The Household Spirit (30 page)

Howie did not need a map to know that he was where his wife had wanted to be instead of with him. He was where his daughter had been when she had told everyone that she was with him. He understood now. He wanted to be here too.

“Mr. Jeffries, I think we should go,” Emily said.

“Where?” They were finally here.

“He might have a rifle,” Emily said. “I'm serious. C'mon, he obviously doesn't want to be—”

Howie said, “Timmy Krogerus?”

The house was empty. Howie knew it. For whatever reason, Timmy Krogerus had gone out, drove off, leaving the lights on because maybe if you lived in a house this wonderful you never wanted to turn it off.

No doubt, Timmy was driving his dinner companion home. He would be back shortly.

“He could be in another room,” Emily whispered.

Or, yes, Howie conceded. He could also be waiting in the dark in another room with a rifle.

Howie asked to see the map. Emily took it out. “Look,” she said. Emily pointed to things in this room that were on the map. Cell phone on a speaker. Laptop internet computer next to the sofa.

“Good,” Howie said. “Could you please get them?”

Emily got them.

Howie looked around. “Is there anything else belonging to my daughter in this room?”

“Mr. Jeffries, please please please. Let's
go
. We can come back for the rest tomorrow, I promise. You're supposed to shoot people who do this sort of thing. Listen to me, I'm not kidding, it would be totally cool for Timmy to shoot us if he wanted to.”

Howie told her to go put the laptop internet computer and the cell phone back in the car.

“I'm not leaving you alone,” she said.

“Then put them on the porch.”

She did as she was told.

Howie walked through Timmy's puppet theater, past the accumulated treasures of a life well lived. There were three doors. He chose the second. “Where does this lead?” he asked.

“Prison? Gunshot wound to the chest?”

“The second door, Emily.”

Emily looked at the map. Sighed. “Toward Piece of Shit and Whore Cow,” she said. “Apparently.”

The bedroom was dark. It smelled of socks, pine sap, cigarettes. Howie could not find the light but did not, in fact, try very hard. He did not wish to see the bed. Emily stumbled forward, rooted out a stack of Harri's clothing, and said, “We're good, let's go.”

“Isn't the bathroom attached to the bedroom?”

“Harriet can buy a new toothbrush.”

“Shampoo.”

“Mr. Jeffries.”

“OK.” He supposed that she was right. Then Emily was off, down another hall to a new part of the house. She scooped a few small items up. Howie, momentarily disturbed by the bedroom, followed. “Where are we going now?” he asked.

“Most of Harriet's notebooks and cameras and stuff are through here,” Emily said. Then, “This is kind of fun, actually. You're right. We should do this more often.”

“What do you think of the house?”

“Are you serious? What do I think?” Emily said. “I think fucking creep is what I think. The whole place smells of sleazeball.”

“Oh.” Howie did not expect that. He had expected that Emily saw what he saw. “I like it here,” he said. “This is a really nice house.”

“What, like from a design perspective?”

Howie said, “Do you think that it's my fault?”

“No,” Emily said. “Jesus, no. What are you even talking about?”

“Nothing,” Howie admitted.

“It's not your fault.”

“To think that I've always been afraid of this house.”

“
This
house?”

Well, all houses. Or was that all people? Or only himself? But why? Howie was having a peculiar freaking day. “I don't know,” he said. “But I like this house.”

“Well, great, but can we talk about it later?”

“OK.”

They both stopped.

Emily whispered, “Did you just—?”

They listened.

They heard wind. Tree. They heard windy trees coagulate into car. Pickup truck. Something. It was difficult to say if the something stopped outside Timmy's house, on the driveway, or if the something had faded down the road, back into Tongue Mountain.

“Mr. Jeffries?”

They did not hear a car door open or close. Listen. They waited. Then, from somewhere in the house, a telephone rang. Emily jumped, grabbing Howie, her nails digging into his arm. Her hand made Howie feel in control. Eventually, an answering machine picked up and they heard Timmy's recorded voice. “Hey, I'm not around, but if you leave a message…” Timmy did not sound like a Timmy. He sounded rugged, bemused, comfortable as a leathery old baseball glove. He sounded more like a Billy or a Bruce.

Harri, leaving the message, sounded worried. “Timmy, you motherfucker, pick up. I swear to God. I'm going to call the police. I'm calling the police right fucking now. If anything happens to my dad…”

BEEP!

