The Household Spirit (6 page)

Things got worse. Emily's garden was nothing but soil and lack now. There was an emptying going on next door. She had begun pulling it all up: shrubs, small trees, ferns. The vegetables and the flowers had gone first, almost overnight. Then the entire garden. She razed anything the spotlights touched, like clearing her yard of plaque. Then she started off into the darkness beyond, back where Howie could not follow. He nearly expected to return from work one night and hear her out back felling pines with a chain saw.

She was in trouble. She was only separated from Howie by a wall and several yards of lawn.

Howie had not saved Peter Phane's life, merely prolonged it by a year. Eleven months. Most of which Peter wasn't even exactly present for, or so Howie had to assume. He should not have meddled. If he had not gone over then Emily would not have dropped out of college to move back in and nurse him to death. She, at least, would have been spared. Howie was responsible. The future was all his fault.

He stood at a kitchen cupboard.

There, in an old green Folgers decaf can, he put two one-hundred-dollar bills. This month's boat savings. He hadn't been able to save for the past half year because Harri had needed a little support in New York City. Why? Wasn't his place to ask. Howie had half his boat money in the Trustco Savings Bank and half here, in the Folgers decaf can. It was childish, but so was thinking that he could someday sail away from himself on a wooden boat. The physicality of the money inspired him. The paper was more likely to become a boat if he could keep an occasional, encouraging eye on it. You can do it.

Howie hadn't seen a light on upstairs at Emily's house in over a
year. Only the living room and the kitchen, and those were hardly ever off. The living room windows were now completely obscured by plants. They hummed green.

Tomorrow, he thought.

But
tomorrow
was still the extent of Howie's plan to save Emily Phane. Today, of course, was yesterday's tomorrow, and yesterday had been the day before that's tomorrow. There'd been weeks of that. Months? Sure. OK. But tomorrow was coming, Howie knew, and here was a Folgers decaf can full of more than a hundred hundreddollar bills to prove it. He shook it.

Back when his wife had been trying to conceive, she had gone on about how caffeine capsized estrogen levels, caused bladder cancer, irritability, muscle tremors. She cut strident, coupon-sized articles from health magazines and stuck them to the refrigerator, obituaries for this or that formerly enjoyable food product.

“Why don't we just get one big sign for the refrigerator that says ‘Eating may cause disease'?”

A kiss on the cheek. “You may cause disease, Howard Jeffries.”

He never went back to caffeinated coffee. First because Howie wanted to prove his ex-wife wrong by drinking a pot of decaf every day for the rest of his life and coming down with bladder cancer anyway, ha ha ha, and then, now, seriously, because that's where his money lived. His boat, his silly, secret future. Howie liked to drink the stuff and think about his Folgers decaf bank account in the kitchen cupboard and how maybe, just maybe, there was some surprise left in him yet.

M
eanwhile, next door, Emily Phane was losing her mind. She stood on a mattress in the center of the living room. She bounced. Or maybe I'm just tired, she thought. This was her pet debate, the conclusion pretty much foregone: Emily was tired
and
insane.

The plants were closing in.

Puckered-up flowers, vines, ferns, saplings. They were vibratory now. And they reached for her.

The room was padded. Everything insulated, top to bottom, and you couldn't even see out the windows anymore. Not like there was really anything going on out there, just more plants.

Emily passed her days in a state of besieged wakelessness. Kind of like dreaming and kind of like hiding—but without the inherent safety of either. The plants protected her, if not from totally losing it, then from total inactivity. There was a continuum that she tapped into while silently, thoughtlessly tending them. Since Peppy died, this was the only safe place that she knew.

She hadn't slept in two, maybe three days.

She rarely ventured upstairs. The doors to the bedrooms might as well be wall. Everything huddled here in the living room, safe, or relatively safe, waiting it out. It'd been almost two years and what had once seemed like an only slightly batty and temporary and understandable spatial adjustment to loss now risked approaching
the territory of someone who, years after the death of a baby, refused to remove the half-consumed container of Gerber's from the fridge. Emily knew that this was not normal.

Emily was bouncing on a mattress.

More than she slept on it, she stood on it, stepped on it, desultorily bounced on it. Like right now. The mattress was a slab in the center of the room. She rarely thought of it as a bed.

She stopped.

Sleep, when it happened, happened like a cough. Her body suddenly too huge and heavy to feel, her vision muffled, squirrely, her brain just totally shot and then
cough
, like that but bigger—COUGH!—and she'd either fall where she stood or make it to a chair, or a nice spot on the floor.

The mattress was surrounded by potted shrubs and buckets of wildflowers.

