Carousel Court (6 page)

Nick bought them a Bugaboo last year, spending money they didn't have and wouldn't earn anytime soon, and she was fourteen pounds overweight and spent every weekend in her purple sweatshirt, and the living room was a disaster and this thousand-dollar stroller they didn't need and couldn't afford sat there like part of some kind of disdainful Puzzle Time quiz on Nick Jr.: Which of the objects in this room is laughably out of place?

The small Korean woman massaging Phoebe's feet in warm water is completely silent. The nail salon is nearly empty. Phoebe turns off her iPhone, closes her eyes, and tries to sleep behind her sunglasses.

Back in the car, the air-conditioning dries her French manicure.
She's spent five hundred hours in the company Explorer. The mileage reads 10,303. It read 789 the day in June when Nick drove her to North Hollywood in the dirty Subaru to pick it up. They spoke six words to each other that morning:

“You missed the exit,” she said.

“Fuck me.”

It's the middle of August now. She inherited all of her clients from a rep whose job she got when the other woman quit to spend more time with her three-year-old daughter. The colleague reminded Phoebe that with so many hours in the car, she should have a second agenda, some other project to fill the hours. In the Notes app on her iPhone, stuck in traffic, the woman wrote a children's book about a boy who ate his blanket and it turned into a cape, as well as a treatment and three episodes of a TV series about a young professional mother whose daughter was dropped on her head as a newborn and now speaks only Japanese, despite being raised by white people and having a Salvadoran nanny. It's a comedy, she explained. Phoebe insisted she had enough to keep her busy, but the woman pressed the point: Be damn sure, because five years can slip through your fingers.

More Starbucks and Krispy Kremes for the office staff. Phoebe can do more of what she did back east. More explicit pics for the docs sent from the Bebe dressing room. But she can't bring herself to drive two more hours to a few more offices to fill bins in sample closets and make nice with moody office managers to get a few minutes in the office of a new doc who simply doesn't need what she's selling. A year ago she was Diamond Status: ten-thousand-dollar bonus (over three months' rent) and a four-day cruise to the Bahamas that she gave to her mother who never did use it. Now she's slipping. She's unranked. Her bonus this year if nothing changes: a navy GSK fleece pullover, bathrobe, and slippers.

The email that arrives on Phoebe's iPhone is from Citibank. A check has cleared. The email is for Serenos Montessori. The amount is a hundred dollars.

She forwards the email to Nick along with:
???

Her cell rings.

“A deposit,” Nick says.

“For what?”

“It's small and affordable. Ten-minute drive.”

“From where?”

“It's an option.”

“Not for us. Not here,” she says.

“Come January?”

“We won't be here, Nick.”

She ends the call.

• •

The tank is nearly empty, but Phoebe doesn't like to refill it until the end of the day, so it will be as full as possible in the morning. She can get through an entire day on a full tank, not have to refill once, if she stops at the 76 station near the house. To get through one day without having to stop for gas is a challenge she sets for herself every week. But there's no way to wait that long today, so she pulls in to a Chevron station. The gas card her job gives her still isn't working.

She sends two texts to her district manager:

Card's not working again. How many times?

Still haven't been reimbursed for last two tanks. This makes three

He doesn't respond.

She uses her own credit card, has no idea how close to the limit they are. It works and the tank is full. She checks the pressure on all four tires. Two need air, and she pulls the Explorer over to the air pump but doesn't have quarters, so she leaves, will do it later.

She counts the six lanes of traffic. She has no more appointments, is dizzy from withdrawal and counting the white lines on the gray freeway. Her head is light from not eating. She's on the 101, passes signs for San Bernadino and Santa Ana. The 405 is what she needs, but she's not paying attention and is pushed into the right lane. She has to get left, and there's a green light, but it's a flashing X, which makes no sense, telling her to go but it's wrong, there's clearly no room at all for her. As tractor-trailers and Harleys roar past her in the far right lane, there's simply no opening. Phoebe's gripping the wheel tightly when she guns it. A black Dodge Charger is feet from her rear bumper. There's nowhere to go. She speeds up. The Dodge swerves, passes, cuts
her off. Her throat is tight. She can't swallow. The traffic won't slow. She accelerates. Texts pour in and she can't resist the urge to look down and click the icon, then looks up, hugging the concrete divider, pulls the wheel to the right, charred remains of a crash lie in a heap on the shoulder. The text is from a doctor with
a raging hard-on until I had to shoot all over my wife while picturing you.

