Just Like Home(14)

“Don’t worry.”

Her eyes snapped open again at the sound of the voice.

“I’m here. You can go back to sleep.”

It was right next to her ear. She couldn’t make herself turn her head to see it, but she could feel how close it was. The voice was right there, right by her ear, practically on her pillow. Vera’s chest ached, bruised from the inside by the frantic racing of her heart. She strained as hard as she could.

She had to move.

“Don’t worry. Just close your eyes.”

The voice was speaking in a half-whisper, rasping and tender. It sounded so familiar. She had to move, she had to turn on the lights, she had to scream. She could swear she recognized that whisper.

“It was just a bad dream. You’re all in one piece now. Go on back to sleep, Vera-baby.”

She could feel the breath of the speaker against her ear. It was cool and close, and it smelled like rot and cut grass and turned earth and sweet lemon. But Vera could not see the lips that brushed the tender skin just below her earlobe.

“Hush now.”

That did it. Vera’s entire body flashed hot with adrenaline and her limbs got the fucking memo and her voice unlocked itself and finally, finally, she could move.

She ran.

She scrambled across the bed away from the voice, half-fell on her way to the door. She screamed and it was a real scream, one that tore out of her, and the long weedy roots of it were wrapped around her pelvic bone and she meant it.

She slapped frantically at the wall and on the third try her palm found the lightswitch, and then the room was bright and the shadows were dead and she turned around to see who was there, who was with her, who was in her ear telling her to go back to sleep.

The room was empty.

Her bedsheets were dark with sweat, crumpled around the place where she had been. Quickly, so she couldn’t scare herself out of doing it, she ducked down to look under the bed. There was nothing there.

Of course there was nothing there.

There was nothing behind the gauzy curtains that covered the window, either. There was no one in the closet—she flung the door open fast, as though somehow the element of surprise would give her an advantage over anyone who might be hiding there. The corners of the room were illuminated and bare and the floor was clean and Vera was alone.

She crawled back into the bed and sat right in the center of the mattress, the blankets gathered close around her. She clutched her arms, hoping she’d leave bruises so that the next morning she would know this had been as awful and urgent as it felt.

“It was a dream,” she whispered to herself. She closed her eyes and tried to dial her breathing down as slow as she could make it. But then with a shiver she opened her eyes again, because she was doing the same calm breathing she’d done when she couldn’t move, when she was frozen, trapped, with those lips breathing soft words against her throat, and what if breathing that way again summoned the thing back—

“A dream,” she said again, more firmly this time. She said it out loud, trying to compel herself to hear the words, to believe them. She was being absurd, panicky, ridiculous. Breathing couldn’t summon anything. And besides, there was no voice to summon. It had been a remnant of her nightmare, a figment of her subconscious. Nothing more.

She had checked. The room was empty, except for her. The door was locked. The lights were on. The sun would come up in just a few more hours.

She closed her eyes and did not allow herself to think about how badly she’d wanted to lean into the comfort that awful voice had promised. She did not allow herself to think about how familiar the voice was.

She did not let her lips form the words that had shot her out of the bed and across the room, that had filled her with a lightning-flash of adrenaline. She did not whisper them to herself as she drifted back into a restless, sweat-soaked sleep. And she did not dream them on a loop, spoken again and again in that soft, rasping voice.

Hush now, Vera-baby. Hush now.





CHAPTER SIX


The town of Marion had changed in the way that all things change, but it was the same town that Vera had left behind so many years before. Main Street was long and straight and featured a combination of small businesses and doomed franchises. When Vera was young, the franchises had been geared toward paint-your-own porcelain and Tex-Mex cuisine. Now there were cupcake shops and places where groups of middle-aged women could drink too-sweet wine while they all tried to reproduce the same painting. The specifics had shifted, but the feel of the place was the same.

Vera wondered which franchise Mrs. Gregson was attempting to keep up these days. When she was a kid, she and Brandon had spent hours, folding brochures for a penny each in the back of the vitamin store. Surely, Vera thought, the vitamin store had gone under by now. If by some miracle that kind of business had survived the first recession, it would have been smothered by the second.

She passed the place between the thrift store and the teashop where the vitamin store had once been nestled. Sure enough, there was a sun-faded FOR RENT sign in the window. An unintelligible sigil of graffiti marked the boarded-over front door.

It looked like it had been empty for a long time. Maybe, Vera thought with a twitch of optimism, Mrs. Gregson had moved away. It would have been the sensible thing. The healthy thing.

Vera parked in front of Alan & Sons, the only hardware store for fifty miles. The windows were painted with a summer sale garden scene, the prices of mulch and shovels illustrated in bright block letters. The store had been owned by the same family for four generations, a monument to the immutability of the town. It was where Vera’s father had worked.