The Household Spirit by Tod Wodicka Page B

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 ayear. 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.

part two
    Emily, without Eyelids

5
    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 approachingthe 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