Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

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.