Howie loved that voice so much. He smiled.

Emily said, “You do realize that your daughter's calling the police on us?”

Howie considered this.

Emily said, “For the sake of argument, we have what, fifteen minutes? Twenty minutes? The nearest police station…”

“Then hurry up.”

Emily shook her head, laughed. Showed him the map. “I think we're almost done. You get the cameras and notebooks in this room, and I'll go through Timmy's so-called Shit Studio, which is right here, and get her electronic stuff. Whatever that means. It's in a cardboard box which is right
there
.”

Howie said, “Thank you, Emily.”

“I like
your
house, Mr. Jeffries,” Emily told him. “For the record. Look at me. You have the best house.”

Howie said, “It's not a competition.”

—

Emily found the light switch of Timmy's Shit Studio. On the map, Harriet had written it with dollar signs.
$hit $tudio

Light revealed dozens of large paintings situated around the room like windows. It was the same painting, in various states of completion.

“Oh, no,” Emily said. “Oh my God.”

It was the painting of Rogers Rock that Harriet had given to Mr. Jeffries for his fiftieth birthday.

Emily turned to shut the light off, leave the room, tell Mr. Jeffries that the box she sought was missing, elsewhere, mislabeled
—he can never see this
—but she turned and Mr. Jeffries was already there, standing in the doorframe, arms full of Harriet's property, seeing
this. Emily watched a smile of pleasure and recognition crack his face. Then she watched it freeze.

“Timmy,” he said, as if being introduced. Like Timmy was standing there in the room next to Emily, holding out his hand.

“We don't have much time,” Emily said. “Let's get out of here.”

Mr. Jeffries walked past her, over to one of Timmy's paintings. This one was less than half done, only the lake really completed, the rock itself sketched in, as if covered by a fog. There were no mountains, no sky. He touched the water, leaving a single fingerprint, like the crest of a wave in the middle of Lake Jogues. “It's really good,” he said.

“I guess.”

“It's really good to see how it's made.” Howie stepped back. Stopped. He turned and walked from the room.

—

They drove deeper into the mountains, the backseat of Mr. Jeffries's car loaded with newly liberated ideas. Ten minutes ago they'd passed two police cars driving up Tongue Mountain.

Emily felt as if she were on the verge of giggling, weeping,
something
; maybe just bouncing in place a little? She did this. She stopped. The fizz of impossible things happening. Having happened. Though all they'd really done was walk out of Timmy's hippy jam of a house undetected, Emily felt as if she'd scratchlessly escaped an explosion. She felt more alive than she had in years.

Mr. Jeffries turned the radio on, searched around the dials, finally stopping at a classical station. It sounded like they were driving through a swarm of golden, morose insects. Emily couldn't see his face. It was hard to say how he was feeling.

It was past midnight.

“Where are we going?” Emily asked.

Nothing.

“Mr. Jeffries?”

“OK.”

“OK isn't a place.”

They were not going home. Neither of them, Emily realized, was wearing a seat belt.

Emily needed to talk. “So, you wanna break into some more houses, or what?”

He did not.

Fine. “Do fish sleep?” Emily asked. Because you can't beat fish.

Still nothing.

Emily pressed on. “I always wondered. I know they don't have eyelids. I bet they don't sleep.”

“They do,” Mr. Jeffries said, finally. “But not like us.”

Speak for yourself. Emily felt sad, suddenly. She said, “We never got to go fishing.”

They drove down from the mountains. They drove into a series of newly built neighborhoods somewhere outside of Lake Jogues Village. Emily noted their names. Evergreen Estates. Bedford Close. Helen Drive. Heinrick Circle. Suburban developments that had lost their way, gotten lodged up here between the mountains; subdivisions from Long Island or New Jersey or TV, stranded, fearful. There was no cover. Few trees surrounded these homes. The streets were smooth, silent. The windows had all been switched off for the night, but the structures glowed like CGI, like 3D, lit by rows of plastic Victorian lamps. Silvery sedans slept in driveways, eyes open. Howie drove slowly, and Emily began to feel dreamy, nice, as though she might fall asleep the way people did in houses like this on TV. Perhaps that was their actual destination. The lawns looked like they were made of Muppet skin. Emily smiled. She still had the map. Maybe here was the way to sleep.

