The Stager: A Novel Read online

  “I’m sure I told you—a friend of a friend is a producer for a cable station that does reality shows about real estate. They’re doing a piece on Unfurlings. How the foreclosure has impacted real-estate prices throughout the surrounding region. And then, when they realized this was your house—well, not just you, but you and Lars—well, you know, the whole celebrity angle, not that you are actually celebrity celebrity, but in Washington, well, even the Salahis are celebrities.”

  “Okay, thanks, Amanda. I’m not sure I have any idea where to begin deconstructing the string of insults there, but the headline is that we never had a conversation about a camera crew coming into the house, and I would never, not in a million years, have been okay with that. I want them out of the house immediately. Do you hear me? Let me talk to Nabila right now!”

  “I’m sorry you don’t remember that conversation, Bella. I have it here in my notes.”

  “In your notes? Just because you made notes doesn’t mean we had a conversation.”

  “Actually, it does. I’m a very organized person.”

  “So am I. Let me speak to Nabila.”

  “Well, if we can back up a minute, that’s why I called. I don’t know where Nabila is.”

  “Where’s Elsa?”

  “No idea. That’s why I called. The doors are open and no one is here.”

  “Is anything gone? I mean, does it look like someone broke in? Where’s that Stager person I keep hearing about?”

  “Gone. No one’s here. Just the camera crew, as I already explained. I don’t think anyone broke in, although in the kitchen—well, it’s odd, there’s food all over the floor, and it’s a complete mess. And then, I’m not sure if this is related, but your garden is sort of a mess, too, like some animal dug up a bunch of the tulips and daffodils. Probably it’s just those rabbits again, but it almost looks like the garden was vandalized. Some of the flowers look … beheaded. Do you think someone might have done this deliberately? Do you have any problems with your neighbors, or is there some grievance with someone at work? Or, forgive me for asking, but there are a lot of angry Luxum investors out there; do any of them know where you live? The open house is Sunday, and I’m going to have to get a landscaper over here ASAP. I mean, I’m not even sure if I can get someone in on time. It’s Wednesday afternoon already, for God’s sake. It’s going to be expensive. Also, and I hate to tell you this, the smell, which I thought we’d resolved, well, it’s back. It’s different but it’s back. It kind of comes and goes. It’s hard to figure.”

  “I thought that Stager woman had fixed this.”

  “Well, she had. As I said, it’s hard to figure. We can’t seem to isolate where it’s coming from, and sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not. We’re working on it.”

  “Okay, more to the point, I can’t tell from your report whether we should be worried about Elsa. It sounds like they might have all just gone off somewhere, right? Or does this seem suspicious somehow? How long have they been gone? Should we call the police?”

  “Definitely not. It’s bad karma to call the police before an open house. It’ll get people talking—they’ll think there’s a curse on the house. Remember that house in Rockville where they found a dead body in the garage during an open house? Come to think of it, there was a bad smell in that house, too.”

  “For the love of God, Amanda, why would you say that?”

  Bella sort of shrieks that last part, and her beleaguered assistant, Vishnupriya or Priyavishnu, who is being forced to work late to oversee this dinner, still droning on upstairs, comes running into the office. “Everything okay, ma’am?”

  Bella nods to VP/PV, but the assistant remains frozen at her door.

  Then, suddenly, I can hear Elsa and Nabila in the background, and then the disconnection of the phone. Bella redials repeatedly, to no avail. She texts a “SOCKS!!!” message, takes the elevator back to the twenty-fifth floor, and returns to the table just in time for the second course, which looks, and smells, like overcooked fish.

  ELSA

  Nabila makes me write a list of the things I did wrong.

  1. I went into a stranger’s house (even though she was very nice and was only trying to help me).

  2. I ate her food (even though I was very hungry because we had no Pop-Tarts, and she was baking these delicious little cupcakes called fairy cakes).

