The Household Spirit (15 page)

It was war. In Peppy's corner:
2 Fast 2 Furious
. In Emily's corner: plants. She started bringing them inside, you know, to spruce the place up. Thinking, perversely, that this would make him remember that there was beauty in the sessile style of life. Plants could be the most implausible and worthy things on earth. Ferns beaming
with bouncy self-respect, showing Peppy how it was done. Indoor forestry and aged-grandfather conservation.

It'd been a few years since Emily had been surrounded by that much inhumanity. So much green. Emily felt like a little thing nestling inside a big thing, and she felt loved. She wasn't gardening outside anymore, but she'd go out there a lot, just sort of watching and listening to the bugs, the creek. The occasional deer crashing through the woods behind her house. The distant bovine lowing of summer thunder.

She'd watch Mr. Jeffries inside his house, slowly, inevitably moving from room to room. Living room. Kitchen. Upstairs bathroom. Bedroom. Lights out. Repeat. Having him there was like having a tiny, cold nightlight in the corner of your room—it couldn't really protect you from the monsters but it was, nonetheless, comforting.

She had lost weight. Peppy, of course, had too. His blue dress shirts were now a few sizes too big. Besides that, he wore sweatpants and slippers. His skin was also a few sizes too big for him, especially on his skull, which was strange because it was unlikely that his skull had lost much weight. He could no longer wear his watch. Even though it was summer, he was cold, blanketed. He slept gently, imperceptibly.

—

Not only did the hospice people help with the obvious and unspeakable but they also regulated the dynamic between grandfather and granddaughter. Pete, in their presence—and they all called him Pete—sparkled. He needed to prove himself worthy of their attention and care, even if their care was the last thing that he wanted. He had the utmost respect for folks doing their jobs. These folks were only doing their job. He was their job and so he made sure not to make their job any harder or more repellent than it had to be. He'd be an exemplary terminally ill patient, a well-behaved prisoner, and in the beginning he wrote to them 100 percent more than he had to Emily, writing
THANK YOU
and
TODAY I AM GOOD THANK
YOU
and answering their questions with a neat
YES
or
NO
. He even managed to come off all Wild West, lamp-lit and charming, like a leather cactus. This both enraged and comforted Emily. The hospice people also helped adjust Emily to herself; their imminent arrival meant she'd put
outside clothes
on, apply makeup, deodorant, even perfume. She'd clean the parts of the house that Peppy couldn't see. The two of them putting on quite a show, acting as if everything was going
JUST GREAT THANK YOU
with this dying business, as if both of them weren't, in fact, close to some kind of double suicide. They'd maintain this grotesque pep for an hour or so after the nurses left, holding their respective anguish at bay, poised in case the hospice people should come back. But then Peppy's eyes would grow dim again—and, worse,
disdaining
. Emily would slip back into her sweatpants and, so armored, the battle would begin anew. She would make him come back to life or it would kill her, and she'd make her hostage know this if he knew anything: that he was killing her by not coming back to life. The stubborn old fool had no choice. She wasn't messing around. Shape up or they'd both ship out.

—

Ethan Caldwell wrote to say that he'd been accepted into his first choice PhD program in New York City. He was going to move to NYC in the autumn. Emily stopped checking her phone. Boston, from Route 29, had all the weight of a dream hours after you've woken up. There was no way that Boston was still happening. She consoled herself that Boston couldn't possibly actually still be happening.

—

The so-called sleep paralysis attacks, which had been occasional—meaning maybe twice a week—with Ethan in Boston, became acute on her return to Queens Falls. They fell on her with a vengeance.

Three, four times a night or day, depending on when she finally plummeted to sleep.

First, the normal horrors just intensified. Her head in a vise of
screaming; footsteps that scrambled rather than walked. The feeling of a hand reaching out and grabbing her neck and then: awake and alone and oh my God no. Her old room. Empty, of course, but vibrating differently, like a screen of a computer about to crash. She'd stumble to the bathroom. The bathroom was the safest room in the house because there was a mirror. Because there she was. Of all things.

