Just Like Home(11)
He looks for a long time. He looks for so long that Vera lets her hands drop away from her mouth so she can brace herself on her palms and lean toward him. “What is it?” she finally whispers, unable to bear it any longer.
Vera’s father sits back on his heels, wipes his forehead with the back of one arm, and leans forward to rest both his elbows on her mattress. His fingernails have something black crusted beneath them, dark crescents that Daphne would make him scrub away with a stiff brush if she saw.
“I have bad news, Vee,” her father says. “There’s something under there, all right, and it’s pretty scary.”
Half of Vera recognizes this tone of voice, knows that he’s about to make a joke. The other half of her is taking in the faint sheen of panic on her father’s face, the bloodless pallor of his cheeks, the thready capillaries in the whites of his eyes, and that half of her knows that something is wrong.
But then his face crinkles up into a wide smile. “It’s the biggest dust bunny I’ve ever seen.” He laughs and she laughs with him, her eyes landing on his chipped tooth. Not because what he said is actually funny, but because he wouldn’t make a joke like that if there was a monster.
Vera’s father checks the whole room—the corners and the closet and behind the curtains, and one more time under the bed just in case. His boots are loud. Mud falls off of them as he walks, mud that Vera will have to clean up tomorrow before her mother sees.
“Why are you so dirty?” Vera asks when her father has come to sit on her bed and told her that there is, definitively, no one but the two of them in the room.
“What do you mean?” he asks, his brow tight, his eyes darting between hers. There is sweat at his temples, darkening his already-dark curls. Vera isn’t sure why she didn’t see it before except that she was too busy being scared to really see that, or the mud that cakes his boots. “Dirty?”
“Yeah, your nails are dirty and you have mud on you,” she says, pointing.
“Oh,” he says. He frowns at his nails. Vera frowns at them too; now that she’s looking at them closely, she can see that the dark grime is tucked in along the sides of his nails, too, and in the creases of his knuckles. “I cleaned the gutters earlier. I guess I didn’t scrub hard enough before dinner.” He winks at her, the frown so completely gone that it might never have been there at all. “Don’t tell your mother. You know how she gets.”
Vera winks back, a trick she’s only just got the hang of. “I won’t tell. Hey, Dad?”
“You don’t need to say ‘hey,’ I’m already listening to you. You only need to say ‘hey’ if you’re trying to get someone’s attention.”
“Sorry. Dad? If there’s nothing under the bed, what were those noises?” Vera swallows hard, afraid that he’ll say the noises were her imagination. Adults say that kind of thing sometimes, and it makes her feel ridiculous, or like they might think she’s ridiculous. Sometimes she does imagine things, but not those noises. Those were real. She’s sure of it.
Francis uses one fingertip to trace the outline of two adjacent squares on Vera’s quilt. She winces because his fingers look so filthy, but he doesn’t leave any dirt on the bedspread—it’s stuck to him, all worked-in. “Our house is shaped like this, right?”
“Okay,” she says, hesitant because she isn’t sure if the house is a perfect rectangle, plus it has a roof on top that isn’t flat, plus there’s the garden shed in the backyard.
“Here’s the top floor, where your mom and I sleep, and where Mom has her sewing room. And I have my office, which used to be your bedroom,” he says, pointing to the top of the two squares he’d traced. They’d swapped his office and her bedroom just a few months before, when Daphne had declared that she couldn’t sleep with all that racket from outside and Vera had declared that she couldn’t sleep with her window closed.
Vera’s father continues, pointing to the bottom square: “And here’s the first floor, where there’s the kitchen and the living room and the dining room and your bedroom.”
“And the mudroom,” Vera adds.
Her father smiles. “And the mudroom.” He smells like clean sweat and rich earth and something sharp, something that reminds Vera of the way the air smells right after lightning strikes during the summer storms that shake her windowpane. “And down here,” he says, pointing below that bottom-story square, “is the basement.”
“I’m not allowed,” Vera says quickly. This is a firm rule and she obeys the rule even though her best friend Brandon keeps asking if they can sneak down there and look around.
“That’s right,” her father says. “It’s my workshop, and the tools are very dangerous, and—”
“—and there are really big spiders,” Vera finishes for him. She remembers this fact and, as a result, is never tempted to go into the basement in spite of Brandon’s eagerness and the allure of not-allowed.
“Huge,” Vera’s father says. He holds his hands out two feet apart, making his eyes wide. “Like cats!”
Vera laughs because she is supposed to, because the idea of a spider the size of a cat is supposed to be silly, because she is not supposed to be afraid that maybe it’s real and possible and waiting to fall on her face in the middle of the night.