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.”
He’s standing over Nick with a thick arm draped on the roof of the car. Heat radiates from his heavy face, a rash on his left cheek. His hair is thinning and slicked back with sweat. The first time they met, Metzger felt compelled to inform Nick that he’s lived in his three-bedroom house for twelve years, longer than anyone on the block. Before the street was even paved, before the nine identical strips of asphalt and houses were thrown up, before everyone came scrambling in like the little ticks they are to suck the soil dry. There’s not enough water, he said, and his yellowing middle-aged eyes were glazed over. Welcome to the neighborhood. Nick promised they weren’t staying.
“Wanna bet?” He laughed and left.
Metzger’s dog and his wife both died in that house. Metzger had the dog stuffed, and it stands at the foot of the stairs by the front door. He also kept his wife’s body in their bed for four days before calling anyone. And that’s when Nick sees it: Whatever crawls along his shoulder is thick. Metzger brushes at it without looking, and Nick nods absently, waiting. Metzger finally sees it, pinches it, and holds it up in the light from his flashlight. It’s a cicada and it’s buzzing, trying to free itself. Metzger balls it up in his fist, turns, and hurls it into the blackness. He finds a brown shell on the lawn. “They’re everywhere. Look through it.” He holds it up and Nick sees the vertebrae, the eye sockets. “That split on the back, see it, that sliver, that’s where the little shits slither out.” He laughs and crushes the shell in his palm, dusts himself off. “Going to Kostya’s thing?”
“Wouldn’t miss it.”
Metzger’s shaking his head. “Neighborhood barbecue with this bunch. Now, that’s some shit I want to see.”
Nick grins, close to pulling away.
“I’m an OG!” Metzger yells, laughing, inexplicably using black Southern California slang.
Nick laughs out loud, pulls away, and then says to himself, “And I’m the new breed.”
He rolls past the dark and deserted house next door to Metzger’s: The family of four who inhabited it disappeared in the night four weeks ago, leaving behind most of their possessions. They were the first family to drop on Carousel Court. They slipped away before they were locked out or chased out. There would be more. Nick hopes one will be the man next door, suspects it might be the Mormons. He knows Phoebe wanted it to be their own house, to come home one night from ten hours in the car to find a U-Haul backed into the driveway, Nick and Kostya filling it. It wouldn’t matter where they were going, just that they were leaving. Nick knows it’s just as likely that Phoebe will come home to find the locks changed, a conspicuous Day-Glo orange notice on the door from the county sheriff’s department to match the young neighbor’s. It’s a matter of time, months or weeks, he doesn’t know. It requires only one or two late payments these days. It isn’t whether or not it will happen but what he can do that no one else has already thought of or tried, some way to bow out gracefully, his marriage and balls intact.
• •
Traffic is light on the wide streets leading out of Serenos. At a red light, Nick removes a worn black-leather pouch from the glove compartment, drops into it his multi-tool with the three-inch blade and a pair of heavy-duty pliers, and removes the pepper spray and a box cutter. He spent an hour last night on the back patio by the pool sipping Heinekens, a white towel at his feet, his tools aligned just so. With one of Jackson’s old cloth wipes and a small tin of Red Devil oil, he cleaned each of them. He heard nothing when he cleaned his tools: not the young neighbor playing his music too loud; not the plaintive wails of dogs (or were they coyotes?) from the barren hillsides; not the dry brush in the wind. A crowbar, bolt cutters, a multi-tool, and a short blade. He was some kind of benevolent failure. Or madman. He was a thirty-two-year-old college-educated father drowning his family in debt but energized by a simple prospect: proving to Phoebe that he alone, not a New York banker or some handsome young physician, was the winning play still.
4
Phoebe can barely hear the music coming from next door over the incessant chorus of cicadas as she walks around the house with Jackson held to her chest, turning on all the lights. Nick left for work an hour ago, his third night this week. The last two words from him as she closed and locked the door behind him and set the ADT were “Lights on.”
