Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

She unmutes and checks her iPhone. There are texts and a missed call from Nick.

“Tell me again,” she says.

“Tell you what?” the doctor asks.

“To give myself a break.”

“Do you really need one?”

She laughs. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“Are you a danger to people? To yourself?”

“You sound like my husband.”

“You’re a stellar rep, Phoebe. Best I’ve seen today.”

“We do it right at GSK.” She winks at him.

“They give you those lines?” he asks, laughing.

“Drilled in. The Blue Army. We’ve always got your back.”

As she passes through the doorway, for no reason that makes any sense to Phoebe, the doctor says in a clinical voice that is so unsettling to her that she freezes: “Be careful out there.”

Phoebe keeps her back to him, slowly pulls the door closed behind her, walks to the elevator, and presses the button. Then presses it again.

She steps onto the elevator. The doors close. She presses a clean, raised circular steel button: double L. Your Life Starts Now . That’s the headline of an osteoarthritis prescription-drug advertisement on the wall. A grinning silver-haired couple cut through a sun-drenched landscape on matching red bicycles. The elevator drops. We won’t grow old together. She can’t picture it. She can’t see Nick losing his hair, gaining weight, swallowing more pills, medication she’ll remind him to take, that he’ll always ask her about: as though these past four miserable years spent peddling GSK pharmaceuticals make her an authority on his physiology. They already sleep in separate beds. Nick ends up on the red IKEA couch in Jackson’s room. He says it’s because of their different schedules; he doesn’t want to disturb her sleep. They’ve stopped having sex. They avoid the topic altogether. She knows this about Nick: He carries the burden of this failure, this home that is crushing them, and will until he’s stooped and broken.

The elevator shudders, picks up speed.

Phoebe considers another path. A way out of debt and away from Carousel Court and nights spent curled up sleepless next to Jackson’s crib listening for shattering glass and footsteps, the next home invasion. Debt and routine and down and down. She sees white Adirondack chairs and chocolate purebred Labradors and a thick lush lawn adorned with children’s toys, short drives to school and smiling teachers and Jackson’s bright eyes and a little wave good-bye and the swell of emotion, and her eyes well up thinking about hot yoga and a call from Nick about a babysitter because they have dinner plans.

Your Life Starts Now . The silver-haired couple is rotting from the inside out: brittle bones and failing organs. If heart failure from too much of the pharmaceutical cocktail doesn’t kill them, the corrosive regret and denial will.

It’s all a fraud. She gets that. They bought the stock at just the wrong time, long after the private-equity investors pocketed their profits. That’s why she sees their situation the way she does now. She’s made her choice. Her insides free-fall. The rush of blood to her head as the swift movement of the elevator eases, gently delivers her to the lower lobby.

The doors open. She nearly grins at the inevitability: This was always going to be the resolution, if not the answer. She’s not twenty-six this time. Unlike then, there is no emotion, no adolescent longing or lust for some other glossy life. Now she has Jackson, Nick, a need to be addressed directly and with conviction.

She shoulders open the tall glass door and leaves the cool, shimmering office building. Ripples of heat rise from the black asphalt. The parking lot is a field of smoldering briquettes and she’s walking through it.

Phoebe’s Explorer, her company car, won’t start. She turns it over again and again and gets no response. Red lights flash. A crude clicking sound. This happened before. She left the iPod charging and drained the battery. It needs a jump. In the parking lot, she sits in the driver’s seat, door open, hot.

She can call AAA or just ask someone for help. There’s a frozen-yogurt place and a Panda Express in the strip mall across the street. She can wait there until help arrives. That’s when she sees the young man with thick arms and a white T-shirt and jeans, a clear blue jug of water on his shoulder. He’s sweating through his shirt and keeps his head up and a pleasant expression on his face, aviator glasses and tattoos wrapped around both arms.

• •

The second time Nick took her out, they were both twenty-four and living in separate parquet-floor efficiencies. He showed up at her building early and she was late. It was the hottest day of the year and he was talking to her short Thai neighbor, a mother of three who lived on the sixth floor. Nick held an enormous jug of water on his shoulder and some daisies in his other hand. The elevator in the building had been broken for a week and the Thai woman had two babies in a stroller. The water was hers, three more jugs on the sidewalk. He didn’t notice Phoebe halfway down the block, watching. He was like Benicio in Traffic, she thought. Hot. Jeans and sweating through his pale blue button-down shirt. And the flowers. Come on. And maybe he knew, but none of it felt contrived with Nick. Four trips up and down the five flights of stairs. Neither could Nick mask his excitement when he discovered the oldest of the Thai kids was some kind of ice-hockey prodigy. He decided he’d document the kid’s life and budding career like a Thai hockey version of Hoop Dreams . He wondered aloud to Phoebe if he should submit the finished project to festivals, maybe pitch it to PBS. She not only said he should, she would eventually make him a list of other potential outlets and producers with their contact information, as well as a list of five agencies she thought he should query.

When he got a call back from a producer at the Boston PBS affiliate about the forty-four-minute final product (which ended with the Thai kid getting kicked off the team for drug use, becoming a small-time dealer, then getting locked up for knocking out his pregnant girlfriend, the last scene with the mother visiting the incarcerated hockey prodigy in jail, introducing his infant son to him) Nick chalked it up to good fortune. “Their pain, my gain.”

“You made this happen,” she said. “You could have blown her off.”

“Instead I just exploited the woman.”

“It’s called ambition.”

“I was trying to impress you.”

• •

Phoebe sends a text to Nick: Need you

The way she taps it out is casual, and she almost adds a smiling emoticon to soften it, because he’ll read it differently. A command, demanding. Like calling up from the kitchen on a Saturday morning when he’s still in bed, drained from work. She’s agitated, Jackson’s cranky, dishes are piled up like their debt, and someone has to take the car in, the rattling from underneath is getting louder and nothing is going as planned, and she’ll call out his name and add “I need you.”

That’s how he’ll read it.

When he shows up, he brings her iced coffee, which she doesn’t need or want.

She thanks him, sips it, and puts it down. She’s peeking in the rearview and side mirror, eyeing the office entrance, suddenly aware of their filthy Subaru that rattles, even when idling. “It’s getting louder.”

Nick is rubbing his eyes, not really listening.

“Should we stay with it?” He means the Explorer.

“Hell with it. Let’s just go,” she says.

“Can’t jump it if we’re not here.”

“Let them figure out how to get me a car that works.” She puts the keys under the floor mat, the doors unlocked. “We’re not sitting in a parking lot waiting for a tow.”