The Household Spirit

by Tod Wodicka

  By the second week, Howie had gone back to work. He explained to Emily about his shifts, and exactly when he would need to sleep, when he would leave for work, and when he would be home, awake, and able to watch TV with her on the sofa. He knew that she would not sleep while he was at work. She would wait for him, even though that first week back was night shifts. The second as well. This was OK. They would both get less sleep than they needed, true, but it was only for the time being, until Emily was a little further from a death that could be legitimately blamed on his inattention. It would have to work and it did work, for a few days, until the morning that Emily, apparently exhausted and spooked, came into Howie’s bedroom during his four-hour sleep shift. He was wearing his clothing, as usual, even a belt; he awoke immediately.

  “Can I?” Emily asked.

  He felt her body indent the mattress next to him.

  He could not move.

  She asked again, softly, “Mr. Jeffries, do you mind? I know it’s weird but—”

  “OK.”

  But OK, he realized, wasn’t the same as Mmm, it was more like a word, and, therefore, more like an actual lie. Howie was not OK. This was not OK.

  Being asleep was as naked as Howie ever got with Emily, and that took him a few days. Co-sleeping with his neighbor really did a number on him. Colleagues, noticing his moderate decline, thought he must have been a little under the weather still, maybe terminal, nobody knew, so they let him take naps here and there. He hardly slept at home. He caught naps in his car, pulled over on the side of Route 29, or in front of the TV when Emily was cooking or tending her plants. But things soon evened out, and exhaustion helped Howie get used to it. Fine. He would come home from his shift and go upstairs and Emily would be waiting in bed, fully dressed. Emily wrapped in the Private Nathanial P. Sounes memorial afghan, above the covers. They only touched by accident. They touched when Howie had to wake her from one of her ringings, which he seemed to do instinctively here, too, even when he was asleep. He would reach over and shake her and go back to sleep. Soon just sleeping next to Howie helped Emily. She couldn’t explain it either.

  It was as though the living room flooded with light after that.

  Howie’s entire house changed, opened up. The TV was on less. Things quickened, felt good. Emily waited for him to get home. The drive to and from work, a drive that used to be exactly the same for Howie in terms of expectation and enjoyment, changed. Leaving the house was a loss. Returning home was something to anticipate. Time began to move differently. For example, the ten days it took Harri to reply to his follow-up thank-you e-mail—after she never replied to his several possibly ill-judged thank-you telephone texts—seemed like a very, very long time. Inexcusably long. Ten days to wait for a reply used to be nothing, but now that Howie shared time, everything had slowed, become richer, more confusing, more alive, every single sound was different knowing that another pair of ears was hearing it, too. What the heck was that? That was an owl. It was a truck. That was the sound of wind moving through trees. You heard it, too? That was only the house. The house was settling. They were synchronizing their senses, deciding together what they saw, agreeing that the carpet was yellowish. That they should call the sofa a sofa, not a couch and never a love seat. Two days would feel like a month. Routines melted away, leaving their bones all over the place, jutting here and there, sharp, ungainly, embarrassing, but also leaving Howie with a kind of purity and newness of movement and thought along with the refrigerator full of new foods that Emily had escorted into the house. Fruits that might very well have been nuts. Diet Dr Pepper and cheese so blue it was green; frozen egg rolls, cilantro, Greek yogurt, brown rice, gourmet baloney. Flavors of Pringles that Howie was unused to.

  Howie loved the underwater way a room full of plants sounded at night.

  They never spoke about Howie’s room, or sleeping. Nor did they speak to each other, ever, once inside the bedroom: no good night, good morning, nothing. Speaking in bed would have been beyond the pale, like using the same toilet at the same time.

  In fact, the more awake with each other they became, the less they were able even to approach the subject of sleep, and the less they thought that this was odd, or that they needed to. Things were quite normal now thank you very much.

