The Household Spirit (17 page)

Was it?

Rho was Darren Prough's ex-wife. By mistake, Howie and Rhoda had always gotten along very well at company picnics, holiday parties, and GE union bowling league nights. Rhoda mistook him for something that he was not. Rhoda, like her ex-husband, enjoyed
fishing. There was that. She would get close to Howie and joke, under her breath, about the irritating, dull people around her, his pals, the sheeple she called them, instigating a kind of militant camaraderie of antisocialness. Baaaah, she'd say. Bah. She often tried to impress Howie with how much she didn't like being where she imagined that Howie didn't like being either. But how to tell her that this was only his face? That his face didn't like being anywhere. How to tell her that he never had a problem being where he was, and that most people were nice, if too loud, and that his greatest desire was to be nice to people? That people made him happy.

Rhoda would say, “What are we doing here?”

Howie would say that he didn't know, who knows, and this would make her laugh.

Sometimes she and Howie spoke about lakes.

“This is crap,” Rho had said once. “Don't you wish you were up in the mountains? Let's go to the mountains, Jeffries.”

“Now?”

Rho barked, “Ready when you are, buddy!”

They never went to the mountains. Howie, also, didn't understand the crapness of not being in the mountains. You were where you were, what can you do?

Darren Prough no longer worked at GE but, apparently, Rho was still friends with some of the other GE wives, or she enjoyed attending their functions in order to tell Howie how crappy they were. It was curious. During the divorce, Darren had referred to Rho as the armadillo. Howie imagined her running through walls, eating pretty flowers. But that was unkind.

Before he left, Rho told Howie that they had to get together soon, go fishing or something. She had said that they should go for a proper drink at a proper bar one of these days and that she knew just the place—up near Fort Ticonderoga. But, Howie knew, that was just the kind of thing that people often said instead of good-bye.

“She was talking to a lot of people,” Howie told Drew.

“Who, Howard?” Drew liked that. “So you admit it! Come on, let's have a name.”

“Her name is Rho.”

Howie dropped his ex-wife and Drew off and they insisted that he get out of the car right this instant so that they could hug him properly. He obliged.

Driving down Route 29, Howie decided that there was no way Robert Rogers had tricked the Indians. Not like that, anyway. Howie knew that rock; there was no safe way down, especially in the winter. No, Howie knew why Rogers alone had survived. He'd stayed there at the bottom the entire time. The Battle on Snowshoes had begun and Rogers had taken off his snowshoes and found a place to hide. Maybe he'd climbed up a tree, or he'd buried himself in snow, or maybe he played dead. Playing dead seemed most likely. Rogers had laid there and listened to his men being slaughtered around him, the soft, safe, grateful sound of their bodies falling in snow, the crack of gunfire and hatchets hitting skin, skulls, bone, backbones, and then, at the last moment, Robert Rogers had gotten up, thrown down his gun, his belongings, everything, and he'd run across the frozen lake, straight toward where Harri had no doubt been when she painted Howie's birthday present. There are no extravagant tricks. No spirits, good, bad, or otherwise. The trick? You keep your head down and hope that nobody notices. Then, at the last moment, you run for your freaking life.

He would promote this version of history the next time he saw Drew, see what he thought, but Howie thought about that, too, and knew that he probably wouldn't see Drew again like this—not for a long while anyway.

Good night, Howie. This had been a good night. He looked at his painting in the rearview mirror, making sure that it was still there. He loved it so much, especially now, without his ex-wife sleeping behind it.

Howie did not realize that anything was wrong until he pulled into his driveway. He smelled it first, stepping from his car. Smoke.
It was sickly, like burning plastic or hair, and his first thought was that his car was on fire, somewhere in the engine, the trunk, and that his car would surely explode before he could get the painting safely out of the backseat. It was almost a relief, then, to find that the smoke was spilling from the open front door of the Phane house. He watched. One second, two. Three. Four. How quiet and unreal, feeling relief harden into horror because there was Emily Phane, on the lawn, lying in the manner of someone who had been on fire and was now dead.

