As much as Sarah wasn’t done, there wasn’t a lot of point in being in Jon’s room right now. Removing things was nice, but figuring out how adding worked was calling her. With a quick glance around the room, she winked at Jon, still sat on the bed, and left the room.
It felt a little weird, padding around someone else's house unescorted. It was quiet, unlike when she arrived. Jon’s mother had been yelling downstairs, trying to get Jon’s little brother, Mikey, out the door for soccer. The dog had evidently gone along, since there was no barking going on either. She felt a bit like an intruder, taking time to look at all the family portraits.
Well, perhaps the word “burglar” was more apt. She stopped at a writing nook, examining the carefully piled receipts and projects that Mrs. Madison seemed to be in the middle of. Receipts for a recent hair styling and dyeing, and one for a mani-pedi. Both seemed useful, and into the bag they went. There was also a card with a brightly colored “Happy 25th Birthday” emblazoned on the front that Mrs. Madison had signed. When it went into the bag, the reminder for everyone to sign Peter’s card vanished from the whiteboard that was filled with all sorts of notes and reminders.
The dog bed caught her eye, not that she added it to her bag, but the dogbrush went into the bag. The amount of hair covering the bed doubled instantly, but nothing else seemed to change.
The master bedroom seemed like a good place to start. This room was well put together. The bed was made, the blinds opened to let light in, some landscape painting hung in a way to bring a lot of light to the room. It was picturesque, almost staged. Sarah stepped into the ensuite bathroom, with its connected his and her closets. She considered the sink, with its various toiletries around it, but nothing caught her eye beyond a simple hairbrush with some strands of long hair tangled in it. In the shower, though, were some interesting things to take. A shampoo for hair health, with a special conditioner for encouraging length? A prize fit for someone. Into the bag it went. An exfoliating skin rub for soft, feminine skin? Exactly what the bag lady ordered. A 12 pack of lady Bic razors? No need to get greedy, just one or two would be sufficient. No need to deprive Mrs. Madison of her whole stock. Why, she might get hairy legs if that happened! Perish the thought, when Sarah was trying for the exact opposite.
In the closet, Sarah flipped through the selection of blouses and dresses. None of them felt really usable. Too much that seemed… well, practical didn’t make for good vengeance.
As she did, she thought a little bit about the bag. The idea of what would happen if all of the razors were gone was an interesting one. How Jon changed when all of his video games were gone was an indicator of how it might work. Definitely some potential there. Unlike the closet, which didn't seem to have much potential at all. A pair of hiking boots in women's size 8 was almost Sarah's only prize, until her eyes landed on a cardboard box at the top of the closet. A handwritten label identified the contents as “Halloween”
Sarah needed to grab the chair from Mrs. Madison's vanity to reach the box, grabbing some eyeshadow for the bag in the process. Inside was the literal mother lode.
Costumes. Halloween costumes. The kind of costumes that seemed a little out of place with such a well-ordered house. On the top was a French maid costume that went straight into the bag. And then there was some sort of Catholic school girl get up. Sarah popped that into the bag as well. Underneath that was a photo album. It was a peculiar set of snapshots through time, as the girl in the opening pages aged, and the costumes changed, each one different, almost not the person in the previous photo, but something about the eyes, the exact shape of the face, that kept the continuity.
Boyfriends came and went, and eventually one stayed. And then the yearly costume began to be worked around a young baby boy, and then a baby girl as well. Sarah could recognize young Jon in some of the pictures, a few memories of her own coming cascading back as the photo album crept closer and closer to the now. Sarah was almost certain that she could see part of her own costume in one of the photos, mostly out of frame and very out of focus. It was almost surreal, to be a tiny part of this lifelong love of dressing up.
A photo of Mrs. Madison in a maid costume was the most recent picture. Sarah paused, confused. It looked exactly like the costume she had put into the bag, as far as she could tell. Shouldn't this photo have also vanished or changed somehow? Flipping through the pages, that schoolgirl outfit was her costume the year before Jon was born. But the photo was still there.
