The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka Page A

slap.
    “Em,” he said. “Em, em, em.”
    Howie waited for the phone to stop ringing. This was just as natural as a waterfall, a Taco Bell, a tree. Once it stopped ringing, he picked it up. He dialed 911 and requested an ambulance.
    “Route Twenty-Nine. Yes. Route Two Nine. That’s correct.”
    Howie would not look directly at Peter Phane. Even when he had to look, he tried, for propriety’s sake, not to see. Peter Phane was like something without a shell. Howie found a quilt and covered the lower half of his body. He maneuvered a segment of sofa under Peter’s oddly weightless head and, like that, the TV stopped singing.
    The phone again.
    Howie got down, told Peter that everything was fine. Peter tried to disagree, tried to get Howie to answer the phone. Tried to say the name of his granddaughter. But Howie only stood, stared out the window at his own house, and when he finally heard the ambulance he turned off the TV, unlocked the front door, and left out the back.
    —
    Emily was home the next day. A week later, Howie received a tray of Rice Krispies Treats with a note.
You saved his life. Thank you, Mr. Jeffries. — E
.
    It could not have been a coincidence. Howie wanted to call his ex-wife, tell her the thoughtful pastries had come full circle, but he lacked the wherewithal and the implications troubled him. Emily was, after all, about the age his wife had been when she’d begun her futile cookie-based courtship of Gillian and Peter Phane.
    “I’ve lived a lot of life since then, Howard,” his ex-wife had said the last time he had tried to share an old Route 29 memory with her. “That was so long ago. I guess I remember.”
    No, no. The implications were clear.
    —
    Emily would not return to Boston, and one year later, Peter Phane was gone. He had been ninety-four years old.
    Her nocturnal ambles began soon afterward. Well, what else could you call them? Sleepwalkings? Excursions? They weren’t quite walks. Howie did not understand them. When he first saw her out back after midnight he assumed that she was looking for a dog, though he knew that she didn’t have a dog. Someone else’s dog? That made less sense. She would hurry out, her movement tripping the motion sensor spotlights, a fluorescent blight that turned the grass into a ghostly
lawn
and the dark that surrounded her property into pure absence. Which is where Howie would be, watching. In a window, normally the upstairs bathroom window, but sometimes the kitchen window, sunken back in that deeper night she had created. She would poke around the corners of her property. Something was missing. But what? True, she spent a lot of this time just sitting out there in a lawn chair, sipping something. Milk? Tea? Looking normal, more or less, except it was 3:00 a.m. and it was about the creepiest thing that Howie had ever seen. Sometimes she would busy herself with night gardening, vegetable picking.
    They were a community though. You saw things. You see things and you worry. There were wild dogs in the area, packs of them, apparently, and every few years a bear would waddle down from the mountains. Foxes didn’t bite but they might, Howie supposed. They sure might.
    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