Nick says. “Good song, though.”

Metzger reports that the neighbor has been in and out of his garage for the last hour, carrying boxes from his truck. This seems to agitate Metzger, for some reason. “And now this shit,” he says.

“Connie Stevens?” Nick says quizzically.

“You think this is funny?” Metzger turns away from Nick and says under his breath, “Just watch.”

The man living next to Nick and Phoebe looks about thirty. He has close-cropped blond hair, always wears a hoodie and shorts no matter how hot it gets, lives alone, and talks to no one. In the three months since Nick and Phoebe moved in, they've had one exchange: The man was ripping tiles from his roof and tossing them onto their driveway, where they shattered. Phoebe asked him to stop; he ignored her. His patchy yellow lawn has a couple of wilting date palms and a
eucalyptus tree. Red spray paint recently appeared on the front door, a signal from the lender to interested parties: This house is dead and ours. The man added to it—a fuck-you to the bank—a red X on the wall next to the door, a white O and another red X, and a blue tic-tac-toe board separating the letters. His black pickup truck has huge wheels and looks new but, unlike Kostya's, is filthy.

Metzger tosses his cigarette toward the street, orange ash on black asphalt, squashes it. “Vietnamese are rotten,” he says, pointing at a house by the entrance to the cul-de-sac. “Mexicalis are rotten,” he adds, pointing out another house. He lights a new cigarette. His cadence is caffeinated, jittery. “Mormons are rotten to the core. That's three houses right there about to get tapped.” He draws three fingers slowly across his thick neck, indicating a throat slitting. The cigarette dangles from his dry lips as he speaks. He's flicking invisible ticks from his thumb at each of the nine homes in their cul-de-sac, referring to their neighbors who are still, after three months in Serenos, California, forty miles east of Los Angeles, mostly strangers to Nick and Phoebe.

“Sucked dry,” Nick says.

Metzger shines the light on Kostya and Marina's house. Aside from Metzger, and waving and smiling at the Vietnamese couple in passing, Kostya and Marina are Nick and Phoebe's only friends.

“They're fine,” Metzger says, “for now.” He shines his light on Nick's house, the thick green grass. “Lawn looks good.”

Nick nods.

“But these idiots,” Metzger says, gesturing around the street. “If they can just talk to someone at the bank!” He laughs. “Guess what? I
was
the bank. You owe what you owe.” He's following Nick to his car, and Nick isn't sure why. He walks with a limp. He wipes perspiration from his forehead with his thick hand. Nick has his keys out and the driver's-side door open.

“Keep an eye out?” Nick says. He grabs Metzger's thick shoulder and motions to his own home. “Tonight. While I'm gone.”

“Find any bodies yet?” Metzger says, and laughs.

Nick starts the Subaru. He plugs in his iPod, cycles through tracks until he finds the song he wants.

“Bring me something. A flat-screen. Some golf clubs.”

Nick laughs.

Metzger is unmoved by the heavy bass from T.I.
spitting lyrics to “Ready for Whatever.”

“Knives. Good knives. I need some steak knives.”