The Household Spirit (29 page)

One more day, that's all. She needed one more before she could talk to Ethan Caldwell.

Emily read more about fish, learning about where they lived, what they ate, how they spawned. She didn't learn why they lived, why they ate, or why they spawned. Maybe that wasn't important.

She thought about getting out of bed, leaving Mr. Jeffries's house or getting into Harriet's bed, at least, but she couldn't move. She knew that once she left this bed that was it. She did not know what was going to happen to her once she left Mr. Jeffries's room.

Hours later, she heard Mr. Jeffries downstairs, but it was too late. It sounded like he was chatting to the TV and the TV was sassing him back. She could jump out of bed, race across the hallway to Harriet's room. Nah, too silly. She would simply apologize, tell him that she would leave at once. Last time, she'd promise, and maybe now they could even laugh at this, finally, Mr. Jeffries finding her like in the fairy tale, growling,
And someone's been sleeping in my bed
. Emily under a bedspread still covered with a dandruff of ceiling dust, one or two crystals, all manner of junk.

So it happened that the second his footsteps reached the top of the landing, where he could look directly into his room and see her, Emily, trying to make this funny, at least, picked up the hammer by the side of the bed, held it above her head, and shouted, “Surprise!”

I
t had been a deeply peculiar afternoon but things, Emily supposed, were OK now. She sat on the couch in her living room in the dark. Everything smelled of smoky soggy blight. The old house was dead now, mulching itself in the humidity. It was an unredeemable fucking mess and Emily thought about better, more persuasive fires.

It grew darker.

They'd had lunch together, the three of them, six feet dangling over the stream. Harriet was a vegetarian, so they ate vegetables, though Emily tried to bring some fruit and Pringles out too, maybe some cheese, but Howie—Mr. Jeffries—territorial, suddenly, and incapable of looking directly at Emily, had said, “She's a vegetarian.”

“I know, but—”

“She eats vegetables.”

“Fine.”

Harriet had told them about her man, money, and artist troubles—told
them
, as if they were a unit—and they'd done their best to tell her of theirs, or at least Emily had. Mr. Jeffries had hardened. He was a powerful hum, like a refrigerator filled with police. Harriet wouldn't believe that they weren't sleeping together, and the subject was so uncomfortable, so unfathomable in the light of Harriet Jeffries's wakeful presence, that they didn't try too hard to convince her otherwise. Because, uh,
how
?
They had been sleeping in the same bed. Not to mention Emily's clothing, toiletries, plants, and the very un-Howie-like perishables and Diet Dr freaking Peppers. “You got my dad to eat
sprouts
?” Emily was more represented in Howie's house than Howie had ever been.

It was still unclear to Emily, but apparently Harriet's Timmy had been an ex-boyfriend of Harriet's mother, Dori, twenty years ago. This was, understandably, a controversial subject. Mr. Jeffries was not comfortable with it, but his discomfort—or possibly anger—suited him. He was still, alert: like a Secret Service agent or spider. The worst part was that it felt like he was protecting his daughter from Emily.

She failed to explain her so-called sleep paralysis to Harriet.

“Makes sense to me. You have bad dreams,” Harriet said. “So you sleep with my dad.”

Emily gave up.

Harriet was no longer the teenager dressed as a corpse. She wasn't in costume. Being in love had freed Harriet, obviously, and made her less concerned with disgruntled externalities and, therefore, even more potently in the moment. The way she used to dress, though at wanton odds with Queens Falls, had actually distorted and stunted Harriet's uniqueness.

“This is so fucked up you have no idea!” she told Emily later, in private. “I guess thank you for taking care of my dad?”

“He took care of me. I know how it must seem, but it's really not like you think, Harriet.”

Harriet gave Emily an
it's me you're talking to
look. She said, “Well, to be honest, this sort of lets me off the hook. Talk about freakily fucking fortuitous.”

Harriet respected the bizarre. More than respected, she deferred to it. Now that Emily was, improbably, Harriet's father's suspected girlfriend, meaning her prospective stepmother, the two girls finally connected. Emily loved that she fascinated Harriet.

“You can come back with us, you know,” Harriet said. She and Emily were walking home through the woods after lunch. Mr. Jeffries had gone ahead.

“No,” Emily said. She pointed to the yellow house emerging on their left. “I really do live there, Harriet.”

“I'm just saying.” Then, quietly, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Did you really set your house on fire?”

They stopped. Emily said, “Kind of.”

Harriet nodded, as if she'd finally been given the answer to a mystery she'd always known the answer to. “Awesome.” She squeezed Emily's hand. “Fucking awesome.”