These came from out back, some of them. There was a dreamy, wholly unexamined system here. Others Emily adopted from the hills and trails around Queens Falls: strays surreptitiously dug up from the littery banks of the roads she found herself walking some nights. She'd even gone out behind Mr. Jeffries's place the other night. Not like he'd notice. The guy was a tree. Emily thought that maybe someday she'd take him in, too, plant him over by the fireplace, water him until he sprouted a smile, a pulse, anything.

Emily laughed.

The TV was company.

She changed the channel.

Emily wasn't particular but she especially loved documentaries about anything that had happened in black and white. Musicals as well; they reminded her of Peppy and Peppy's version of her mother, Nancy.
Anything Goes. My Fair Lady. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
. Emily loved baseball. Baseball was a log in the fireplace. But not watching, only listening. Peppy'd watch the game on his radio out in the backyard, and it wasn't until Emily was six that she
finally saw the game on TV. It looked nothing like it was supposed to. They were playing it all wrong. Real world baseball was stodgy, inexplicable. But weren't most things, actually, if you opened your eyes and bothered?

The bathroom was off the hall that led from the living room to the kitchen. Only door on the right.

She walked by it.

Emily Phane was walking.

The hall itself was longer than you'd think, especially at night. It was a tunnel lined with the dead. Emily's grandparents, great-grandparents, great-uncles in great, awesome hats. Nancy, age seven, on stage in dancing duck costume. The NDE Emily had called it: their hallway as a near death experience. “Go toward the light, Peppy,” she'd joke when he got up for a snack during a commercial. They used to joke about everything.

Compared to the plant-choked living room, the kitchen was a sky. Four uncovered windows. Everything washed out by a hundred years of direct sunlight: pale wooden cupboards, a steel marshmallow of a fridge, a microwave and a toaster and ostensibly brown wallpaper that had long since camouflaged itself into the exact color of the light that struck it. The linoleum was permanently clammy and nice underfoot.

In the kitchen there were doors. Laundry room door. Door to the backyard. Door to Peppy's office.

It was past midnight.

Emily refilled the yellow ceramic jug at the sink. Then back to the living room to water the plants.

They thickened and hushed expectantly. Stupid things. Stupid me. Emily's eyes wanted to sleep, but her head, she knew, was no mattress. Who said that? Sometimes she'd close only one eye, as if this would be enough, tricking herself, giving half her head relief. Keep busier than time and time goes away. That was also a trick. Because it wouldn't be past midnight forever; soon, once again, it'd
be before midnight. Meaning what? Meaning Emily didn't know, just do something before you fucking fall asleep. Not fall, she thought. Plummet.

She watered a particularly sullen tree. Its tilt and sag worried her. Then a shrub, a matriarch, Emily decided, with a sudden gust of goodwill toward her own peculiarities. You're a good old girl, aren't you? Look at you. You're a grandmamma.

Then on to the spider-eyed berry thing. Then the one with the pointy clown wings. She watered a palm that reminded her of a blind hunting dog.

Emily's old professor reprimanding her again: enough with the animism, Ms. Phane!

Was that all she was doing?

Back before all this, at Boston University, she'd made motions toward a study of botany, plant biology, environmental science. That kind of thing. In the end, she'd felt too drowsily bemused to adapt herself to another view of reality. Science seemed fussy, insincere. Biometrics had made her sad. She had, however, become loosely interested in the more esoteric end of so-called plant neurobiology, specifically in long-dismissed studies of CIA agents who'd hooked up houseplants to galvanometers. It made sense to her that lie detector machines could pick up the electrical stress of plants when you thought about eating them or setting them ablaze. Emily couldn't quite believe in the line that separated plants from animals, or, for that matter, sleep from the waking world. Plants dominated the world. That was a fact. They ate light and invented aspirin and talked to one another via chemical signaling. They learned. They gossiped with one another over great distances. In a sense, they were time machines. Plants existed in a different, slower dimension.

They were kind of terrifying, actually.

Look at one under a microscope and try not to freak out.

Start small. Baby steps. Snap out of it. Emily could still maybe go back to before all this, couldn't she? She could! She wasn't one of those women who later found themselves half eaten by cats, or
mummified in a room wallpapered in aluminum foil. No way. She'd always been the cutup, the class clown. This was like that. This was
quirky
. Seriously, what could be funnier than a room full of sentient, stolen plants?

Tomorrow she could jump in her Mazda and drive down to the Aviation Road mall. Buy a new smartphone. Clothes, shoes: new things for a brand-new you. She could even hit up Burger King and buy back some of the weight she'd lost.

The mouth of the fireplace was fanged with cacti. Urgh. You guys. Emily did not like them one bit. She poured water over their heads.

