• •
Later, close to ten, Nick walks the block with Metzger. The men are waiting for Kostya, who can be heard singing loudly to his children, who squeal with laughter. Metzger carries the Mossberg pump-action by his side. The gun is the reason Nick is out here at all. He returned it when Metzger got home from his second Buffalo trip. Nick wants it back.
Metzger hacks something up, spits. He laughs as he says, “Dumped my father’s ashes over Niagara Falls. Blew back and hit a buncha Jap tourists, thought it was spray from the falls. Dim sum dipshits.”
“I need your gun.”
“Of course you do.” Metzger’s eyes are yellow. He’s heavier than he was, hair thinner. He looks ghostly in the dim orange light. “When?” he asks.
“What?”
“When do you need it, and who are you going to shoot?”
He could take it now, bring it with him to La Puente where he’s meeting Sean.“Tomorrow,” Nick responds, and he’s walking without seeing and the soft asphalt feels like it’s giving way and he’s sinking in it when he realizes he’s no longer sure what he’s capable of.
52
Sean is in the kitchen of the La Puente foreclosure. He’s shirtless and sunburned, a sweaty beast whipping tuna cans at the hornets that have nested in the kitchen. He’s not supposed to be here.
Sean keeps missing the nest but comes closer each time. The nest is a misshapen gray balloon. And it’s humming. Arik is shaking his head, but he’s smiling, too, because Sean is getting pissed and cursing. Each time he grabs a can of green beans or tuna or soup and whips it at the nest, his baggy jeans fall lower. He’s agitated and so are the hornets, brown and yellow monsters, bigger than any Nick has ever seen. The hornets sense that they’re under assault and grow louder. They come and go through a living room window that’s been shattered. Boss warned Nick about the hornets. And Sean. Arik was supposed to bring Black Flag but forgot.
“Shouldn’t you do this on your way out?” Nick asks.
He came for an initial assessment. It was supposed to be just him and Arik. Nick’s plan was to show up, assess whether he could take some pictures and list the house after the trash-out. He didn’t bother to check the location ahead of time—he’s not as focused these days—and the house is a ranch-style in a gang-infested blue-collar barrio. He’ll never rent it.
“Tell me this,” Sean says, clutching a bottle of ketchup in his meaty right hand, an edge to his voice. “Do you think we’re idiots?”
Nick says nothing.
“You think we’re doing this for flat-screens and microwaves? Like we don’t see what you see?”
Nick watches the hornets. Arik moves behind him, out of his sight line, which makes him even more uneasy, as though something’s going to happen and he’s not sure what: the hornets or these two men in this hot, empty house. But he’s not in a mood to be dictated to. Nick hacks something up, spits on the floor, and wipes his mouth using a towel he grabbed from the granite countertop.
“My turn,” Arik says, and reaches for the ketchup bottle. Sean keeps it from him, stares at Nick for a beat. Nick swallows hard, stares at this insane long-haired man from Orange County who has a kid facing trial for putting another kid into a coma, whose Jet Ski business is failing, who seems to have some strange attachment to Arik. They are standing in a hornet-filled kitchen of a foreclosed house in La Puente, California. The room feels too small. Nick breathes in Sean’s body odor and the stale marijuana from Arik, who has moved closer to Nick.
“Thing is, dude, we’re doing this,” Sean says.
“Doing what?” Nick says casually.
Sean turns to Nick. The hornets are going insane now, poised to attack. Sean looks older, his thin lips tight, deep lines across his forehead and around his eyes like cracked glass. “Stay out of the way. Better yet, find something else.”
Nick is silent.
“You don’t want this. We got this. You’re too late.”
Nick has the addresses to the foreclosed properties. It’s a growing list. So many properties to rent. Sean and Arik see it and want it for themselves. Sean is here for a reason. This is the message they’re sending: It’s over, it’s their thing now.
“Besides,” Sean adds, “who’s your muscle? You think no one’s in these houses already? You think gangbangers aren’t squatting in there? Can’t believe you’ve made it this far. Who’s going to clear and hold? You? It’s mine now.”
