The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  Howie sat down and looked into the internet computer.

  On Facebook, Emily Phane was currently in a relationship with a young man named Ethan Caldwell. Ethan Caldwell’s profile was private, but his photograph revealed an Oriental man in a robe. Twenty-six years old and standing on a hilltop with a sword. The male someone Howie heard during the muffled portion of the recorded message did not sound characteristically Oriental, but huh. Really, what did Howie know? The sword was, potentially, a problem.

  It was morning now. Past midnight, anyway. Howie watched the phone and the bossy old clock above the stove. It clicked 12:17. Then, in what seemed like significantly more than sixty seconds, another click. A clunk.

  12:18.

  Howie yawned.

  He had put that clock up there after his wife left. The louder the time, the better. Once, this kitchen had been a place for mornings. That was before his family fled, and long before Marty’s internet computer had installed itself on the round oak table. There between the toaster, microwave, radio, telephone, and the answering machine. Ex-husbandhood meant he could do this, crowd his antique kitchen table with machines. Because why not make toast or reheat Bellaggio’s pizza where you’re going to actually eat Bellaggio’s pizza? The resulting spaghetti of wires extending through the air from the kitchen table to the kitchen counter didn’t bug Howie in the least and, in fact, the limits they imposed upon kitchen mobility were satisfying. There were already too many ways one could do things. Howie rarely thought of his wife preparing breakfast anymore.

  The computer crackled with exertion. He watched a pop-up ad for heartburn relief. Indigestion as poignant blobs of red light. Howie had pulled a night shift yesterday and then, before dawn, on a whim, drove straight from the GE Waste Water Treatment Plant to East Caroga Lake, where he’d spent the majority of the day fishing.

  The phone rang.

  His first reaction was that it was an alarm, and that it was time to wake up, go to work. He reached for it, instinctually, as if to hit snooze.

  The red blobs on the screen yo-yoed from stomach to neck and back again. Caressingly, almost. They looked like something you might enjoy having inside you. Why fight it?

  Howie was exhausted.

  The phone kept ringing, so Howie kept his right hand on the receiver, feeling a ticklish electric purr, holding the receiver down, shhhhhhhhhh, as if there were a genuine possibility of it leaping up and answering itself or Howie’s left hand going rogue and finding out why Emily Phane had been calling all night.

  It stopped ringing.

  Harri, age sixteen, spoke from the table: “My technophobic dad’s not home right now. Or, who knows, actually. He probably totally is. Either way, leave a message after the—”

  BEEEEP!

  Then, Emily: “I’m sorry, Mr. Jeffries, I’m sure you’re at work or out night fishing but…” Howie yanked his hand off the phone as if it had actually become the top of his neighbor’s head. Emily paused then, as if in confused reaction to the removal of Howie’s hand. Like they were both listening for the other now through the static snow of distance. Boston and Route 29. Breathing. Both of them waiting for the other to make a move. Then, “Well, so, I’ve been calling my grandfather since yesterday and he hasn’t picked up. If you’re listening to this, could you look and see if his car’s there? If it is, please go and see if he’s OK, Mr. Jeffries. It’s probably nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. It’s usually nothing. His phone is probably unplugged or the TV’s too loud or something. But please. I’m worried. I’ll try calling again in the morning.”

  BEEEEP!

  From the kitchen window, Howie could see the Phane house. The lights were on downstairs, all of them, and Peter’s car, a sable black Cadillac DeVille, was in the driveway.

  —

  The disappointment lasted only a moment. It was replaced by incredulity. What else did he possibly think she could have been calling for? She was not his daughter. She had not been calling him for money—nor was she calling because she was inebriated, alone, momentarily sloppy hearted…

  He looked out at the Cadillac again. Now that Emily was at college, Peter Phane was lights out by nine. It was well past midnight now. The windows had the cold, empty light of a refrigerator opened at 2:00 a.m.

  Emily knew that Howie liked to fish.