“Seriously, Mr. Jeffries,” Emily yawned. “Where we going?”

Howie would know what he was looking for when he found it. But wasn't that a lot of crap? Maybe you need to pretend to have an idea of what you're looking for before you find anything really worthwhile.

They did another circuit through the neighborhoods.

The development had the feel of one of Timmy's unfinished
paintings. Howie imagined opening the front door of one of the houses, stepping inside, creating his own puppet show, animating his own objects. For the first time in more than thirty years Howie realized that he could move house if he wanted to. Howie could freaking
move
.

“You thinking about the painting?” Emily asked.

Not exactly. But he said, “I'm fifty years old.”

“I know what you mean.”

Did she? Howie said, “It was a birthday present. It was Drew told me that she'd painted it. Probably because he'd asked Harri and what else was she going to say?”

“Uh,
I didn't paint it
?”

“She knew I'd love it.”

Emily almost said something. She winced, smiled. Then she closed her eyes.

Howie sped up. He turned right, then left, right, and in an hour they were on Route 29. OK was a place. Howie's daughter was waiting for him—and Emily. Emily beside him sleeping safe and sound.

S
he eventually took a bath on the sale of her Route 29 house. The economy, Emily kept hearing.
The economy
, invoked like the name of a good pal who'd been killed doing something stupid, like wrestling alligators. She'd been strongly advised to wait until the market improved, but whatever, Emily needed to improve first and, she knew, getting rid of Route 29 was step one.

Ethan came to call it her
hongza
, or calamity house. Hong Kong, he explained, had a secret database of such places, so why not Queens Falls?
Hongza
s were homes in which remarkably unhinged murders, suicides, or other horrors had occurred. It was a genuine problem, since real estate entered into the
hongza
database lost most of its worth, and depending on the ferociousness of the horror, otherwise innocent floors of Hong Kong high-rises could plummet in value, forever trapping neighboring residents who were suddenly unable to sell. Who wanted to buy a haunted house? Killing yourself in Hong Kong, unless you really wanted to fuck with your neighbors, was an act better accomplished out of doors, off a bridge, in the street. Ethan said he wasn't joking. Emily hadn't been laughing.

She sold her house to a lawyer representing another, richer lawyer from Manhattan. That was nearly five years ago. She invested her Route 29 money—plus the sale of her Mazda and an otherwise aimless hunk of investments Peppy left her—into purchasing a percentage
of Les French Flowers. Boo used Emily's money to open Les French Flowers Deux, in Newton. They were partners. Boo managed Newton, Emily the old Jamaica Plain shop, though for the past few years, due to the demands of her PhD, Emily had a tattooed curiosity named Hunter helping out. If all went well, Hunter would soon be taking over Emily's responsibilities. Ethan and Emily were leaving Boston. Probably. Ethan was awaiting word on a junior State Department position in Seoul, South Korea. Emily, meanwhile, had applied for a research grant that would place her at the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology at the University of Florence in Italy.

They'd been through far too much bullshit, pain, and spectacular weirdness to let their improbable careers get in the way of their improbable relationship. Emily was already looking into research possibilities in Korea, and Ethan was already poking around Edward Gibbon and a few books about the Medicis. He knew very little about the Old World, and the idea of being the only Korean in Florence excited him, he said, even though he wouldn't be, and, as Emily pointed out, he wasn't. The real worry was that they'd both get exactly what they wanted.

Taking things seriously had changed Emily's relationship with time. It had been the slowest five years of her life. She made mistakes. But her mistakes were now more like the mistakes that someone might make during her first few months navigating a foreign country with a foreign alphabet. Emily didn't set anything inappropriate on fire. She didn't forget to sleep. Everything just felt so real. Had everything always been so real? Had there always been
so much
of everything? So much all the time?

She could barely remember the first few months she spent in New York City, subletting Harriet's Brooklyn sublet. They'd traded. Harriet squatted in Emily's Route 29 house, working on her art, growing closer to her father and getting some distance, then closeness, distance, closeness, and then more distance from
motherfucking Timmy
. Timmy Krogerus repaired Emily's house. He
even moved in there for a while with Harriet. From there he helped Mr. Jeffries do all sorts of lovable damage to
his
house, including a log cabin–like extension that didn't seem to serve any purpose whatsoever but, Harriet said, had been fun for the both of them to build. They also constructed an equally useless dock out by the Kayaderosseras. They'd sit there, fish. Sometimes they'd paint. Timmy had started giving Mr. Jeffries lessons. But he might as well have been painting with his fingers, Harriet told Emily; no matter how much Timmy guided him, Mr. Jeffries's landscapes had more in common with Harriet's woeful old rust and pus abstractions than any lake or mountain she'd ever seen. “He's tenacious now is the thing. Dad won't give up on his lake.”