Another from Nick that says
Nice list
in response to a Post-it with tasks for the rest of his Friday and the weekend.

You do realize I worked overnight last night and am just getting home. Will be sure to squeeze this shit in before the four jobs I have this weekend
.

The sunlight around a sharp bend momentarily blinds her. Without seeing, she swerves, switches lanes. Two more lanes and she's over, brakes hard, and is off the freeway. The engine idles, the company car in park on the shoulder as traffic flows past, indifferent. She exhales and starts tapping the steering wheel that she still grips with her thumbs until she's pounding it. Her extreme dream.

• •

At yet another post-college party off of Boylston Street, Nick complained to an Emerson friend about getting stuck with a water bill because a running toilet went unaddressed by the landlord (along with two faulty outlets, a leak in the ceiling, and mold). The bill was a week's salary for Nick, whose days were spent in a windowless basement office managing the schedules of unpaid interns and cataloging the PR firm's client reels.

The words that introduced Phoebe into his life he said more to himself and were less about the apartment or job than his life: “I might just burn it down and start over.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

He took her in: athletic with thin shoulders, green eyes, and a jaw he wished he had. Her lips were full, her cheekbones sculpted, and her eyebrows thin and arched; there was a sharpness to her.

“Two words: tenant's rights,” she said. She instructed Nick to stop paying rent and file a claim with the help of the public advocate's office.

“There's such a thing?”

“I have a friend.”

“And if I'm evicted?”

“Won't happen. Landlords feed off tenants' fear. Especially kids. Smack him upside the head and watch what happens.”

The landlord caved, paid the bill, and replaced the toilet.

They quickly fell into an easy rhythm of weekend mornings with bagels and coffee while Nick read the
Globe
and Phoebe went online or scheduled her week and paid bills and returned calls to friends. They went to the farmers' market and movies at the Outer Circle or the Uptown. Nothing they did together ever felt like work. They'd stand in line outside Pasta Mia on thirty-degree nights, sniffling, holding each other, her cinnamon breath visible. Invitations always poured in for Phoebe. Yet there was no party or event Phoebe declined that made her feel like she was missing something. Instead of taking the party cruise down the Charles, they welcomed the new millennium on the roof of her building in a sleeping bag with a bottle of wine. She wondered what Nick would look like with his head shaved, so he let her do it. He liked that she always seemed to smell as though she'd just stepped out of the shower.

“You have really long fingers,” he told her one morning in bed, not long after she shaved his head. “You should let your nails grow.”

She stared at him and said, “You look better with hair.”

She was self-conscious about her overbite and the slight gap between her front teeth. Nick loved it. What he was less fond of but also appreciated was her forthrightness: Phoebe's tendency to goad Nick, accuse him of settling too easily, accepting average outcomes for himself. When he didn't follow up on a production assistant gig for MSNBC in New York, she was livid and wondered aloud if his lack of killer instinct might be their undoing. She had rough edges.She had ambition and volatility that aroused Nick. She knew people: bouncers, managers, bartenders. She seemed to know everyone. They once brought home a friend of hers with the intention of having a three-way, but the girl got sick before anything happened and spent the night on the bathroom floor. Phoebe twisted his balls once during rough sex, and he spent an hour nude, in the fetal position, battered
by tsunamis of pain. She grabbed a blue gel ice pack from the freezer and tickled his back with her fingernails.

She could pull off any look: Nick's Mets cap and V-neck T-shirt and jeans or strappy little black dress from Bebe. She was the most gorgeous woman Nick had ever dated. She was tall and angular. On their couch (she moved in after five months), she ate ice cream from the container with an appletini, her phone constantly buzzing, someone always asking a favor: Could she cover a shift, pick a person up from Logan, let her crash on the floor for a night after a fight with the boyfriend? She always said yes. Favor asked, favor granted. Up and out the door. She knew Nick felt slightly intimidated, and she liked that, reveled in it.