E
mily, asleep on Howie's sofa, looked like a telephone that you expected to start ringing with bad news. Like, at any moment, she would ring and Howie would answer and she would tell him that she was, actually, as a matter of fact, deceased. You were too late.

But she was OK, Howie reminded himself. She breathed; she no longer coughed. The worst was over.

The fire had started in the fireplace. Emily had, of course, started it. Everything would have been fine if she had remembered to open the chimney flue.

Later, Howie saw that it had been started with some pillows, chair pieces, magazines and newspapers, and what looked like a bunch of potted plants. The smoke, with nowhere to go, had stayed home. It had filled the house. The wallpaper around the fireplace had bubbled and charred like a thin sheet of roasted marshmallow. The ceiling was black.

Howie hadn't exactly saved her life, but, he knew, he would have if it had come to that. He had been prepared to do whatever it took, running from his car to Emily. The unexpected thump of his feet had made the earth feel stage-like, hollow. He hadn't used his legs in that manner since high school, and it had thrilled him, the way that he had been able to momentarily outrun his shyness.

So. Freckles and sleep, not soot or ash or death. There were bits
of cut grass stuck to the side of Emily's face. She looked otherwise OK. No burning.

He had woken her.

“Mmmph—” Her hands groping for a pillow that wasn't there. “I don't wanna.”

Neither did Howie,
but he had
. He did. He was. Howie pulled his neighbor up from the gathering smoke and held her in his arms. He took her to his living room, laid her on the sofa, and found himself back outside, facing the blaze alone. Except it wasn't a blaze exactly, just smoke. Howie noted the green garden hose that snaked from the outside of the house into the front door. He watched water lazily slip out the front door, over the porch, and down the steps to the grass. It sounded like an old fountain at a Chinese restaurant.

The lights were still on inside Emily's house, giving the smoke an eerie theatrical aura. Like a rock 'n' roll person was soon to step from Emily's front door, followed by fireworks, noise. But then, as Howie approached, he heard a loud crack. He jumped. The lights clapped off. Something sizzled. Howie walked through the smoke up to the front door and followed the hose to the fireplace, holding on to it as if he were a mountain climber. The living room was flooded. He stepped on broken pottery, heaps of soggy leaves, mud, clothing, what felt like a squishy wet mattress. He couldn't exactly see. The water must have shorted the electricity, and Howie realized that had he entered the house a minute earlier, he might have been electrocuted. There was no fire now, just smoke. Covering his mouth, Howie stepped back outside. Howie did not call 911.

He coughed. He listened to the pines. They were a community here, he thought. You take care of your own. For ten minutes he waited with Emily's house, as if holding its hand, calming them both down. Gradually, the smoke dissipated. Because you could not be too sure. Never turn your back on smoke.

They'd assess the damage tomorrow.

Howie walked back to his house. He walked down Emily's driveway, turned right on Route 29, and then another right up his own
driveway. He approached his living room with considerably more fear than he'd approached Emily's house. She was still asleep. Howie went upstairs, listening to his footsteps, and he found a red, white, and blue afghan in Harri's room, or the guest room, because, despite what his daughter had been telling her mother and Drew, she hadn't been to visit in years. Howie covered Emily with this afghan, tucking her in. Howie went to the kitchen and drank a refreshing glass of milk. Then he went back upstairs.

For some reason, he expected Emily to be awake when he returned, as if she knew he'd brushed his teeth and hair and put on a presentable shirt. Like, for propriety's sake, she'd been waiting for this. She was still asleep. Sleepyhead, he thought.

This sleeping was weird, considering, but she didn't seem to have suffered any visible head trauma besides the bits of lawn that were stuck in her hair like plastic Easter basket grass.

Telling her, in his head, that he'd be right back, don't worry, Howie went to his car and began moving his cache of stone anniversary gifts inside with an emotion he didn't have time to acknowledge as happiness. He left the
Playboy
magazine in the backseat.

—

Howie sat on a wooden ladder-back chair in the center of his living room on a beige carpet. He observed his neighbor, waited. He practiced hellos in his head. He had never thought about his carpet being beige before. Howie assumed that this was the correct color, in case Emily asked what color it was, specifically, when she awoke, though Howie knew how remote the possibility of such a question was.

