The Household Spirit (27 page)

“That's more like it,” Rho said, also laughing. She took his penis into her mouth.

It occurred to Howie that he was doing this, all of it, for Emily. Or somehow
as
Emily, but that did not make sense because Emily
would certainly have opened her eyes here. She hated having them closed.

Everything felt good.

For some reason, whenever he wondered if he would ever have sex again he thought that, if he did—which had been doubtful—he would remember how to do it like people said that you remember how to ride a bicycle. That saying. This was not the case. Howie remembered how to have sex in a similar way to how he remembered extreme, feverish pain: it was a continuum that could only truly be remembered by being powerlessly inside it. It was not casual. It was like a city in a recurring dream that you only remember being in when you're actually dreaming inside it, wandering about, being hunted, ignored, frightened. Being loved. Howie remembered every street. He did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to leave. Why had he ever left? Where the hell have you been?

—

Hours before, over dinner, Rho had told him that sex was important to her, and she admitted to finding people to have sex with on the internet computer. Men, she'd said. She hoped that this didn't bother Howie. It didn't. It was unusual, he thought, and didn't exactly make sense, but OK. Howie often found new places to fish on the internet computer. He found a boat. Therapy, she'd continued, was like going to school to study yourself—you needed a good professor but you also had to do your homework. Howie had not been sure if homework, in this analogy, was supposed to mean sex with people that Rho met on the internet computer or something else entirely.

Then, in the middle of the night, Howie was awoken with, “By the way, I only met one person online like that and it was a long time ago and it wasn't even good. Howie? I thought you were awake. Howie, sweetie, you awake?”

“Yes.”

“Just in case that was freaking you out.”

It had not been.

She said, “I don't know why I say the things I say sometimes. You make me feel so safe or nervous or I don't know.”

“It's OK.”

“Is it?” Rho touched his head as if making sure that it was still there. “I really like you, Howie. That's all. I'm sorry about tonight. If I was a disappointment.”

“OK,” he said.

He was awake again and not as drunk as he had been. He needed to get home. It was terrible; he hadn't texted or called Emily since before dinner.

“Howie?”

He stood up. “I need to make a phone call,” he said.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I have to call my daughter.”

“In New York City? Now? It's four in the morning, Howie…” Then Rho laughed. “Do you always call your daughter in the middle of the night after…?”

She turned on the light for him. Howie looked through his pants on the floor of the bedroom. His phone was not in his pocket. Now that was something.

“Oh,” Rho said. She explained that she might have taken his phone when he wasn't looking and turned it off because, she said, she'd gotten kind of stoned and, OK, a little paranoid with the way he kept checking it, the constant buzz buzzing text messages he'd been getting, like a high school girl, and she'd really wanted the dinner to be perfect and romantic and she'd been planning it for so long, and she was sorry that it'd all gone to shit, total f-ing shit, but when Howie went to the restroom, and the phone started buzzing again next to his fork and knife, and she was sorry, but who was Emily?

“Shit,” Howie said.

“You're mad at me.”

He was not. “No,” he said. “But Rho, where is my telephone?”

It was in the kitchen. On it were fifteen unopened text messages and more than sixty missed calls, one after another.

—

Emily would not answer the phone. Howie passed trees that he knew by heart. He searched the radio for Pachelbel's “Canon,” thinking that maybe he'd just drive himself to sleep.

He did not want to go home.

He was worried, ashamed, confused. Desire felt like regaining a limb that he hadn't even known he'd been missing. He was also happy.

He could not carry Rho and the past day back home. He did not know how to bring that through the door, and the last month with Emily began to feel like hearsay to Howie: an exaggerated fishing tale. The three-hundred-plus-pound lake sturgeon berserker that got away. Howie saw himself and Emily as Rho might, as anyone would. It was not normal. Then the vision of that splashed once and disappeared beneath the surface. Bloop.

He was exhausted. He was maybe still a little drunk. He had assured Rho that Emily was not a girlfriend. “It's OK if she is,” Rho said. “No strings. I get it.”

“She is not.”

But the idea of bed now, of sleeping next to Emily after all this, after Rho, was unmanageable.

He would try to talk to Emily. He would tell her that they could no longer sleep in the same bed. But, then, wouldn't that be admitting that they had actually been sleeping in the same bed? It was not something he felt like they should talk about.