  Nabila isn’t happy with this list. I’m supposed to work on it more, add other things, like running off without telling anyone where I was going, and messing up the kitchen and spilling the flour, and not cleaning up the doll stuff, and refusing to run laps at school. Probably I should add that I still have Nabila’s bag of mashed-up leaves in my pocket, but she hasn’t noticed it’s missing yet, and I definitely don’t want to bring it up.

  Just like in that movie Groundhog Day, where the same thing happens over and over and over, I’m walking through the basement on my way to get the vacuum, since part of my punishment is to clean up the kitchen floor, when something catches my eye, a white blur racing through the garden, and I’m pretty sure, again, that it’s Dominique. I have my hand on the latch and I’m about to open the door, but then I hesitate—I’m not supposed to leave the house, not even to go into the garden.

  Still, I think about it and decide that if I get in trouble again for trying to catch Dominique, which is actually the right and even morally correct thing to do, I’ll just recalibrate and go back to Unfurlings. I met a wonderful family there, a lady named Marta, who has seven-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and she told me to come back anytime. I wonder if I could just move in with them and stay forever. Then I wouldn’t have to go to London.

  I’m still staring out the window, my hand on the latch, trying to decide what to do, when I see another rabbit squeeze under the fence and into the neighbor’s yard, and I’m not sure if that’s Dominique, and, as if that’s not enough, out of the corner of my eye I see a third rabbit, except that one is in the swimming pool, floating belly-up.

  I scream one long, loud, continuous scream. Nabila hears me and she comes running from the kitchen and down the stairs, and she says, “Easy, easy, calm down, Elsa.” Then she says, “You have sure been doing a lot of emoting lately.”

  I point toward the pool. Nabila looks, squints, moves toward the door, looks again, and starts screaming, too. Then she steps back, spins me away from the glass at the door, and puts her hand over my eyes, which is ridiculous, because I’ve already seen the possibly, probably, dead rabbit. She leads me upstairs to the kitchen and sticks a brownie and glass of milk in front of me. Then she runs up to the second floor and comes back down with the Stager.

  “Stay here,” Nabila says, “and don’t look out the window.”

  As if I am not going to look out the window! How can I not look out the window, even if a rabbit isn’t floating in the pool with its feet sticking up? The entire wall of the kitchen is glass! Beyond the pool and the rest of the yard, now with flowers all ripped up, is the eighth hole of the golf course. You can even see the little flag on the green when you sit in the chair at the head of the table. Sometimes balls fly into our backyard, and more than one has landed in our pool. I take a bite of the brownie, but it isn’t that great, at least not compared with the fairy cakes, which I can’t stop thinking about. They had blue-and-pink frosting, with sprinkles shaped like stars. I wonder if maybe they had some magical properties, like the Turkish Delight in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  The Stager and Nabila are talking by the side of the pool. I’m trying not to cry, and I’m also trying not to laugh, which I suppose means I’m trying not to emote. I already had to try not to emote in school today, when everyone else in my class got to work on their schedules for electives for next year. They told me I didn’t need to bother, since I’m moving, and even though I was upset, I pretended I didn’t care. I didn’t even cry when I was asked to go to the office to bring the attendance sheets to the secretary and Ben Simpson, who was waiting for his mom to pick him up b
ecause his stomach hurt, threw up and it splattered on my shoe.

  I watch Nabila go to the shed. She comes back to the pool with the long pole that has a net on the end that my dad uses to scoop up leaves and dead bugs, except this time she’s going to use it to grab the rabbit. It looks pretty dead. Even from the distance of the kitchen window, it looks dead, as stiff as an animal in a diorama at the Museum of Natural History. Nabila starts to pull the pole back, but then the automatic pool cleaner—which is a little robot that floats around the pool, clinging to the walls and sucking up debris—rises to the surface and squirts a stream of water from its spout, splashing Nabila. She screams and loses her grip on the pole, and then she starts to cry. Now the pole is floating in the middle of the pool with the rabbit in the net, and it drifts out of reach.