—

Emily lit candles. She went to her kitchen. She ate a handful of stale, chewy Honey Nut Cheerios. She opened her refrigerator and was met with a warm death burp of fungus, mold, and what looked like maggots roiling from vegetable-shaped swellings. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Emily slammed the door, retched. Then she laughed. She imagined Mr. Jeffries standing behind her, sharing the absurdity of a poisonous refrigerator.

She missed him so much.

She lit a cigarette, took two drags, dropped it on the wet linoleum. Fzzzzz. She had no idea why the linoleum was still wet.

And she thought that the honking that she'd been hearing was a car on Route 29. But it wasn't horizontal, it was steady, didn't fade, and so Emily walked through her hallway, into the so-called living room, and looked out the window into the two steaming eyes of Howie's car.

She opened the front door.

“Emily,” Mr. Jeffries shouted from the car. It was like hearing a cat bark. “Emily!”

Emily got in, buckled up. Harriet was not in the backseat. “Is everything OK? Mr. Jeffries, what's wrong?”

“I need your help,” he said. The car pulled out of the driveway, onto Route 29. It plunged forward.

Emily hadn't bothered blowing out the candles because who fucking cares. Harriet was right. Emily was awesome. She said, “Where we going?”

“We are going to get my daughter's ideas back from Timmy.”

—

They drove north, into the mountains. Emily felt safely shelled. She felt like they were fleeing a disaster that had claimed the entire world but for them. She loved how Howie's headlights stunned the forests around them, freezing trees guiltily, fleetingly, as if they'd been momentarily caught in the act of crossing the road. This was not like sitting next to Mr. Jeffries on the sofa. He was holding the remote now. This was his show.

He handed Emily a piece of paper. He said, “It's a map that Harri made.”

Emily clacked on the overhead light. It didn't make any sense. “These are roads?”

“House.”

Oh, Emily thought. Duh. Because even in upstate New York,
Bathroom
and
Living Room
and
Painting Studio
weren't typical town names, not to mention the gridlike road system, windows, doors, toilet. This was a detailed floor plan. Harriet had marked in which rooms she had property that they were to take back to Route 29. Two digital video cameras; a hard drive and a laptop; itemized clothing; a cellular phone and books, notebooks, toiletries,
Piece of Shit
. Harriet had placed
Piece of Shit
, clearly labeled, in a town called
Bed
, right beside
Whore Cow
.

Emily asked, “Is this Timmy guy going to be there?”

“Is he on the map?”

Was that a joke? “Mr. Jeffries, are you really OK?” Emily asked.

“Sure am.”

“Well, I don't know, can we talk about before? Things feel off
between us and I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't have been there. On the positive side, Harriet seemed cool with things. Once she understands that—”

“Timmy is the man my wife left me for,” Howie said. He cleared his throat. “My ex-wife, Dori.”

Um. “Is this really a good idea?”

“It's a pretty good idea,” Howie said. “I'm sorry about this afternoon.”

“That's OK.”

“I didn't know how to be.”

“Well, I guess you did seem different. But not in a bad way exactly. Don't worry about it. You were angry.”

“Ever since I was a kid I've been afraid of ringing doorbells. But I want to now.” He turned the steering wheel. “I don't think that I'm angry, Emily.”

“Maybe you are.”

“OK,” he said. Then, “But what am I angry at?”

“That's the thing about anger,” Emily said. “You're thinking about anger all wrong.”

The car accelerated. He said, “Thank you for joining me tonight.”

Endearingly formal, as if Emily had agreed to accompany Mr. Jeffries to a polo match and not into the mountains to confront a grown man named Timmy. Emily said, “Where else would I be.”

—

Timmy Krogerus lived deep up inside Tongue Mountain. His house appeared to be homemade. Made, it seemed, quite literally, haphazardly, from square chunks of other homes. It was unlike anything that Howie had ever seen. He imagined that the house had started way at the top of the mountain and tumbled down like a snowball, growing larger, collecting and subsuming other houses along the way. Probably there were entire wings of the structure full of other men's children, wives, pets.

There were windows the size of walls.

There was a trailer jutting out from the side of the structure, as if docking there temporarily.

The lights were on.

The plate glass windows made the place glow like a secret, rustic department store. These were the first lights that they had seen for miles. Timmy's weedy gravel driveway crunched satisfyingly beneath the wheels of Howie's car.

They stopped. The car purred, rattled, ding ding ding ding, and fell still. Howie took the keys out of the ignition. They remained seated. Emily said, “Here we are.”

It was pretty dark out there.

Howie realized that he was pretending to collect himself silently so that Emily did not think he was being too cavalier about what he was about to do. The remarkable thing was that Howie did not know what he was about to do. He did not need to collect himself because Howie was, he knew, all there.