You're quirky, all right, she thought.

She laughed.

Quirky as a crippling bone disease.

They were zombies, these cacti. Part here, part irretrievably elsewhere. They reminded Emily of Peppy's last months on the sofa. The hospice nurses in their Honda Civics coming by to water him. The way his beard continued to grow, eyes bald and calked over. How inappropriate TV was, but how terrified Emily'd been to click it off. The glaucoma of TV light further draining her grandfather's face of color, as if he were entering a horrific version of one of those Turner Classic Movies he so loved. Caterpillar whorls of hair growing from his ears, and oh my God did that mean he'd always trimmed his ear hair before? Should Emily have? How? With what? She wished she could have joked with him about that too, about all that fuzziness filling up his ear—Can you hear it growing, Peppy?
There's more hair inside your ear now than on the top of your head!
The two of them laughing instead of sitting there watching those plastic tubes pump him full of absence.

She'd plugged the cacti into the fireplace partly as a warning and partly as proof that her sense of humor was intact. Best of both worlds. She'd gotten to threaten houseplants with fiery death, safe in the knowledge that threatening houseplants was also, obviously, kind of hilarious. Oh it was satisfying. The only question
being, at what point does having a sense of humor about your own eccentricities cross over into the lane with the people who wander around laughing at everything for no apparent reason? Because maybe insane laughing people are only laughing in order to prove to themselves that they are self-aware and not, in fact, insane. They get it; they're totally in on the joke. They're still fucking insane.

S
he was everybody's second-best friend. Growing up, Emily wasn't lonely or necessarily unpopular, but something was missing.

She'd watch other girls being best friends. She'd fixate, zone in on it, couldn't help it. She measured best friends against her own limper friendships, sometimes jealously, always inquisitively. Studying how they'd entangle their laughter, perfumes, ringtones, slang, blouses (the word itself,
blouse
, was, to Emily, a best friend word, a mom word, something Emily wanted to discuss,
what do you think of this blouse
, but didn't know how or with whom). The way they did their hair, seemingly
shared
their hair; best friends applying cosmetics together, using each other as mirrors, finishing their eyes with the precision of synchronized swimmers. Their high-pitched hallway hugs and the giggly, locker-side huddles. The way best friends rode through hallways as if they were in the back of invisible taxis, discussing what and who they saw from the windows as if nobody could see or hear them, nobody important, anyway. Nobody that mattered. Emily had wanted to have that too, to feel like she was in the back of a cab with another girl, awesome and mattering. Instead, she'd begun to feel as if her very girlhood was unrequited.

You saw them everywhere. Texting each other. Confiding. Best buds bitching on TV, solving crimes, sharing rapturous advice about home equity insurance and butter substitutes. Best friends
talking about boys—freaking
dwelling
on the retarded conversational minutia of boys, as if what happened when Tucker e-mailed Caite was some kind of a Buddhist koan. Even in the pages of Emily's Spanish exercise book. Repeat after me:
“Eres una amiga maravillosa…”
It was a conspiracy! Like something from a new Richard Scarry children's book.
Best Friends Come in All Shapes and Sizes
. Because they did! But not in Emily's shape, or size, and she didn't want to feel sorry for herself but at that age, at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, whatever, sometimes feeling sorry for yourself can be indistinguishable from feeling anything at all.

Did they sense her neediness? Was need always the same thing as desperation? Can there be something so wrong with you that people pick up on it on some other level, a level they don't even consciously know they're picking up on? Because even weirdos, as far as Emily could tell, found best friends. Even jerks. There was this shy girl, also named Emily, Emily Hecker, and she didn't seem to have any friends, like, ever, and seemed as if she couldn't even raise her voice to normal talking levels. Kids called her Meep. Then, one day, Meep had a best friend too. Two of them meeping obliviously down the hall. How? Were Meep's parents loaded? Was it because Emily Hecker
had
parents? Emily Phane couldn't talk to her grandfather about this. Peppy was the best but not at being a girl; if she tried then he would probably only wonder why she cared so much about pleasing idiots anyway and then she'd have to talk herself blue explaining that she
didn't
and that they
weren't
. Don't worry, he'd say. You work yourself up, he'd say. Can't force that kind of thing.

Fine.

Probably he was right, she'd concede. Though, of course, the conversation hadn't even actually happened, so
who
was right? Concede to
whom
? Emily would, for a time, try to stop pleasing the idiots, pleasing anyone, but then she'd realize that in doing this she was only trying to please Peppy, and, worse, she was trying to please a Peppy that she'd made up in her head! Her grandfather hadn't
said a word about not forcing something or Annie Sweeney being an idiot, though he was right, Annie Sweeney totally was.

