Just Like Home(31)
But the problem was the second thought, the one that followed right after the notion of her mother’s loneliness.
It was the thought of strangers, standing in this bedroom, looking at the empty places where Francis Crowder’s life used to be. Strangers who had been invited in where Vera had been cast out. The thought of all the strangers looking at the places where a life used to be. And one stranger in particular—Hammett Duvall, tall and cigarette-musty, standing in this bedroom and planning his book.
She’d read the book. Of course she’d read the book.
Vera had been sixteen years old when it came out, desperately lonely, and gullible enough to think of Hammett as a friend just because he smiled at her and asked questions. There had been a pile of limited-edition paperbacks on the dining room table, complete with photo inserts! according to the cover, waiting for Daphne’s signature. It had been easy enough to grab one, to hide it under her pillow for late-night reading.
Being in her parents’ bedroom now surfaced the memory of reading that book, of realizing how wrong she’d been about the first Duvall she’d met. Vera remembered how the flashlight beam had trembled across the page as she learned about the scope of that man’s violation.
I laid my head down on the pillow that had once supported Francis Crowder’s rest, and I breathed in the air that had once filled his lungs, and I wondered how such a quiet house could create such a vile, unspeakable, repugnant monster.
Daphne had let that man into their home, let him into this bedroom, let him lie down on that bed. She had let him write his book, the book that had cemented Hammett Duvall as a legendary true-crime author. The book that had secured Francis Crowder’s status as one of the great villains of the twenty-first century.
Daphne had let him in, and then she’d let the rest of them in. Vera knew with absolute certainty that at some point every goddamn poet and painter and journalist and spiritualist who passed through this house had put their head on her dead father’s pillow and tried to breathe him in, too. She knew it like she knew her way through this house in the dark.
She knew it the way she knew her own skin.
That sharp snap of fury gave Vera the energy she needed to rip into the closet.
She struck at the center mass of the hangers, tearing down fistfuls of old work-and-church clothes. She threw them to the ground, the khaki slacks and the cap-sleeved blouses, the crystal-buttoned cardigans and the linen sundresses, the sensible skirts in sage and lavender and cream and desert rose and denim. The musty smell of unworn fabric rose around her until the room was choked with stagnant fog.
“Fuck,” she whispered to herself, not knowing why but knowing that the word was right for the moment. She sat down in the middle of the clothes and looked at them, unable to see them for what they were.
They didn’t seem like things a person could wear. They didn’t seem like things Daphne had ever purchased. She couldn’t imagine the jaw-clenched woman who had locked her out of this house twelve years ago slipping into a skirt set and driving to the store. She couldn’t imagine the woman in the bed downstairs walking into a changing room and modeling a dress for herself, bringing it home and pulling off the tags.
Maybe, Vera thought, she was just out of practice.
She’d learned to stop thinking of her mother as a person a long time ago, back when it still hurt to want Daphne to love her. Forgetting that her mother was human had been necessary. It had been the only way to survive the years when she still lived with a mother who looked at her daughter as if she were black mold blooming across the kitchen counter. It had been the only way to get through the years after that, when Vera was all alone in a world where someone always seemed to find out who she really was.
But now, she had to think of her mother as a person. As a person who needed things. As a person who was sick and deserved care and dignity.
“Fuck,” she whispered again, and she folded herself up until she was on her feet again, scooping up an armful of fabric for the DONATE bin. As she turned to drop it in, something came loose and drifted to the floor at her feet.
Vera let the clothes fall into the plastic bin, then turned to see what she’d dropped. It took her a moment of digging through the piles of fabric to find it, but after a few seconds, her fingertips met something that wasn’t rayon. It crinkled at her touch.
She withdrew her hand from the blouses. It was a slip of paper. She told herself that it was probably a dry-cleaning slip, or maybe even an old cheque that had been crumpled up in a pocket—but she knew.
Of course she knew.
It was folded into eighths. She unfolded it, and there were those even, rounded letters. There was her name.
VERA’S GROWING UP TOO FAST. WE WENT FISHING TODAY AND HAD THE TALK. I WONDER IF SHE KNOWS I’D DO ANYTHING FOR HER. I WONDER IF SHE UNDERSTANDS HOW I JUST WANT TO PROTECT HER AND KEEP HER SAFE. DAPHNE TOO. SHE’S SO GOOD INSIDE AND I NEVER WANT TO LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO HER, NO MATTER WHAT. I THINK SHE’S STARTING TO GET IT I JUST HOPE SHE DOESN’T EVER HATE ME FOR WHAT
And that was it. Just like before, the writing cut off midsentence, only this time it wasn’t because the page was ripped—it was because the page ended. Vera flipped the paper over as if she didn’t already know the back side was blank. Francis Crowder had only ever used one side of a page to write. There was a dark smear at the edge of the page, like an inkblot or a fingerprint. When Vera touched it her hand came away sticky.