The Household Spirit (20 page)

Emily asked Howie if he was OK.

“Yes,” Howie said.

Emily turned the TV back on. She made a sound, a deflation, like someone getting into a really hot bath. She said, “You don't mind the TV?”

He did not.

“You look like you mind.”

Howie thought about that. “I always look this way,” he said.

He expected Emily to smile. She did not. She said, “I'm sorry I slept through your eggs.” Then, on second thought, “I don't like eggs.”

“It's OK.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jeffries. Really.”

Howie knew that this was the point where he was supposed to say something else, ask Emily a question about what had just happened, perhaps make a quip, throw out his fishing line and, plop, see what was there. But this he could not do. Normally, at this point in an interaction, Howie would calm his head, close down shop on his face and wait, and wait, and the other person, unless that other person was Rho or drunk—or, God help him, a drunk Rho—got the hint and either nervously chit-chattered through the moment or found a way to leave Howie to Howie. But this person was Emily. Besides that, this person was on Howie's sofa. So, finally, he said, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure,” Emily frowned. “I guess.”

Disaster. Not only because Emily's face had suddenly gummed up with circumspection, but when was the last time that Howie had asked anyone a personal question? It was much worse than ringing a doorbell, this admission that Howie had a specific question he wanted permission to ask. He felt exposed. Trick or treat—or how about please don't even bother opening the door? Howie tightened the mask of his face.

He looked down at the carpet. The carpet. “Is this beige?” he asked.

Emily tilted her head. Um. “The color?”

“The carpet.”

“It's yellow.”

Howie said, “OK.”

“I think it's yellow?”

They looked at the carpet together.

Howie said, “Maybe it used to be beige.”

“Mr. Jeffries,” Emily smiled. “You are so weird.”

They watched TV.

Because the alternative to acting as if this was perfectly normal, both knew, was acting like they'd lived next door for the past
twenty-five years and never once said a single word to each other. Confronting that, they'd decided, was kind of impossible given the sofa and the
Frasier
, not to mention the fact that they'd just shared a moment that both of them would have trouble describing as anything less than nuts. They watched a lot of TV.

—

Howie awoke on the sofa, next to Emily. He stood up. The CNN was on. Emily Phane was, too. Embarrassed, Howie said, “What time is it?”

He generally had little trouble asking questions that concerned numbers. They exposed nothing. He moved into the hallway and its promise of a safe, intermediary state. He stood there.

“It's like five in the morning. You've been asleep for a while. I'm sorry,” Emily said. She picked her freckles, rubbed them. They were a mess. “You want me to go home now? I should probably be going.”

She looked unwell. The soggy dawn light didn't help, the sky aggressively low, overcast, drizzling all over the house. Emily's eyes were pink. Her arms were too thin, pale, almost dewy. They reminded Howie of something he'd seen on TV about eyeless albino cave salamanders. The air smelled of puddle and musty green. Emily had opened the windows.

Howie respected sleep. He stopped, listened to it—and he knew that he needed maybe three more hours, four tops. There would have been no way that he'd have been able to maintain thirty years of shift work, two weeks of night followed by two weeks of day, without a deferential relationship with sleep. Many of his colleagues were permanently jet-lagged connoisseurs of caffeine, neon energy drinks, worse. Guys who didn't figure out how to manage their sleep shifts quickly got fat, ill-tempered, divorced; early-onset heart disease and alcoholism were well-documented worries. You got to know pretty quick which ones would last. Emily, Howie saw, didn't stand a chance.

“You should stay,” he said. “You should sleep.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm going upstairs now.”

Howie wanted to tell Emily about Harri's room but thought it would be too strange, both of them climbing the stairs together. Maybe it was better if she stayed on the sofa.

“Bad night,” Emily called out.

Howie, climbing the stairs, paused, then continued without turning around.

“I mean, good night!” Emily said. “Mr. Jeffries?”

He was upstairs. He called down, “Yes?”

“Good night!”

“OK.”

Emily couldn't believe that she was still here. She listened to the footsteps above her.

