The Household Spirit (14 page)

“Did you know my mother?”

This took Winnie aback. “No, I didn't, sweetheart. She was just a girl when I worked for your grandfather,” Winnie said. She placed a hand on Emily's leg. “Can I be honest with you, Emily? You need to get as far away from here as possible.”

—

Emily was not, generally speaking, a hugger of women. But she tried to hug Winnie Shapiro. She tried to get Winnie Shapiro to hug her back.

The man with the suit shouted, “Hey now!”

Emily stepped back. She said, “It's me, it's Emily.”

The old woman made as if she was screaming. But there was not enough of her left to scream—her mouth simply creaked.

The man in the suit cussed, said, “Christ, Ma.” He said, “Do you know this girl?”

Winnie Shapiro cowered from Emily, hiding herself around the body of her son as if she were a toddler and he were a leg.

“Ma, stop,” he said. “Enough.” Then, to Emily, “Do you know my mother?”

“It's OK,” Emily apologized. She backed away. “She doesn't recognize me. It's OK. I'm really sorry. My mistake.”

“She's not well,” the man said, sighing. Raising his voice: “Ma, she just wanted to say hello. Can you say hello?” Then, back to Emily, his eyes slipping from annoyed to
male
. Intrigued, sickeningly flirtatious. “Have I met you before? What's your name?”

“I don't know.”

Winnie whimpered.

“I'm sorry,” the man said. “What? Where did you say you knew my mother from? Hey.” He swatted at Winnie's hand, which tugged at his:
I want to go home take me home
. “Christ's sake. I'm trying to talk to ask this girl here—”

Emily hurried past the beds on wheels. People on wheels. Blood balloons and real balloons and you either had wheels or you had feet and:
GET WELL SOON!
Emily still had feet. She couldn't look back. Fuck you, she thought. Someone shouted about her suitcases. Fuck suitcases. People said, “Hey, excuse me!” People said, “Ma'am!” People said, “You can't just—!” But Emily did just. She walked into the first tunnel that took her. Then the next. She would get her grandfather out of this building if it was the last thing she fucking did. She would take them both as far away from here as possible.

E
mily's first three months back in Queens Falls were like trying to hold in your head the color of a brand-new color.

JUNE,

for example, started when the taxi dropped Emily off on Route 29. The first things that struck Emily about being home again were how tall the trees were and then how loud. Their incessant hissing.

She'd had to leave Peppy at the hospital. He'd suffered a massive stroke.
Massive
was their word. He was living entirely by their words now, an actor reading off their asinine script. Emphysema, partial paralysis, medically induced coma. Plus, the script writers noted accusingly, borderline malnutrition, aspiration pneumonia…

“Inspiration what?”

“From breathing in vomit, ma'am.”

Theirs, Emily assumed.

Her house sitting right there where she'd left it. It was smaller, less yellow than she remembered. On the way, she'd spoken to the taxi driver at length about the best kind of dog. His name was Roy. For a while, until Roy mentioned
flavor
, Emily thought that they'd been talking about actual dogs, like woof woof, and, despite or because of everything, she'd been momentarily happy, watching the middle of nowhere from the window, wondering what Hebrew
Nationals looked like. Did they look Jewish? Could she ask? Was that racist? “Excuse me, this your place, miss?”

“What?”

It was Mr. Jeffries's place, actually, but she'd gotten out, paid Roy, and then, oh my fucking God, accidently hugged him after he removed her suitcases from the trunk and said, “So long.” Roy hugged Emily back. He patted her back and told her that everything was going to be OK. What Roy said she needed now was some rest. Drink some fluids, he said.

“It's going to be OK,” Emily assured Roy.

“I know it is.”

Mr. Jeffries wasn't home. Peppy wasn't home. Trees fucking
everywhere
. Emily managed the rest of the journey on foot.

—

The bedroom window was open, and Emily listened to Mr. Jeffries's lawn mower. She floated inside the sound of it, eyes closed, waiting for her phone to pick up the song, harmonize, start vibrating along.

The smell of cut lawn, Emily knew from her studies in plant signaling and behavior, was the chemical equivalent of a bloodcurdling scream: the grass releasing chemicals into the air to warn other grass, other plants, of the massacre. The smell of the screaming was even louder than the lawn mower. Plants felt pain. Everything that struggles to live must.

Emily closed her window.

Emily's phone would not vibrate.

Emily opened her window again—because maybe the glass? Maybe the glass was hindering the phone's reception?