  He went upstairs. He tucked in his shirt, combed his grey hair back; he brushed his teeth, shaved, and put on his good shoes. He brushed his teeth again. Then he took off his good shoes and put on his sneakers. This could be an emergency.

  And, well, sure she knew that he fished. They had lived next door to each other for twenty years.

  Downstairs, back in the kitchen, the so-called screen saver had snapped on. It bubbled. Cartoon fish. Shortly after Harriet’s birth, Howie had stopped killing them. Fish. If he could help it, and he mostly could, he’d chuck them back into the lake, only once in a while making a trophy of one, like the twenty-four-pound muskellunge pike he caught seven years ago ice fishing on Lake Champlain. He rarely thought of fish as something that could also be food.

  Howie walked down his driveway. Reaching Route 29, he turned left. Then another left up the Phanes’ driveway. Do this proper. No sudden movements. His hands were in his pockets. This, he realized, probably made him look shifty. He removed his hands from his pockets. He wished he had brought his book because nobody would be afraid of someone walking up a driveway with a book. Howie wanted the house to know that he was approaching it with only helpful, neighborly intentions. He’d briefly considered driving over.

  Howie had never stood on the Phanes’ front porch before. It was his house, but wrong—and yellow.

  Howie knocked on the door.

  He could hear the TV.

  Knock, knock.

  He could hear a ringing telephone. Fine. Howie found the doorbell. Fool thing, he thought. It ding-donged joyfully.

  He did not expect an answer. If he had, would he have even come over? Probably he would not have.

  He stepped off the porch and approached the living room window, standing among waist-high shrubs. The mulch felt queasy underfoot. Howie saw Peter Phane on a rug, TV light flickering over him. He was not wearing trousers. His eyes were open.

  Howie found himself trying to open the front door.

  Locked.

  He hurried around the back, on the grass now. The back door was unlocked.

  The kitchen was a crime-scene reenactment of his own kitchen. Dishes everywhere; a broken glass on the table. Flies and candy wrappings and slices of bread hardened into mossy stone; unopened mail, opened mail, and sticky dried beige stains on the linoleum. Lots of newspapers from New York City. The refrigerator was open.

  Then down a hallway decorated with framed photographs. Howie had the same hallway, of course, but his was barren but for the twenty-four-pound muskellunge pike on the wall across from the bathroom door, so whenever you exited the downstairs bathroom: remarkably big fish. (“Dad, whoa, that is the single weirdest place to put a fish. Is that even a fish? You’re so awesome. You’re art. What is wrong with you?”)

  What was wrong here?

  The living room was humid and bad. Howie smelled something chalky, rotten, medicinal. His feet crunched through a spill of unexpectedly cheerful breakfast cereal—Peter Phane ate Lucky Charms? Froot Loops? Pills, too. There were bloody tissues, a splayed Sports Illustrated magazine, orange peels. The TV applauded. Two black women began to sing. The phone began ringing. It was there next to the TV. The black women on the TV seemed annoyed by this. Peter was too, each ring registering on his face like a slap.

  “Em,” he said. “Em, em, em.”

  Howie waited for the phone to stop ringing. This was just as natural as a waterfall, a Taco Bell, a tree. Once it stopped ringing, he picked it up. He dialed 911 and requested an ambulance.

  “Route Twenty-Nine. Yes. Route Two Nine. That’s correct.”

  Howie would not look directly at Peter Phane. Even when he had to look, he tried,
for propriety’s sake, not to see. Peter Phane was like something without a shell. Howie found a quilt and covered the lower half of his body. He maneuvered a segment of sofa under Peter’s oddly weightless head and, like that, the TV stopped singing.

  The phone again.

  Howie got down, told Peter that everything was fine. Peter tried to disagree, tried to get Howie to answer the phone. Tried to say the name of his granddaughter. But Howie only stood, stared out the window at his own house, and when he finally heard the ambulance he turned off the TV, unlocked the front door, and left out the back.

  —

  Emily was home the next day. A week later, Howie received a tray of Rice Krispies Treats with a note.

  You saved his life. Thank you, Mr. Jeffries. — E.