Then nothing.

Then a toilet flushed. Loud. She felt weird about that, but the subsequent and comfortingly domestic rush of the sink, of teeth being brushed, washed that weird away. Emily heard a door close. Slowly, softly, Howie tapping it shut, as if he didn't want to wake himself up. She remembered him knocking on his own front door. Didn't that kind of say it all? Emily liked that so much. She missed him already.

She thought: I won't even start to think about what happened back there with Mr. Jeffries.

Because he was safe. He was as sexually intimidating as a Cheerio.

There was no negativity in the old man, she thought. He wasn't even old. There wasn't any of the crotchety, ossified annoyance that she'd long assumed was his primary motivation for getting out of bed each and every day. If she'd thought of him at all, Emily had thought of him as forever festering here, next door, sitting in his kitchen enjoying a brutal, endless, self-destructive sort of discontentment. Like revenge. Life and Mr. Jeffries having an idiotic stare-off, waiting to see who'd flinch first. Like Mr. Jeffries was bearing witness to how bad shit was to prove to everyone just how
bad shit really was, and Emily hated that she thought she understood this and, furthermore, if it wasn't true, and it didn't seem the least bit true, then who exactly was Emily describing here?

Fuck.

Because his sleeping face had been revelatory! Everyone looks softer asleep, unguarded, but Mr. Jeffries looked beatific, not like a tree or a stone but like a tree or a stone on which the face of a wise, wondering saint had been carved and, incredibly, was in the process of coming alive to cry blood or something: a miracle! He was more animated asleep, like he suddenly had so much to say if only he wasn't
asleep
. Sleep plied his features with personality and, Emily thought, a sense of communicable history that was unreadable during his waking life. It wasn't just the snoring you couldn't shut up. Emily had felt as if she were getting to know the guy, not the facts of him, but something more essential. And it broke her heart, the way that Mr. Jeffries slept through himself.

—

Time passed. Emily went to the kitchen. Nobody knows where I am.

She made her yawn full, operatic. She touched the kitchen counter, both palms down, and she could see through the wall.

It was raining.

The drizzle on leaves sounded like distant applause. She poured herself ginger ale. She spilled ginger ale. Shit and fuck and piss poop fuck. Emily cleaned it up.

No.

She did not clean it up at all—Emily stood there thinking about getting a paper towel, watching her intentions wipe ginger ale from the counter as in a dream, and the wall that she could see through wasn't even a wall. It was a window. Emily saw her house. She had never seen her house framed from the window of another house before. It was like looking back in time. Though the distance between the two identical houses could be measured in feet, in walking human feet, Emily thought of the night sky haunted with
stars from a million light-years away, many long since imploded. Ghosts come in a lot of different forms.

Peppy had died in Emily's sleep. Right over there in the yellow house. By that point, of course, there hadn't been much difference between Peppy awake and Peppy asleep. He had been
centering
, not dying. Solidifying his states, approaching the balance that would finally pop him out of this existence.

Emily yawned.

Death was such a dumb way of looking at death.

In it for the wrong reasons, Emily thought, remembering. Smiling.
IN IT FOR THE WRONG REASONS!
had been the final full sentence that Emily's grandfather had written on his yellow legal pad. Meaning, his last words had been a joke, a comment on Andi Hoffmann, a rapacious contestant on the fucking
Bachelor
, the matrimonial game show they both enjoyed. Peppy, weeks before, had referred to Andi as the
SHE BEAST
.

But from then on out, when he could write, it was a sketchy, whispery,
YES
or
NO
or
THANK YOU
or
FINE
. He was always feeling either
FINE
or
NO
.

He never got to find out which beast the bachelor proposed to on the romantic, fairy-tale island of Saint Lucia.

Emily watched her house.

Mostly, of course, if you asked, Peppy had been feeling
NO
.

