Just Like Home(30)
They will know each other for fifteen more months.
CHAPTER TEN
Seventeen years had passed since Francis Crowder last slept under his own roof.
Vera dropped her plastic bins on the floor of the bedroom he used to share with Daphne. She swallowed back revulsion at the sight of the worn-down carpet, the lopsided mattress, the plexiglass-topped nightstand on the left side of the bed. The empty spaces, everywhere, that had never been filled.
This bedroom, like the rest of the house, was a set piece. It was a tourist trap. It was all for the eyes of strangers who wanted inspiration.
It had not been a bedroom for two bodies to sleep in since everything went wrong.
When he went away, most of his possessions went with him—or, not with him, because where he was going, personal possessions weren’t an option. But they went away at the same time, Francis and his things, to be inspected and examined, studied and tested, entered into evidence whether they mattered to his case or not.
At the time, Daphne had said that they were trying to prevent any of his things from becoming objects of spectacle. That’s how she put it. Vera can remember the way her mother bit out the words: objects of spectacle. Ridiculous, in hindsight, Vera thought—her mother had turned the entire house into an object of spectacle just as soon as the money had run out.
But Daphne couldn’t have been planning on it from the start, because she let the police take what they wanted. She must have regretted it later, not keeping some things back.
They didn’t find everything, though. They didn’t find the toolbox in the closet with his gloves in it, and they didn’t find the drafts of his confession, the ones he’d ripped up and tossed into the trash can beneath his desk. Vera had hidden the box all the way at the bottom of her laundry basket, and she’d gathered up those precious scraps of paper and put them down the garbage disposal just in time. She’d done what she could. She’d tried to save him.
They also didn’t find his journal. Vera knew where he kept it—she’d fished it out from under his side of the mattress and hidden it under the front porch, where she thought it would be safe until he got home. She’d figured that he’d want it back, or at the very least that he wouldn’t want strangers reading it.
That was it. His toolbox and his journal and his trash. And, Vera now supposed, his thermos, forgotten beneath the kitchen sink. That was all they had left behind. They took his reading glasses and his clothes and his shoes. They took his one good suit—a blue one with gray stripes that he wore to every day of the two-week trial, letting it rumple and darken with sweat and wear. They took his toothbrush, his hairbrush, the books from his bedside table.
Francis Crowder was never going to come home to claim that journal. A tuberculosis outbreak at the supermax facility took care of that. And now the front porch was rebuilt. For all Vera knew, the journal had been digested by mushrooms, or shredded into bedding for a family of possums, or torn up and turned into papier-maché for a sculptural element long before the porch had been rebuilt.
Daphne’d had seventeen years to fill up his side of the double-wide closet, to put her own books on the nightstand. She’d had seventeen years to fill those empty spaces.
But she hadn’t done any of that. His half of the closet was home to empty hangers and a mothball-smell. A shoebox sat on the floor beneath those bare hangers, its lid askew, its previous inhabitants gone.
Those had been his good dress shoes, Vera remembered, the black ones with the stitching around the gore.
Now there was just the empty shoebox. She picked it up and threw it overhand into the bin marked TOSS. The hangers went to DONATE, and with that, Vera’s father’s half of the closet was finished.
She slid the mirrored door shut and marked it with tape, then moved four feet to the right and opened her mother’s half of the closet.
She took two steps back. That was the distance she needed to take this side of the closet in.
It was packed.
Vera took a deep breath. She eyed that shelf, trying to imagine how she would go about taking a sweater down without risking the whole pile collapsing on her. She didn’t wonder why her mother hadn’t expanded to the other closet—that seemed transparent enough—but she did allow herself a good hard slug of judgment. There had to be twenty years of rayon and poly-blends in there.
The rounded, pastel plastic hangers of Vera’s youth were gone, replaced with a tangle of thin wire hangers that could slide close together. The closet rod, assuming there was one under all that wire, bowed with the weight of them. All her mother’s dresses and skirts and blouses pressed so tightly together that Vera could hardly distinguish them from each other. Two layers of shoes covered the closet floor, and the shelf above the rod was stacked with shirts and pants and sweaters right up to the ceiling.
The performance of sentiment, the guilt, the melodramatic self-indulgent drama of it, was so thoroughly in-character for Daphne. Vera thought she could see a Christmas sweater in the sediment on that shelf, and for what? Who was her mother wearing Christmas sweaters for? It wasn’t as though she’d been invited to any parties in the aftermath.
The truth of her mother’s isolation should have pulled Vera up short. It was a vicious loneliness Daphne must have experienced, a loneliness with rows and rows of teeth on it. It should have stopped Vera in her tracks, that thought; it should have brought up some kind of compassion. It should have reminded her that Daphne had been alone for nearly two decades, trapped in a notorious house in a town that hated her.