Carousel Court (19 page)

“Honey, honey,” she says into his ear as she stands. “Let's go home.” His body gives out. He's instantly asleep, head heavy against her chest.

She sends Marina another text:
I have Jackson.

She leaves the house. Before she pulls the front door closed, she feels it being pushed hard against her, forcing her out, probably Titan, and the dead bolt clicks and then another lock and the chirp of the alarm being set and the string of white lights in the tall skinny palm is coming undone, dangling, whipping in the wind like the skinny bright tail of a dark beast she can't see. But it's okay, she tells herself, squeezing her son to her chest, walking fast along the deserted asphalt street.

The only sound is her bare feet slapping the warm pavement. And Jackson's breathing, made raspy from the dry hot air.

The shadows in the orange-lit street like misshapen dogs are three coyotes, and they freeze, not scared, more poised. A fourth appears and their yellow eyes glow like embers. Phoebe stops. The animals are blocking her path to the house. If she turns and goes back to Kostya and Marina's, she's sure they'll chase her. If there weren't four of them, she would have thought they were Kostya's pair of German shepherds. God, she wishes they were Kostya's dogs. The largest animal turns away from Phoebe first, disinterested, but the other three keep their eyes trained on her. They take a few cautious steps toward her. The click of their claws against the asphalt is the only sound. They don't want her, though.

She hears it: a low moan. They're growling, hungry. They want Jackson. She's placed her son only feet from the animals. She deserves what comes. Her legs are weak. The animals are so close she can smell them—pungent, like something decomposed. A hush. One of the animals, the smallest, looks like a pup. It has large triangle ears that are too big for its little head. The pup eyes Jackson, tilts its head ever so slightly, seems to sense a kindred spirit.

The shots explode and the echo reverberates around the cul-de-sac, ricocheting off the terra-cotta walls of the houses. Jackson is stunned, silenced by shock. The wailing is the animal sprawled out along the street in pieces. The shots are from the orange tent, Metzger. He killed one, for sure. Another tries to limp away. Another shot rings out, sending the wounded animal into the side of a recycling bin, knocking it over. Right, right, Phoebe is thinking. She makes herself small, clutching Jackson, whose screaming is pained, too tight. Right, right. Okay, okay, she keeps thinking. Inside, sweetie. Let's go inside. Everything's all right. Doors are opening, figures cautiously emerging from the few well-lit houses that remain on Carousel Court. Kostya and Marina. Mai and her husband. Phoebe watches their front door, now jogging toward it, sure it will swing open and Nick will appear, shirtless and ready.

31

I
n the bright sunlight, Phoebe stares at blotches of faded blood on the asphalt from the coyotes Metzger shot last night. The text that arrives is from Marina:
He toss them in his backyard empty pool. Skin them. Eat them??

Phoebe responds:
I was holding Jackson when he fired the gun.

Sorry honey I'd have done same thing.

In our direction?

They're savages. Lucky he sit out there and watch for all of us.

Nick hasn't said anything to Phoebe this morning. All he said last night was: “Why didn't you run?” But he wasn't standing at the door, poised to save them. He was half dressed, texting some girl from their bed.

Now he stands outside, shirtless, cleaning the pool. He has to work this morning.

“He's a professional contact,” Phoebe says from the shade of the patio as Nick pulls the tarp tightly over the pool. “He is nothing more. It is not here we go again.”

Nick kneels over the far end of the pool. Then he stands, walks around the pool once, pulling on each of the tarp's straps to ensure its stability. He stops a foot from her. Says nothing.

“Let's not get into some long-drawn-out—”

He presses two fingers over her mouth, but too hard. She recoils, slaps his hand away. He laughs.

“Fuck you,” she says.

Protruding from the waistband of his shorts is the butt of a semiautomatic pistol. He could hold it up to his head or hers, even unloaded, scare her straight. She knows she looks like shit: limp hair, bloodshot eyes, and so thin.

