“But then she has a place for that, right?”
“Yes, a cramped place without any windows and bad lighting. And Jenny never brings anyone over to play anymore, since there’s no room for her and her friends to hang out. That’s the way it is here. We’re together, all together, all the time. Just us.”
“We like being together.”
“But it’s nice to be able to choose.”
He sighed and picked up the newspaper again.
“Fine. But you can go on your own, right? I don’t like open houses. You know that.”
“We can’t make an offer on a house that only I’ve seen! We’re going together. It won’t take long, and it’s a nice walk. Look at how nice the weather is. We can ride our bikes.”
He sighed again, but we ended up taking Alva and biking over to the open house. The two older girls made it clear they didn’t want to see any lame house and went off to go hang out with some friends.
As we approached, I started to get butterflies in my stomach. There it sat on the slope, so inviting it almost sparkled. And although I tried not to, I immediately started planning huge Christmas parties that began with the guests stomping snow off their shoes on the steps and walking inside to the aroma of slowly roasted goose and bubbling gravy and juniper and all kinds of other exotic scents and domestic wizardry.
At the same time there was also a quivering uneasiness within me. An uneasiness about the choice that might lie ahead of us. Because this was just the kind of thing that would rouse the Tehomic forces. They had only been dormant this long because I had kept a low profile.
But even more than that, I now realized, I felt an uneasiness about how many people were looking at the house right now and thinking similar thoughts. The young female lifestyle bloggers and nouveau riche oil engineers. Interior architects and café founders. Surely there were people willing to trade in their upmarket Canada Goose winter jackets for a cheaper brand like Bergans or Kari Traa in order to afford this house. Or even worse—there might be people who had enough money to buy the house and do any remodeling it might need.
“Why did you sigh?” Bjørnar asked.
“Lifestyle bloggers,” I said, lifting Alva out of the bike seat. “I bet a lot of them will show up at the open house. Shabby chic, you know.”
“We’ll see,” he replied and took Alva’s hand, “we may not even like it.”
I snorted, while little tingles ran up and down my spine at the sight of the big planter pots of blue and lavender hydrangeas lining the walkway to the front door, and the tiles and chandelier in the hallway that were even more beautiful in real life.
We took off our shoes and walked into the living room, where Alva immediately freed herself from Bjørnar’s hand and ran over to a bowl of chocolates.
“M&M’S!” she cried excitedly, scooping up a big fistful.
“No, Alva,” I warned, “don’t take the candy! It’s just for decoration!”
“I’ll watch her,” Bjørnar assured me. “Why don’t you go have a look around?”
I nodded and took a few steps toward the dining room, where the real estate agent was. He was talking to an elderly woman who had made herself right at home at the dining table, while another woman stood in the doorway to the kitchen, practically swooning. I noted with relief that neither of them looked like lifestyle bloggers.
“My daughter won’t be home for a couple of days,” the woman sitting at the table told the real estate agent. “So I wonder if we couldn’t set up a private showing on Wednesday?”
“In principle that would be fine,” the agent said, “but we’ve already received a few offers, so the property may already be sold by the end of the day on Monday.”
My throat constricted and I tugged on Bjørnar’s sleeve as he walked past with Alva, whose face was covered with chocolate and who was pretty much ready to go home.
“Chocolate is yummy,” a voice mumbled.
I glanced over and saw that it was the swooning woman, talking to Bjørnar.
“It’s the best,” he replied and lifted Alva so she could touch the chandelier.
The lady smiled lopsidedly and took a swig from a hip flask that she pulled out of an inside pocket.
“Cough medicine,” she explained to me. “I’ve been a little under the weather lately.”
I tried to close my mouth and turned to Bjørnar.
“Should we go take a look upstairs?”
“More M&M’S,” Alva whined, pulling on his hand.
“You go,” he said. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
The stairs were soft and uneven and bathed in sunlight and led up to a second story that featured three bedrooms the size otherwise found solely in furniture catalogues.
They had done a great job with the renovation. Bjørnar and I could never have pulled this off. Tasteful wallpaper with birds and stripes, beautiful built-in closets featuring exquisitely made hooks, the original floorboards painted a dark brown, tiny tiles in the bathroom, and a superwide showerhead, the kind I had only ever seen in hotels.
I was standing there admiring it when I heard the stairs creak and Alva’s chocolate-covered face appeared atop Bjørnar’s shoulders.
“Did you eat all the M&M’S?”
She nodded contentedly. It wasn’t until just then that I noticed how shabby she looked. Boots that hadn’t been cleaned off after a slushy week at preschool and long underwear covered by a well-worn wool sweater and her raincoat. We should have at least put a clean skirt or a pair of pants on her. The way she looked now, she might as well have been in pajamas.
Not that my own outfit was much to brag about. Old baggy pants with a hole in one knee and a faded gray H&M jacket that was missing two buttons. I also hadn’t bothered to wash my hair, just put it up in a limp ponytail.