“We’ll see,” Nick says. Hesitant for the first time.
“Dude, look. I don’t know you. But I’m giving you a chance to get out. Find something else.”
“You’re the muscle.”
“Yeah, motherfucker, I am,” Sean says. “And you need to pay more attention.”
Sean pivots, whips the bottle of ketchup at the nest, and hits it. Ketchup splatters against the wall. The gray balloon falls, lands heavy on the floor. Nick curses him. The hornets move too fast. Nick slips on a wet spot, hits his head hard against the floor. He’s being stung repeatedly. Sean is on his hands and knees, crawling toward a doorway that leads to the garage. Arik is gone. Nick stumbles into a hallway, toward a sliding glass door, the backyard. The hourglass-shaped pool is nearly drained; dead mice and garbage float on the surface of the thick dark water. He rolls in.
Only when he’s leaving the property does Nick notice the black Maxima parked in the driveway. He checks: Nevada plates.
53
Turning from the main road, Nick drives into the darkness of Carousel Court. Kostya and Marina have added to their Halloween decorations: A Frankenstein statue that resembles Kostya stands pitched to the right, on the verge of falling over; a couple of small black hooded things with glowing red eyes join the zombie corpse propped up against the base of a palm tree. Nick knows Marina will tuck her pink .38 in her waistband if anyone shows up. It’s unlikely that anyone will venture out, especially children. Not on Mischief Night. Not these days, with cars casing neighborhoods and home invasions. All the more reason to carry the gun locked and loaded, Nick thinks. Which reminds him: He needs to check the house again, make sure Phoebe hasn’t bought a gun of her own.
All the lights in the house are turned off. He sits in the idling Forester, headlights illuminating the garage door, the blue and red chalk doodles from Jackson: a cockeyed smiley face. “Leave some goddamn lights on,” he says to himself, addressing Phoebe’s negligence.
Inside, it’s cold, and when he flicks the switch for the living room and foyer lights, he’s surprised to see that it’s clean. He hears the barking from upstairs. For an instant it occurs to Nick: She’s gone. He calls out as he peels off his drenched T-shirt in the foyer. There’s no response. Then he sees Phoebe’s white Coach bag on the glass coffee table in the living room. He taps out a text: Thought you left . . . damn
Blackjack is barking upstairs. Maybe Phoebe’s not home. Despite Nick’s desire to keep the dog in the master bedroom, she left Blackjack in the bonus room without his water dish and with the lights off. He’s whining and wagging his tail, ears pinned back, thrilled for any human contact. The room smells like urine and feces. He’s been in here for hours.
Did u even walk him before you left? Or ask Kostya? You said you had nothing scheduled today. Would be home all day. And yet you’re gone. Question: are you really this much of a self-centered cunt?
After feeding Blackjack and letting him out back, Nick feels the headache from this morning returning. He is so tired. His teeth hurt and his bones feel leaden. Nick turns off the kitchen lights, watches Blackjack sniff the yard in the bright glow from the floodlights. Nick has seven messages on his burner cell, all tenants with questions about cashier’s checks or utilities or the people who showed up claiming or reclaiming the house as their own. All of them want answers and help, and he has none and can offer nothing. Now he wonders how many of the same houses Sean will visit and claim. Does he have the addre
sses already? Nick considers calling all of his tenants and warning them about scams, men who pose as bank contractors hired to repossess the house. He decides that none of this means anything next to one fact: It’s after nine and Phoebe isn’t home. Again.
Nick deletes the messages, doesn’t make any calls. He has their deposits and rent. He’ll collect next month if he can. Or not. His head throbs; the sharpness of the pain in his lower back is acute. Images of Phoebe taking JW’s cock in her mouth burst in from nowhere. Nick falls to the sectional, eyes wide and unfocused as his mind races. He can’t resolve disputes over ownership, so he resolves to stay away, never return the calls or visit the properties in dispute; JW forcing himself deeper into his wife’s mouth until she’s gagging; her iPhone flooded with messages from clients asking for lewd JPEGs.