Emily'd suss out a room for potential best friend material; it was second nature. She did this scan. Like, who was unattached? Were there weak links, current best friendships on the waver, going stale? She looked for small, potentially exploitable stylistic divergences that maybe portended some kind of greater rift on the horizon—a girl experimenting with Hot Topic goth, suddenly, and directly in the confused face of her Old Navy BFF…Emily knew best friend-hood was coming, must be, like losing her virginity, graduating from high school, learning to drive. Have a little faith. Everyone gets a best friend. Emily wasn't shy. People liked her. Her wavy anti-seriousness drew people in, but it was becoming clear that Emily was attractive to other girls in the same way that the poisonous, toothy things are the most attractive things at an aquarium or zoo. It was like they knew what happened to her at night, like she was contagious. Knew without knowing. Press your palms to the glass, get close, but not best friend forever close. You best-friend one of those fish, girl, and you're done for.

It was different with the guys. The skaters, burgeoning potheads, and the sarcastic, unhappy brainiacs. Emily didn't like the jocks as much, but even some of them, the cute ones, whatever, they could be fun to hang with too. They had a bovine niceness that could be hypnotizing. But boys didn't count. That kind of buddyhood was way too easy: all braying loud surfaces, body humor,
dude
. Dude, check this out. Emily needed someone to hold on to through the storm of puberty—though, of course, that wasn't at all how she thought about it back then.

Basically, middle school sucked. That's when the second-best-friend thing started. That
sobriquet
, as Peppy would say. Seven girls over a period of three, four years. Oh, it was like they
knew
. Like they wanted to rub her face in it. Because, seriously,
second-best friend
? Who said that?

Jess Yarsevich for starters.

They'd met during the Adirondack Children's Troupe rehearsals for
Free to Be…You and Me
. Jess Yarsevich was fourteen, two years older than Emily. She had recently moved from Tucson with a mother and a prematurely balding older brother, Jared, whom Emily had once mistaken for Jess's father. “Naw, Dad's back in New Mexico. I'm gonna spend the summer with him.” Her words twanged. She complained about not having enough winter clothes, though obviously she liked wearing the crap out of her revealing southwestern skirts and tops under the puff of her new upstate New York jacket, always asking if you'd heard of things that she knew you couldn't possibly have ever heard of. Cool Tucson things, people and websites for bands her older brother knew of before they were lame. Jess was membership only. In her club, you were either in or out and you knew immediately, before you'd even had a chance to apply. Most of the kids in the troupe were out.
Free to Be…You and Me
? Kind of dorky. But Jess liked Emily; right off the bat they'd made not-too-needy eyeball contact, an eyebrow up, a thing with their lips, and: membership considered. Their eyebrows fit. What are you doing here? Their smiles fit. Then their laughter. Membership accepted!

It was magic.

They'd make demonstrably tortured faces across the room at each other during “It's All Right to Cry.” They snuck out to get coffee at the nearby Stewart's gas station. Jess insisted that girls at the University of Arizona in Tucson drank coffee. So they did too and they'd talk about how awesome Tucson was.

Once, afterward, Emily told Jess about her and Peppy's garden. The garden was her favorite thing. The furry, green wholeness of her Route 29 backyard was like a pet or a family member: the flowers waking up in the morning, vines all done up in vegetable ornaments, the berries and the roots, the kind, useless plants that didn't produce food or beauty but existed all the same, and the scent of soil, mulch, and how insects, if you listened right, sang better than birds. They weeded because they had to, to save the others from
being strangled to death, but they also had a patch—at Emily's seven-year-old insistence—that they left specifically for weeds, a sanctuary out near the creek. Emily and Peppy working together silently, the only time they were really entirely serious with each other, hour after hour and not a single slip into irony. That was their sacred space, and these were things that she hadn't mentioned to anyone at school—ever. Why? Because plants and grandfathers were uncool? Partly, sure. But were they really
that
uncool? More uncool than time-share Disney World vacations and Jesus? No, it was something else: something like, if she told a girl about her garden, then, naturally, she'd have to tell her all about her grandfather too, about their perfectly contained world and—and then she'd be too close to what happened to her at night. Her sleep problems. And then what would they think? Well, they'd think something like: you are obviously not right in the head, Emily Phane, and you are therefore unworthy of being a friend, best or otherwise. Because, actually, what was Emily even supposed to think? The worlds didn't fit. Emily had to keep things separate, uncontaminated. Later, she'd recognize that some of her let's call them social problems stemmed from this, maybe a lot of them. But on that day, Jess set something off simply by telling Emily how much cooler the trees in Arizona were. The trees in Arizona, she said, were cacti. She said they even grew giant flowers. She said how her brother would go out into the desert with his friends and their uncle's rifle and shoot the shit out of them. To Emily, this was a little burst of light. It was what she'd been waiting for and she couldn't resist, needed to know more, not about massacring cacti necessarily but about how you took care of plants in Arizona, the desert soil—or sand?—and she wanted to know all about the garden that Jess never once mentioned having in Tucson but surely had, secretly had, just like Emily. Emily felt it. Jess loved to garden.