But Emily, in NYC, had been far from that. The city was palpable dislocation. It took Professor Ethan Caldwell two weeks before he would even meet her for a quick coffee, a beverage neither of them even liked. He had PhD responsibilities. He had moved on. Memories of Emily would occasionally seize up in Ethan like cramps, he'd tell her, but he never thought that they'd ever have anything more than a haunted friendship. Frankly, he was enraged that this squawky and
monstrously
irresponsible Harriet person—who'd initially contacted Ethan—had actually thought it was a good idea for Emily to come down to New York City in the first place. What had she been thinking? Emily wasn't his responsibility anymore, and he told Harriet this and, also, how did you get my number? Who are you?

Now, of course, Emily and Ethan looked back on the fits and fumbles of their Harriet-enabled time in NYC as
romantic
, but back while it was happening it had been hell. Especially for Emily.

It took time.

Boston, of course, came after that, and then Emily's big idea. Les French had been, in retrospect, about negotiating a controlled crash landing into the idea of a normal life. Ethan knew it was premature, a mistake, but it wasn't, he'd later tell her, the sort of mistake that he thought she'd really come to regret. He knew that she
would find another path, but he also clearly saw that she'd require a safe place from which to begin figuring her shit out.

Because all that while, Emily still felt as if she could, at any moment, slip back into the place that Mr. Jeffries had rescued her from. And whether she jumped or she was pushed, she had found the courage to allow her days the same degree of reality as her nights, even if there hadn't yet been any real reconciliation between her two states. The nocturnal assaults continued. They would, like the student loans she took out to pay for her education, torment her for the rest of her life.

Now, waiting to hear from Italy, and several months after her controversial paper on plant signaling and behavior (in relation to
ayahuasqueros
and the shamanic religious practices of the indigenous rain forest tribes of Brazil), Emily would occasionally joke with colleagues that she'd arrived at many of her hypotheses by losing her mind. Her work was undeniably eccentric, but it was never less than rigorously supported. You need otherworldly patience to work with plants in the way that she did, not just slowing yourself down to their speed, but, in a sense, to their dimension. Watching grass grow is easy, Emily would say.
Try watching it speak
. It would take many more years, dozens of papers, and then her popular-science book before the quietly revolutionary extent of her work on so-called plant consciousness would be fully appreciated.

Ethan had been the one to introduce Emily to what he called “the world of crackpot comparative religions.” This was shortly before they returned to Boston together. He'd said that some of her unusual states of consciousness were discussed in this or that book, and so she started exploring. Cheondoism, Transcendental Meditation, Nyingma Buddhism, you name it. Real esoteric stuff, too. Chakras. Trance states. Kundalini yoga. For a few months, Emily had been dazzled. It was like suddenly finding ladders and handles and guide ropes all over a world that she'd previously thought of as unmanageable and perilous. Ethan had studied a lot of this stuff and knew it as one might know a dead language. He was proficient.
He was academic. He didn't believe a fucking word. This helped Emily from falling in too deep. Because she did begin, finally, to sleep a little better. Or, rather,
stronger
. This stuff made space for her experiences in a way that hinted at a possible integration of her waking life and her sleeping life.

The propitious end of Emily's new age and, therefore, the start of her scientific journey came swiftly. Her readings had taken her to a book about Siberian shamans. The book's old photographs of the shamans with their high, lonesome faces hypnotized her at first; she couldn't figure out why. Then they spooked the crap out of her, and she realized exactly why.
She'd seen them before
. It was like when she was little and she'd stare into the mirror, subtracting Peppy and Nancy and Gillian from her face. There was that face again, looking back at her from this book. From Siberia, 1906. Too much. Then Emily read exactly how a future shaman was identified. Children with extreme night terrors, exactly like hers had been, would be taken from the village and taught to control their access to the other world. Otherwise, it was said, that access would go bad. Without proper training, it would leak in and destroy them.