There was no reception this far out on Route 29, but Emily liked to think that an important enough call might just make it—The Little Call That Could,
I think I can I think I can
—from Ethan, say, in Boston, or one from the hospital with news that Peppy's coma had finally cracked open, hatching him out as good as new. Emily knew that Ethan was calling her. Right this second. Invisible signals
shooting from Ethan's phone, from their window in Boston, slicing over suburbs, through the Berkshires, taking a hard right on the Hudson River and hurtling at her, meters above the treetops, then down Route 29 until the call, and Ethan, a mere two miles from Emily's house, were yanked back at the neck like a dog chained to a tree.

—

Tuesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. Every day felt like Wednesday at the hospital. Emily thought that one of her grandfather's doctors had been flirting with her. The way his eyes bungeed from her eyes to her chest, eyes, chest, eyes. Chest. Every day Emily went in with the intention of flirting back, smiling at least, maybe grabbing a coffee with him, a plastic-wrapped Danish, thinking a good flirt might convince this doctor that her grandfather was not going to die after all.

Better yet, wasn't her grandfather's life worth putting in some overtime for? If not his life, then these tits?

But this guy, my God. He was always more skeevy than she remembered. It was the pubic-like hair on his knuckles. The way his earlobes were more orange than the rest of his face, which itself was more orange, Emily thought, than any human face had a right to be. His breath heaving minty rot all over Emily, saying, “Hum-dee-do, oh, and how are we today, Miss Phane? What up, what
up
?” Like she'd just intercepted him icing a fucking cake. In the ghetto.

“I'm fine, thanks.”

“Well, I wish we had better news for you. Please, walk with me.”

—

Emily made a thank-you tray of Rice Krispies Treats for Mr. Jeffries. She'd waited until he was at work before leaving them on his doorstep. She'd never stood so close to his house before. It was family, in a way, a long-lost brother. Mr. Jeffries's house seemed to understand more than anyone what she was going through and she wanted to hug it, like Winnie, like Roy. Peppy once told her how Mr. Jeffries's ex-wife once assaulted them with trays of Rice Krispies
Treats. The wife, Harriet's mother, had been unhappy. Toward the end of her stay on Route 29, she'd visit Peppy, secretly, when Harriet was asleep and Mr. Jeffries was at work, and they'd talk into the night. He had given her advice. “She was a good woman,” Peppy told Emily. “Married too young is all. I never told her anything she didn't know already. Mostly you can't, you know, with people. Folks just want to hear someone else say it.”

“What was she like?”

“Young,” Peppy said. “Young people get married to become old, to grow up. Old people, people over fifty, well, they get married to feel young again. There's never a right time.”

—

To everyone's surprise, Peppy broke out of his coma. The stroke had paralyzed the left side of his body. His right side was weird too, but otherwise he was strikingly responsive, even if his face looked like it was melting off his face. Strikingly, they said. Emily liked that. Strikingly! Now that was more like it.

They unplugged him; out came the tubes, wires, everything. He could breathe on his own and he could, they said, even begin learning how to eat again. The aspiration pneumonia got downgraded, no longer aspired to anything. The other stuff took a rain check, leaving Emily to organize the insurance things, money, hospice, medication, equipment, nondenominational evangelical Christian grief counseling and legalities and pinprick specifics that she enjoyed talking about because it was so helpfully and manifestly fucking false. The paperwork existed to help her not smell what she was smelling. Phone calls with bureaucratic offices helped her not dwell too obsessively on things like: How exactly would he shit? He couldn't really walk, could he? How would Emily wash him? Feed him?

But for the first time they were talking to Emily in a way that didn't imply her grandfather was already more or less a stuffed animal. That was enough. He was only dying.

His eyes were all that was really left of the old Peter Phane now,
the only two islands of pure Peppy that remained. The deluge and cataclysm of his body had effectively drowned everything else, and even his eyes, Emily saw, were sinking. She would never hear his voice again, not the Morgan Freemany one that could narrate geology, anyway. From there on out, the earth and all its stones would sit unremarked upon and still. He might, Emily was told, soon be able to write a little.

—

The day before Peppy returned, it stormed. Emily walked out into it for a couple of minutes. It felt like something a woman in her situation might do. But she just got wet and went indoors and watched a sitcom on TV.

Emily had pizzas in the freezer. Diet Dr Pepper. Hebrew National dogs. Little eggs of hope she'd laid all over her house, things she used to like. Reese's Pieces. Cherry Garcia flavored Ben & Jerry's ice cream. She bought a pack of cigarettes because Ethan hated when she smoked. Some white wine because you never know. Carrots. Good soap. The rain sounded like hundreds of thousands of Ping-Pong balls swarming the roof.

Moisturizer and professional natural-extract shampoo. The more expensive the product, the more it smelled of minty soil or Middle Eastern food.

That morning, it'd been sunny. She'd spent the entire previous night cleaning the house. The hospice people would soon be coming by to help Emily prepare. She prepared for them as she would for a job interview. She wasn't above subterfuge. Maybe she could trick them.