  It could not have been a coincidence. Howie wanted to call his ex-wife, tell her the thoughtful pastries had come full circle, but he lacked the wherewithal and the implications troubled him. Emily was, after all, about the age his wife had been when she’d begun her futile cookie-based courtship of Gillian and Peter Phane.

  “I’ve lived a lot of life since then, Howard,” his ex-wife had said the last time he had tried to share an old Route 29 memory with her. “That was so long ago. I guess I remember.”

  No, no. The implications were clear.

  —

  Emily would not return to Boston, and one year later, Peter Phane was gone. He had been ninety-four years old.

  Her nocturnal ambles began soon afterward. Well, what else could you call them? Sleepwalkings? Excursions? They weren’t quite walks. Howie did not understand them. When he first saw her out back after midnight he assumed that she was looking for a dog, though he knew that she didn’t have a dog. Someone else’s dog? That made less sense. She would hurry out, her movement tripping the motion sensor spotlights, a fluorescent blight that turned the grass into a ghostly lawn and the dark that surrounded her property into pure absence. Which is where Howie would be, watching. In a window, normally the upstairs bathroom window, but sometimes the kitchen window, sunken back in that deeper night she had created. She would poke around the corners of her property. Something was missing. But what? True, she spent a lot of this time just sitting out there in a lawn chair, sipping something. Milk? Tea? Looking normal, more or less, except it was 3:00 a.m. and it was about the creepiest thing that Howie had ever seen. Sometimes she would busy herself with night gardening, vegetable picking.

  They were a community though. You saw things. You see things and you worry. There were wild dogs in the area, packs of them, apparently, and every few years a bear would waddle down from the mountains. Foxes didn’t bite but they might, Howie supposed. They sure might.

  Things got worse. Emily’s garden was nothing but soil and lack now. There was an emptying going on next door. She had begun pulling it all up: shrubs, small trees, ferns. The vegetables and the flowers had gone first, almost overnight. Then the entire garden. She razed anything the spotlights touched, like clearing her yard of plaque. Then she started off into the darkness beyond, back where Howie could not follow. He nearly expected to return from work one night and hear her out back felling pines with a chain saw.

  She was in trouble. She was only separated from Howie by a wall and several yards of lawn.

  Howie had not saved Peter Phane’s life, merely prolonged it by a year. Eleven months. Most of which Peter wasn’t even exactly present for, or so Howie had to assume. He should not have meddled. If he had not gone over then Emily would not have dropped out of college to move back in and nurse him to death. She, at least, would have been spared. Howie was responsible. The future was all his fault.

  He stood at a kitchen cupboard.

  There, in an old green Folgers decaf can, he put two one-hundred-dollar bills. This month’s boat savings. He hadn’t been able to save for the past half year because Harri had needed a little support in New York City. Why? Wasn’t his place to ask. Howie had half his boat money in the Trustco Savings Bank and half here, in the Folgers decaf can. It was childish, but so was thinking that he could someday sail away from himself on a wooden boat. The physicality of the money inspired him. The paper was more likely to become a boat if he could keep an occasional, encouraging eye on it. You can do it.

  Howie hadn’t seen a light on upstairs at Emily’s house in over a year. Only the living room and the kitchen, and those were hardly ever off. The living room windows were now completely obscured by plants. They hummed green.

  Tomorrow, he thought.

  But tomorrow was still the extent of Howie’s plan to save Emily Phane. Today, of course, was yesterday’s tomorrow, and yesterday had been the day before that’s tomorrow. There’d been weeks of that. Months? Sure. OK. But tomorrow was coming, Howie knew, and here was a Folgers decaf can full of more than a hundred hundreddollar bills to prove it. He shook it.

  Back when his wife had been trying to conceive, she had gone on about how caffeine capsized estrogen levels, caused bladder cancer, irritability, muscle tremors. She cut strident, coupon-sized articles from health magazines and stuck them to the refrigerator, obituaries for this or that formerly enjoyable food product.

  “Why don’t we just get one big sign for the refrigerator that says ‘Eating may cause disease’?”