He had told Rho that he wanted to see her again because she had been so sad there, standing watching him get dressed, handing him a sock, another sock, and also because he did want to see her again. He sure did. But first things first.

—

Howie stood in his living room. Something was missing. The plants stared accusatorily. It was morning. They knew. The TV was on, but muted, CNN types going to town, hurling bricks and bottles, waving flags and swinging burning person-shaped pillows from sticks someplace far away.

There were flayed, thin, silvery junk food wrappers on the floor. Pizza crust parentheses. Two empty bottles of Diet Dr Pepper. Howie remembered what Emily's house had looked like when he'd found Peter Phane half dead on the floor. Emily was the thing that was missing here, obviously, and she was, Howie reassured himself, probably only upstairs in his bedroom. But she was a whole different kind of missing is what Howie also thought. He checked the kitchen.

He opened, closed the refrigerator. From the kitchen window he saw his chandelier in Emily's backyard. It looked as if it had crash-landed from another, more magnificent planet.

Think about that later.

Nor was Emily half dead in the downstairs bathroom. Or the laundry room, and Emily was not in the cupboard with his money, which, Howie saw, was no longer in the cupboard, anyway. Howie went upstairs.

B
ecause Emily wouldn't open and read her own e-mail, she read Howie's. Similar to sharing a home and a bed with him, this was an invasion of privacy that she didn't try to rationalize. In a sense, it was all part of the covenant that they'd made. None of this was really happening.

The e-mails she'd read, coupled with Howie's disappearance and his phone going off-line, broke Emily's heart. They made her angry. Most of the e-mails he got, he didn't reply to. His inbox was a fearful container. There was the needy, slangy, admirably indefatigable love of Harriet's e-mails, especially considering Howie's bureaucratic replies (Emily read those, too), and then there were the ones from Dori, Drew, and Howie's pals, most reaching out to Jeffries, as they called him, inviting him to birthday parties, fishing getaways, middle-school graduations, gourmet nights, Little League championships, bowling, or just sincerely inquiring as to how he was doing. Drop us a line, bud.

This may have been behind Emily's decision to remove the chandelier from his room and drag it out into her backyard. She'd meant to take it all the way to the creek, toss it in there, drown it, as if that might wake Howie up, but she'd been far too tired. Now you'll have to find something else to hate, even if it's only your own self-protective and sickening inertia, Emily thought. Even if it's me. Emily sort of wanted it to be her. That would clarify things at least.

Now please come home
.

She'd ripped the chandelier and a shoe-sized chunk of the ceiling plaster down around midnight. It was good to have a project. She hadn't slept the night before since it was one of Howie's night shifts, so time had begun to fuzz, waver. Like the good old days.

She called him. She called him. She called him.

His phone was off, but she called him. She texted from the internet.

Sitting, waiting, hoping for Howie to return had begun to feel worse than when she'd been on her own next door, because at least hope hadn't been a part of that equation. This was more like when she'd been waiting for Peppy to die. Like then, she supposed she knew that when Howie returned, if he returned, if he really existed at all, nothing would be the same. It would be like willing yourself back to the exact same dream after being awake for hours.

She'd taken his money and hid it so that Harriet wouldn't get it. Partly, Emily thought that Harriet deserved the money. If that was all the love her father could manage to express, then she should take whatever she could get. But another part of her was jealous. Harriet didn't deserve it; Howie did, Emily did, and the two of them were going to sail away on a boat named
Richard
, because where the fuck was Harriet, anyway?

Clearly that was the mystery. Dori and Drew's e-mails made no sense. Harriet should have been here, right now, in Howie's house. She'd been spending weeks at Howie's house, on and off, apparently. It made Emily's heart race, reading that. It made her dizzy, and she'd had to look over her shoulder. Emily thought often of Howie's iconic daughter—and it had made things here more palatable, less ridiculous. Like, maybe she could become Harriet now, start over as Harriet. The idea of little Harriet held Emily's hand. But what the fuck? Had Harriet come and, if so, where and how had Howie disposed of her body? Or was Harriet hiding? Emily listened to the house. She heard Harriet upstairs when she was downstairs,
and vice versa. Emily locked the doors. Closed the curtains. She sensed Harriet's punk eyes out in the dark of the woods. Had Harriet and Emily switched places, or maybe Emily had always been Harriet, and Harriet was insane now, out here with her father, hallucinating herself into the hell of Emily Phane? Emily thought about her past and how unhappened all of it now felt. Boston was a ghost story. Peppy and her childhood wasn't even that, it was a ghost story in a different language. She held her hand before her face; she went to the mirror, said her name. She laughed. Get a fucking grip.

