The Household Spirit (3 page)

They saw little of Peter and Gillian's granddaughter in the months before the accident. Howie's wife, in a flurry of postnatal superstition, decided that “that shit” next door was contagious, and, for a time, they stopped discussing the Phanes. They didn't stop watching.

It should have been strange that the two new mothers hadn't once visited, communicated, or acknowledged their common providence. Nary a nod or a tray of thoughtful pastries passed between them. It did not feel strange. This was, after all, a route, not a neighborhood. Meanwhile, the Phane household continued to purge itself daily. The old woman out back, the younger one out front. And would you look at that: both smoking now. When Howie did see the baby, she was with her grandfather. The tall old man contained such stillness, never rocking the baby, only looking
off into the forest while he whispered or quietly sang. Catching Peter Phane lullaby Emily alone in the backyard was similar to the way time stopped when, as a teenager, alone in the mountains, he would realize that within some ordinary patch of forest he had been watching there had been, all that time, a deer, stone still, watching him back. Then, like that, another deer. And another. The real world gone otherworldly. Howie imagined one day stepping out of time, joining Peter, the two of them holding their babies, singing.

—

Howie had been in his backyard the September afternoon that Emily's mother and grandmother were killed in a head-on collision with a car that Howie always imagined as a Saab.

Howie's wife had taken the baby shopping. Then they'd be stopping by her parents' house for dinner and, if he knew his mother-in-law, a few hours of the sloppy, gin-garbled mayhem she considered advice. Howie had decided on a headache, and he took the opportunity to clear a path through the woods to the Kayaderosseras Creek. Someday he would build a small dock and a bench for his family here. He loved the creek's cold hum. He loved the Indian summer smell of the forest bed, the Halloween mess of pine needles and orange and yellow and red leaves. The buggy shafts of light hanging from the treetops. Foxes quiet as fish. The semiotic squabble of deer prints in the mud by the bank of the creek. Chipmunks, wasps, squirrels, birds. This is my spot. This is where I make our home. He would fish here someday, sitting on his dock, and when Harriet was old enough he'd build her a boat, asking what color she wanted Daddy to paint it. Every color, she would say, all of them. But let's paint it together.

His wife, of course, still bristled at any project that implied permanence. Let her. Because someday they would sit out here and sip iced tea, maybe even wine, the pink kind she liked, watching the water move the dusk into evening. Howie would get candles; she'd like that. Candles that smell like purple or apple pie. Put some there
maybe, fix them to that tree. He would get a dog, a kindly one that ate snakes.

Thing was, you had to be delicate. His wife didn't enjoy watching him labor intensively on anything suggesting that their world couldn't change tomorrow at the drop of a hat. It was probably a phase but boy was he getting sick of explaining the differences between the construction of a prison and a family. Couldn't she at least try and be happy?

Exiting the woods that day, Howie turned to the Phane house. Peter stood facing him.

Their eyes met.

Peter was by the back screen door and he was holding Harri.

Howie's first thought:
He's kidnapped my baby
. His second thought as well, and his third, as if Harriet, his little Harri, were the only one of her kind. Not a human infant, a species unto herself.

The sudden realization that his happiness was ordinary, shared, and based on a common enough prop, that all of it amounted to nothing much at all. That from a short distance, yards, mere yards, he couldn't even tell the difference between the thing he loved the most in the world and something he didn't yet know the name or gender of…

Peter Phane's face mimicked the way he wore his pants high up over his belly. Chin and bottom lip up: preposterous, formidable. Handsome as an old barn, or at least Howie's wife had once said so.

Their eyes held.

Howie's face stiffened, then snapped shut. He felt it happen. Couldn't help it. Maybe if he'd been holding Harri it would have been better, but Howie held nothing.

Peter Phane grinned. It was as intimate and unexpected as if he'd actually dropped his trousers. Then he held his grandchild up in the air, actually lifted her over his head for Howie to see. Would you look at
this
? Such a smile.

Howie shook his head no.

He didn't realize what he was doing; then he'd done it. No. Shaking his head as if to say, Shame on you, old man. Why, you oughta be ashamed.

Peter Phane nodded plainly, and, pulling the infant down to his chest, he walked back into his house.

