The Stager: A Novel (32 page)

I ask my mom if the ground is going to swallow our house, and my mom says, “We should be so lucky.” When I ask her what she means she says, sorry, she was just making a bad joke. Then I ask her if Mademoiselle Shapiro is going to lose her job, and she says “Don’t be silly, Elsa,” but I don’t know why that’s silly. Then, when I ask if the boy in the box is going to be okay, she tells me the news is too gruesome for a child to be watching, and she asks the nurse to turn the channel. When the nurse says that’s not possible, my mom suggests I close my eyes and try to take a nap.

I try, but it’s impossible to take a nap with the other people in the waiting room talking and with the bright fluorescent lights. There are a lot of other distractions, too: like, the woman across from us is crying and moaning and rocking back and forth, and someone else is throwing up, leaning into the garbage can. Outside, I can hear ambulance sirens and then a helicopter. My dad wakes up every once in a while and starts talking, too. Twice he taps me on the shoulder and asks me if I have his spleen. My mom goes to the admitting desk to complain a few times, but the nurse says there’s just been a nine-car collision on the Beltway. My mom says she understands, but explains that we’ve been waiting to see a doctor for over three hours, and the nurse says, “People literally bleeding to death take priority over people who simply
think
they are bleeding to death.”

Finally, in the middle of a really interesting news story about the discovery, in Florida, of a dolphin with three extra fins, it’s my dad’s turn to see the doctor. I’m allowed to come in, because Nabila has gone out to get us food and my mom says she can’t leave me alone in the waiting room.

I watch the doctor listen to my dad’s heart and ask him a bunch of questions, and then he sticks a fat needle in his arm and draws blood. We all watch it snake through a plastic tube. Then, after another hour, the doctor says that my dad’s okay, all things considered, although he talks about cholesterol and weight and blood pressure and depression, but the doctor says what he really needs to do is go into rehab. My dad sits up and says, No! The problem is that he’s lost his spleen. The doctor says that’s impossible. My dad says he’s certain. They go back and forth about this for a while, and finally the doctor agrees to order up a sonogram, mumbling to the nurse something about malpractice and having to give in to the nutty patients sometimes. But this means we have to wait for the radiologist, who isn’t going to come in until 4:00 a.m., which is more than three hours away.

We wait what turns out to be more like five hours to discover that my dad still has his spleen. When the doctor tells him the good news, my dad says, “Thank God, I thought Dominique took it!”

“Who is this Dominique?” the doctor asks.

When my mother explains that Dominique is our missing and possibly dead pet rabbit, the doctor looks at her meaningfully and writes a prescription for something called Zanziflexxx. He suggests we stop at the pharmacy on the way home, and says to give my dad five of the green pills ASAP but to keep a close eye on him, because the side effects can be very intense and sometimes involve something called
disambiguation
. Also, he says to be sure to get the triple-
x
version, and not the double-
x
, since the double-
x
is for peptic ulcers, not for severe disorientation, and the two medications are frequently confused. Then he writes out the name of a psychiatrist on a different sheet of paper and says my mom should be sure my dad sees Dr. Benghazi, who is very good with this sort of thing, right away.

“What sort of thing, exactly?” my mom asks.

“Talking to animals, depression, missing internal organs, the whole shebang.”

*   *   *

AFTER WE STOP
at the pharmacy, I float a bunch of ideas to keep us from going home. I suggest we go out for breakfast to celebrate that my dad still has his spleen, but my mother just says, “That isn’t funny, Elsa. The open house is in two hours and I think we’d better stop home to make sure everything is in good order. Honestly, I don’t know what to do with your dad.”

“We could just tuck him into bed and hope the people looking at the house won’t notice him,” I say.

“Or we could get some things and go to a hotel,” Nabila says.

“Probably that’s best,” says my mom.

Home is the opposite of where I want to go, because I’m terrified about my mom finding the Stager in my bed. I can’t say why I feel like everything to do with the Stager is my fault—it’s not like I hired her to come into our house. Plus, I don’t want my mom to see the mess in my room. I try a couple more ideas, ranging from stopping at the grocery store (even though I’m now terrified of its being swallowed by a sinkhole) to going to 7-Eleven for Slurpees, but my mom says that in our family we don’t have Slurpees for breakfast, and that I should understand that my dad needs to get into bed.

