The Stager: A Novel (8 page)

And the pig that I love is gone! The naked starving person/pregnant lady/African statue, too! The bowl of tulips is still there, but it’s alone, so now there is no cluster of three. For almost my entire life, there has been the green table and the pig and a vase of flowers (but not always tulips), the naked starving person, and then, since last year, the famous yellow painting, and now it’s all gone.

Also, the kitchen is all wrong. Everything has disappeared. All of the pictures on the refrigerator—me at the beach with my cousins from Sweden, and the schedule that tells me when I have field-hockey practice, and my last report card. I look at the counter and can see that my dad’s coffeemakers are all gone, too. Even the toaster has disappeared. Suddenly I love and miss my toaster and I want to have a Pop-Tart for my after-school snack, but how can I do that without a toaster? I think I’m going to cry again, which is really ridiculous, so I decide that instead of crying I will just fix this situation. I open the cabinet and find the toaster, which has the cord wrapped around it neatly. I put it back on the counter, unwind the cord, and plug it in. Then I open all of the cabinets until I find the coffeemakers, and I put those back out, too. Once everything is where it belongs, I climb onto the counter and stand up so I can reach the higher shelves. I begin to look for Pop-Tarts, but everything is in the wrong place now—all the cereal boxes are on their sides instead of standing straight up, and the cans of tuna are stacked one on top of another—and I can’t find anything.

I hear someone enter the kitchen and turn to see the Stager passing through on her way to the basement. She has the can of paint in one hand, and holds the brush over it, to catch the drips.

“Hi, Elsa,” she says, but she doesn’t stop to talk to me, or ask how my day’s been. She doesn’t even comment about me standing on the counter with my muddy field-hockey cleats on, or about the coffeemakers and the toaster being back out again.

“Hey, why are you painting the door white?” I yell to her as she walks down the stairs. “And why are you going downstairs?”

“I’m painting the door red,” she says.

“But it’s white!”

“That’s the primer. You have to put a coat of primer on to get it ready for the new paint. Also, it will help cover up the black.”

“Oh.” I don’t really understand why you’d put white on black before putting on red, or why you’d even put red on in the first place when the black looked perfectly good.

“After it dries, I’ll start layering on the red. I’m just going downstairs to wash the brush in the laundry-room sink.”

“But why?”

“Because it’s full of paint.”

“No, I mean why red?”

“Oh, it’s just another staging thing. Mostly because it’s a cheerful color. It’s eye-catching, it has curb appeal. But there’s some symbolism, from what I’ve read. In some cultures—maybe Ireland?—it actually means the mortgage has been paid and the house is owned free and clear. And in feng shui it means stability and fortunate rest inside.”

She’s halfway down the stairs now, and I want to keep her from disappearing into the basement.

“What’s feng shui?”

“Oh, just some Eastern-religion design thing.”

“Do you know if we have any Pop-Tarts?”

“I don’t know, darling. Ask Nabila. I’m sorry, but I really need to get back to work. There’s a lot left to do, plus I have another appointment later today, so I’m in a bit of a rush.”

I wonder if her other appointment has to do with Vince and the loft. I wonder, too, if it involves another girl, maybe one who likes to run laps at field-hockey practice or who has a better collection of American Girl dolls. I ask her who Vince is, but she doesn’t answer, so I shout another question. “Hey, what did you do with the pig and the naked starving person?” But she’s already all the way downstairs, and I can hear the water running in the sink in the utility room.

*   *   *

I KNOW WE
have Pop-Tarts, somewhere, so I take everything out of the cabinet to see if they’re way in the back. The counter is getting crowded with food, and a box of crackers falls to the floor. Looking at all this food is making me hungry. I think maybe I should stop trying to find the Pop-Tarts and just eat the crackers, or maybe have a bowl of Froot Loops, but I’ve already taken the toaster out and feel weirdly like I need to use it, so I keep looking. There’s a lot of ramen soup, like almost a hundred packages, but I don’t particularly like ramen soup. None of us really do, but my mom says she keeps it for emergencies.