Emily hadn't been dreaming or deeply asleep when it happened. She had been next to him on the sofa, eyes closed, her thinking indistinguishable from the jitter and spew of the TV. It had been like the bottom of her consciousness dropping out. Her eyes opened. She knew. She'd been having one long, seemingly endless near-death experience, almost a year of it, and suddenly death wasn't near anymore, it was gone. This terrible emptying. Emily felt like she was left sitting naked at the bottom of a bathtub, all the water drained out. Her body bristled with sharp, cold goose bumps. Don't look. Do not look. Peppy? She threw up.

Peppy, what have you done?

Hours later, the hospice people found her in the backseat of her Mazda. The seat belt felt good, necessary, and for many minutes she wouldn't let them take it off.

They got Emily inside. They got her stoned. The hospice pills made the hospice people make sounds that Emily could turn into sentences of words or leave as they were, as kind, imbecilic cooing. Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. Sitting at the kitchen table, a stupid mug of tea before her, the way the pills made the tea crisp, implausible, and Emily heard herself telling a puffy Hispanic lady about Ethan. Ethan could speak Korean. Ethan had taught her words in Korean.

“
Kkoch
is Korean for flower.”

“Pretty.”

“You would like Ethan.” What the fuck was she talking about?
Stop talking
. “I know you're not Korean,” Emily added. “You're from Hispanic?”

Emily's hand was squeezed. “It's going to be OK.”

Liar.

Emily was in the kitchen when they removed Peppy from the living room. They had tricked her with the pills and tea and handholding and, sweetheart, excuse me, Emily, there really isn't anybody who we can call?

“What?”

“Family or a friend from school? Ethan maybe? You said about an Ethan. Maybe your neighbor?”

“My neighbor?”

“What about your Korean friend, Emily?”

“I want to go home.” She was home. She wasn't home. She had lost control. Emily could not stop laughing. She said, “Why am I laughing?”

“You're in shock, Emily. You're crying.”

There was no funeral. The legal entity known as Peter Phane had insisted on a cremation, so here was something else Emily couldn't think about: Peppy in an oven. Peppy on fire. Peppy's eyes exploding.
She waited in the car. Her Mazda, in the beginning, had been the only space that wasn't charged with emptiness. Emily signed papers. She put
personal effects
into cardboard boxes. Emily chatted with insurance people and bank people and the folksy monsters at the crematorium, and they were all so much more comforting than the hospice nurses. Emily would snap to it, and for the duration of the call she would be the person they required her to be. Insurance Person on the Telephone, please don't go.

“Well, I think that'll be about it, Miss Phane. Everything seems to be in good order on our side. Do you have any further questions?”

She'd run out of questions. She said, “Is there someone else I can talk to?”

“Oh, well, I really don't see—is there a problem? I'm sorry. Maybe I can answer…”

“No problem.” Coquettishly, “But can I please talk to somebody else?”

Taco Bell, Emily found, was even better than her Mazda. Burger King. Pizza Hut. Long John Silver's. You could sit there as long as you like, just purchase a beverage. Like
personal effects
, Emily appreciated the term. Beverages didn't exist in kitchens or living rooms. Fast-food places felt eternal. Emily felt normal inside a McDonald's. She could be there without being there, and Emily soon began to notice the old people, alone, nursing coffees, milkshakes, giant plastic cups. Fellow travelers on reprieve from the afternoon. It made sense. McDonald's had captured the safe, utilitarian feel of a hospital and placed it beyond the touch of death. There were no surprises at a McDonald's. Better to feel nothing in a place like that than the so-called living room where one had once felt so much. Emily's thoughts slid cleanly off the surface of McDonald's, one after another.

Ethan, for example. She had not seen Ethan in six or seven months.

Peppy's final joke repeated on her. Emily had been in it for the wrong reasons. In what? In everything. Life. Ethan. Boston.
Taco Bell. Sleep. Queens Falls. Love. And suddenly she was in it for no reason whatsoever—right, wrong, or otherwise. Emily was unreasonable.

Hadn't Ethan said that, or something just like that, on the third or fourth day of his Queens Falls visit, before she'd made him leave for good?

The attacks, of course, grew worse. Her sleep, when she slept, crackled with menace. They were everywhere now and she was alone. They swarmed her.