*   *   *

TWO AMAZING THINGS
are going on in front of our house when we arrive: First, the door is finished. It is painted red, and is no longer streaky. This almost certainly means that the Stager is no longer asleep in my bed. Also, there’s a rabbit sitting on the front stoop.

“Dominique!” I shout. I try to open the car door once we stop in the driveway, but it’s locked. I bang on the window and tell my mom to hit the unlock switch, but she doesn’t listen. My dad leans forward, and it seems like he’s trying to say something, but he’s having trouble forming words. We’d given him the five Zanziflexxxes, and I guess they made him sleepy. I think he’s trying to say “Dominique,” too.

“All these rabbits look alike, you guys,” my mom says. “And Dominique has gone to rabbit heaven, remember?”

“
Dominique
,” says my dad, this time more clearly.

“Mom, you heard him. Open the door.”

“He might just be disambiguating,” Nabila says. “Remember what the doctor said about the medicine?”

“What’s ‘disambiguating’?” I ask.

“It’s the present participle of ‘disambiguate,’” Nabila explains.

“But what’s ‘disambiguate’?”

“I don’t know,” she replies, “but I see it on Wikipedia all the time.”

My mom finally turns off the ignition. “Don’t even think about going after the rabbit, Elsa. I’m warning you, I’m completely out of energy, and I can’t deal with any more drama.” She finally unlocks the doors. As we’re getting out, the rabbit hops away. I want to go after him; he looks exactly like Dominique, and if I had to guess, I’d say it really
is
Dominique, but I don’t dare. Besides, I’m genuinely concerned about my dad and this whole disambiguation thing.

“Why do you think my dad is disambiguating if you don’t know what it means?”

“Because the doctor said it might happen, right?”

“I know, but still … How do you spell it?” I tap it into my phone. “Here, I’ve got it: ‘In computational linguistics, word-sense disambiguation (WSD) is an open problem of natural language processing, which governs the process of identifying which sense of a word (i.e., meaning) is used in a sentence, when the word has multiple meanings. The solution to this problem impacts other computer-related writing, such as discourse, improving relevance of search engines, anaphora resolution, coherence, inference et cetera…’ That doesn’t sound like what my dad is doing,” I say.

“I think the doctor was suggesting that your dad might be having some double meanings.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“Like, maybe he’s splitting in two? Or something like that. It’s one of those words that sound good but no one really knows what they mean.”

“So why did the doctor say it’s a side effect?”

“I don’t know, darling. Maybe because then it covers a broader range of possible side effects? Or maybe because … Who knows? No one really pays attention to these things.”

*   *   *

WE ALL STARE
at the new red door before my mom turns the key in the lock. “It does look nice,” she says. “Don’t you think?”

We all agree. Even my dad.

“I must say,” my mom continues, “that’s a fabulous shade of red. It’s so … assertive! It’s like it’s saying, Buy me! Or even, Buy
me
! Why didn’t we think to paint it red while we were living here? Why do people always wait until they’re moving to make their homes look nice?” I start to tell my mom that she’s already asked that question but decide it’s probably better not to.

“Be careful of the paint, everyone,” she says as we go inside. “It looks wet.” As soon as we step into the foyer, I double over. I feel like I’m going to be sick. My mom and Nabila also begin to gag.

“Holy Mother of God,” my mother says. “I thought I smelled something foul yesterday, but it’s twice as bad now.”

“It’s true,” says Nabila. “I mean, I sort of thought there was something bad in the air the last few days, but I figured it was just the remnants of the first bad smell. Unless maybe it’s just that, once you leave for a while and then come back, it seems worse just because you’ve been away?”

“No,” says my mom, “I think it’s just metastasized. It’s sort of quadrupled in intensity since yesterday.” The Stager must have noticed it, too, because all of the windows in the living room are open. I wonder if she’s still here. I didn’t think to look to see if her car was on the street when we came in. I guess I was too distracted by the door and the rabbit.