She'd fall asleep on the sofa next to Peppy and awaken inside of one of the attacks. She couldn't move, open her eyes, and then she'd feel herself fall deeper. Herself closing around herself for good. This was a new kind of attack. She would almost feel as if she were pregnant with herself, thinking: Was this her future? Some kind of skip in time to a point where Emily would be in a coma but wide awake and surrounded by thick, immovable nothing. She'd feel Peppy near her, not the material Peppy who she could hear breathing but the paralyzed, true Peppy. He was screaming for help. For release. She could smell it. The two of them screaming silently with the plants, stuck listening to the TV, being buried alive. This was her fault. She was maintaining this garden.

“Peppy?” Emily said. She'd finally opened her eyes after an attack. “Peppy?”

It was the middle of July.

He was, of course, in the only place that he ever was now. Emily next to him. But he was staring at her, not the TV. There was something dreadful in his eyes, like the look that Winnie Shapiro had at the hospital. Emily thought, He doesn't see me. He no longer recognizes me.

“Peppy?” she said, and began to cry.

Peppy struck the remote control on his little table. Like a gavel. Like: Stop.

“I'm sorry,” Emily said. “Peppy, I'm sorry.”

Peppy wrote,
IT'S OK
.

It was the first thing he'd written to Emily. She couldn't believe it. Don't draw attention to it; she didn't want to spook him back
into a blockbuster movie. He suddenly struck her as a little kid who'd been holding his breath until he got what he wanted—which was what? To stop breathing. Had she won? Had he? He was still breathing.

“I had another attack,” Emily said.

I KNOW
.

Emily needed to change that subject. Something funny. They had to make each other laugh. Could he still laugh? He could snore, so he probably could laugh. She had to pretend this was totally normal. Grasping, she said, “Oh, guess who I ran into the other day?”

WHO?

It was working! “Winnie Shapiro,” Emily said. Um. “She was at Price Chopper.”

SURPRISED SHE DID NOT FOLLOW YOU HOME…

That was more like it.
He wasn't stopping
…

DID SHE FOLLOW YOU HOME?

“No, no,” Emily said. She laughed. “But she looked good. She asked about you. I told her that you were fine.”

THANK YOU
.

“Told her you'd married an erotic dancer.”

YOU DIDN'T
.

“I did indeed.”

Peppy hadn't been exactly distraught by the loss of Winnie, but it had shifted him. She was his last. Two years would pass before he talked to Emily about her, and, when he did, on the phone, he admitted that one of the reasons she left him was that he had, actually, asked for her hand in marriage. Her hand, he said. He'd even bought a ring. He wouldn't go into it any more than that.

“Peppy,” Emily asked. “Can I ask, why do you think she said no? What happened with her anyway?”

His right hand paused. Hovered over the paper. He wrote,
WIN ALREADY MARRIED
.

Emily laughed. “No, but really.”

REALLY
.

“Peppy, c'mon, that's impossible!”

IT IS A FACT
.

In other words, Peppy had finally met his match. “That whole time?”

DID NOT KNOW. SEPARATED. GOT BACK TOGETHER. UNSURE. SERVED ME RIGHT
.

“Why, Peppy?”

He made a noise. Waved his pen.
YOUR GRANDMOTHER
, he wrote. He paused. Continued:
MADE EACH OTHER UNHAPPY. BUT I HAD BETTER. I HAD LOVES. THEN SHE GONE AND I HAVE YOU. SHE NEVER HAD YOU. SHE NEVER HAD ANYONE EMILY
.

Emily felt strange. Peppy's voice would never say something like that; it felt like she was talking to his dream. Unnerved, she said, “I spent an afternoon with Winnie once. I really liked her.”

ME TOO
.

“She took me up into the mountains for a picnic.”

Pause. Then,
MAYBE I COULD SEE HER AGAIN?

“Maybe,” Emily said. What was she doing?

I MISS HER
, Peppy wrote.

Emily looked away. She said, “Do you want to watch TV?”