“There's something out there.” He waves his pistol at the distant hillside. “I can hear it at night. Kostya, too. He thinks it's a mountain lion. I think he's right. Go look. I dare you.” He walks inside the house, slides the door closed behind him.

32

I
f the open front door of the Pomona house weren't white, the streaks of blood on it wouldn't look as stark as they do. Nick rented the three-bedroom new-construction house to a Lithuanian family last week. The call came in on one of Nick's burners, from the renter who had paid him three thousand so far for three months.

Now the man is bleeding and pale. A man and woman stand over him on the yellow lawn. The man standing up clutches something dark. The garage door is open. A pickup truck is idling with the driver's-side door open. The object is a long blade that he is wiping clean against his jeans. The woman is fat and sweaty and holds an aluminum baseball bat in front of her, shaking it, repeating some phrase in Russian.

Nick could carry the unloaded pistol as he approaches but decides against it. They're all agitated and sweating. The man on the ground is cursing back at the couple, clutching the bloody gash on his forearm.

The woman yells at Nick in Russian.

The bleeding man falls back, closes his eyes, exhausted.

The other man says something to the woman. She takes a wild swing at the man on the ground and connects, hard, with his chest. He cries out, balls up.

Nick grabs the bat, struggles with the woman, and the man with the blade waves the knife at Nick, spitting and cursing. Nick backs away without the bat, holds his hands up.

From his car, Nick calls Kostya, who doesn't pick up. He tries his landline. A child answers. Tundra, the oldest, Nick thinks. His parents aren't home.

“Tell me what they're saying,” Nick instructs. He holds his cell in the direction of the cursing woman and man with the blade. He's a few arm's lengths from Nick but close enough for the kid to translate. It's made clear to Nick: They want their house back.

Nick is ready to hang up. He knows what this is: The owners who left have come back, not quite ready to give up or with no place else to go. Either way, they want the people who Nick put in their house to leave.

“They called police. The police are coming.” It's the kid. He's still translating for Nick.

Nick turns to the wild Russian couple, holds up his hands. “We're sorry. We're sorry.” Nick is tapping his chest. “My mistake. Not his. My fault.”

The man and woman don't move. Nick hears sirens. He drops his iPhone on the turf and, bending over for it, keeps his eyes locked on the couple.

Nick decides the renter will be fine. Police are on the way. He considers what they have: the burner number, which is untraceable to him; his first name, “Paul”; no address; no copies of the rental agreement. He doesn't need this house. Nick has cleared, after trash-out and painting and lock-changing expenses, fifty-two thousand for all of his houses. He walks to his car, gets in, starts the ignition, and leaves.

• •

The message that appears on his iPhone, the screen smeared with the blood of his former tenant, is from Mallory:
Want to get high?

Nick is on a freeway heading east to a drive-in theater he passed on the way here.

Is Arik there?
he writes
.

I'm not home

Where? Are you alone?

It makes a difference?

Of course

Then yes. I'm alone. On the beach.

And you want me to come get high with you?

That is my desire, yes.

Can I bring my wife?

Don't fuck with me, mister.

I have blood on my iPhone. I may have witnessed a murder that I caused.

Sounds exciting. Come.

I'm not sure I can handle getting high right now. Want to see a movie?

I just want to put my head on your lap.

7:30 Mission Tiki in Montclair.

Yummy.

33

T
he houses surrounding the playground, a mile from Carousel Court, are all the same, exact replicas of Nick and Phoebe's: Spanish-style new construction. On one of the many bank-owned signs someone tied a bouquet of white helium balloons with bleeding yellow heads and Xs for eyes. No one is playing in the yards. No fathers doing yard work or carrying groceries in from the minivan. No landscapers. It's a hot Sunday morning and the cicadas are screaming.

Jackson cries out from the backseat, “Playground!” over and over. It's too hot to be outside. But he starts to whimper, tears streaming down his cheeks, when Phoebe passes it. He wails. She's gripping the wheel and shushing him and saying it's too hot to be outside.