  The Stager rubs Nabila on the back, and they briefly hug. There is some conversation I can’t hear, and then Nabila goes to the shed and gets another long pole, and they take turns using this one to nudge the other pole, with the rabbit in it, toward the side of the pool. Finally, it’s close enough, and the Stager gets on her knees and lies down on the side of the pool and reaches into the water and pulls that pole up onto the concrete patio, and then the pool cleaner surfaces again, like a whale rising to the top of the ocean, and it squirts water at the Stager, and this time she screams. Nabila and the Stager both laugh, and then the Stager stands up and they hug each other again. Then there’s a little more conversation, and Nabila goes back to the shed. She returns with my Beauty and the Beast beach towel and puts it over the rabbit like it’s dead, and then, unbelievably, they both start to cry.

  By the time they come into the kitchen, I’m onto my third brownie, even though they’re really dry, and I’m feeling a little sick. They look at me with grim faces, and Nabila says, “That was terrible, darling, and I’m so sorry if you witnessed any of that, but the good news is that I don’t think that’s necessarily Dominique. He’s been gone a long time, and we both know—especially after what happened yesterday, with you chasing rabbits all over the neighborhood—that all of these rabbits look alike.”

  “That’s kind of a racist thing to say, Nabila! Dominique was very distinctive-looking. He had a brown splotch on his stomach. Did that rabbit have a brown splotch?”

  “I guess you’re right. I didn’t look, but I don’t recall Dominique having any brown splotch. Do you?” Nabila asks the Stager.

  I haven’t noticed until now how disheveled the Stager is, with her mascara smeared from all the crying and laughing, her garish lipstick faded, her shirt untucked, and her trousers and shoes all wet from being splashed. “Dominique and I didn’t have much time to get to know each other, which I now regret, of course, and I definitely didn’t get a good look, really any look at all, at his stomach. I only knew Dominique for a few minutes before he hopped away. I found him in the laundry room the day I was trying to figure out the source of that awful smell—well, the first awful smell—remember?”

  As if we could have forgotten, two days ago. Although I had, until she’d just reminded me, almost managed to forget this was all the Stager’s fault. To be honest, I couldn’t really remember if it was true that Dominique had a brown splotch, and I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d just said that. Did he have a brown splotch? Or had I just made that up? Apart from the possibility of a brown splotch which he may or may not have had, I couldn’t make the case that he was all that distinctive-looking. He was sort of white, but also sort of the color of heather, and everything else about him was pretty standard rabbit stuff: a puffy white cotton-ball rabbit tail and pointy rabbit ears and very sharp teeth. Even if he was mean, you couldn’t look at him without wanting to hug him and snuggle up. But that didn’t make him very distinctive, and I realized that there might be a little bit of truth in what Nabila was saying.

  That’s not to say I didn’t spend time with him. After school, just about every day, we’d lie on the carpet in the television room and watch reruns of a Bravo show about people getting makeovers, which he seemed to enjoy as much as I did. We’d stare at the TV in shared amazement that a person could look transformed just because she’d had her hair cut, and every once in a while someone would burst into tears when she saw her new look. (People emote all the time, I might point out, even when they aren’t moving to London and their parents haven’t left them alone for ten days and their rabbits haven’t possibly drowned.) Dominique and I would always share an after-school snack while we watched television. The vet had given us a list of forbidden items, but most of them seemed dumb—like, Dominique wasn’t supposed to eat iceberg lettuce, even though it didn’t have any calories, because maybe he’d get so full chomping on stuff that was essentially nothing but crunchy water and air that he wouldn’t eat his regular rabbit food. Then, in theory, he’d wind up not having enough protein, and he’d be malnourished, which was ridiculous, because Dominique never got full. He would just eat and eat and eat until you ran out of food, and then sometimes he’d throw up, even though the vet said that was impossible, that rabbits technically can’t regurgitate food. I told this to my mom, but since there was, in fact, rabbit vomit on the carpet, I’m not sure she got my point.

  “Everything in moderation” was one of my mother’s favorite things to say.