The TV was already on. Emily reached and got the remote. Put it on Peppy's little table, next to the yellow legal pad on which he was writing,
OF COURSE
.

—

That was only the beginning. Somehow Emily had won her grandfather back. His love and his engaging conversation, but especially his humor. Though there was a new sincerity to him that made Emily uncomfortable, most days you couldn't stop his chattering hand, the way his handwriting seemed to chuckle. But it really wasn't until

AUGUST

that the true stakes of the battle of June and July were revealed. By then, Emily was the one hanging on by a thread.

Cleaning out the wastepaper basket next to the sofa, Emily had been feeling choppy, sleep deprived, on edge. She was collecting Peppy's conversations, putting together little piles of them, flattening them out, reading them again. His new voice. The polite handwriting he used for the nurses. The rakish scrawl he used with Emily when he was feeling good.

But there was something else. She discovered unspoken papers at the bottom of the wastebasket that, archaeologically speaking, probably dated back to before he'd begun writing to Emily. They weren't addressed to the hospice nurses. They seemed, in fact, to be for Emily. But the handwriting was all over the place, his new voice's equivalent of a scream or sob.

GO AWAY PLEASE I LOVE YOU GO AWAY LET ME ALONE

Dozens of these, many of them angry, some begging for forgiveness, others for death or, most disturbing to Emily, simply help.
HELP ME EMILY
.

HELP
.

—

On August seventh, Emily returned from grocery shopping to find Ethan Caldwell in the kitchen making tea. Holding aloft a teapot. Backlit by sunlight standing at the end of the hallway. Like: You want some, Em? It's fresh.

Then he walked back into the kitchen like no big deal.

He'd found them. The assassin had finally arrived. Emily went to her grandfather, sat next to him. She held his hand. She looked around the room, heart attacking her chest, thankful that Ethan had allowed her this momentary space. Typical, timeless Ethan. He knew her so well. I love you so much. How long had he been here?

How long had she been gone?

What am I wearing?

The sofa already had four or five of Ethan's books. His duffel bag. His phone and laptop. Litter. No, not litter: crumpled-up pieces of yellow paper, entire conversations ripped off and tossed onto the
floor around Peppy's feet when, Jesus H. Christ, the wastepaper basket was
right there
. Men.

The TV was off for the first time in a decade.

Her men
.

Music playing from Ethan's iPod speaker thing. Gongy wongy Javanese gamelan music; not exactly Peppy's taste, or anyone's taste, but it was sweet if not totally deranged that he'd brought it. The music sounded like cookies baking in the oven.

No, wait. Emily actually smelled cookies.

Ethan
.

I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not…

“OK, coming—” Ethan said from the kitchen, as if this, too, was the most normal thing. Like everything was OK again. The three of them in this house together. Cookie time.

Peppy's hand was moving.

THE NEW NURSE
, he wrote, was still writing,
IS A MONSTER
.

This pulled Emily up tight. Peppy warned Emily that the monster was in the kitchen.
SHHH
, he wrote. She began to correct her grandfather, to tell him that Ethan was
Ethan
, when Peppy made a noise. Nugha nugha. Nugha. He was laughing—probably. They both were. Definitely. Then, looking not at the paper but into Emily's eyes, Peppy wrote,
HE IS PERFECT
.

the Community

A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects.

—Milan Kundera,
Immortality

I
t happened when Howie Jeffries least expected it. It was Tuesday. He had the evening off, but Steve Dube phoned him last minute. Yo, could Howie cover his shift? Steve had, he explained,
dropsy
. “You understand, Jeffries.”

Howie did not. He said, “OK.”

“OK, champ?”

Howie said, “OK.”

“Sorry such short notice.” Was Dube laughing? “Owe you one. Hey, by the way, I left my gym bag in the canteen last night. You mind swinging by there first, pick that up for me before lost and found puts it on eBay? You're a pal.”