“Fine,” she says, taking him out of his car seat. “You'll see.” She'll stay at the playground for fifteen minutes until he can't stand it anymore. It's not just the heat. Phoebe hates this place as much as Nick does, but it's the only one near them.

The equipment is all bright primary colors and the slides are wide and slick and the ground is blue rubber and the white wooden fencing that surrounds the perimeter was probably nice once but now is
faded and splintered and an entire stretch is missing. No one bothered to plant any trees. The only shelter from the sun is a metal overhang behind two metal benches that sit side by side. A few women sit while the children burn. Unlike the playground with the pond and mallards and tall oaks and birches and blue herons along the Riverway, where she took Jackson nearly every day last summer, there is no water here, no trails or trees. The only birds she's seen are black, grotesque, drifting overhead, circling. She's not convinced one of them won't swoop down, sink its claws into Jackson's back, disappear with him.

Most of the women on the hot metal benches speak Russian and Spanish. Phoebe knows a couple of them by sight but not by name. Marina knows all of the Russian women, who sit in a bunch and smoke and sip sugary drinks and feed their skinny kids chewy Kopobka candy. Phoebe always ends up going home with a handful stuffed in her purse. There may have been Goldfish here once, but not anymore. Marina's not here today and Phoebe's relieved. She won't have to stay, and can carry Jackson away screaming, and who cares?

The boys here today are much older than Jackson and play on a random patch of asphalt that looks like a half-finished basketball court. Someone amassed a huge pile of cicada shells on the edge. Two older boys in white T-shirts and baggy jeans are trying to set fire to it. They flick a lighter over and over. Curse each other. Phoebe shields her eyes, watches one of the two boys remove something from his pocket; the other ignites it, and they lay the flame on the pile of shells and watch them burn.

Other boys form a mosh pit and take turns sending each other through. It's a game: The others prevent escape by any means. It's up to the boy getting pummeled to break through. If he falls, he's out. Jackson thinks it's funny.

The skinny monsters flail and shove so hard that Phoebe looks at Jackson, because if she watches the boys much longer, she'll start to see the barren landscape fold in on itself, this patch of earth swallowing her and Jackson whole along with the rest of the debris. Massive electrical towers loom over everything from brown hills that separate them from the next ripple of homes. Phoebe rubs her temples.
The headaches are from tension and the foolish decision (made Friday night when Nick found her passed out behind the wheel in the Explorer, engine idling, in front of the young neighbor's house on Carousel Court) to radically wean herself off the benzos, cutting the dosage to nearly nothing just to prove she could. Or maybe it's the electromagnetic waves from the towers generating the tingling down her spine, through her arms to her fingertips, until she's shaking out her hands like some kind of madwoman. She could be walking down Sunset punching the exhaust-filled air or pushing a stroller through the vapors or letting a physician finger her until she cries. What's the difference? She wants JW to bail her out again. It's not about her. It's another woman entirely, doing her bidding. She'll make them the young, beautiful family they should have been.

She sends Nick a text:
Not sure when we'll be home.

She may go to the beach and spend the day. She may check them in for the night at the Beach House Inn or the cheaper one farther up the Strand. They'll have their own little adventure. Pretend they live there. They'll look for neighborhoods and houses they can rent near the beach, near Laguna, where she'll soon work if she handles this the way she should.

Another message to Nick:
Could be tomorrow. Don't know.

There's no reply.

With the entrance of a chubby Thai kid into the melee, Phoebe hears the sound of slapping skin and rising voices from the skinny monsters. The shoving becomes punching.

A thin boy with shaved red hair lands a closed fist to the temple of the Thai kid, sending him into the asphalt. One of the Russian mothers yells something from the bench but remains seated. The Thai kid doesn't seem to have a mother here, rubs his head, slumped on the asphalt. Phoebe is ready to leave. The kid tries to stand, but another kid kicks him and the boys laugh as he falls again. Phoebe takes a step toward the boys but stops. “Enough!” she calls out instead.

A Russian mother snaps her fingers. Another stands. When the kid rises again, two boys shove him hard and he falls. They won't let him up. That's the game.