Maybe the Pop-Tarts are on the very top shelf? Even standing on my tiptoes on the kitchen counter, I can’t see what’s all the way up there, but I can reach it with my hand, so I just start pulling stuff down, and some of it’s heavy, like the bag of flour that falls, almost knocking me down. It splits open, and there’s flour everywhere. Still no Pop-Tarts.

Nabila comes into the room and stares at me.

“What in the world are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m looking for a Pop-Tart.”

“A what?”

“You know, a thing you put in the toaster and eat for a snack. Or for breakfast, maybe. They have different kinds, like chocolate, or strawberry, or ones with sprinkles … I know we have some. I know we used to…”

“My God, Elsa. What are we going to do with you?” She opens the freezer door and pulls out a box of Hot Pockets.

“No, silly!” I find this hilarious, confusing Pop-Tarts and Hot Pockets, and I start to laugh, but now Nabila is clearly furious, and I feel bad, since where she comes from not only do they have scrawny rabbits, but they apparently don’t have Pop-Tarts, either. I realize that I don’t even know what country she’s from, but this doesn’t seem like the best time to ask.

“Look at this mess you’ve made!”

“It’s not my fault,” I say, even though it is, sort of, although if someone had put the Pop-Tarts where they belonged and closed the bag of flour properly this wouldn’t have happened. There’s white powder pretty much everywhere.

“What’s gotten into you, girl?” Nabila asks. “I’ve been with you for almost a year now and I’ve never seen you behave like this.”

“I’m not behaving like anything. I just want a Pop-Tart. Why is everyone being so mean to me?”

“Okay, I get it. Your mum and dad are away, and that’s tough. I understand that myself. I haven’t seen my own mum in two years. Also, this moving stuff is very hard. Maybe you’re upset because the lady is changing everything around here. Your mum explained this to me.”

“What about your dad?”

“What about my dad?”

“Why don’t you miss your dad?”

“Well, I do, darling, but he’s been gone six years.”

“Gone where?”

“Gone. Gone.”

“Did he have cancer?”

“No. The warlord came to our village and…”

Now I burst into tears.

“Oh no, darling. I understand, I really do. On top of everything going on, your mom said you might be getting a little moody, between the move and your body growing so fast.”

“I am
not
moody!” But maybe I’m a little moody. And it makes me even moodier to think of my mother and Nabila talking about my body. But really what makes me cry is the word “warlord.”

“Oh no, Elsa, please don’t cry. You’re such a big girl. Your mum will be home at the end of the week, and probably she’ll bring you a present. And she said the new house is so nice, you’ll have a lovely big room all to yourself, and a pretty garden…”

“I already saw a picture of my new room and I don’t like it. And I already have a lovely big room all to myself, here. And we won’t have a pool. And there’s a stupid stone rabbit in front of the house that’s going to make me think of Dominique every time I see it. And I don’t miss my mom, so I don’t know why you’re talking about her. I’m crying because…”

“Elsa.” She comes over and puts her arms around me, but I push her away. She looks startled, like she might cry herself. “I don’t even know what to say to you anymore, Elsa.”

“Don’t worry, Nabila, it’s not your problem. I’m going to clean this up and do my homework. I’m just going to go downstairs to get the vacuum.” But I’m not really going downstairs to get the vacuum. I’m going downstairs to find the Stager, even though it occurs to me that it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to try to make Nabila happy, to just go get the vacuum and clean up the mess.

On my way to the utility room, I pass by Nabila’s room. She’s left the light on, and when I look inside I remember how small and dark it is in here. She doesn’t even have a closet, so her clothes are either piled neatly in stacks on the floor, or hanging from a rack. We have two empty bedrooms upstairs, and I wonder why she doesn’t just move into one of those.

Her bed is unmade, a wet towel is lying on the floor, and her jeans are crumpled on the chair. I decide to do something nice for her to make up for being so mean, so I clean up a bit. First I make her bed, then I pick up the wet towel and put it on the hook behind her door, and then I pick up the jeans, which are perfect; they’re just the right color of faded denim. They’re so long that when I hold them up they’re almost as tall as me. When I begin to fold them, something falls out of the pocket.