No shit, Emily thought.

They were doors. Translators. But mostly they were taught to deal with plants. To commune with plant spirits, so-called. To use the wisdom of the plants to heal and do whatever—to play drums and sit in a tent and diddle around with animal bones, teeth, chunks of bark. Emily told Ethan all about it.

“You want to start playing the drums now?”

“I want to go back to school.”

Science would not be a phase. Where once Emily felt estranged from academia and research—from reality, really—suddenly she needed to know more. Emily threw herself into studying the biochemistry of plants, learning about their behavior, their intelligence and signaling, the way they used chemistry to talk. She needed to know how plants communicated and she wanted, she said, to make contact. To talk back. Chemistry was a gorgeous language, and
Emily became proficient. Over the years, she would come to think of herself as a translator as much as a scientist.

Boo, checking through Les French's mail, said, “Something special for you, Emily.” She flapped it in the air.

Ethan and Emily stood, expecting it was about Italy, though they both knew that Emily would no doubt be notified via e-mail. Or cell phone. Science, after all.

Boo went snip snip tie snip back to her flowers.

The envelope looked as if it were sent from Victorian England. It contained a heavy card of some sort. It felt and looked like an invitation to a wedding.

“Harriet Jeffries,” Emily read the return address. “I don't believe it.”

Ethan said, “You don't think—?”

“Timmy's not getting any younger.”

Emily opened the envelope.

It was an invitation, but not to a wedding. “Oh my God, it's her opening. New York City. West Chelsea. Solo show. Ethan, it looks pretty serious.”

Emily turned the card over. The photograph on the front stopped her cold.

Ethan said, “You all right?”

“What?”

“Did she mention this to you?”

“I haven't really talked with her in a few months…”

“What's the matter?”

Emily shook through it. “Nothing,” she said. “I mean, I knew she was working on something, the mysterious Route 29 project, that there was a big-time gallerist who was sort of interested?”

“But there was always a big-time gallerist who was sort of interested.”

“Exactly.”

“Seriously, what's wrong with you? Let me see that.” Ethan
looked at the picture on the front of the card. “Whoa, is that what she's doing now? Photographing war criminals?”

“That's Howie,”
she snapped. Emily snatched the card back. “That's Harriet's father. That's just how his face looks.”

—

“Sorry about before,” Ethan said. “I didn't know. I should have known.”

Emily was reading a new paper on decision making in plants. Instinct versus behavior. How the trajectory of a root, for example, responds to subtle environmental cues that go well beyond the instinctual. She turned around. Ethan was holding two glasses of red wine.

“Well,” Emily said. “It took me twenty-five years to see past that face.”

“It's an interesting face.”

“Yeah,” Emily said. But, to be honest, the face had derailed her. She felt bereft. She often felt like this when she thought about Mr. Jeffries. It was almost as if she didn't know
how
to miss him. “What is it, Ethan, why are you smiling like that?” Then, fully noting the wine, said, “Oh, no, no, no. I've got to work. Later, OK?”

Ethan didn't budge. “You didn't check our voice mail,” he said.

“No,” she said. “What?”

Then she knew what.

Ethan placed a glass of wine in Emily's hand, softly, here. “It's Italian,” he said. “Florentine. Brunello di Montalcino. It's made from
grapes
.” Ethan sipped the wine. “Not quite
soju
, but I'll get used to it.”

“Ethan?” Emily was standing.

He shook his head. “I didn't get the job,” he said, simply. “I'm so proud of you, Emily.”

Seven years later, in Seoul, Emily would learn at a diplomatic dinner party that Ethan hadn't even applied for the job. He'd been offered it cold. It was so romantic, another diplomat's wife said,
pulling Emily aside, whispering, sideways glancing at Ethan. That he'd been willing to turn down
that
position, this woman said. It should have killed his career, you know. You guys shouldn't even be here. The woman made a noise then, a Korean noise that meant love can sure make people do idiotic fucking things but isn't that the dream? Isn't it all a dream?

—

Emily hadn't really spoken to Harriet in a year or so, though they were never too far apart online. Harriet was fond of sudden Google Chat barrages, always irreverent, manic, profane, but never too revealing, and Emily, when she thought about it, would send Harriet updates letting her know that she was thinking about going to Italy, for example, or that she missed her.