  The month passed. They might not talk for a full day or two, but they were together. Emily bought things for the house and things that she thought Mr. Jeffries might like, like a baseball cap. She had wondered what he would look like in a baseball cap. Both of them cooked for each other even if they tended to eat separately. Emily in the living room, always. Howie in his kitchen. The baseball cap made Howie look like an incognito Nazi war criminal on vacation. He wore it around the house, way too high up on his head, until, enough was enough, OK, creepy idea: Emily plucked if off. It was never seen again. They didn’t talk much about their past and far less about their future; the present was just kind of there, all over the place, so what could they say? You want to watch TV? Sure do. They never spoke about Peppy. They never spoke about Harriet.

  —

  One day Howie followed Emily back to her house so that she could start evacuating the rest of her plants and, she said, get some clothing, some photographs. Howie waited on the porch because Emily had not invited him in.

  “It’s a mess,” Emily said. “Obviously.” She stood in the doorway. She was wearing a backpack. She felt a little off to Howie: nervy, aware, like her ears were squinting. She lit a cigarette.

  He had never seen Emily do this before.

  “Do you mind?”

  He did not.

  “I found these upstairs.” Exhale. “I need to get the smell of the house out of my nose. Everything’s smoky and moldy and—I don’t know. Something like a raccoon or ferret got in a fight with the couch. Know what? I was thinking that maybe we could move my kitchen table out by the creek.”

  “Probably not a ferret.”

  Emily blew smoke rings. “It’s refreshing, actually. You ever smoke? It’s been a while, so I’m totally buzzed here. Got a nice buzz on.”

  “Maybe we should get someone over. See about the electricity, the water and fire damage.”

  “No,” Emily said. “But listen, about the table. Wouldn’t it be cool if we moved it out back by the creek?”

  Howie supposed that he would have to see the table; there were logistics to consider. “Is it weatherproof?”

  “Is anything?”

  “Yes,” Howie said.

  “It was just an idea. It doesn’t matter.”

  They watched Route 29. The hanging silence of an empty country road. Emily ashed her cigarette onto her porch. She said, “Mr. Jeffries, why do you have almost ten thousand dollars in a can of Folgers decaf?”

  “Depends what kind of wood your table is made of,” Howie said, as if he had not heard her. He had heard her. “The kind of lacquer we use,” he said. “To protect against the elements.” He coughed. “Weather is an element.”

  “Seriously?”

  —

  Howie enjoyed watching Emily tend plants—the way she moved among them, lulling them, somehow, as if plants could possibly be more lulled than they already were. They were everywhere now. The living room, kitchen; even some in the bathroom and the one in the laundry that Emily said was a “little purple-leafed know-it-all thing.” There were none in their bedroom. It made Howie feel safe, Emily caring for her plants, like when he was a small boy, in bed, and he would listen to his parents mysteriously tend to the household, moving room to room to recognizable room and sometimes, he would imagine, to rooms that did not exist during the day, or that were not available to Howie at all. Howie, in the darkness, could hear his parents walk through rooms that seemed to exist below, above, or just to the left of the actual rooms he knew so well. He loved to fall asleep imagining what was in these rooms, and who, why. Howie’s parents were rarely together in the same room after Howie went to bed.

  Emily was like a fish and a fisherwoman, Howie thought, sud
denly, and this made sense the same way her sleep ringing made sense. He said, “I am going fishing.” This was an invitation.

  Emily understood. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “I don’t think I like fish.”

  “OK.”

  “No, but maybe it would be nice?”

  “You don’t have to like fish to catch them. I think that you would like it.”

  It was rare that Howie let Emily know what he was thinking. “Really? Why?”

  Howie thought about that.

  Emily sat down. “Fish kind of freak me out, actually. They don’t have eyelids, right? They can’t blink.”

  “I don’t kill them.”

  “Yeah, OK, but hooks? You do catch them. I’m sorry, but I don’t see the point.”

  “If you’re careful, you can remove them from the hooks without doing serious damage. I can show you how.”

  “But if you’re not going to eat them, why do it? It just sounds mean. Do we have to use hooks?”

  “If you want to catch them.”

  “Let’s say I don’t.”

  “Then OK. Then you could use anything.”

  “I could just throw out free worms?”

  “Cast out, sure.”