  So we tried that, me and Dominique, a little bit of everything in moderation in our little after-school snack club. Apples were allowed but were boring, so we spiced them up with peanut butter and honey. He liked the peanut butter so much that he licked it off my hand and didn’t even bite me, so I went the next logical step and began to bring him Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He liked those, too.

  “I want to look more closely and see if that’s really Dominique,” I say.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” the Stager says. “It’s not a pretty sight. Better to just remember Dominique as he was.”

  I remember Dominique as he was, my best friend, the only pet I’d ever had, and I worry I’m going to start crying or laughing or screaming again, so I get up from the table and leave my current half-eaten brownie sitting there, then I run out into the backyard quickly, before anyone can stop me, and I pull the towel off the rabbit. It’s horrible to see something dead up close, especially something matted, bloated, wide-eyed, and reeking of chlorine.

  This may be difficult to believe, but I swear, at that very moment another rabbit that looks just like Dominique hops by, looks me in the eye, and squeezes under the very same hole in the very same fence that the rabbit had squeezed under yesterday.

  I can’t help it. Now I’m certain this new rabbit is Dominique, and I go running after it.

  * * *

  “YOU KNOW, ELSA, you’re becoming something of an unreliable narrator,” my mother says later that night, after Nabila and the Stager find me at Unfurlings and send me, like the tragic child who has been kidnapped in some fairy tale, to my room without supper.

  I sit on my bed, holding the phone, staring at the easel. I’m trying to paint a chair. I think maybe if I get it started, the Stager will see it and she won’t be able to resist coming into my room to help me make it better.

  “What’s an unreliable narrator?”

  “It means your version of events might not be believable. Your story keeps changing. You’re making poor Nabila miserable, and you’re not letting the Stager do her job. I don’t know what to believe anymore. You run off, you don’t tell anyone where you’re going, and you frighten everyone half to death. I’m also starting to get the feeling that maybe you’re the one who dug up all the flowers yesterday—did you know that I had to leave a pretty important dinner to take that call? I nearly had a heart attack—I thought something really awful had happened to you. Do you think you might illuminate me?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “What don’t you understand? It’s pretty straightforward, I’d say. Did you dig up all the flowers?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, who did it, then?”


  “A rabbit.”

  “You know this how?”

  “I just do.”

  “You didn’t touch any of the flowers? Like maybe what I was thinking was that you were trying to make a bouquet for me. I thought that was sweet. A welcome-home gift?”

  “You’re coming home?”

  “Well, in a couple of days.”

  “Yes. That’s it. A welcome-home bouquet.”

  “Great, thanks. So you did pull up the flowers, then?”

  I now see this is a trick question. I had not pulled up the flowers, but I want her to think I made a bouquet. Also, this is starting to make me sad about moving again. “Remember how we’d plant bulbs every fall? How we’d go to the garden center to pick out a pumpkin and we’d always buy daffodil bulbs and also some tulip ones with crazy names? Remember the Hillary Clinton tulips?”

  “Of course I remember, Elsa. We did that every year since you were old enough to hold a spade.”

  “Yeah, and you always said, ‘Someday, Elsa, we’ll have the most beautiful garden in the whole world!’”

  “And we do!” I walk over to the easel and use a black marker to draw a rabbit in the half-finished chair. I put my mom on speakerphone while I draw the outline. Or try to draw the outline. I’m not a very good artist. It looks sort of like a rabbit, but one ear is longer than the other. The rabbit looks less like Dominique than like a villain rabbit in a Batman movie.

  “We do. It’s a beautiful garden, and now we have to leave it for someone else.”

  “Of course. Okay, that makes sense. I get it, Elsa; this is really hard stuff, and I’m so sorry about Dominique, and…”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. That wasn’t Dominique. There was no brown splotch on the stomach. I know he’s okay, because I saw him today. He squeezed under the fence, just like yesterday. That’s why I ran after him again. I’m just trying to bring him home, where he belongs.”