Just Like Home(13)

She falls asleep so quickly that she doesn’t register the faint sound that comes from beneath her bed.

It is the sound of clumsy fingers, trying to learn how to snap four times fast.





CHAPTER FIVE


Vera awoke in the closet of her childhood bedroom, knees bent high in front of her, toes curling on the dark brown wood of the floor.

The closet door was open. She tried to see out into the room, to the moonlit square of the window. She tried to peer under the bed but the night was dense and the shadows in the room were deep and the darkness beneath the bed was thickest of all. She was tucked into the corner of the closet tight, the walls snug against her arms, her bare spine curving into the angle where the walls joined.

When Vera’s father built the Crowder House, he did a good job insulating it. The cool fresh air of the night stayed out while the slow-building heat of the day stayed in. The walls stayed as warm as skin. Still, Vera shivered in the darkness of the closet. The night was warm, the house was warm, the room was warm, but she was cold, cold from the inside, a kind of cold that fought against her with grunting strength and bulging veins.

Her hand drifted to the old key that still hung around her neck, squeezed hard enough to feel the bite of the metal against her palm. Then she let her hand drop to her belly because there, right there—that’s where the cold was coming from, just a palm’s width to the right of her navel.

Right there.

She looked down and could almost see herself through the pressing-down darkness—a pale, naked, hunched-over thing, vulnerable and alone. Her hair fell around her face as she curled in on herself. She blew a tendril out of her eyes as though that would help anything.

Vera couldn’t see much, but she could see just enough. Shades of black and gray. She could see, by straining, that there was something stuck to her. It was dark against the pale plane of her abdomen.

She pressed against the edge with a fingertip, experimental, gentle—she gasped, it was so cold, it was the thing that was making her so cold. She had it now. She let out a shaking, shivering breath and pressed against the thing again, harder this time, and she gasped again because when she pressed down, her finger slipped inside the dark thing.

She knew at once that she’d been wrong. It wasn’t something stuck to her.

It was a hole.

Of course. This was the hole in her stomach. She knew what to do about this. She knew how to make herself less cold.

She dug her finger deeper into the hole, arched her knuckle to make room for a second finger to slip in alongside it. The movement made the key swing on its chain, bumping back and forth between her goosefleshed breasts.

Her skin stretched tight around her fingers but it didn’t hurt—it was too cold to hurt. Her hand was shaking, but it was just because of the thing inside the hole. Once she got that thing out she could go back to bed and be warm. The thing inside the hole in her belly was slippery and freezing, but she knew she could get it if she could just stop trembling.

Vera’s fingers were inside the hole in her belly, all the way to the last knuckle, aching with cold. They would be numb soon. She had to hurry. She took a deep breath in through her nose, let it out slowly through her mouth. She had to stop shivering. It would only take a moment and then it would be out of her and she could be warm again.

She hooked her fingers around the thing inside of her, and carefully, slowly, so it couldn’t slip out of her grip, she pulled.

It unspooled fast and sudden like a fish sliding out of a net. She let out a sob of relief as the long gray rope fell to the floor with a wet-laundry splat—but she was still so cold. Her relief turned to dismay, then crystallized into determination: it wasn’t all out of her yet.

She had to get it out. She had to get it out in order to be good. She had to get it out so it couldn’t go bad inside her.

Vera wrapped her hands around the section that hung just outside the hole, her fists filled with whatever this awful thing was that had been coiled up in her gut. She clenched her jaw at how painfully cold it was.

She pulled hard.

There was so much of it, so much more than she’d expected. She pulled out lengths of it, hand over hand like climbing a rope in gym class which she’d never been good at but she couldn’t stop now, piling loops of frigid meat between her feet, her toes curled tight against the wood floor, her teeth chattering—

Vera woke up without a start, without a gasp, her eyes flying open. She was in her bed and her heart was pounding but the nightmare, at least, was over.

She tried to lift her hands to her belly to reassure herself (it was just a dream, there is no hole, your intestines are warm and pink and they are inside where they belong, there is no hole to pull them out of, it was just a dream).

She tried to lift her hands, but she couldn’t.

She couldn’t move her hands at all.

She couldn’t move her arms either, or her legs. She screamed silently at her limbs to obey her, but they wouldn’t. Her heart was beating so hard and so loud that she was sure she was dying.

She tried to scream, but the only sound that came from her throat was a thin whine.

She squeezed her eyes shut tight. Sleep paralysis, that was all. She’d had it before once or twice as a teenager and now it was happening again. She’d done a packet on it. B-plus, but the content had stuck with her.

She repeated the facts to herself, trying hard not to be afraid. Her brain had just gotten its wires crossed, woken up her conscious mind before waking up her body. That was all. She’d had a nightmare and she’d woken up in the wrong order. It would pass soon and she would be fine.