  “Like feeding ducks. But wouldn’t that undercut your fishing? Wouldn’t that be unfair competition?”

  “It’s not a competition.”

  “But why get a hook up the jaw when you can get dinner for free?”

  Howie sighed. “That is not how fish think.”

  Howie spoke of fishing. He had been speaking nonstop for about five minutes, Emily thought, when he must have realized, suddenly, that he’d been speaking nonstop for about five minutes. It was like his description of an early-’70s Norwegian tackle innovation woke up, looked around in a daze of fear, and promptly killed itself. Boom—and the heavy, resurgent curtain of Howie’s inhibition crashed down over his face. Stupefying as this bait and tackle minutiae had been, Emily wanted it back. She enjoyed hearing him talk with such wakeful enthusiasm. She said, “Howie, OK, c’mon, fess up. What’s the money in the jar for?”

  It was the first time she’d said his first name. They both knew it. The switch had been flipped.

  Mr. Jeffries paused, but not for long, and Howie returned, looked Emily nearly straight in the eye, and said, “Ever since I was a boy I’ve wanted to live on a sailboat.”

  —

  Emily stood behind Howie on the banks of the Kayaderosseras. “Lesson two,” she said.

  The sun slashed and slithered down the creek. Howie was never bored. The late afternoon wind picked up. Howie watched the sunlight move like drifts of gold across the surface of the water.

  Emily sighed. “I don’t have a lesson two, actually.” She was standing next to Howie now. “Look, I’m sorry. That was bitchy of me. The Playboy stuff. Who cares. You want to go inside now?”

  “I have to mow the lawn.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t.”

  Howie shrugged. He thought about what the ducks must look like to the fish.

  Back home, finally, Howie and Emily made themselves busy. Howie washed dishes; he put a load of laundry into the dryer. He checked the expiration dates on things in the refrigerator. He stood, for a few seconds, looking at Harri’s painting in the living room. He would mow the lawn tomorrow after the TV and the sofa switched places, and then, he thought, I will purchase a goddamn sailboat.

  He imagined himself and Emily in a boat, in the painting, feeding the fish around Rogers Rock with free, hookless worms. He would look inside the computer for boats tonight. He sat down next to Emily. She had made them both iced tea, super sweetened; she handed a glass to him, silently. They had not said a word since they’d left the creek. Lemons and sugar; sugar still spinning around the bottom of the glass like river silt. Howie almost expected to find a bottom dweller, a slimy sculpin, say, or an eel, doing circuits. She’d prepared a small plate of cheese and other female foods. Moonlike wedges of apples, a crayon-yellow fruit thing, and crackers seemingly fused together from seeds and sawdust and reddish felt. She had been going a little over the top with the snack plates.

  She had just moved a plant from over there to over here. Plus, a drowsy, bored shrub was now sitting on Dori’s tufted Rhapsody chair. Howie did not ask.

  Emily thought: If only I could see the tattoos. Then I would know.

  She turned on the TV. She thought: But know what, exactly? You’d know shit. Indulgently, Emily imagined that the tattoos might be back at her house somewhere, in a drawer, pressed inside of one of Peppy’s books, folded in one of his jacket pockets or in a shoe box under his bed. Peppy hadn’t exactly lied, he’d never said that Nancy wasn’t chunky or messed-up or tattooed, but it was obvious that the old journalist had filed a story with her that had been full of holes. Poke a finger in. Put your eye up to one and see: these holes were the bottomless kind. They were fucking pits.

  “Do you ever think about who used to live here?” Emily asked.

  “Before me?”

  “Before us, yeah. But I mean, like a hundred years ago. Back when they built these houses. Like the old mills, when there was a town out here. But in these houses especially. They couldn’t imagine us.”

  It would be like a fish imagining the rest of the duck, Howie thought. The day was hot. He thought of Emily and himself sitting there, staring at the TV, but one hundred years ago. Rogers Rock timelessly behind them. How could they possibly explain themselves? He said nothing.