In thirty years, Howie had never seen the lights off in the GE employee canteen. It was a windowless, eternal place, like the Price Chopper or a roadside rest station, like the empty walk-in closet where his wife's clothing used to live. Four tables, two snack-food dispensers, the ever-humming Nescafé machine and a wall-mounted TV for ESPN, Fox News, golf. Everything had disappeared in the darkness. Had Howie missed the memo? He entered. The light switch was not where he imagined the light switch would be.

No matter.

Howie had promised. Blind, he made toward where Steve Dube always held court, planning to root around under the table for a
gym bag that had almost certainly fallen into the clutches of lost and found's Mikey Zoschenko. Howie bumped into a chair.

He heard rustling. There was a female giggle, a swallowed breath. Howie stopped where he was, imagining that Tierra from HR and that new guy, Braydon, had come here for none of Howie's business. There'd been talk. But did they have to turn off the Nescafé? Embarrassed, Howie began walking out of the room, backward, quiet as a current.

“Surprise!”

Light, suddenly, and a nightmarish frozen flash of eyes, teeth, T-shirts. Twenty, possibly thirty people, all of them insane. Howie looked behind him, mortified to have stumbled into and possibly ruined someone else's surprise party.

The rest happened quickly. First, the hugs. It'd been years since he'd touched another person who wasn't his daughter, Harri, and here he was, an entire room of hugging people,
including women people
, some snapping his cheek with minnow-like kiss-kisses, everyone wishing him a happy belated fiftieth birthday. Plus, happy thirty years at GE. Howie was paralyzed. It was like going to sleep in Montana and waking up in MTV.

Not since Howie was a boy had anyone thrown him a party, and it was uncomfortable, at first, being happy as a little boy. That they had organized a complex surprise party around the surety of Howie being unoccupied on a Tuesday evening was something, later on, that might have troubled another person. But it pleased him. They knew him. Howie was a pal.

There was a canoe-sized sign on the wall that read
HAPPY STONE ANNIVERSARY, JEFFRIES!
Next to that, an amusing poster that someone had, no doubt, created on a computer. Mount Rushmore with Howie's Facebook profile face superimposed over the one that wasn't Lincoln, Washington, or Roosevelt. President Jeffries. There was a pile of rocks on a table, too, each wrapped in a colorful ribbon, most with smiling faces painted onto them.

Hugging concluded, Dube gathered everyone's attention. He was stocky, bald; he looked like a hairless, comically suffering cartoon beaver. Little chugging arms. “Having miraculously recovered from dropsy,” he began, and everyone laughed. Cheered. Dube continued, said, No, seriously, that this was a very special night. Serious now, folks. Dube taking a drink from his Corona, preemptively moved by his own words, which eventually managed to speak of everyone's appreciation for everyone's pal, Jeffries. If not the life—everyone laughed—then certainly the
soul
of General Electric. Long may Howard Jeffries watch the machines that treat the capital region's wastewater! More party sounds, applause. Now, the stone anniversary, Dube explained, marked ninety years. The stone being the symbol here because, heck, ninety years of marriage or anything would be enough to turn you to stone or make you wish that you were, was he right?

“Depends who you're married to, Steve,” Dube's wife, Marcy, shouted.

“Don't I know it,” Dube said. “So, we got fifty years of life plus
thirty
years of service at GE—”

“That's eighty, dumbass!” Roger Schulz said.

Dube's best flummoxed face. More hooting from the room as he held his fingers before him, counting. “So it is,” he said. “Fine, you got me. But that missing ten years? My guess is that if anyone's hiding an extra ten years somewhere, it's our man Jeffries!” He raised his beverage. Everyone followed suit. “What else is there to say? To ninety more years of Howard Jeffries!”

The room shone with noise. Someone called for a speech, and a vulture of a hush settled on Howie. People began chanting. Speech speech speech. Howie said, “OK.”

“Can't hear you!”

Blinkless and burning, Howie stared. This is how deer die. He lifted his right hand—and he put his right hand back down. He put both of his hands into his pockets. OK. About four of the heaviest
seconds of Howie's life elapsed before the room erupted into the biggest round of applause yet. Someone said, “Hear hear!” “Jeffries for president!” “Four more years!” The partying began.