Her father, the merchant marine, volunteer firefighter, and finally, driver for UPS, who left the family when Phoebe was twelve and had been in touch only three or four times, called her on September 12, 2001. It was the first time they'd spoken in six years, and the call lasted twenty minutes and ended with Phoebe in tears, her father still talking, cursing the women in his life, who were all leeches and takers. Within a week she'd applied for a job as an FBI agent. She trained relentlessly: On days when she bartended the lunch-to-close shift at the boutique hotel in the city she woke up at six thirty to get to the indoor pool to swim, lift weights, run a few miles. Nick called her “Special Agent” and bought her a fake badge. They drove to a shooting range and blasted holes through Osama bin Laden. She ate a Paleo diet: leafy greens, nuts, and fish. She cut her hair shorter than Nick liked, but he was so turned on by the whole mission that it didn't matter. Nick would come on her as she clenched, and he'd watch it slide down the smooth surface of her taut stomach. But Phoebe's pursuit of a career in law enforcement sputtered. Dark winter mornings made getting out from under the covers with Nick more difficult. More shifts were available at the bar, and they needed the money, so she took them. Worked later, slept more. Her hair grew back. She craved Pasta Mia and Belgian waffles for Sunday brunch at the diner. Nick didn't mind. There was no shortage of adventure, she said. They'd find another mission.

“This is going to be fun,” Nick said when he asked her. They were twenty-six. It was the weekend after Labor Day. They'd driven to the
Cape. He had an artsy handcrafted silver ring with an emerald-green stone that cost ninety dollars. They'd each gotten a week off from their jobs: By then Nick was at a small PR firm with mostly commercial clients, and Phoebe had just completed orientation for new hires at an investment firm downtown. She was meeting partners, she told Nick. The first week. She was having lunch the next week with a senior manager. She was making an impression. She worked insane hours. She was up at five thirty, at the office by seven. She had a new mission.

Their after-tax income was stable. They had Saturday-morning co-ed soccer and Sunday Pats games with a keg and wings and mutual friends. There was an easy rhythm to their life together that allowed Nick to overlook the lull Phoebe hit when the FBI thing came to an end. There was a month, maybe two, during which she withdrew, sleeping too much, watching daytime TV, letting calls go to voice mail until the box was full and you couldn't leave a message. She gave no more rides to friends. She and Nick fucked, but it felt strange; she was indifferent, never saying no but never seeming to enjoy it. Once or twice he stopped and told her he wouldn't finish until she did. “Then don't finish.” And it was winter and she hated winter and Nick wanted to think that was it but he knew better.

What he'd learned from spending those years together and what gave him some peace of mind about the lull was this: She would find something else and the fire would return and calls would be answered, rides given, television turned off, fucking until they both finished, like it mattered to her. What he didn't concern himself with then and what would surely become relevant to him in ways he couldn't begin to anticipate was this: Where would she channel her manic energy if she didn't find another mission? When it was time for Phoebe to cycle up again, all of that drive would have to go somewhere. And Nick couldn't see or refused to recognize an unavoidable outcome: She would eventually turn it on him, and he better be ready.

• •

It's almost four. She's in Hermosa Beach because she had one more appointment today, but it was in Tustin, and when she saw how far
that was on the GPS, she canceled it. Seagulls cry out overhead, steady themselves in the wind while the surf rushes over Phoebe's bare legs, her shoes dangling in her right hand, iPhone in the other. The sun has burned through the marine layer and the sky is bright blue. She doesn't want to leave the beach, refuses to return to the car, head east, two hours with traffic. Picking up Jackson is her only motivation. When they found the house on Carousel Court, went all in and bought it, Nick promised: “And we'll have a summer rental on the beach.” But they aren't on the beach. They're nowhere near it. She resolves to bring Jackson back here this weekend whether Nick's working or not.