  “They slept here too,” Emily said. It was rare for her to speak of sleep. But he had never seen her so unclouded. “Shouldn’t be weird, but it is. I imagine them sleeping mostly. The nineteenth-century millworkers or whoever. I used to think of ghosts a lot when I was little. I used to read a lot of books about ghosts and it seemed obvious to me what ghosts were. I think ghosts are the dreams of people a long time ago. Like, if you see one, you’re only running into someone else’s dream. Like there’s some stutter, some skip or momentary flaw in the fabric of consciousness. Or time. Or something,” Emily laughed a little. But she didn’t stop: “It’s why ghosts are so confused, so dreamlike? In the books, anyway. They’re not trying to scare you. They’re just there, totally in their own zone, stoned almost. They’re tripping. They just kind of go through the motions like we do in dreams. The most boring stuff, too. I don’t know. Like dreaming of being at work. How they can’t be reasoned with and if they really see you that’s it, they disappear. They wake up. But somewhere else. I think in some way all that stuff exists right now, like all around us. Like we’re all trapped. Those people are here too, somehow, sleeping or whatever. Paper working. Doing whatever they did at the mills.”

  “They invented the flat-folding paper bag at one of them,” Howie said.

  “Right,” Emily said, momentarily derailed. “They did that. But, anyway, I think it’s scarier, in a way, than simply running into the spirit of a dead person with a grudge or a secret. Seeing someone trapped in a dream. Because where are we then? We think we’re, like, at the forefront of time moving,” Emily made a small, cute, diving arrow motion with her hands. Splash! “But there is no forward. There is no future. Not like we think. We’re not the end point of everything moving onward. Do I sound crazy? I don’t think that everything has culminated in us right here, right now. We’re just a point on a river that already exists, beginning and end. Everything is a dream.”

  She wanted to say nightmare. She didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wanted to tell Howie that there were far worse things than human ghosts, and that these things were real and all around them. That they could see nothing of what really existed. They watched TV.

  Howie was confused. He thought about Halloween. “But ghosts aren’t real.”

  “Well, if they were,” Emily said. She’d said too much. Shut up. “Do you want to watch this?”

  They watched Animal Planet.

  But Howie, too, often thought about the tempora
lity of Route 29. Not that he would put it that way. He would find himself daydreaming sometimes that he was living in the past—back before the paper industry had burst up the Kayaderosseras, those half-dozen mills, the old railroad you could still see poking through the mulch of the forest, the veritable boomtown and its workers, German and Polish immigrants mostly, their horses, their stony, sacrificial wives. Coughing babies; snow. Back before the houses were built, abandoned, plundered, and finally retaken by the woods. Every house but his and Emily’s. Howie would imagine that the stone walls and foundations you saw in the woods weren’t the remnants of a hopeful past but markers toward a future. He would mix the futures up. The paper mills opening and a town sprouting up—horse stables and barns and a Pizza Hut—he and his pregnant wife driving up the route that now had a proper name like any other road. Pine Tree Road. Pretty Street. Evergreen Estates. How happy they were going to be! Both of them getting out of the car, looking up at the house, arms around each other’s waists.

  Home.

  Neighbors everywhere, mowing lawns and returning baking trays with thank-you notes written on purple paper. The sizzle of sprinklers and whatever a nineteenth-century paper mill sounded like. Probably, Howie thought, they sounded like whispers.

  “There used to be a lot of houses up here, a hundred or so years ago,” Howie said, not turning from the TV.

  Emily ate some cheese. She said, “Do you know what, when I was little I thought that you had been there before me. Like, when I imagined how it used to be, like who lived here before, I’d imagine you. I’d imagined that you lived in my house before we did. Isn’t that weird? Even though you were way younger than my grandfather. Like you’d always been there.”

  “My wife and I used to think that about—”

  “Name.”

  “Doris. Dori, my ex-wife, and I used to think that about your grand—” Howie stopped. “Peter and Gillian Phane. That they’d been here forever.”

  The names stabbed Emily. She did not want to talk about her grandfather, so she said, “What was my grandmother like?”

  “I don’t remember,” Howie said. This untruth came easily, felt true.