Until this moment, he had never thought about how abandoned his living room looked. He'd taken the wooden ladder-back chair from the kitchen. He only had one chair in his kitchen. Slouchless, alert: Howie sat with intense formality. He did not move. He'd brought the chair into the living room because imagine him waiting there for Emily to wake up while sitting casually, intimately, in his ex-wife's tufted Rhapsody chair. That chair was the color of pollen.
Even worse, imagine him
standing
above her. His first impulse had been to wait in the bathroom upstairs in the dark. That would not do at all. Even though it was a muggy summer evening, Howie had covered Emily in a red, white, and blue afghan that had once belonged to his mother. Emily was clothed. To Howie's mother, Doris, knitting had been a joyless, patriotic act. She only had red, white, and blue yarn. She didn't follow politics, and she didn't read the paper or necessarily enjoy the company of her fellow man, but ever since her first husband, Nathanial, had died in the Pacific, Doris had dogmatically cleaved to the accoutrements of being a proud American. Toward the end of his life, Guy, Howie's father, in a rare moment of communication, said that Doris, who had passed away several years before, had probably been a more invested widow than wife. Temperamentally, she was just better at it. Basically, she'd felt it was her duty to dress her household in a manner respectful to the country that Nathanial had given his life to protect.
Your father
, she might begin, when speaking of Nathanial to Howie, and then correct herself: “I mean to say, my first husband, Private Nathanial P. Sounes.” Howie knew everything about Private Nathanial P. Sounes, certainly more than he knew about his real father, the gentle, ghostly Guy. Howie's father had been 4-F. Something about his heart, and something—like everything—that they never got around to speaking about, though Howie was certain that his father knew exactly what his wife was doing with all her flags and afghans and doilies. Like Howie, Guy Jeffries didn't have a competitive bone in his body. Perhaps that was the real reason for his 4-F. Howie could not imagine his father saying a harsh word to anyone, never mind rousing himself up enough to patriotically kill strangers.

Crickets chirped and stopped, started, stopped; outside, on Route 29, three trucks gusted past, shaking the silence. They left a deeper, darker silence in their wake. Then more crickets and the revving hum of Howie's old refrigerator, the clunking of the clock. It was 2:41 a.m., and time moved reasonably along.

It was 2:42 a.m.

2:43 a.m.

Clunk.

2:44.

The microwave in the kitchen would say it was 5:44 p.m., but the microwave had been insisting, silently, on a different time zone for years. You learn to be tolerant.

He had left Emily with her muddy shoes on so as not to take any liberties with her feet or property. Nobody wants to wake up on a stranger's sofa without her shoes. Mud was only wet dirt. Howie thought about his face and how best to comport it. Sitting in the ladder-back chair, he would try an expression, freeze it for when Emily awoke, which could be any second, then forget which expression it was, erase it, start over, probably make the same exact face again. Who was he kidding? Howie only had one face.

He had never been more afraid of anything in his life than he was of this freckled girl asleep on his sofa. Howie was wearing his muddy shoes indoors, too. Under the circumstances, this seemed like the rectitudinous thing to do. Don't want her thinking that she was the only person wearing muddy shoes indoors, that he had extended deferential treatment to her that might, when she awoke, make her feel self-conscious or in any way uncomfortable. That, and Howie did not want Emily to see his socks.

Harri's painting was behind Howie, the accurate colors of Rogers Rock and his beloved Lake Jogues leaning against the TV. It pretty much covered his entire so-called entertainment center. The painting supported him, rallied him, propped up and straightened his back: he was Robert Rogers, hiding here in plain sight, waiting for Emily to ring.

She looked huge up close, though she was, Howie decided, not so very large. In twenty-five years, he had never been this close to her. In fact, she had lost a tremendous amount of weight. Her dark hair was unwashed. Her brown freckles, if you stared long enough,
popped about her face like fleas. Under the Private Nathanial P. Sounes memorial afghan, she wore red shorts and pink socks and a filthy maroon and white Boston University hooded athletic shirt.