  A kiss on the cheek. “You may cause disease, Howard Jeffries.”

  He never went back to caffeinated coffee. First because Howie wanted to prove his ex-wife wrong by drinking a pot of decaf every day for the rest of his life and coming down with bladder cancer anyway, ha ha ha, and then, now, seriously, because that’s where his money lived. His boat, his silly, secret future. Howie liked to drink the stuff and think about his Folgers decaf bank account in the kitchen cupboard and how maybe, just maybe, there was some surprise left in him yet.

  part two

  Emily, without Eyelids

  5

  Meanwhile, next door, Emily Phane was losing her mind. She stood on a mattress in the center of the living room. She bounced. Or maybe I’m just tired, she thought. This was her pet debate, the conclusion pretty much foregone: Emily was tired and insane.

  The plants were closing in.

  Puckered-up flowers, vines, ferns, saplings. They were vibratory now. And they reached for her.

  The room was padded. Everything insulated, top to bottom, and you couldn’t even see out the windows anymore. Not like there was really anything going on out there, just more plants.

  Emily passed her days in a state of besieged wakelessness. Kind of like dreaming and kind of like hiding—but without the inherent safety of either. The plants protected her, if not from totally losing it, then from total inactivity. There was a continuum that she tapped into while silently, thoughtlessly tending them. Since Peppy died, this was the only safe place that she knew.

  She hadn’t slept in two, maybe three days.

  She rarely ventured upstairs. The doors to the bedrooms might as well be wall. Everything huddled here in the living room, safe, or relatively safe, waiting it out. It’d been almost two years and what had once seemed like an only slightly batty and temporary and understandable spatial adjustment to loss now risked approaching the territory of someone who, years after the death of a baby, refused to remove the half-consumed container of Gerber’s from the fridge. Emily knew that this was not normal.

  Emily was bouncing on a mattress.

  More than she slept on it, she stood on it, stepped on it, desultorily bounced on it. Like right now. The mattress was a slab in the center of the room. She rarely thought of it as a bed.

  She stopped.

  Sleep, when it happened, happened like a cough. Her body suddenly too huge and heavy to feel, her vision muffled, squirrely, her brain just totally shot and then cough, like that but bigger—COUGH!—and she’d either fall where she stood or make it to a chair, or a nice spot on the floor.

  The mattress was surrounded by potted shrubs and buckets of wildflowers.

  These came from out back, some of them. There was
a dreamy, wholly unexamined system here. Others Emily adopted from the hills and trails around Queens Falls: strays surreptitiously dug up from the littery banks of the roads she found herself walking some nights. She’d even gone out behind Mr. Jeffries’s place the other night. Not like he’d notice. The guy was a tree. Emily thought that maybe someday she’d take him in, too, plant him over by the fireplace, water him until he sprouted a smile, a pulse, anything.

  Emily laughed.

  The TV was company.

  She changed the channel.

  Emily wasn’t particular but she especially loved documentaries about anything that had happened in black and white. Musicals as well; they reminded her of Peppy and Peppy’s version of her mother, Nancy. Anything Goes. My Fair Lady. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Emily loved baseball. Baseball was a log in the fireplace. But not watching, only listening. Peppy’d watch the game on his radio out in the backyard, and it wasn’t until Emily was six that she finally saw the game on TV. It looked nothing like it was supposed to. They were playing it all wrong. Real world baseball was stodgy, inexplicable. But weren’t most things, actually, if you opened your eyes and bothered?

  The bathroom was off the hall that led from the living room to the kitchen. Only door on the right.

  She walked by it.

  Emily Phane was walking.

  The hall itself was longer than you’d think, especially at night. It was a tunnel lined with the dead. Emily’s grandparents, great-grandparents, great-uncles in great, awesome hats. Nancy, age seven, on stage in dancing duck costume. The NDE Emily had called it: their hallway as a near death experience. “Go toward the light, Peppy,” she’d joke when he got up for a snack during a commercial. They used to joke about everything.