Pretty much everyone Howie knew from GE was there, even two of the janitors, old Andy O. and Miguel, and someone, probably Dube, had raided Howie's Facebook friends and invited a few of his fishing buddies. Earl Stolaroff. Mike Ed Walker. Bob. Their wives, too. (Mike Ed Walker's wife could have passed, truth be told, for Mike Ed Walker's brother.) The fisherpeople clustered to one side of the room, sipping quietly; without a rod or a body of water near them they looked exposed, at a loss. Howie wondered if that's how he looked too. The way their eyes scanned the floor, as if scoping out the best spot to cast their lines. Howie made sure not to look at the floor. Besides the jokey pile of stones, Howie received more gifts than all his past fifty birthdays combined. The boys had all pitched in to get him a new rod, an elegant seven-foot six-inch St. Croix LegendXtreme. But that wasn't all. One of the guys, Keith, got him a subscription to
Playboy
magazine “for the nudity”; Benny's wife gave him a wool sweater. “You can't wash it,” Benny said. “I told her, what's the point if you can't wash it in a machine? She said quality is the point.” Howie got a gift certificate for dinner at Bellaggio's. Lots of fishing-themed curiosities. Two
I'D RATHER BE FISHING
coffee mugs and a digital alarm clock in the shape of a shark—with working jaw. He got a goldfish in a jar that Stevenson had affixed a small sign to.
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
. Howie was so busy being talked to that he couldn't drink his beer. It grew warm in his hand. Simon's wife, Gerty, made a cake in the shape of something Howie didn't have a chance to note. It was gone before he knew it. There were potato chips, pretzels, nachos; someone brought a dish of what Howie could only assume was a taco pie. There was always a group of at least three people around him—it was antagonistic almost, like children poking a turtle with sticks. Except that wasn't it also fun, sometimes? Being poked? Folks care enough to poke, you let them. There was music, even a little dancing.
Sloshing left and right, swaying. Tierra and Braydon, in the corner, had slow danced themselves to a standstill. They were basically just hugging now. Howie did not dance. Mostly, he stood in the same place he'd been surprised in, being visited, making sure his smile was under control and wishing, above all, that Harri were here to see how many pals he had. One hour into the party, Howie's ex-wife showed up with her husband, Drew. “Surprise,” they said.

—

They brought two bottles of champagne, one of them already half consumed. She wasn't drunk because she never, ever got drunk, or so she'd claim, loudly, whenever she was particularly drunk. She got
rosy
. She was wearing heels. Drew wore a Christmas red Ralph Lauren sweater with pleated khaki shorts. Black socks, sandals.

Howie was happy to see them both. They brought a gift for Howie the size and shape of a window. It was wrapped in silver paper.

The room, in an attempt to hush itself, momentarily increased its volume with two dozen
Shhhh
s. Like the top of a forest before a storm. Drew said, “Don't even ask how we got that thing in the car.” Hand on Howie's shoulder. “It's from Harriett,” he said.

Carefully, carefully, thinking it was an actual window, Howie opened it. It was a painting of Lake Jogues. It was a painting so clear and picture-perfect that it might as well have been a window. It was not painted with sludge or soil; it was not a blustery, aggravated abstraction. Harriet had painted him the actual Lake Jogues, and not only that: Howie's favorite spot on Lake Jogues. It was a view of the lake facing the gigantic stone cliff known as Rogers Rock. It was so real that you could hear it. When had she started painting like this again?

Drew pointed something out. There, on the back, Harri had written
LAKE JEFFRIES
.

Howie wanted to step into the painting, shut the window behind him. It was too intimate. Everyone please turn down your eyes. Turn them off. Howie was smiling too much.

“Don't look so sad!” Dube shouted. “It's a birthday present!”

Because no. Howie wasn't, in fact, smiling. He'd been trying so hard to control his face, to prevent his happiness from cracking it apart, that he'd very likely been glowering.

“That's just how Jeffries
looks
,” someone said, shushing the others.