“I don’t smell anything,” says my dad. He looks, and sounds, like he’s drunk. He’s swaying back and forth a little. “I need to lie down,” he says, and walks toward the stairs.

“I don’t know, Lars, why don’t you stay down here? I’ll go up and change and get some of your things. We can go to a hotel for the afternoon. You’ll be more comfortable.”

My dad ignores her and begins to climb, but he’s wobbly, so Nabila goes over and puts an arm around his waist. It looks like they are both going to fall backward, so my mom goes over and grabs him from the other side.

“It smells worse up here, I think,” Nabila says as they approach the second floor. They stop for a minute while my dad catches his breath.

“How long, once we figure out the source of the smell and remove it, will it take to clear the air?” my mom asks Nabila.

“I have no idea,” says Nabila.

“But in your experience?”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that. I’m not really experienced with smells. Is there some reason you think I’m a smell expert?”

“Jesus! Hold on to the bannister, Lars!”

My dad says something no one understands.

“Try enunciating, Lars,” my mom instructs.

He tries, but we still have no idea what he’s saying.

Everyone is in a really bad mood.

They move up, slowly, a few more steps, all three of them linked together. Now they’re on the landing just a few feet from my room, which is the absolute worst spot for them to be pausing. There’s no way my mom is not going to turn her head to look inside. When she does, she gasps.

“I would never have thought to put the bed there!” she says. “I mean, it’s completely counterintuitive, to move a bed to the center of the room, to make it ever so slightly askew like that. This Stager person is causing me massive anxiety—there’s definitely something unsettling about this situation, and I have a really bad feeling about this whole thing—but I’ll give her credit for knowing her stuff.”

I run up the stairs, relieved. I don’t know how she did it, but the Stager has fixed the mattress and made the bed, and she’s picked all of the doll food up off the floor and put it away, and she’s even changed the girls into normal clothing and cleared the soup and pie and kebobs and set out the tea service. Molly has a cookie on her plate, and Kaya has one in her hand, which is poised about an inch from her mouth. I want to help her eat it, but I don’t dare move.

Even the red footprints are gone. Everything looks pretty normal, except that there’s a gigantic rabbit painted directly on the wall. The rabbit is sitting in a red velvet wing chair, and it’s the most beautiful rabbit in a red velvet wing chair that I’ve seen in my life. My mom evidently disagrees.

“I take it back,” Mom says. “That woman is a complete menace. What is she thinking, defacing our home just before the open house? This is as bad as graffiti! I’m going to call Amanda Hoffstead, and I’m going to figure out who this woman is, and then I’m going to hunt her down and kill her!”

I run to my mom, throw my arms around her waist, and dig my head into her stomach, hard. “No, Mom! Please! Please don’t kill the Stager!”

THE STAGER

The brush is not quite fine enough, or, frankly, of the quality to which I’m accustomed, but it will have to do, because this rabbit needs a whisker revision. I let the girl take the first pass at this earlier, and held my tongue as she turned out whiskers as thick as pipe cleaners. Sad to say, but with that heavy hand, this is not a child destined for a future in the arts. Still, I gave her nothing but praise and encouragement. Had I been a mother, which I am not, I would have been a spoiler. I would have given my kids rewards for every just-missed field goal, for every atonal note, for every almost-A. Or so I like to think. I’m told that mothering wears a woman down, that ideals go by the wayside as you try to get through each day. But still. I told the girl her whiskers were the best whiskers I had ever seen, and she beamed.

Now that the child is gone—off somewhere with Nabila, I can only assume—it seems wrong to leave the rabbit this way when it’s within my power to make a quick, easy fix. Leaving those too-thick whiskers is like declining to tell a friend that she has something stuck in her teeth or that her zipper is down. After re-creating the whiskers, I begin to layer some depth into the rabbit’s tawny hide. The child resisted my suggestion that she add a bit more brown to the pool of paint she dumped, indelicately, onto the mixing tray; hence, the rabbit has come out looking too monotone. Ditto for the eyes, which the child had also made a thick, muddy brown, but which seemed to me more appropriately hazel—not that I am all that familiar, to be honest, with the color of a rabbit’s eye.