“Garden?”
Jess said.

“Mine's amazing,” Emily whispered.

They were outside waiting to be picked up after troupe rehearsals.
It was January, dark, windy; a bone-dry snow hissed around their feet, weightless in the freezing halogen light of the Queens Falls Middle School parking lot.

Jess laughed. “You're hilarious, Emily Phane! Oh my God, I love your sense of humor. I know, right? Who
gardens
?”

Emily balked, recovered, said, “Old people garden.” She laughed. “Me and really old people. Obviously.”

The ability to crack Jess Yarsevich up overrode any sense of betrayal. Gardens, Jess repeated, wondering why such things existed. Before they moved to Queens Falls, she'd given her brother's friend, Quint Ferris, a blow job, she said, suddenly. “Speaking of gardens—”

Emily felt as if she'd been thrown into a pool. She had never heard anything like this before. She couldn't help staring at Jess's mouth. The same mouth that had just been singing “Parents Are People” and “Don't Dress Your Cat in an Apron.” Jess told her how to give Quint Ferris a killer blow job.

“Did it hurt?”

Jess said, “What, why would it hurt?”

Emily thought that it was supposed to hurt a little.

Fourteen wasn't an approaching age so much as a whole new freaking planet, and one that Emily wanted to immigrate to ASAP. Couldn't she just skip thirteen altogether? Maybe, she decided, and maybe this secondhand blow-jobbing was her visa. Because there could only be one thing going on here, don't miss your chance.

“Jess,” she blurted. “You're my best friend!”

Sharpened silence, wind. It was like a nightmare where you suddenly can't find your legs. You look and look and: no legs. No nothing. The moment was false. Emily knew it. Jess probably knew it. Best friend? Best crap. It was like the snow around them had suddenly become confetti, had always been confetti, the mountains in the distance nothing but flat Adirondack Children's Troupe scenery. Pretty soon the trees would start singing about gender equality.
The moon hoisted up with ropes. It was so wrong. Emily was so wrong.

“Aw, Em,” Jess said in her
Free to Be…You and Me
voice. “That is so sweet of you to say. You're like my best friend, too.”

Emily hated Jess Yarsevich. “Whatever,” she said. Then, “I'm just fucking with you.”

Emily had never cussed like that, not once. That wasn't—where did that even come from?

Jess said, “Oh.”

Maybe Jess
was
her best friend? Or would be, could be? Maybe Emily had jumped the gun and, wait, could it be that Jess's factious
Free to Be
voice was her true voice? I mean, she was here, wasn't she? She was a terrific singer. She never flaked on a rehearsal or gave less than 110 percent. Emily said, “Well, I mean, I'm sorry, you're like one of my best friends.”

They paused, adjusted. They looked at each other and tried to figure out just who they were now, or should be. What had happened and how had it happened so quickly?

“Good, kid, because I was gonna
say
.” Jess pretended to laugh.

Emily pretended to laugh.

Kid?

Jess stopped laughing, finally, and offered, “I guess you're my second-best friend.” Pause. “In Queens Falls.”

They were hardly even tenth or twentieth best friends after that. Maybe Jess
had
begun feeling best friend inclinations and Emily had messed it up. Maybe Jess felt she'd gone too far, that blow-jobbing the twenty-year-old Quint Ferris didn't sit nearly as well with Jess Yarsevich as she'd claimed it had. Jess soon left the Adirondack Children's Troupe—she joined another, bigger theater group in Saratoga. They stopped hanging out. On the rare occasion that they'd run into each other at school they'd mime happiness, say that they'd see each other soon, joke about the old troupe maybe, say they'd call, text, whatever, and then, many call-less and text-less
months down the line, stop acknowledging the other altogether. And maybe Jess didn't see Emily. But Emily did see Jess: for a whole year she was acutely aware of Jess's movements through Queens Falls Middle School, where her locker was, her homeroom, what period she had lunch and who she sat with, which friends, at which table. Seeing Jess made Emily feel disgusting—yes, that was really the word—because it reminded her that she was always looking, in a sense, for Jess Yarsevich.