Thirty minutes later the police arrived with the news of Nancy's and Gillian's deaths. They arrived at Howie's house first, dreamlike, mistaken, two uniformed men hand-delivering their blue hats.

M
arty, a colleague from work, had given him the internet computer, an old one, apparently, though all computers looked inherently new to Howie. He frequented websites and forums dedicated to fish. He enjoyed photographs of boats. For over twenty years, ever since his wife and daughter left Route 29, Howie had been saving up to purchase a sailboat. Nobody knew this. He had not meant for this to become a secret, but the opportunity to inform someone had never presented itself and now, Howie felt, it was too late and probably too weird to suddenly tell someone, his daughter, for example, that, oh by the way, for twenty-some years I've been stashing away money for a giant wooden boat that I will someday live on. His dream was a 1971 Catalina 27. In good condition, one might put him back anywhere from twenty to thirty thousand dollars. Depending on how much more he had to subsidize Harri in New York City—she was out of work again—he hoped to be able to purchase this two-bedroom sailboat by the time he was retired in ten years. (Two bedrooms had always been the plan, just in case Harri ever wanted to visit him—and though she never visited him now, he did not want to assume that this would always be the case, especially if he had a boat. Even though she hated boats.) Howie knew a fellow, a hushed old coot, Earl Stolaroff, who might even let him dock the boat at his summer cottage on Lake Jogues. Once, while ice fishing, they'd talked around the issue. Stolaroff took
snapshots of Lake Jogues and posted them for people to see on Facebook. Howie liked these immensely.

He had initially misunderstood the internet computer. Harri insisted that he sign on to the Facebook, and so he did and became, once again, her Father, officially listed now, Howard V. Jeffries, right there above Mother, his grainy face grimacing from an old photograph that Daughter had e-mailed him while helping register his account. Being Family on the computer meant that they didn't need to talk on the telephone so much anymore.

He had started by writing Harri letters on her wall. “Dear Harriet,” these would begin. Minutes later, they'd be gone. This happened over a dozen times. Perhaps he'd misclicked? He consulted the Facebook troubleshoot, Howard V. Jeffries troubleshot, but still couldn't quite figure it. Well, huh. Concerned, finally, he posted a final letter on Harri's wall asking why none of his previous letters had been delivered. This too disappeared.

Shortly after, he received a private e-mail.

love you to death dad but please enough with the graffiti?
:)

He'd thought that was the point, why she'd asked him to join, but OK. He apologized.

: (

Howie was friends with his ex-wife now, on and off the internet computer. (There was no official Ex-husband status on Facebook.) In fact, months after joining he had forty-three friends. Pressing the Confirm button had not been easy. It was as bad as a doorbell—an announcement of engagement, presence. They now know exactly where I am. They know I am here. Howie was someone who knocked, always, and the obtrusive clicking, pinging sounds by which the computer marked his movement through its world embarrassed him. Shhhhh. Most of these friends were unrecognizably aged men and women whom he may have known from high school, and after Howie's initial confirmation of friendship no other communication
was ever forthcoming or apparently deemed necessary. Often they hid their years behind profile photographs of their grandchildren or pets. He was friends with GE employees, past and present, and some of their spouses who remembered him fondly from picnics, Secret Santa, potluck Super Bowl fiascos. He was friends with Ken Tapper's wife's dog. But it was not helpful, almost an affront, having different shifts of his life coexist at the same time inside the internet computer. The machine made it harder to punch out or move forward cleanly.

Harri had 453 friends. Howie would sometimes look through them, vacillating between pride and incredulity. In high school, Harri hadn't had more than 3 friends that Howie knew of. His ex-wife had 249 friends now, and his ex-wife's latest husband, Drew Sullivan, had even more. Deservedly, Howie thought. He'd met Drew on numerous occasions and genuinely liked the man and his relaxed, attractive intelligence. He was older than Howie, a retired high school English teacher from downstate, and he sometimes called wanting to know whether Howie'd like to go out with him for a brew, he'd say, maybe catch the game at Sandy's Clam Bar. Howie never accepted but often wished that he had. Drew posted poems and links to articles about how Republicans were berserk onto Harri's wall. She would often comment on these—OMFG! LOL! NSFW!—and her stepfather would comment back, others also chiming in, Liking, and Howie enjoyed keeping up with their easy, winking repartee. Last May, Drew had been the only one to call Howie on his fiftieth birthday. Everyone, meanwhile, remembered on Facebook.