It looks like a baggie full of smashed-up leaves, or maybe even tea, which is what I think it is at first, until the word “marijuana” pops into my head from the unit we did at school on “harmful narcotics,” which was right after the unit on “stranger danger.” It seems pretty unlikely to me that Nabila would do any harmful narcotics, since she’s always talking about being healthy and eating fruits and vegetables. She’s become friends with the guy who works across the street, at the farmstand in front of Unfurlings, and she’s even convinced my mom that it’s better to buy the vegetables there than in the grocery store because they don’t use pesticides. I open the baggie and smell the leaves, but I don’t know what marijuana is supposed to smell like, so this doesn’t help.

Someone knocks on the back door. I hear the Stager open it, and she starts talking to a man. Then I hear another voice, and then another, and then Nabila comes downstairs to see what’s going on, and all of a sudden there are three men in the basement, carrying equipment. I don’t know who they are, but one of them has a video camera that says “HGTV” on the side, and he’s standing outside Nabila’s door, talking into a microphone.

“And now we journey to the leafy suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, located just outside Washington, D.C.
Forbes
magazine has named Bethesda one of the most affluent and highly educated communities in the country. CNNMoney has listed it first on top-earning American towns, and, most intriguingly,
Total Beauty
has ranked it
first
—and, yes, I did say
first
, ladies and gentlemen—on its list of the country’s Top Ten Hottest Guy Cities … This is of course a nice segue into the home of a celebrity couple who wish to remain anonymous, which is why they have chosen to live in relative obscurity in a tony enclave of million-dollar-plus homes known as The Flanders…”

The camera is pointed at me, and I cling to the baggie, terrified that I’ve just been caught on camera snooping
and
holding drugs.

I stuff the bag of leaves in my pocket and squeeze past the HGTV people into the main part of the basement, where the door leads out to the pool. A blur of white races across the garden and squeezes under the fence. The next thing I know, I’m outside, where it’s raining, with a bag of smashed-up leaves in my pocket, chasing after a rabbit that might or might not be Dominique.

LARS

Bella is in the middle of another important dinner when she learns that Elsa is missing.

We had originally planned to make this our big London date night, to dine at some five-star fusion restaurant in Soho she’d heard about from a colleague, but then she remembered that she had a work-related “thing.” This is not atypical Bella behavior. Sometimes when we have plans, her memory is jogged at the last minute by a chirp of the calendar function on her phone, other times by a flip through her pocket diary. Another method involves smacking herself on the side of the head as she recalls suddenly that she has another obligation. Last night it was dinner with Luxum’s CEO; the night before, drinks with the outside counsel in from Frankfurt. Tonight is the marquee event, an expensively catered welcome-to-London-I’m-the-face-of-Transparency-at-Luxum-International dinner with various dignitaries, celebrities, and big-time investors. How one forgets about this until an hour prior to the event is something that eludes me.

And there she is, seated between the visiting prime minister of Kazakhstan—or maybe Kyrgyzstan (I am reasonably well traveled, but my experience is confined to places where I have either lived, played tennis, or vacationed)—and the boozed-up American ambassador, who seems to be hitting on her.

Bella can see on her phone, which she pulls discreetly from her jacket pocket a couple of times as it vibrates, that she’s missed several calls from home. (This is where I begin to understand what I was beginning to understand back in the hotel room when I could hear her talking on the phone even though maybe I could not. I have a working theory about why this is possible, but I’d like to string it out a few paragraphs longer to be certain it is true.)

Bella is beginning to worry, but not overtly. Right now it’s just a low-grade worry, the equivalent of a dull toothache. She tells herself that it’s probably just Elsa calling with more field-hockey shenanigans; the coach has already e-mailed us to say that we need to meet to discuss the problem of our daughter when we return. Or maybe there’s simply a homework-related question, or the violin teacher needs her check, which Bella now realizes she has forgotten to write, or perhaps there’s some update on the Dominique situation. Then Bella’s assistant comes in, a stunning young woman of South Asian descent. (Might I note, perhaps irrelevantly, that Bella’s assistants are always lovely? If I had to speculate, I’d say this is her way of demonstrating that she is confident enough in her own skin to surround herself with beauty.) She taps my wife on the shoulder to tell her that her estate agent from the States is on the phone, and that, unable to reach Bella by cell, she’s called the office directly to report a real-estate emergency.