Just Like Home(28)

“Are you okay, Dad?” This feels strange to say—she’s not used to thinking of her father as someone who might not be okay.

“I’m okay, Vee. Go on,” he adds with a frown. He tricks the frown into being a smile, sort of, and even Vera can see the desperation in it. “Go on and I’ll come get you when it’s time for dinner.”

She goes into her bedroom, and she waits. But he doesn’t come get her all night, and she falls asleep without ever hearing his footfalls on the stairs above.



* * *



Days later, Vera is sitting at her desk, writing a paragraph about the water cycle for her Earth Sciences class, when she catches a snippet of her mother’s voice. It’s rising again.

It’s been rising a lot lately.

Vera swallows and stands up, succumbing to the draw of a habit she’s been trying to break. She opens the closet and pulls out her laundry basket, kicks aside a couple of pairs of shoes, and sits down inside. She pulls the door most of the way shut after her. Leaning back into the corner of the dark closet, she squeezes her eyes shut. She can still hear the fight, though, and it makes her prickle all over with an elemental kind of fear.

For the first time in the closet, Vera snaps her fingers four times fast.

Her mother’s voice fades as though someone is turning down the volume.

It’s quiet enough now that Vera can hear her own breathing. She frowns at that silence. It’s a familiar quiet—the quiet that fills up the bedroom at night when she can’t sleep, the quiet that surrounds her when there have been bad dreams or when she’s been sent to bed early for some infraction. This kind of quiet is the reason she sleeps with her windows open, so she can hear something other than herself, alone.

It’s a quiet that she usually thinks of as belonging to the night. But the warm late-afternoon sun is streaming through Vera’s bedroom windows and leaking in through the gap in the closet door, and the absence of sound is thick and close and sudden, and it’s just a little too much to bear.

Vera extends her leg and nudges the door open a little more. It’s still too quiet. Tentatively, carefully, she leaves the closet and cracks her bedroom door.

Her mother’s voice slices into the quiet like the blade of a shovel opening up the earth—trying to hurt me? You won’t be able to save—and then Vera firmly shuts the door again, and the silence returns.

This could be a coincidence—Daphne’s volume rising and falling at just the right moments. But Vera thinks, as she scrambles back into the safe nest of her closet, there is also the possibility that she has magic powers. This is an appealing option. Daphne would say that Vera is too old to believe in things like that, and she’s mostly given up on the notion of magic powers, but there’s a part of her that still hopes to discover something special and vibrant within herself.

She rolls her eyes, as if someone’s watching her and might think she’s silly for what she’s about to do.

Then she whispers, “I want to hear them,” and she holds her hand out toward the open closet door, and she snaps four times fast.

A noise comes right away—her mother’s voice. Just a few words, sharp and sudden. Go tell her.

Vera hears the familiar tread of her father’s footsteps outside her bedroom door.

“Vee?” His voice is just on the other side of the wood.

For a moment, she finds it impossible to answer him. Is the fight over? Or did she actually end it by snapping her fingers, like casting a spell? A damp wave of panic threatens to rise in her, and she presses her palms flat against the floor, not knowing quite why she feels so afraid.

She flexes her fingers, feeling the comforting ridges of the woodgrain. The floor creaks under the pressure of her hands, and two of the floorboards slip apart, making a gap just large enough for her fingers to slip between them.

The wood is warm and snug against her skin. Her breathing slows. Everything is okay, Vera tells herself. She just got caught up in her own imagination.

Francis raps gently on the bedroom door with one knuckle. “Can I come in?”

She climbs to her feet, steps out of the closet, shoves her shoes and laundry back inside so it won’t be obvious that she was hiding in there like a little kid. When she opens the bedroom door, Francis is standing there, waiting patiently. He still looks pale but he gives her a weary smile and she knows that the worst of the fight is over.

“How much did you hear?” he asks.

“Almost nothing. Are you getting a divorce?”

He lets out a short laugh. “What? No! Your mother and I—she just needed to set me straight about a couple of things, that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about,” he adds.

“I wasn’t worrying,” Vera lies.

Francis lifts his eyebrows in a silent acknowledgment of the lie but he lets her have it. “Well, good, because there’s nothing to worry about,” he repeats. “Anyway, Brandon’s at the door. He wants to ride bikes. Your mother says we have about an hour before dinner, if you want to go.”

Vera frowns. Some part of her raises a warning bell, tells her to just go, but she hasn’t learned yet to listen to that warning. “Aren’t I supposed to help with dinner?”

Her father shrugs. “You can go into that kitchen if you want to, but I’ll warn you, it’s not the friendliest place in the house right now.”