: )

Emily Margaret Phane was not Howard Jeffries's Facebook friend. Still, he'd spent a fair amount of time monitoring her profile. That is, until it disappeared shortly after she returned from Boston to nurse her dying grandfather.

Before that, Howie had been able to keep track of her at Boston
University. She made 72 new friends. She was even “in a relationship with” what appeared to be an Oriental young man. In photographs she appeared happy, if overworked. Howie sometimes lingered over the doorbell of her Add Friend button, swirling his arrow, thinking, Why not?

Thinking: Because you are a ridiculous man.

His intentions, he knew, were chaste. Protective but not prohibitive. His interest in his neighbor no more inappropriate than that of an elderly female relative who cared from afar: Howie desired nothing more from Emily than the knowledge that she was doing OK. Even though she was closer now, no longer in Boston, right next door in fact, yards away, snug inside her house doing God knew what, Emily felt farther away than she ever had. She had deleted herself. He would plug her name into the internet computer search: emily phane. But there was no longer any active emily phane, or
EMILY PHANE
or Emily M. Phane or emily margaret phane, or any of the variations Howie tried. None of them was now doing OK.

—

If most adults are failed children, as Howie vaguely assumed, then Emily had been a rare success. She was first-rate. Year by year she didn't grow out of or actively debase her girlhood but grew gracefully into the peculiar child that she had been. That was his take, anyway. Her presence next door enlightened him—made his days and thoughts
lighter
—especially after his own daughter had begun to become something he adored but could no longer entirely comprehend.

Emily never smiled while waving hello to Howie. She got him. She did not smile so that he would not have to smile back. Because she sure smiled at everything else. She was made of nimbler stuff, maybe, more refined matter than the everyday heaviness Howie pushed through. Like everything was absurd, a joke, and watching her you felt in on that joke, aligned with the bright, mocking interrogatory light she shone on everything. Some people, no
matter what, when they start laughing, you can't help but laugh along, even if you have absolutely no idea what's so funny. Even if it's abundantly clear that nothing ever really is. Not that Howie ever actually joined in laughing, alone, at his house, at his window. Because that would have been nuts.

Her face was round but not chubby, not quite. Her hair was black, shoulder length, with bangs that drew a line above her dark eyebrows and grey eyes. Then her freckles. Rare on someone with her coloring, they looked as if they'd been painted on her high, wide cheeks—a light brown, almost tribal smear of them. If Howie had to guess, he would say that the girl's father might have been an Eskimo. Though, from a distance—a next-door neighbor's upstairs bathroom window, say—it looked like her father might just as well have been a panda bear. She had looked that way since she was five.

The first years after the death of her mother and grandmother, Emily didn't lack for feminine care. Old women abounded. Five or six of them took turns stopping by, badly parking their cars—sometimes in Howie's driveway by mistake—bringing Tupperwared meals, pink baby supplies, cardboard boxes of used toys. One of the women stayed overnight occasionally, and Howie's wife claimed to have seen this one holding hands with Peter out in the backyard, smoothing his eyebrows. Peter was to have many such friends in the years that followed, but never for longer than a few months. Howie couldn't figure out where they came from, or why they left. He assumed they'd known Peter from before, must have, and that they'd long been kept at bay. Tellingly, the
NO SOLICITORS
sign disappeared a month after Gillian's death. Later, when Emily began to walk, the old women came less and less, though they never entirely stopped. One theory is that they'd begun dying off. More likely is that they were unnerved.

Howie's wife called her the Little Biddy. Emily adopted the old man's walk, even the manner in which he puckered his pockets with his hands, and the part ministerial, part astonished way his head tilted when he spoke. Little Emily chugging around the
lawn, wearing grown-up sweaters and blouses as dresses. Gillian's clothes, most likely. Howie would watch the two of them tending the garden, or sitting together in the backyard, conversing—the six-year-old girl, her hand on her chin, hmmmming and nodding in time with her grandfather.
Yes, yes, but of course
. Timeless old friends comfy inside a total lack of necessity. Harriet wouldn't ever sit still and talk to Howie, not like that. He tried. His wife said that this was because Harriet was healthy and not a freaking freak, actually, and, Jesus, what the hell did Howie think that they were supposed to talk about, anyway?
Fishing?