Emily deleted the mail about the money and then deleted the unread (by Howie) follow-up, the one explaining why Harriet needed it so bad, and then she'd put the money under Harriet's bed for safekeeping.

Emily called. She kept angrily calling and then, eventually, she plummeted to sleep.

—

“You're not even going to ask? Jesus, seriously, what is wrong with you that you haven't even asked?”

Emily was referring to the chandelier. But so what? Why should he ask? Finding out why did not change the fact that the chandelier was in her backyard, that his bedspread was covered with ceiling. Dust, crystal, wire, asbestos. She had used a hammer. What else did he need to know exactly?

“Nothing?” Emily said. “You got nothing for me? If I'd thrown the refrigerator in the creek would you, like, shrug and go buy a new one?”

“Eventually,” Howie said.

“I don't know whether to laugh or cry.”

“Are you asking me?”

“What?” she said. This tone was new.

“Because if you're asking me, Emily, I would prefer if you laughed.”

It took her a moment to realize that he'd finally said her name. The sound of it stunned her. It sounded like a spotlight: like suddenly she was really happening. Found at last.

“Howie?”

Howie said nothing. This wouldn't normally scare her. But it was pouring down now; the living room window like a grey stone.

“It's raining.” Howie sighed.

They watched.

Emily said, “Please don't make me go, Mr. Jeffries. I don't have anywhere left to go.”

She had been awake for an hour after having slept for nearly five hours, most of those with Howie watching over her. He had found her in a hollow, incoherent state, half sitting, half sleeping amidst the debris on his bed. He had told her that she had to sleep, and told her that she had to not sleep there, in his bed, and she had told him to please not say that. Then begged him to sleep, too, next to her. That it was OK.

It was not OK. They were talking in the bedroom. The spell was broken.

Eventually, he had carried her to Harri's room, where she fell asleep curled up next to the computer. Howie pulled up a chair, sat by the bed. He touched her head as he would have touched the head of his own daughter, when she was young, if she'd ever been the type of girl who needed him to be there, petting her, telling her that everything was OK when it very clearly was not.

Emily would wake every twenty minutes in a state of panic, and she'd ask him why he didn't help her, where he had been. Howie told her that he'd been right there. “I'm right here,” he said. But then why'd he let them have her? He told her that he didn't know what she was talking about.

Now they were on the sofa. The TV was off. The plants were, too, somehow, like a movie that had switched from color to black-and-white. It wasn't only the storm. Howie and Emily regarded each other as hungover strangers might after waking in each other's
arms. The awkward depth of their intimacy matched only by the fact that everything they'd learned about the other had evaporated with the alcohol. But he'd said her name.

“It's like I'm my own coffin,” Emily said. “That's what it's like.”

She was explaining. But words weren't much up to it. It was like putting shoes on a headache. She told Howie about her sleep paralysis. She told him about the entities.

Howie said, “I don't understand.”

“I mean, what is this?” Emily meant everything. She made an
everything
gesture with her hands.

They listened to the rain.

“I don't know how to help you,” Howie said.

“You did.”

“OK.”

“You helped me before. You knew somehow. I'm not crazy, don't make me feel crazy, Mr. Jeffries. You know what I mean. You helped me.” She could not call him Howie anymore.

“I'm sorry.”

“These things are everywhere, all around us. They're laughing at us. Because this doesn't feel like it's happening. Being awake. I can't take anything seriously.”

Howie said, “I know.”

Quietly, “Do you?”

Did he? “I don't know.”

Emily said. “Never mind. Look at me.”

“OK.”

She scooted away from Howie, opening a space between them. They looked into it. Their look greeted each other, acknowledged something, as if they were accomplices who'd just spoken for the first time about a crime they committed together, years before. “Do you think that you're real?” Emily asked.

Howie did not want to think about this crap.

“It's like we're puppets sitting here,” Emily said. “OK, I know, enough. I'm so fucked up it isn't funny. Time terrifies me, Mr.
Jeffries. Seriously, I'm so scared of time and being stuck inside it forever.
Consciousness
.” She laughed. “What am I, you know?”