Shabby minus the chic, that was us.
To be sure, this was also a stroke of genius. It would keep us under the radar.
But I was the only one who knew this.
No wonder the real estate agent hadn’t bothered to greet us.
He was surely disappointed, poor guy. It wasn’t much of a turnout for an open house: a shill standing in for someone who couldn’t come, a wino, and a family of paupers. He was bound to be wondering where all the lifestyle bloggers were. As was I.
“Where’s the door to the attic?” I wondered.
“Maybe here?”
Bjørnar pulled on a little closet door, which opened onto a narrow staircase.
I lost my breath. A secret entrance! I was right! This was no normal house. Portals to revelations and insights into another world. Anything could happen here. Maybe it was a blessing? Maybe this actually was a house with an even stronger magical shield? An opening to the sun itself?
My heart started pounding again, and I reminded myself that it wasn’t by any means certain that it would become ours. But we were meant to live here, said another, far more powerful voice. This was a gift. Money? We had money! Why else was Bjørnar working so much? What was the point of being a lawyer if one couldn’t live well?
He stood looking out one of the bedroom windows.
“What a view,” I commented. “Imagine falling asleep to that.”
“These must be the original windows,” he said, poking at the frame. “They’re going to need replacing, all of them. Can you imagine what that’s going to cost?”
“Hmm,” I mumbled absentmindedly.
I walked dreamily down the stairs, but when we got to the basement, I realized the competition had picked up. One family in particular stood out. The man’s hair was short on the sides and long and slicked back on top. He wore a dark parka and matching slacks, and the woman had a big scarf arranged over a feltlike sweater and tight gray pants. They were accompanied by a kind of miniature version of the mother, topped with blonde curls and a ribbon and wearing a dusty-rose jacket and matching tights. On her feet she wore clean, attractive leather boots.
“There’s no room to put the sofa here,” Shabby Chi
c told her husband. “Can we move the wall?”
He started knocking vigorously on the wall.
“Paneling,” he said. “We’ll move it. Plus the kitchen would have to be expanded. I think maybe an island in there. And new countertops. Silestone.”
She nodded contemplatively, and I threw up into my mouth. Oil money. Most likely an engineer and a graphic designer. They would remove the door hiding the attic stairs. And the portal to the other world would close and the magic shield would vanish. Possibly forever.
In a panic, I turned to Bjørnar, but instead crashed into a young pregnant couple.
“Sorry,” I said and laughed slightly, but they didn’t seem to have noticed me.
“How practical to have a separate ‘children’s wing,’” the pregnant lady exclaimed with air quotes.
“Yes, and the kids can use the basement entrance when their friends come to visit,” he chimed in.
I snorted. Children’s wing. This couple would fill the house with ten million books on how to parent. Besides, they were far too young to own a house like this. This wasn’t where you moved when you were expecting your first child. You bought a condo or maybe a modernist town house with a cute little yard. Not an enormous, stately old home! And the same goes for the shabby-chic family. What would they use all the space for? Walk-in closets? A wine cellar?
I was seething. Didn’t any of these morons get that this was my house? Mine and Bjørnar’s and Ebba’s and Jenny’s and Alva’s? Ours!
Suddenly going back home to our actual house felt unbearable, and all the warm fuzzy feelings from a leisurely morning with the newspaper and the croissants were gone.
I was repeating to myself the importance of breathing from the belly when Bjørnar came and took me by the arm.
“Did you get to see everything?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Then I guess we can go? But put your name on the list.”
“Really? You mean it?”
“Yeah, let’s put ourselves on the list.”
Joy darted through my chest, and I pulled him close and kissed him before we went back to the dining room, where the agent was now talking to Shabby Chic.
Neither the agent nor the woman paid any attention to me, but that didn’t matter. We were meant to get this house. We, the Ragamuffin Family, were going to move into this house with its portal to another world. It was meant to be. So all these other people could just go take a hike!
“How high can we go?” I asked Bjørnar as we biked home.
“Not much over the list price. I’ll have to crunch a few numbers. But I’m in court all day Monday, so in case it comes to a bidding war, we’ll have to agree on a maximum offer in advance. Then you can handle the back-and-forth.”
“Marvelous,” I rejoiced. “I’ll take care of it!”
10
Monday morning I hung up my “Testing in Progress” sign again before I sat down at my desk and pretended to work. When the real estate agent finally called, it was clear that he’d already begun to grow weary of the whole “interested” list.
“Are you considering making an offer?” he asked in a monotone.
“We’re thinking about it,” I said. “Have you had any other offers, by chance?”
“One. For six point eighty-five million kroner.”
“How long do we have to put in an offer?”
“Until noon.”
I asked him to contact me if any more offers came in before then, and he called back after just five minutes.
“We received an offer for seven point one million.”