She carries Jackson and his clean laundry upstairs to his room. A CD of international children’s songs plays from his Bose box. Jack
son fills a Tonka truck with Matchbox cars while Phoebe hums along to his songs. She folds his size-2T shirts and shorts and places them neatly in his blue three-drawer dresser. The blinds are closed and the ceiling fan turns slowly as she arranges his books neatly on the shelf. She straightens a framed illustration from Where the Wild Things Are that hangs over his crib. She turns on the light and dims it. The room is bathed in orange light and peaceful as she sits on the plush beige carpeting with Jackson. Downstairs, the refrigerator hums, churns: a fresh batch of ice cubes. The LG stainless steel behemoth is restocked with organic raspberries, blueberries, kiwi, mangoes, and strawberries. Thick slices of bruschetta brushed with olive oil. She’ll eat both, one side rubbed with a cut garlic clove while it’s still hot, the way JW showed her once when he took her to a long lunch three months after she was hired at twenty-four, a perk and a leg up that she surely hadn’t earned yet.
All good? comes the text from Nick.
Fine
Is he sleeping?
Just now
You should see this place—insane
She doesn’t respond. She has nothing to say about whatever he encounters on the other side of the door, all these rotting five-bedroom corpses and their Bermuda grass, yellow from neglect.
• •
Before Nick left the house, he had her by the jaw. Something he’s done since their first weeks together, when he held it in bed, perched over her. “There’s something about you,” he’d say. It had a calming effect on her until recently, because now they’re thirty-two with a son and debt and tumbling down the face of something they never anticipated and the gesture sends all the wrong signals, draws attention to his limitations. Like a grandfather doing the same lame magic trick for the grandchild, who is a teenager now and bored, because that’s all he’s got. Tonight, when Nick was lacing up his boots, giving her instructions, she knew he was feeling guilty about leaving them alone again.
“Kostya and Marina are home.” The neighbors, who might be considered friends, were also in their early thirties, with two sons and a daughter, all somehow named after pickup trucks, Titan, Tundra, and she always forgot the third. “Call them, obviously . . .” Nick trailed off. “If anything happens.” His back to her, he sat on the stairs in the clean marble foyer. His voice echoed when he called out: “It’s Loma Linda. Maybe an hour from here.”
But Phoebe didn’t hear Nick because Jackson was awake again and wailing. He hadn’t slept through the night all summer, since they arrived in June. He knew something Nick and Phoebe only suspected. His fitfulness was an alarm they’d heed if they could. Phoebe was at the top of the double-ascending Couture by Sutton buttercream-carpeted spiral staircase. She was headed to their son’s powder-blue bedroom with its crown molding and accents of textured glow-in-the-dark galaxies of stars and moons. She turned and studied Nick, who had climbed back up the stairs, looking shorter than his six-foot frame when set against the sixteen-foot ceilings.
“You feel good,” he said as he gently massaged one of her breasts even though she held their son between them. “Really fucking good.”
She closed her eyes and rested her chin on his shoulder and exhaled. “Tired,” she said.
“When do you leave in the morning?”
“Early,” she said. “Maybe seven.”
“We’ll miss each other.”
“Again,” she said.
• •
Dirty dishes top off the kitchen sink, wet laundry clings to the inside walls of the washer, musty from neglect, forgotten last night or the night before. The landline never rings. They turned it off because all the calls are from lenders or collections and there’s no point in answering. The days are tough and grinding, long needles scraping bone.
It’s just past one A.M. In the upstairs bathroom, Phoebe swallows her last five milligrams of Klonopin because even curled up next to Jackson’s crib under her old comforter with his night-lights and hushed breathing, she couldn’t sleep. The pillbox she keeps in the Explorer (they drove to North Hollywood to pick it up the day before, a new battery installed) is empty. So, too, is the bottle in the bathroom vanity.
Did you take my klonopin? That’s the text she sends Nick.
There’s no immediate response.
She studies herself in their sweeping vintage Astoria pivot mirror, finds a single long silver hair, and pulls it from her scalp. Nick’s right: She’s too thin. And the thinner she gets, the older she looks. She runs her fingers lightly along her collarbone, then smiles weakly at herself, full dry lips and almond-shaped eyes and eyebrows that Nick traces with his thumb when they’re getting along.
The vibration is her iPhone.
No. You finished them. You just lost track. You’re not paying attention.