Then, and without moving a muscle, she changed. She went from looking like a phone that he was expecting to ring to a phone that was ringing, but internally, ringer on silent.

This did not exactly make sense. The air around her face had changed. The volume of the air was raised, and kept getting louder, louder.

Louder.

Howie stood. He walked across the living room carpet. He paused, steeled his face, and saw the impossible: his hand reaching out and touching his neighbor's shoulder. He shook a shoulder and he snapped open Emily Phane's eyes.

—

Emily had been awake for what seemed like hours but was probably only minutes or that eternal hell space between seconds. She couldn't place herself inside any kind of immediate, narrative past. Only that she was herself again, stuck inside herself, and she wanted out. She thought she'd found a way out, but nope, she was on her back.

Back was not out.

Emily was back on her back on her fucking living room sofa. She could not open her eyes. She was breathing, and she smelled smoke, but faintly, as if she'd just come back from a Boston party where everyone had been smoking plastic and logs instead of cigarettes, pot. She felt the shoes on her feet.

She couldn't move her feet.

Though she couldn't hear anything but a strangely loud clock, then a strange refrigerator, she knew that her grandfather was in the room with her. There was a caring presence nearby that she hadn't felt in years.

Jiminy crickets, she thought.

Her grandfather breathing.

Buzzing refrigeration.

They were on her.

The sound first, as always, as if her ears were being filled with molten
scream
. She felt herself being pushed down to a small, dark point inside her head. Drowning inside herself. She struggled. She couldn't move. Her eyes, of course, would not open. But something was different this time because when she heard the footsteps approaching her, she didn't sense the evil. Then, a hand on her shoulder, a good hand, Peppy's hand. I'm here. Don't worry.

The carpet was yellowish, old. The walls, too. The fireplace empty and cold, totally clean. It was exactly her living room but all the plants were gone, gone; everything was gone, actually, except for a giant, strange window that reached to the yellow carpet and revealed a view of a cliff, a lake. The air had the bland, white smell of boiling pasta.

For the first time, there was an actual human man standing over her.

His face, which, in her paralysis, she'd anticipated as being made of some kind of pure, grandfatherly goodness, looked angry. Like a chiseled, angry rock. Like tree.

Emily gasped, began coughing.

Mr. Jeffries had finally snapped and abducted her
.

His eyes were blue. Emily had never seen her neighbor's eyes. But his face, if you started with these eyes and moved outward, his face wasn't angry at all. It was frightened, resigned, like a courageous little boy preparing himself for a spanking.

He didn't speak or move, as if he'd been possessed by the paralysis that had just held her, and Emily felt immediately, oddly protective.

She stood.

She'd been wrapped in a large, knitted flag. She was dreaming. Not dreaming, walking. She followed Mr. Jeffries down the hall to the kitchen. It was her hall but denuded: no family photographs, nothing but a terrible fish. This was exactly what her house would look like if it were dead.

—

Even after all that planning, Howie had forgotten to say hello. Emily was trembling; she was coughing, maybe sobbing a little. Then she was still. Except for her eyes, which clicked around the room.

She put up her hood.

Howie took his neighbor to the kitchen. That is, he began walking to the kitchen and hoped that she would follow. Everyone knows that the kitchen is the safest room in a house.

Howie opened a cupboard. He turned and heard himself say, “Do you want a glass of water?”

But he was the only one who heard this, because Emily said, “What?”

She sounded like a woman.

Howie handed Emily a glass. He pointed to the sink—with his face. He watched her grip the faucet as if it were there solely to prevent her from slipping to the floor. She pushed it up, the water came down. Perhaps she was too weak to move the faucet from the hot left to the cold right, or maybe, Howie thought, she just likes her tap water warm. Some folks did.

Howie had moved his computer, toaster, and telephone off the kitchen table. These he had unplugged and planted in a nest of wires on the linoleum in front of the refrigerator. This is why Howie was unable to offer Emily a refreshing glass of milk or ginger ale. On the table, in their place, he'd moved his birthday gifts, including the large pile of stones with faces painted on them.