Joe McGinniss Jr. - Carousel Court

“Houses,” he says to Phoebe. “I know where they are. They’re all sitting empty and clean, and there are too many for the banks to track.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Nick.”

“It’s a disaster out here. No one’s in charge. I can put people in these houses, and we can get something going.”

“Renting vacant houses? Just so we’re clear. That’s your idea?”

“How badly do you want to get off of Carousel Court?”

• •

Nick had called the number from the orange flier the same day he tore it from the wall. EverythingMustGo! was the name of the company, but the voice that picked up just said, “Yeah.” When Nick said why he was calling, the voice started firing questions: Was he in shape? Yes. Did he have his own transportation? Yes. From? Boston. Did he know the area? Not yet. Education level? College graduate. That slowed things down, the answer unexpected, and the rest of the responses led to a half-hour meeting at a diner in Chino Hills, where the questions continued.

“Why do you need this job?” the boss asked him.

Then: “When you stumble on a corpse in some bedroom, will you pull the diamond ring from the finger?”

Nick stared at him. There was nothing to say.

“Messing with you.” The man laughed. “What did you do in Boston?”

“Film production.”

“You can’t find that out here?”

“Had an offer that fell through. And now no one’s hiring.”

“That’s for sure.”

“But you are,” Nick said.

“I am.”

The man, for some reason, studied Nick’s résumé, seemed genuinely interested in if not impressed by Nick’s background, and peppered him with more questions, none of which had anything to do with the job. Nick told the man about his trip to New Orleans after Katrina, when he’d driven down to document the aftermath, pitch to cable networks, piece together a documentary short. As he showed the man his driver’s license and a pay stub from his last job, Nick studied the thin gold chain and shaved fat head of the man his employees called “Boss” and wondered what other angles the man was playing and how soon Nick could find his own. The world around them was sliding into the sea, furnished houses left behind in the dark of night. Everything was folding in on itself, yet Boss wore a soft pink polo shirt with his collar up and Ray-Bans and a fresh cigar he lit only when he started the ignition of his white convertible Lexus and said, “Welcome aboard. Have a hunch you’ll do well here.” It took under three months for Nick to earn the promotion to crew chief.

“You married?” Boss had asked him that warm spring morning in Chino Hills.

“Six years,” Nick said without hesitation. He sipped his coffee, which was cold. The man stabbed a greasy sausage link with a fork and, without looking up, said: “She scared yet?” The question caught Nick off guard. Its precision cut like the sharp edge of the dry palm fronds that scraped Jackson’s bedroom windows at night.

• •

Nick races by a refinery he can’t see, breathes in the warm, oily air that whips through the Subaru. He smells his fingers. It’s not the refinery, it’s him — the Red Devil he used to clean his tools, a task of questionable utility aside from its meditative qualities. It helped him slip into character, readying himself for whatever awaited them inside the dead house in the darkness. Nick keeps the windows down so he can hear whether or not the rattle is getting louder.

Before he left their house on Carousel Court for the overnight job, he shot a look through the foyer window: the orange military-style tent on Metzger’s lawn; the lighting he helped Kostya install along the front of his house; and the feeling that no amount of security devices could undo what was done, or worse, prevent what was to come. Jackson squirmed and giggled between him and Phoebe; a game, Mommy and Daddy closing in around him before Daddy headed out for the night. That was when Nick brushed Phoebe’s strong jaw. He could have squeezed it until it cracked, but what good would that do? He’d rather hold it, marvel at its bold lines and angles, the faded little scar on her chin, the perfect symmetry of her face. Hers is a face people steal when they create fake online profiles. They actually found her face on three social media accounts. (She deactivated, then reactivated, then deactivated her own account when they arrived in Serenos.) Hers is a face that sells Advair to physicians who don’t need it. A face that deserves granite countertops and recessed lighting and the excess of rooms that require designers to come up with new names like “double-bonus room.” Boss likes him. Nick thinks he’ll have this gig as long as he wants. What he can’t wrap his mind around, what he dreads: facing her in the quietest hours of the night when he’s the reason she can’t sleep.

Phoebe stands on the hot pavement, drinking a cold Fiji water. The sun is a blistering yolk. Phoebe will be in the San Fernando Valley all day. She looks up when a helicopter roars overhead, too low, giving chase. She finds the sun, which momentarily blinds her. Her eyes adjust as an impossibly thin blond woman in tennis whites and sunglasses pushes two bleached-blond Ethiopian kids effortlessly across the black asphalt in a Bugaboo Cameleon double stroller, two thousand minimum, Phoebe thinks.

Nick bought them a Bugaboo last year, spending money they didn’t have and wouldn’t earn anytime soon, and she was fourteen pounds overweight and spent every weekend in her purple sweatshirt, and the living room was a disaster and this thousand-dollar stroller they didn’t need and couldn’t afford sat there like part of some kind of disdainful Puzzle Time quiz on Nick Jr.: Which of the objects in this room is laughably out of place?

The small Korean woman massaging Phoebe’s feet in warm water is completely silent. The nail salon is nearly empty. Phoebe turns off her iPhone, closes her eyes, and tries to sleep behind her sunglasses.

Back in the car, the air-conditioning dries her French manicure. She’s spent five hundred hours in the company Explorer. The mileage reads 10,303. It read 789 the day in June when Nick drove her to North Hollywood in the dirty Subaru to pick it up. They spoke six words to each other that morning:

“You missed the exit,” she said.

“Fuck me.”

It’s the middle of August now. She inherited all of her clients from a rep whose job she got when the other woman quit to spend more time with her three-year-old daughter. The colleague reminded Phoebe that with so many hours in the car, she should have a second agenda, some other project to fill the hours. In the Notes app on her iPhone, stuck in traffic, the woman wrote a children’s book about a boy who ate his blanket and it turned into a cape, as well as a treatment and three episodes of a TV series about a young professional mother whose daughter was dropped on her head as a newborn and now speaks only Japanese, despite being raised by white people and having a Salvadoran nanny. It’s a comedy, she explained. Phoebe insisted she had enough to keep her busy, but the woman pressed the point: Be damn sure, because five years can slip through your fingers.

More Starbucks and Krispy Kremes for the office staff. Phoebe can do more of what she did back east. More explicit pics for the docs sent from the Bebe dressing room. But she can’t bring herself to drive two more hours to a few more offices to fill bins in sample closets and make nice with moody office managers to get a few minutes in the office of a new doc who simply doesn’t need what she’s selling. A year ago she was Diamond Status: ten-thousand-dollar bonus (over three months’ rent) and a four-day cruise to the Bahamas that she gave to her mother who never did use it. Now she’s slipping. She’s unranked. Her bonus this year if nothing changes: a navy GSK fleece pullover, bathrobe, and slippers.