For starters, Howie thought. Sure, maybe fishing.

Harriet and Emily parallel played. Together, yards away. Tiny Harriet in their living room with her books and remarkable drawings, her paintings; Emily in her backyard and garden. Howie's wife and Harriet shared and magnified each other's suspicion of everything outside their house—meaning everything Howie most loved and wanted to share with them. He'd try to get his daughter to come outside with him, let's go see the baby ducks at the creek, let's name them, feed them bread, but the girl would look at her mother and begin to cry. Mommy, don't make me. Route 29 and its psycho trucks were too close to their house. Drowning in the Kayaderosseras was too close to their house. Rabies was too close. Bees and skunks. Peter Phane and his unnerving granddaughter were far, far too close. There were clouds that spat lightning and giant trees that dropped branches the size of small trees and deer carrying ticks carrying Lyme disease and God knows what kind of other crap. Bears. Everything was too close to their house that was far away from everything. Harriet was in agreement with her mother: they were surrounded.

The toddler spent most of her days “with other children” at day care, or at her grandmother's house or one of Harri's new, honorary aunts' houses.

But Howie knew that Harri watched Emily, sometimes, particularly when her mother wasn't around. Once he caught his four-year-old
daughter at the living room window, watching Emily and Peter in their backyard. Harri was whispering, giggling, as if talking along with them. Emily saw Harri, waved. Peter waved, too. Harri made a thump of a sound, quickly turned, saw Howie watching her, and burst into tears.

Howie's wife had been trying the best she could. She loved him, she said, and every so often he knew that this was true. But it wasn't enough, not for either of them. They had reached adulthood at different times, he with her, before they even married, whereas she was struggling into hers before his eyes. She was helpless inside herself. She felt smothered and afraid of her feral discontentment and the direction she could not stop growing in. He figured this out later. She did not want to hurt anyone, Howie especially, him most of all, but she could not remain as she had been or where she was. She no longer fit. She wore herself badly. It made Howie love her more, and sometimes the pain she felt at not being able to reciprocate her husband's love, or the life he tried so hard to create, actually made her love him more, too. But this was a love that fed on self-hate, on the guilt for a wrongness she couldn't help throwing around her in destructive desperation.

Peter and Emily Phane vexed her. Their garden particularly. Whereas Gillian's garden had had all the regulation and rot of a vegetable concentration camp, after Emily and Peter's liberation, it grew effusive, ramshackle, and right out onto their lawn and toward their home. Its fecundity spoke of something unwholesome, depraved. Those two, that house.

“It's not normal,” Howie's wife would say. “Do not even tell me that that is a normal thing!”

—

The years passed, his family departed, and Howie was left with Emily and old man Phane. He knew her shifts as well as his own. He knew when she was home sick from school, and at night he could follow her from room to room in her house, and through that make guesses at what she was doing—when she did her homework,
ate her supper, watched the TV, when she was talking on the telephone upstairs while Peter thought she was doing her homework. He didn't stare or obsess; Howie would just glance from a window now and again, unthinkingly, as one checks a clock for the time or the sky for weather.

Unlike Harri, Emily appeared to have a lot of friends. Boyfriends, too. Howie followed her academic achievements in the local paper—a solid student, Emily M. Phane always made the honor roll, and once or twice the principal's list—and then what characters she played in the Adirondack Children's Troupe productions that it didn't feel proper to attend, though he wanted to, and even waited up after the first night of
Free to Be…You and Me
, trying to gauge by her expression how it had gone. It went great! Likewise her roles in
A Light in the Attic
and
Charlotte's Web
. To earn money for college, she worked for a few years as a waitress at Davidson Brothers. Howie never visited during her shifts. He did, however, go when he knew she wasn't working, and he'd imagine the honorable manner in which she served people who couldn't possibly have appreciated her. He felt bittersweet on her seventeenth birthday when Peter bought her the used Mazda.