Emily was there because he had promised Harri that he would take her along for support. He didn't want Harri to worry either.

“I don't see any cars,” Emily said. “Maybe he's not home?”

“Maybe Timmy parks out back?”

“Where is out back?”

She was right. Besides the strip of driveway, there wasn't anything but forest and Timmy's house. There was no real yard, no lawn, just some rooty trails and piles of scrap metal that Howie knew enough about art to know was art. “Look,” he pointed. “Some art.”

“What?” Emily said. “That's just redneck junk. Do you want me to do the talking?”

“But it's also art,” Howie insisted. “What would you like to talk about?”

“Do you want me to talk to Timmy, I mean.”

“No,” Howie said. “Do you have the map?”

“You think we'll need it?”

“Of course we'll need it.”

Emily was being weird. Howie opened the door. The forest
wheezed around him like laughing gas, like gas that was actually laughing, and Howie made what he imagined to be a pleasant noise, very nearly a hoot. Or maybe I'm being weird, Howie thought.

“What's so funny?” Emily asked.

Trees? The pine trees? The scent of them on this improbable lukewarm evening? That his daughter had been hiding up here with the same fellow who'd broken up his marriage almost twenty freaking years ago? Howie listened to the insects, the wind, the hilarious rustle of nighttime critters, and somewhere, over in the dark to their right, water tickled rocks. What
wasn't
funny? Howie said, “Watch your step.”

Cautiously, Emily followed.

The entire day had been like a dream where you find yourself doing something very bad and enjoying it. Perhaps I
have
been angry. There'd been a dredging. Howie's past rearing up and laughing, once again, in his face, and it did not frighten him. That was the big surprise. How strong he felt. This is how he should have taken care of Emily all along. They should have been going on dangerous missions from the get-go.

Emily said, “But shouldn't we have a plan?”

“We have a map.”

“Please shut up about the map, Mr. Jeffries! You're seriously starting to freak me out.”

“OK.”

The plan was to retrieve Harri's property. Then they would see what else. There was no doorbell, which was a significant disappointment to Howie, who'd counted on one. He knocked. Emily watched. He knocked hard, harder, now looking at Emily, showing off, like: Would you look at me knocking the shit out of this door?

“That's probably enough,” Emily said.

Nobody answered.

Howie said, “Open up, please.”

“I think maybe we should come back tomorrow?”

Howie admired his fist, his knuckles. He knocked again. He was
not going home without retrieving what Timmy Krogerus had stolen from his family. Howie watched his right hand try the doorknob. “It's open,” he said.

He walked inside. Emily, from behind, grabbed his hand, pulling him back. But nope. Howie pulled her into the house, where they then stood, briefly, holding hands like new homeowners.

Emily said, “Shit.”

They let go of each other's hands but stood close, neither moving. “Timmy Krogerus,” Howie said. He raised his voice. “Hello! Excuse me!”

Emily giggled nervously. She nudged him, whispered, “Tell him about the map.”

Good idea. “Timmy!” Howie said. “We have a map!”

The room was both gigantic and cozy, all shipwrecked wood, exposed brick, overlapping Persian rugs; it reminded Howie of an Italian puppet theater that he and Dori had once taken Harri to in New Hampshire. This was the kind of room where inanimate objects became imbued with life, magic, and Howie experienced a sudden wave of happiness. Happiness, of all things. Or was it relief? He looked about him.

The room was robust, too. There were so many healthy objects to snag your eyes on. The room was a community unto itself. Books everywhere, both in breeze-block shelves and in piles, on chairs, under lamps. The brick walls, of which there were two, were painted white; they were empty. The log walls, however, were hung with paintings, elaborate European masks, animal horns, primitive crockery, black-and-white photographs of naked people, and an old Sunoco gas station sign from Howie's childhood. The kitchen, which occupied a corner of the room, was as modern a kitchen as Howie had ever seen. It made him think of astronauts. There was a table made of glass and wood in the center of the room. The safe, motherly smell of well-seasoned food recently prepared, eaten, enjoyed; cigarettes, too, and something that reminded Howie of Rho. Illegal drugs? Probably, yes, illegal drugs. If only Rho could
see him now, Howie thought. There were extinguished candles everywhere, poking from wine bottles and rising from giant, colorful melted mounds of wax. There was a record player, which was still on, spinning, record at an end. The speakers played amplified, circular fuzz. Playing cards; sketch pads; lots of interesting hats and things made of leather. Two almost emptied glasses of red wine; three empty bottles. Piles of big city newspapers and art magazines and a gigantic sofa, which looked as soft and welcoming as any that Howie had ever seen. Pillows that somehow managed to look both soft and manly.