The Household Spirit Read Online Free PDF

stopped. One theory is that they’d begun dying off. More likely is that they were unnerved.
    Howie’s wife called her the Little Biddy. Emily adopted the old man’s walk, even the manner in which he puckered his pockets with his hands, and the part ministerial, part astonished way his head tilted when he spoke. Little Emily chugging around thelawn, wearing grown-up sweaters and blouses as dresses. Gillian’s clothes, most likely. Howie would watch the two of them tending the garden, or sitting together in the backyard, conversing—the six-year-old girl, her hand on her chin, hmmmming and nodding in time with her grandfather.
Yes, yes, but of course
. Timeless old friends comfy inside a total lack of necessity. Harriet wouldn’t ever sit still and talk to Howie, not like that. He tried. His wife said that this was because Harriet was healthy and not a freaking freak, actually, and, Jesus, what the hell did Howie think that they were supposed to talk about, anyway?
Fishing?
    For starters, Howie thought. Sure, maybe fishing.
    Harriet and Emily parallel played. Together, yards away. Tiny Harriet in their living room with her books and remarkable drawings, her paintings; Emily in her backyard and garden. Howie’s wife and Harriet shared and magnified each other’s suspicion of everything outside their house—meaning everything Howie most loved and wanted to share with them. He’d try to get his daughter to come outside with him, let’s go see the baby ducks at the creek, let’s name them, feed them bread, but the girl would look at her mother and begin to cry. Mommy, don’t make me. Route 29 and its psycho trucks were too close to their house. Drowning in the Kayaderosseras was too close to their house. Rabies was too close. Bees and skunks. Peter Phane and his unnerving granddaughter were far, far too close. There were clouds that spat lightning and giant trees that dropped branches the size of small trees and deer carrying ticks carrying Lyme disease and God knows what kind of other crap. Bears. Everything was too close to their house that was far away from everything. Harriet was in agreement with her mother: they were surrounded.
    The toddler spent most of her days “with other children” at day care, or at her grandmother’s house or one of Harri’s new, honorary aunts’ houses.
    But Howie knew that Harri watched Emily, sometimes, particularly when her mother wasn’t around. Once he caught his four-year-olddaughter at the living room window, watching Emily and Peter in their backyard. Harri was whispering, giggling, as if talking along with them. Emily saw Harri, waved. Peter waved, too. Harri made a thump of a sound, quickly turned, saw Howie watching her, and burst into tears.
    Howie’s wife had been trying the best she could. She loved him, she said, and every so often he knew that this was true. But it wasn’t enough, not for either of them. They had reached adulthood at different times, he with her, before they even married, whereas she was struggling into hers before his eyes. She was helpless inside herself. She felt smothered and afraid of her feral discontentment and the direction she could not stop growing in. He figured this out later. She did not want to hurt anyone, Howie especially, him most of all, but she could not remain as she had been or where she was. She no longer fit. She wore herself badly. It made Howie love her more, and sometimes the pain she felt at not being able to reciprocate her husband’s love, or the life he tried so hard to create, actually made her love him more, too. But this was a love that fed on self-hate, on the guilt for a wrongness she couldn’t help throwing around her in destructive desperation.
    Peter and Emily Phane vexed her. Their garden particularly. Whereas Gillian’s garden had had all the regulation and rot of a vegetable concentration camp, after Emily and Peter’s liberation, it grew effusive, ramshackle, and right out onto their lawn and toward