The situation comedy convinced her to call Ethan tomorrow before taking her grandfather home. She smoked a cigarette. On TV there'd be a reason, something obvious, as to why she felt like she couldn't talk to Ethan. In the sitcom, Ethan would have already arrived and there'd be applause.

The storm passed and the sun was out again, almost as if it were already tomorrow morning, not eight in the evening. The birds
sounded like teeth. Birds reminded Emily how much she currently fucking hated birds. She kept changing the channel, a wasted pianist going up and down scales.

—

It wasn't until the second Tuesday after Emily arrived in Queens Falls that she was able to communicate with her grandfather. Emily told him that she was going to take him home. His eyes said, No.

She would go back to Boston later, she assured him.

No.

She held his upper arm, she touched the top of his head, fighting her instinct to gather and bunch up the left side of his face, move it back where it belonged, hold it until it stuck. She told him about the sports. She'd memorized the scores for him that morning. No. Emily talked about the world. News. But nothing calmed Peppy's eyes into
maybes
until she talked more firmly about Boston. The awesome life she had waiting for her back in Boston. Don't you worry, she assured him. I'm going back soon.

—

Did people ever fully recover from a massive stroke plus emphysema plus partial paralysis plus borderline malnutrition plus aspiration pneumonia? Some did. How about from being so unreasonably old? Less.

Emily standing by the open freezer, shoving her face full of ice cream.

She put makeup on each day before the hospice people came to help wash Peppy and whisper to Emily in the kitchen. Low, nononsense herbal-tea-warmed voices. Emily smelled cigarettes on one of the women, a comfy staleness that Emily liked. She told this one that it'd be OK if she wanted to smoke in the kitchen.

The looks Emily got from both nurses.

“We don't smoke,” the smoker said.

The other nodded.

“Emily, are you holding up all right?”

The TV raging in the other room. It was never off. Emily rarely
sleeping. Emily spooning airplanes of food into Peppy's mouth. Spoon after spoon after spoon and Peppy's eyes raging along with the TV, screaming, No.

Emily said, “I'm OK.”

“You're doing fine.”

“If you need to talk to someone—”

“I'm doing fine.”

—

“Ethan, it's me,” Emily said. “I don't know what to say.” Pause. “I'm sorry. I'll call later.”

Emily sat in her Mazda. She'd pulled off the road, two miles down Route 29. This is where cell reception started again.

She was smoking, but only to finish the pack. Smoking didn't remind her of Ethan. Smoking reminded her how gross smoking was. She could have called from her house, of course, from the home phone, but she didn't want anyone seeing that number, saving it, calling her out of the blue. She was averse to talking to Ethan in the same house as Peppy.

It was the first time she'd called Ethan. He hadn't answered, likely because he was asleep, as Emily knew he would be. It was 4:00 a.m. It would take more than a buzzing Samsung to wake him up.

She came here every day. She'd come here on the way to or from the hospital, but now she sometimes came out here in the middle of the night, or in the early hours before the sun rose. Pulled up on the side of the road, the forest heavy around her car. She'd sit alone in the car and stare at her glowing screen.

This was her internet, too, since she'd spilled tea on her laptop last year. Ethan had let her use his.

Ethan
.

Sitting in the car, she'd check her e-mails. She'd only half read them. Then the endless, anxious feed of Facebook updates, and then she'd read and reread the supportive, funny, increasingly hurt daily letters from Ethan. She didn't write back to him.

Please don't give up on me, Ethan.

Emily was weak, exhausted, scared, and she was also, she thought, a terrible person who didn't believe in anything half as much as she was supposed to.

Five days after jokingly asking Emily in an e-mail if he should change his Facebook relationship status—and, of course, not getting a response—Ethan went and changed it to “it's complicated.” Emily knew that this was a joke, but he was also right. It was complicated. Then, a few days later, he'd changed it to nothing. Then it went back to being complicated. It was an atypical and therefore heartbreaking admission of confusion, presence, sadness, and Emily couldn't bear it and so, finally, in the most cowardly and comical form of self-destruction there was, Emily deactivated her Facebook account around the first week of

JULY.

Peppy didn't want to eat. He didn't want to communicate using the paper Emily provided. He wanted to watch
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
.

She would talk. He would sleep and watch blockbuster movies on TV and not write her messages on the yellow legal pad she'd left on a small table by his right hand, which would not relinquish the remote. His magic wand, his only means of controlling the world around him.

Things got unseemly, as Peppy would have said.

It felt like he wanted to punish Emily with the Disney Channel or
You Don't Mess with the Zohan
. He wouldn't channel surf during the commercials. They watched those too. They watched those
especially
.