by Susan Coll
“Wait, Elsa. You don’t just knock on someone’s door unannounced. Plus, we’re not here to eat cupcakes. We’re here to find your dad.”
“Actually, it’s possible this is the house Eton called from,” Nabila says, pulling out her phone. “Let me check the address … 54 Naomi Wolf Lane.”
“No way.”
“Yes, we seem to be in the Contemporary Nonfiction division of the Literature compound.”
“I hope we’re not in Vagina.”
“Mom!”
“It’s okay, honey. It’s a book.”
Nabila is already knocking. Marta opens the door. She looks a little like an angel, with flowing blond hair and a lot of bangles on her wrists. She throws her arms around me. “Elsa! Thank God you’re here. I really don’t know what to do. I think I’ve got your dad here, of all the coincidences in the world. He’s only semi-conscious, but he keeps saying your name. I don’t even know how he got in here, but I came home from running errands just a few minutes ago and there he was, lying right there on the floor, talking to himself. I was totally panicked, because I didn’t want to call an ambulance since I’m not supposed to be here…” She stops talking and stares at my mom. Maybe my mom looks like the sort of person who might call the police.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I explain. “It’s the model house. That means it’s supposed to look perfect so that people will want to live here and they’ll want to buy one just like it. Look, it has fake everything, even dishes and a coffeemaker. I mean, it’s pretend, but it’s real. But since no one is going to buy a house here anymore, Marta is staying here so it doesn’t go to waste. Right, Marta?”
My dad makes a noise. I squat down beside him, but I can’t tell what he’s saying. His hair is a total mess, matted with sweat and sticky with something that looks like blood. His shirt is full of stains, and the zipper on his trousers is down; I’m embarrassed to see him like this. My mom sits down on the floor on his other side and runs her fingers through his hair. “Wake up, Lars,” she says softly.
He mumbles some more, and it sounds like he says, “Once upon a time there was a man named Lars…” And then he stops. And then he starts again and he says, “Once upon a time there was a man named Lars.” And then he stops.
I go over to him and say, “Dad, finish the story!” And then he starts again with the “once upon a time” part, and then his eyes open and he tries to sit up, but he can’t. He looks around, then puts his hand on his stomach and says, “Oh my God, where’s Dominique? What did he do with my spleen?”
“Jesus, Lars!” my mom says. “You’re hallucinating.”
“Do you want some water?” Marta asks.
“Just more tea,” my dad says.
“Enough with the tea!” my mother shrieks. “How much did he drink already?”
Nabila shoots me a nervous look.
“I have no idea,” Marta says. “As I was saying, I just got home and there he was. I don’t even know how he got in here.”
“What’s the rest of the story you were going to tell, Dad? ‘Once upon a time there was a man named Lars.’ I think that’s what you said. Is there more? Is Dominique in the story?”
“My God, where am I? I was in the middle of a dream about … You know what, I think you’re right … I think I was actually dreaming about Dominique, and he wanted me to tell him a story.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I don’t really remember, but he really wanted to hear about my life, and I think all I could talk about was you.”
“Is that good, or is that bad?”
My dad doesn’t answer. He’s staring out the window, mesmerized.
“Of course that’s good,” my mom says. “Right, Lars? Tell Elsa that any story about her is a good story, no matter what. It’s important that you tell her that.”
I don’t know why my mom says that. I already know that any story about me is good, unless it’s one about me not running laps or spilling paint or eating too much or doing something else that’s bad, which makes me remember the Stager in my bed and the red paint on the floor and my broken bed and the half-finished six-foot rabbit on my wall.
“You are the light of my life, Elsa,” my dad says. But the words come out slurred, and then he asks me if I have any idea where his spleen is.
“We should really get him home,” says Nabila.
“Actually, what I think we should probably do is get an ambulance,” says my mom. “Let’s first wipe up all that blood … Do you have a cloth or something?”
“Please,” says Marta, returning with a bowl of water and a cloth. “Please, I’ll do anything I can to help, just don’t have anyone come here. Anyway, these look like superficial wounds, just scratches on his head and all over his arms. Maybe from the barbed wire on the fence?” She wipes his forehead with the cloth and puts some iodine on the cuts. “I’ve also got to get busy baking. I have a big commission for tomorrow. I was just hired to bake cupcakes for some realty firm, to serve at open houses, and I can’t afford to blow it. So, as much as I want to help, I really need you guys to get out of here. No offense.”
“They give cupcakes out at open houses?” I ask. “We should totally do that!”
“I think maybe we are,” my mom says. “It was either that, or Amanda was going to do some sort of cash giveaway to whoever guesses the sale price, which seems to me a little tacky, so I voted for the marginally less tacky cupcakes.”
“Did you say cupcakes?” my dad asks.
Nabila puts a hand under his arm, and my mother does the same thing from the other side, and Marta puts her hands around his waist, and they pull him up onto his feet. He peers down at his side.
“Hey, weird. Somehow the wound has closed up, but it’s still pretty tender, and it’s not quite healed. Do you think my spleen is back inside? Or do you have it? Did someone say something about cupcakes?”
“Lars, for the love of God, what’s wrong with you?”
He pulls up his shirt and points to his side, but we can’t see what he’s talking about. Then he looks out the window and then back at me, and he smiles hugely and says, “My God, Elsa, look at that gorgeous sun poking through the clouds!”
* * *
THE HOSPITAL SEEMS to take forever. We’re there all afternoon, and then all night. The good news is that I get to watch television in the waiting room, and no one tells me to do my homework or practice the violin, but the bad news is that the only thing to watch is CNN, and they run the same stories over and over and over. Most of the stories are terrifying.
First, the ground has opened up and swallowed a grocery store in Louisiana. A lady who had been pushing her shopping cart down the cereal aisle disappeared, and then most of the food in the cereal aisle disappeared, too. They’re bringing in drilling equipment and men with flashlights and goggles to try to find her, but she’s been gone for half the day and they seem to think she’s unlikely to be alive. They interview the chief of the fire department, and then they talk to her husband, who cries and says she’d just gone in to get some Diet Coke and sliced salami. They also interview the manager of the grocery store, who says nothing like this has ever happened before. Then they interview a lady who had just been standing outside the store with her dog while her daughter ran inside to buy paper towels, and then they interview the daughter, who had just been getting her change from the paper towels, and she’s really relieved that she hadn’t dawdled, because she’d actually been thinking about maybe getting some cereal, too.
The next story is about a crazy man who has a lot of guns and has kidnapped a boy and put him in a box. That story is on a lot, too, and the CNN newswoman says, “Wow, it’s a busy news day, and a grim one at that!” For the boy-in-the-box story they talk to the police, the FBI, the boy’s mom, who says he’s a very good boy, and then they talk to another person, who’s just standing there with his dog and doesn’t know what’s going on, so he doesn’t have very much to say.
Then there’s a story about the gove
rnment not having any more money and how that’s going to mean people are going to lose their jobs and some schools are going to have to close because they can’t afford teachers. For that they interview a senator who’s the head of the budget committee, a lady who’s the head of the teachers’ union, a teacher, and a mom holding the hands of two children. There’s no dog in that story.
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 co
vers 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.”