He’s slouched against the back of the sectional, neck stretched until he’s staring upside down at the climbing wall. She rolled her eyes when he fell. That’s what he knows. Whether or not she’s fucking JW, the night Nick fell from the wall to the living room floor, when she heard the sick, dull thud from his nearly two hundred pounds hitting the ground, her instinct was to roll her eyes. During a recent argument, he’d pressed a wooden salad spoon into her abdomen and demanded her answer to the question: “What did you do when you heard me fall? The first thing, the instinctive reaction when you heard me land, the whole house shook, because that tells us all we need to know.”
Her response: “I don’t know, Nick. What do you want?”
The house is completely dark, hushed. Only the refrigerator makes any noise: ice cubes tumbling from somewhere deep inside into the overflowing plastic bin. What he’d give to be back in Boston, in their old place, his old job, morning routines, predictability and stability. The doughnut store. The ice cream store. The Super Playground. The Red Slide playground. They’d go back with a dog and wrecked credit. They’d do the work required to fix their marriage.
He showers. On the bathroom floor he finds a bulging brown spider, crushes it with a clenched fist. He leaves it smeared across the white tile floor. In the kitchen he finishes off half a container of fresh-cut mango, fills a tumbler with Grey Goose. Blackjack barks at the patio door. Nick lets him in and taps out a text to Phoebe: Are you with him? Working him?
She doesn’t respond. He stirs the drink with his index finger, sucks it free of vodka. He’s sent eight texts to his wife today and she’s returned none. It’s Thursday, almost eleven o’clock. Jackson is spending the night at Mai’s because Nick has no idea where Phoebe is, when she’ll be home, if ever. He’s shirtless and pacing the living room.
He fires off another text to Phoebe: Hahaha. I mean, really? The glow from the screen saver of Phoebe’s laptop (a floating portrait of Jackson’s face, brown eyes and tangle of brown hair, puffy pink cheeks) as Nick pops the bubble, tapping the keyboard. He rereads an old email from JW. Five paragraphs. His answers to her questions. Nick has read it a dozen times. He does some push-ups. Sends another text. Love? Really. You “love” him? Still you think you love him??
He laughs out loud.
He rereads the message she sent to JW in August, the one she inexplicably left open on her laptop:
I don’t sleep. It’s eating me from the inside. I’ve lost 19 pounds this summer and none of it has anything to do with anyone or anything but you and what I feel for you. There’s nothing healthy about it all but I love you and love thoughts of you and dreams of you and the tastes of you and the weight of your body on mine and I apologize for this much honesty but you asked and I’ve decided that there is no more time for pretending and misleading. I know what I feel and think I know what I deserve finally, after everything.
Nick is a lunatic laughing out loud alone in the house. If he had Marina’s pink .38, he’d be shooting the light fixtures and the windows and the laptop. Tapping out a succession of four one-word messages to Phoebe:
This.
Will.
Not.
Work.
He drops to the floor and does eleven push-ups. The sudden burst of activity ignites Blackjack, who grabs the first object he can find, Jackson’s green Croc, and charges Nick, wants to engage, cold wet snout pushing against Nick’s face and neck. Nick shoves the dog away too hard, eyes the rock-climbing wall. He starts to climb, then hops off. Blackjack is circling, whining, still with the shoe. Nick taps out another text: Not sure why you’d ever think this would be ok. What ARE you thinking? Are you thinking??
Then again: LOVE? Love. You Love him. That’s what you think it is? Or is that more of the game? Your master plan.
Okay. I love you too. I love him too. That’s right. I love JW too.
The message from Phoebe is instantaneous and stuns him: Not what it looks like, Nick. At all. Trust.
FUCK THAT. Fuck you fuck trust. You blew that one babe. May as well not come home. I got this. You’re not needed here. Not wanted. Still want the dick pic?
The sound of Nick’s heavy breathing, exhaling through his nose, and Blackjack, circling still. Nick wipes perspiration from his forehead, and his eyes glaze over staring at the glowing screen, Phoebe’s cryptic response to his rage. The dog gives up, slumps to the carpet.