While she tries to think of a response, he writes:
Again, Phoebe.
She possesses an ability now, since the move, if not months before, to tune him out. Nick playing the role of concerned, engaged husband, her partner, looking out for her well-being: Watch yourself, careful, keep an eye on this because these are serious drugs. Want another reason why? Run your finger along the raised pink scar on Jackson’s scalp.
What Nick doesn’t know, what he can’t possibly grasp, is the interaction with the second glass of wine or the Maker’s Mark she sneaks in the afternoons when she finds herself home, skipping appointments while he works, wandering their bloated new-construction house, considering picking up Jackson’s toys, then deciding that their presence, scattered across the plush carpet and glass coffee table, gives the place warmth. She lazily undresses, runs a bath, places the bottle of Maker’s Mark on the cool tile floor.
And tonight, even with the low dosage, she has enough in her system to effectively complement the Maker’s Mark. She wipes condensation from the face of her iPhone, taps out another message to Nick after sliding into hot water.
Do you know how comfortable I am right now, Nick? This very instant?
Klonopin cocktails don’t go well with warm late-night baths.
I’m not trying to hide it.
As evidenced by the empty little MM bottles in the recycling bin.
Eco-friendly ;)
Careful Phoebe
Afraid I’ll go under?
Afraid you’ll want to.
Nick is also right when he prods her about work. She is slipping. The allergy and anxiety products she’s been selling for GSK are the same she sold for four years back east. Now she follows the GPS directions to medical office campuses and hospitals from Santa Ana to North Hollywood. She’s been back at it since they arrived, makes only some of her appointments, rarely tends to her cold-call list, occasionally dropping in to the doctor’s offices with her sample case and sales pitch, flat and without conviction. She makes the appearance, reads the script she’s memorized, leaves the office before the physician’s second glance at her legs. She’s doing enough to stay employed, barely, the handsome young physician she courted recently a unique exception.
What she also does is linger in the produce section at Whole Foods, watching brown men in black aprons thoughtfully arrange and tend to red, gold, and deep-green vegetables. Whole Foods trips trigger a uniquely intoxicating blend of adrenaline rush and sedation. Or maybe it’s the Klonopin. Or both. Since the move here, she’s learned that the fine mist showering the mustard greens, arugula, and summer squash is on a forty-second cycle—ten seconds on, thirty seconds off. Lentils, red beans, omega-3–enriched milk, brown rice, and kale: It is all there, aisles of superfoods, a road map to cultivate the healthiest child on the planet. Jackson deserves nothing less. On that much, she and Nick agree.
She’ll come home with too many organic red bell peppers, asparagus shoots. They can’t afford the food, don’t even always cook it. She’ll throw out the same bunches of kale and broccoli, never getting around to steaming them. Her attempt last Sunday at fennel with lee
ks, roasted red peppers, marinated feta, and Greek olives was a disaster, stuffed down the garbage disposal before Nick got home.
The down comforter is from the master bedroom, the same comforter they’ve had since they moved in together eight years ago. The faded stains are spilled wine and soy sauce. She clings to it like a child. She curls up with an oversize blue pillow next to Jackson’s crib and stares at her iPhone, listening to her son’s fitful breathing. She sends a message to Marina, apologizing for blowing off shopping the other day, and asks if she’s going to the playground this weekend and if they’re still on for Desperate Housewives Sunday night. The response is immediate.
Hell Yes, girlfriend! Juicy Couture. U like?
The image is of Marina: pouty, too tan, bleached blond, with her wide forehead and bright red lipstick and pale blue eyes. She wears a too-low-cut camisole, her swollen breasts spilling out.
Hot, Phoebe lies.
ciao, skinny thing
Nick’s right about her losing weight. But Nick’s wrong, too. She does not obsess about what didn’t happen. Of course, she considers where they were supposed to be instead of Carousel Court. After Jackson’s asleep and Nick is working or knocked out upstairs or on the patio throwing rocks at shadows on the dry hillside behind the house or walking the block playing vigilante, she spends idle hours Googling Redondo and Hermosa Beach and child-friendly restaurants and playgrounds within walking distance of where they’d planned to live.