“What? So much? Are there any others?”
“Yes,” the agent responded. “The people who made the first offer are planning to increase their bid. How about you?”
“I’ll add fifty thousand,” I said.
Then I sent Bjørnar a message: I offered 7,150,000. We’ll see how it goes.
Our deal was that we would give up and walk away at the list price, which was 7.25 million.
“If we go over that, we’ll be struggling,” he had concluded after plugging through our budget three times. “Because I haven’t set aside all that much for unforeseen expenses. True, it did look like it had been nicely maintained, but at the same time it’s almost a hundred years old, so we have to assume that things will pop up.”
To my despair, I had scarcely sent the text before someone else added another hundred thousand and then someone put in fifty thousand on top of that. It was a bidding war. I went to the bank’s mortgage calculator to find out if maybe we could swing a little more, but it only showed astronomical sums that seemed abstract and unreal and I couldn’t really see how these numbers had anything to do with me.
So when the agent called me back, I added another hundred thousand, even though it was over the limit we had agreed on. After all, we wouldn’t necessarily need any money for repairs right in the beginning. And Bjørnar was always so cautious. It was up to me to secure our future now.
It kept going like this for a little while longer.
I did some calculations and estimates of my own.
Until everything started to melt together and I could no longer distinguish plus from minus or things that had been said from things that had only been thought.
When the agent called to congratulate me, I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“The other bidders hated to withdraw, but they had already offered more than their limits,” he said. “So the house is yours now.”
I looked down at the piece of paper where I had tried to jot down how much the offers were as we went along. But after 7.5 million, my handwriting became illegible and I appeared to have started drawing hobbits instead.
I wondered if it would be socially acceptable to ask him how much we had ended up agreeing to pay.
Probably not.
“Do you want to discuss the move-in date now, or should we do that at the contract meeting?”
“Could I maybe call you later?”
“Sounds great.”
I put my head down on the desk and tried to think.
What was the last offer I remembered making?
Nothing. Apart from the offer that was supposed to have been the very last one, which was 7.25 million. But on my piece of paper it said 7.5 million. That was way too much. And that was also a lot of minutes ago. Many, many, many minutes.
I called the real estate office and gave the man who answered a fake name. I told him I was wondering if the house had been sold and, if so, what it went for.
“I’m not sure,” the man replied, “but I can transfer you to the listing agent if you’d like?”
“Oh, no. That won’t be necessary,” I hurried to say. “Couldn’t you just check for me?”
“Sure. Please hold for a moment.”
Pause.
“It went for eight point two million kroner.”
I concentrated on breathing.
Breathing was incredibly important. The brain needed oxygen to live.
So I breathed in.
And out.
And in.
And out.
I was still practicing breathing when Bjørnar called at noon.
“We’re taking a break here now,” he reported. “Has the bidding started?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the price at?”
“It’s over.”
“It’s over?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Well, then, how much did it go for?”
“Eight million two.”
“Eight million two!”
He laughed and I could picture him shaking his head.
“Hope the buyers have a lot of money. How many people were bidding?”
“Only three.”
“Three? How long did you stay in?”
“A long time.”
“How long?”
“Until the end.”
“All the way until the end?”
“Yes.”
“Well
, how high was your last offer then?”
I held my breath.
“Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
“How much was it?”
“What?”
“Your last offer?”
“Eight million two.”
There was silence.
“We bought the house?”
“Congratulations?”
“You’re kidding me now, right, Ingrid?”
“No.”
He hung up, and I started to cry.
Two minutes later he called back.
“I had to step out. What in the world have you done?”
“I don’t know? I got caught up in the excitement.”
“Do you know what this means?”
“I—”
“It means we have zero money for repairs, zero money for whatever unforeseen expenses there might be, zero money for vacations, and that we’re going to have to think long and hard the next time the kids need winter coats or skis or bikes. Have you heard of living beyond your means?”
“Yes?”
“That’s what we’re going to be doing now!”
“Don’t yell.”
“I’ll yell if I WANT to!”
“OK.”
There was silence.
“I have to go,” he finally said. “We’re starting again in five minutes. You call the bank and explain what you did.”
“Couldn’t you—”
“No.”
“I’ll call them. I’m sorry.”
There was more silence.
“To be or not to be?” I tried.
“Don’t even.”
I sat there all day staring at my computer screen without understanding any of what was on there. I went to the real estate site once and looked at the page for the house. A little yellow note in the corner now said “SOLD.”
I gulped, and the tears crept out of the corners of my eyes.
At the same time there was a small part of me that couldn’t help feeling happy as I looked at the pictures. This was all ours now. Even if we had to live off oatmeal and charity, we were the ones who got to have the yard, the “children’s wing,” and the attic.
I didn’t want to think about how all of this commotion had probably also awakened Tehom.
The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter (The Ingrid Winter Misadventure Series) Page 5