Before he can decide whether to question her further, call her, or simply tell her he won’t be here when she gets home, he’s leaving for a few days, that their son is still with the nanny and the dog is alone in the house, she sends one last message: I love us, Nick.
54
It’s two A.M. Phoebe sits in the driveway, listening to the end of “Heads Will Roll” on Alt Nation. The Forester isn’t here. Nick is gone. Inside, the house is cool and quiet. Blackjack is nowhere to be found, must be with Kostya. Nick wouldn’t leave him in the bonus room. She swallows three Klonopins with the last gulp of merlot she left on the fireplace mantel, walks barefoot upstairs, falls asleep without undressing on the floor next to Jackson’s empty crib. “I’ve got this, sweet baby,” she says. “Mommy’s got it taken care of now.”
Her iPhone wakes her. It’s ringing. The display reads Blocked. She picks up. The call drops. There is no voice mail. It doesn’t ring again. She messages JW, asks if he just called. There’s no reply.
• •
The next morning, Friday, Halloween. She has appointments. Jackson must be checked on. The dog. She needs Nick. She’ll tell him what she knows: that she’s getting an offer, one that will allow them to move, leave the house, get her out of the car, put them in a little house by the ocean where they belong. They’ll mend things, stick the broken pieces back together, and time and routine and Jackson will heal them.
If Nick were home while she dressed, he’d ask what she was doing. “You’re clearly not working today,” he’d say. And she’s not. She’s skipping her appointments. Nick would say something about the sheer material and thin straps that keep slipping from her shoulders. If it were two months ago or even September, he’d watch her, and she’d ask if he liked the dress, and only then he might grab her and slide his hands under it and around her hips and tell her they had time, quickly. Or maybe he’d just stare at her and say nothing, too fatigued to care.
But now she’s alone in the house and the wind is gusting outside, sunlight seeping through the blinds, and she has the day ahead of her, waiting for word, confirmation, from JW.
She makes herself a mimosa and sips it slowly. In the bright cold kitchen: a sink full of dishes, a bloody rag from Nick’s most recent work injury. Her phone is quiet. She slips a strap from her thin shoulder and unbuttons the top two buttons of her cotton dress and snaps a picture of herself with her free hand pulling up the hem revealing her tan thigh, the yellow edge of her lace panties, sends it to Nick: Off to work
• •
The man who answers the door at Mai’s house is in his fifties and wears a white T-shirt and khakis. It’s Mai’s husband, who has a Vietnamese name Phoebe can’t remember. Mai and Jackson
aren’t here. They’ve gone to the playground.
“Down the street?” Phoebe asks.
“The zoo.”
“I thought you said playground. She took him to the zoo?”
“Yes. She ask your husband and he says is fine.”
Phoebe is quiet. The woman took her son to the zoo. He’s never been to the zoo. She wanted to be the one to take her son to the zoo for the first time.
“She took him to the zoo” is the message she’s leaving on Nick’s voicemail. “Why does that make me sad? I wanted to take him for his first trip to the zoo.”
Nick doesn’t call, he texts. News flash: not his first trip to the zoo. Daddy took him. And he loved it.
55
The first house she sees is a three-bedroom Craftsman six blocks from the beach in Laguna. The rent is high and the enclosed backyard is modest but lush. From the master suite she can see palm trees, wires, and the ocean. She takes pictures of every room. This is it. She asks the agent what it will take to close today. She considers Nick’s sweaty cash and the leverage she’ll have with D&C as JW’s girl. Although the house is a rental and doesn’t make financial sense, securing it will drive the point home to JW: She’s moving to Laguna Beach, minutes from work. She is serious about D&C and ready to start now.
“How much?” she asks.
Rent is $3,950. Offers are in. The view from the second bedroom of the house, Jackson’s room: the ocean. The image in her mind: a white rocking chair by the window, Jackson on her lap, a story, watching sunsets that light up the room like some kind of golden dream.
D&C is all she types, attaches an image of the house from the street: this little yellow home off the ocean.
No response.
This is Laguna. They’re asking $3,950. Ten minutes from work. Thoughts?
Nothing.
Hmm . . . I love us.