OK.

Well, let's show them how he looked. Howie looked up and fine: he let his face go. It is likely that he smiled because there was more applause, and Howie, finding his voice, said, “Thank you.”

He held up
Lake Jeffries
for everyone to see.

“It's from my daughter, Harri.” His daughter, the greatest freaking artist in the world. His daughter was happy now, obviously, finally, and she had painted something gorgeous for him. “It's Rogers Rock on Lake Jogues.”

—

Howie's ex-wife said, “Obviously, Howard, your daughter—” Nothing good ever started with
your daughter
or, for that matter,
obviously
. Plus, she had that face. “Your daughter was supposed to be here.”

Enough, Drew mouthed.

“Harriet had to get back to the city is all I was going to say, Drew. That's literally all I meant.”

“Something she couldn't miss,” Drew added.

Howie's ex-wife bitched an eyebrow. (This had been one of Harri's terms for the numerous communication possibilities of her mother's eyebrows.)

Drew continued, “Harriet sends her love. I know she really wishes she could've been here. She made us promise to come. It's my understanding, Howie, that she's been painting that secretly for a long time now. Every time she's come up to visit this year. It's a shocker all right. Unlike anything she's ever done. She really wanted to give it to you in person.”

“Thank you for bringing it,” Howie said. “Thank you for coming, Drew.” Thinking: Harri's been up to visit this year? She never told him. She never visited him. But OK.

Drew said, “Howie, it's our pleasure. I mean that. It's really good to see you, buddy. Wouldn't miss it. Happy belated. Oh, one small request. Harriet asked that we would take some photographs, hope you don't mind.”

Howie did not mind. Drew stepped back. Drew held his telephone out before him, turning slowly, a crazy person checking for radiation. Some of the boys came over to appreciate the painting, which one deemed of museum quality. “I've been to the museum,” Roger Schulz said. “Jeezum Crow. This could be in the museum.”

“I read about this painting sold for forty million. It wasn't even nice like this. You couldn't even tell what it was.”

“Could be worth something someday, that's for sure. It is something.”

But Howie was listening to his ex-wife, who was standing nearby and speaking into the side of Drew's nodding face. Howie was still tuned into her voice like no other, especially when she was worked up, rosy. She was a poor whisperer.

“…but seriously, do me a favor and will you stop defending her, please…doesn't work, she hasn't worked in years, it's not like…his fault anyway, why shouldn't he know, why isn't this the right place, he's bankrolling her and, anyway, you said you'd talk to him. You said, Drew. Why do I have to always be the bad guy I'm sick of it…fine, you're right, you're exactly right, this isn't the place I know this isn't the place but then where is the place I'm…these people, they blame me for him, oh you know they just do…always have, see how they can't even look at me…he's not my fault or responsibility, he's not, OK, I'll calm down. I'm calm down. I
am
calm down, Drew…”

The water was blue. The mountains green, and Howie knew what this meant if nobody else did. Harri giving her father the world in accurate colors.

—

Two hours later, Howie was driving up the Northway, his ex-wife asleep, laying across the backseat, completely hidden under Lake Jeffries. The painting took up the entire backseat. The ex-wife snored lightly. It didn't sound like waves lapping anything, though Drew, sitting next to Howie up front, had said that it did. “Well, if you listen just right.”

They laughed.

Howie had agreed to take them home, both of them way too rosy—she'd said—to drive legally. Predictably, the more his ex-wife bloomed, the nicer things became, and, by the end of the evening, she'd soggily apologized for tending not to like him very much anymore, among other things. “It's your fault, Howard, but I'm so sorry anyway. OK? How's that?”

“That's fine,” he'd said. “I'm sorry too.”

“I'm so happy you came,” she said, possibly forgetting for a moment where she was and whose party she was attending. Maybe it was too much to comprehend: a party all for Howie. But she'd continued, “You look so handsome today, actually. You're not so bad. You are not so bad! We're not doing so bad, are we? Let's face it, Howard, look at us. We didn't turn out bad at all, did we?”