Just Like Home(21)
Goosebumps ran up Vera’s arms. That darkness was heavy. It reminded Vera of her dream the night before—the way her bedroom had been so oppressively, cruelly dark. Her hand drifted to her belly, to the memory of a cold that had to be pulled out by the fistful.
The doorknob rattled behind her, making her shoot up out of her chair with a sudden shock of adrenaline.
“Just me, settle down.” James closed the door behind himself with exaggerated care. Even if he hadn’t announced himself, the smell of him came in with the rush of night air: stale tobacco, burnt wrapper, turpentine. He’d been working, then, and smoking another one of those cheap cigarillos while he did it.
“I don’t need to settle down,” Vera said.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he replied with an unwelcome wink. “Care to introduce me? I’d kill for an encounter.”
Vera decided not to look at him. That, she thought, would surely help. “Are you ready to eat?”
He grinned at her, lopsided and unwarranted. “Always.”
Vera pulled plates down from the cupboards with a needless amount of clattering. She handed them to James, flinching at the warmth of his fingers when they met hers. Then she pulled a tray of lasagna from the oven, where it had gone from frozen to edible over the course of the past hour. “I think she’s still sleeping,” she said.
“I doubt it,” James replied easily. “Daphne loves our dinnertime chats. I think she sees me as a kind of surrogate son, you know?”
Vera grimaced, glancing again at the dining room. The darkness didn’t look quite so impenetrable as it had before—maybe the light had changed, Vera thought, or maybe her eyes had adjusted sometime in the past few minutes. She didn’t like the idea of her mother being awake. If Daphne had been awake, then she would have been able to see Vera perfectly in the bright kitchen throughout the day. Would have seen her lug the plastic tubs in, label them, put her hair up. Would probably have been watching, silently, the whole time Vera had been working, and the whole time she’d been sitting there, avoiding her dying mother. Picking at the cover on the table.
If Daphne had been awake, then she would have seen Vera find the torn-out excerpt from Francis’s journal. Vera very much needed that not to be true.
“Shall we?” James asked lightly. Vera’s gaze snapped to him.
“Right,” she whispered, and as he watched her, unblinking, she took the first step toward the dark room where her mother waited.
Balancing the tray of lasagna on one oven-mitted hand, Vera snaked an arm around the wall that separated the kitchen from the dining room, shivering at the cold. The temperature difference between the two rooms was as stark as the smothering darkness. “It’s freezing in here,” she said as her hand found the lightswitch at last. She desperately hoped there wouldn’t be a reply. “I’m sorry, Daphne, I didn’t know. I would have turned the heat up if I’d—”
“I don’t mind,” Daphne interrupted. “I barely feel it.”
The lights flickered on and Vera felt the subterranean fear drain out of her. With the darkness gone, all she had to worry about was Daphne. Vera opened her mouth to ask if Daphne needed anything—a blanket, a glass of water—but she didn’t get the chance to speak.
“Glad you’re awake,” James said, breezing past Vera, leaving smoke in her mouth. “I can’t wait to finish our discussion from last night.”
Daphne’s face transformed. She turned to James like a sunflower seeking light, and her lips curled up into a sweet, almost feline smile. “Oh, you’re a precious one,” she purred. “Do you have my dinner?”
“I have it,” Vera said, lifting the lasagna with both hands now. “It was in the freezer, so I’m assuming it’s the kind you like?” She moved to set it down on the sideboard, so she could slice and serve it.
Daphne tracked her daughter’s movement, and though the expression on her face didn’t shift a millimeter, her eyes had gone flat, everything but the barest acknowledgment draining out of them in an instant.
Vera faltered. “No?”
“That’s mine, actually,” James said. He slid past Vera and put the plates down in front of her. He was standing so close that she could smell his breath, the faintest trace of vodka and sweet cream. “I don’t mind sharing, though.”
Vera turned away from him, meeting her mother’s cold eyes. “What are you going to eat, then?”
“A lemonade,” Daphne said. “Please. From the refrigerator.”
“You don’t have to tell me ‘from the refrigerator,’” Vera said as she stalked back into the kitchen. “That’s the only place it’d be.”
Vera knew that she shouldn’t be annoyed with her mother. It wasn’t Daphne’s fault that she had made assumptions, hadn’t bothered to ask questions. Vera was the one who didn’t even know that her mother wasn’t eating solid foods, who didn’t know what that meant about the progression of her mother’s illness.
She didn’t have the right to be annoyed. She knew better than to let herself get annoyed. She’d worked so hard to crush that kind of feeling out of herself for so long, because she needed to be the kind of person who could lure love out of someone. But the strange twitchiness that had come over her that afternoon was making everything inside her clench, and so she opened the refrigerator door harder than necessary, rattling the lemonade bottles inside.