“You're Emily.”

“Established. But can I be someone else now, please?”

“I doubt it.”

They looked at the window.

Howie said, “It's really coming down.”

“You said.”

Howie remembered how Rho spoke. The way Rho splurged herself to Howie with such trusting, wanton generosity, chucking her thoughts out of her head like ballast from a sinking balloon—Rho falling around Howie in pieces. She was so unashamedly alive. Howie would speak as she did, as she might. Thinking and talking, it was a communal thing: it was the only thing that made you real among other real things. He had been unreal too long. He said, “I'm very shy.”

Emily's eyes widened. “It's more than that.”

“OK,” he said.

“No, continue. I'm sorry.”

Howie said, “I feel like an actor playing a human.”

Emily laughed. “You're a terrible actor most of the time!”

“OK.”

“I'm not kidding. You're the worst. Totally miscast.”

Howie nodded; smiled. Nodded harder.

“Can I say, every time you smile I think you're preparing to bite me. It's going to take a while to get used to,” Emily said. She touched Howie's shoulder. “No, listen, but I've never had a best friend. I always used to have a lot of friends, but nobody could get that close, like there was something wrong with me. Turns out, there
was
something wrong with me. Let's face it. The other girls knew. People know. I knew they knew, but I could never figure out what or how. That scared me. I don't think I was being paranoid. Nobody wants to be close with someone who doesn't
take seriously what they take seriously. Did you ever have a best friend?”

Howie said, “My wife.”

“Doris? Really?”

“Dori. In high school, that's right,” he said. “I don't think that we ever should have gotten married.”

“Why not?”

“But we used to have so much fun,” Howie said, wonderingly.

Emily said, “What kinds of fun things did you do?”

“Well, roller-skating.”

Emily gawped her mouth.
“Roller-skating?”

“For some reason I was better at skating backward than forward; I'd go like this,” and Howie stood up, gracefully chugged his arms. Closed his eyes. He laughed, too. Then sat down with the self-contained triumph of someone who had just given a successful speech.

“Oh my God, that's too much! Did you, like, win competitions?”

“It wasn't a competition,” Howie said. “It was for fun.”

“Mr. Jeffries.”

“Well,” Howie said. “People always thought that something was wrong with me. But nothing was ever really wrong with me.”

“No offense,” Emily said, “but I'm pretty sure that something was wrong with you.”

Maybe he
was
mean, like Rho supposed. Maybe he'd been hiding in plain sight all this time: someone who hates everything safe behind the immovable mask of someone who hates everything. But it couldn't be that simple, could it? Leaving yourself alone for so long rarely is.

“I wish I'd known you then,” Emily said. “Do you think we would have been friends if I was your age?”

“No,” Howie said.

Emily nodded. “But I hope we would have said hello to each other once in a while.”

“OK.”

“More than we did for the last twenty-five years, anyway. Right? It's hard to believe that was us.” Emily made a face. “For the record, that was totally your fault.”

“I'm sorry I didn't try to help you sooner,” Howie said.

“If it's any consolation, you probably haven't helped me. I'm still crazy.”

“I don't know,” Howie said.

“Me neither.” Emily sighed. “I'm sorry. You have helped me, I guess. If keeping me alive is of any value.”

“It is, Emily.”

Something caught in Emily throat. “Well, thank you.”

“What was Ethan like?”

“Wow, really?” Emily wiped a tear from her eye. “Mr. Jeffries with a question!”

She did not want to evoke Ethan Caldwell right now, her half-lived life in Boston, Les French Flowers, Boo. Ethan was a regret, not one of many but the one that could be said, in a way, to contain them all. She told Howie about the last several days that they'd spent together on Route 29.

“I made him go,” she said. “I was a monster.”

She said that Peppy had loved him too. She told him that she had reacted in a bad way to how much her grandfather loved Ethan and how invisible and secondary she became when Ethan was in the room.
MY BOY
, Peppy had called him, writing, suddenly, in full, perfectly crafted paragraphs, telling Ethan more about his past than he'd ever told her. Had she really not asked? Was that all it was? The ambitious, lost Pete Phane resurgent, proud, full of a masculine bluster that Emily hadn't even guessed. She felt like a fussy, hysterical little girl and realized that maybe she'd been kidding herself: that she'd always just been that to her grandfather. His trouble girl.