Sarah shrugged. There were plenty of costumes not in the box. In fact, the book seemed to be mostly costumes that weren't kept. A snapshot was the only physical reminder left. Perhaps the bag didn't remove wearing the costume, instead removing keeping the costume beyond that Halloween night.
There were some pages in the back of the album that felt like they had photos, leaving a solid 20 pages if not more empty. Sarah flipped to the back and closed the book after a glance. That was not a picture taken at a Halloween party, she thought, blushing. Sarah wasn't innocent by any means, just caught unawares. Opening the back of the book again, there was Mrs. Madison in costumes. But the photos were a lot more risqué. And the costumes indicated that the woman's love for dressing up extended to the bedroom as well.
Sarah set the book back into the box almost reverently. She didn't really know Mrs. Madison. She doubted many people really knew her, especially this side of her. When she had first seen the box, Sarah had considered just dumping all of it into the bag; she was glad she had decided to take it piece by piece. It would have been a crime to have ruined that part of Jon's mother. Well, more of a crime than what Sarah was doing now. An emotional crime on top of the actual taking of things.
She went through the box, carefully considering all of the costumes. A nurse, a cop, one or two variations for teacher/librarian, and some spandex that seemed to be some superheroine costume with a logo that Sarah didn't recognize. All of these she set aside, so that she could put them right back in the box. She did take out the cheerleader outfit, but that was more a point of professional pride. Sarah was sure that she could get an actual cheer uniform for Mrs. Madison. The one in the costume box had clashing colors, poor seams, and a design that no one had actually performed in since the fifties.
The costume at the bottom of the box also went into the bag. Some cowboy boots, same size as the hiking boots, a plaid shirt that was still tied, and a pair of Daisy dukes that were probably there to make the character identifiable, instead of just a generic farm girl. The shirt was a look that Sarah could do something with. Well, Sarah could make someone do something with.
She carefully put the costumes back into the box, nestling the album underneath the nurse’s outfit this time, and placed the box back up to the top of the closet.
A brief look into Jon's father's closet didn't really return anything interesting. A lot of blue suits that seemed to match the only thing Sarah remembered about Jon's father, that he flew for an airline and was out of town quite often. It also put the stewardess outfit in the costume box into a new perspective.
Sarah was almost done with the master bedroom, when she spied a pair of keys sitting on the dresser. The window looked out onto the driveway, where Sarah's old Corolla sat pathetically behind a brand-new Mazda. Airline money seemed to be quite a good way to make a living. Nothing like being out of town for five days and then spending three days driving a luxury car around town. It was almost unfair.
Unfair, but fixable. With practiced ease, Sarah's hand found her keys in her purse. It wouldn't do to swap the whole key ring, as transferring your house key probably changed your address. She fished the car keys off of each ring and held them over the bag. She hesitated. If she put her keys into the bag, would she even remember that she should have a car? Probably not. Sarah wasn't immune to the wish that made the bag. She reached into her purse again and pulled out the wishing stone.
“I wish that when I put something of mine into the bag, I will remember that it used to be mine.” And with a deep breath, she dropped both pairs of keys into the bag. Down below, both cars vanished. Sarah reached into the bag again and felt around. Boy, there was a lot of stuff in here, she thought. As much as the bag didn't feel very full, it was hard to find a pair of keys with all of these clothes, and these video games. She pulled out the video games and set them on the nightstand, then reached back into the bag. So focused was she on retrieving the keys that she didn't notice as the master bedroom developed a gaming console and a large TV. A wireless controller appeared next to the stack of games, the Harlequin novel that Linda Madison had been working her way through each night was now doomed to be unfinished, stuck at the bottom of a pile of video games that never really seemed to go down.
Frustrated, Sarah brandished the wishing stone again. “I wish it was easy to pull out the item you were thinking of from this bag,” she said. The keys suddenly were in her grasp. She pulled out first the Mazda key, and then the key to the Corolla. She set one next to the key ring, and the other she put in her purse. When she looked out the window again, the cars were back. Except this time, the Mazda was parked behind the Corolla, as if it had just pulled up an hour ago. Which, in this reality, it had.
Satisfied, she shut the door behind her as she left, not noticing the glint of binoculars across the street.
