Just Like Home(33)

The kitchen was warm and bright, suffused with afternoon sun like honey in tea. Vera let the warmth unravel a little of the strange panic that had seized her at the prospect of walking by her mother. She wondered if she could bring herself to ask about the pieces of Francis’s journal. She got the bags from under the sink, and when she passed back through the still-lit dining room, she forced herself to stop.

“How are you feeling?” Vera thought that Daphne’s eyes were back to normal now, brown and tired. Had they really been so dark just a moment before? “Do you need anything?”

“I feel fine,” Daphne answered, and her voice was a thing with claws, painful to hear and surely painful to use. Vera got her a cup of water without asking if she wanted it, ignoring the corner of her mind that was preening at the idea of her mother’s silence. “What are you doing up there?”

“… Closets,” Vera said after a moment, because it didn’t feel right to tell her mother that she was emptying a bedroom the woman would never see the inside of again. She eyed Daphne’s cracked lower lip. “That’s gotta sting,” she ventured. “Do you want some lip balm?”

Daphne looked up at her with exhausted eyes. “That would be nice,” she said softly. “It does sting.”

Vera retrieved lip balm from a drawer in the kitchen. It was in the same drawer it had always been, and it was the same brand her mother had always used—it came by the jar and had a shepherd on the lid. She opened it and held it out, but Daphne didn’t move.

“Will you?” Daphne asked, not making eye contact.

Vera swallowed around the catch in her throat. “Sure.” She dipped the pad of her middle finger into the jar, then patted her mother’s lower lip as gently as she could. The skin of Daphne’s mouth was thin but tough, like crinkled-up wrapping paper. The balm left a thick sheen everywhere Vera touched. Daphne’s eyes stayed on her the whole time, flat and evaluating. Vera wondered if this meant anything to her mother, or if it was simply a matter of practicality.

“There,” she said, looking away from her mother’s mouth as soon as she was finished. “That should be better.”

“Thank you,” Daphne murmured. She picked up the paper cup of water and drained it, leaving a waxy crescent on the lip of the cup. “So. Closets.”

The room felt too, too small. “Yep. I think I’ll finish the bedroom today or tomorrow. It’s going fast, since there’s only the one side to do.”

“I’m glad it’s convenient,” Daphne said, the edge in her voice just a shade duller than it had been a moment before. “Not too much trouble, then.”

Something pathetic and small inside Vera leapt at that hint of gentleness, like an alley cat standing on its hind legs to plead for a scrap of trash. She tried to slap the yearning down, but it got away from her. “Not too much trouble, no.”

“Do you know,” Daphne said softly, staring down at her own trembling hands, “that my life began the moment I laid eyes on you?”

Vera’s skin prickled the way it did when she was walking at night and stepped off a curb without realizing it, the feeling of a sudden drop and a near-fall. “What did you say?”

“You were covered in blood and screaming loud as your lungs would let you, choking on your own voice,” Daphne continued. Her voice was low and even, like she was reading out loud to herself. Vera had never heard her mother like this before, not once. “Everything you’d ever known had just been torn away from you. Everything was cold and everything was awful and you didn’t understand what had just happened to you. I saw you there in that bedroom, raw and miserable, and I loved you more than I’d ever known I could love anything.”

There was no air in the room. Vera sank slowly into the chair near the foot of Daphne’s bed, the one James usually occupied during dinner. She couldn’t remember her mother ever saying I love you, even in the time before it all went so wrong. She couldn’t remember her mother talking to her this much, either.

The lights flickered overhead. Vera ignored them. Hadn’t they just been talking about closets a moment before? What was happening?

“You didn’t know it yet,” Daphne said, her voice taking on a rough edge, “but you were mine and I was yours. I knew right then that we’d always have each other. We’d be tangled up together until the day one of us died. I remember thinking that maybe we’d both die at the same time, and wouldn’t that be the best way for it to happen? Both of our lights snuffed out at once, so I’d never have to imagine a world where there was you without me or me without you. Of course I knew that wasn’t how things would go—we’d be pulled apart by time, by circumstance, the way the world works. But that seemed so far away back then. It seemed impossible.”

Heat flared in Vera’s chest, because it wasn’t time or circumstance that had pulled them apart. Old fury warred with a deep and profound hunger to hear these words, to hear her mother telling her that she was wanted, that she’d always been wanted, and Vera pressed her palm to her mouth to keep from gasping at the pain of those two emotions meeting each other.

“The night you were born, the doctor had to come here because it was the middle of the night and the hospital was so far away. He handed you to me and you didn’t know what love was yet. You were the most selfish thing that ever was,” Daphne added, “claiming every inch of love your new family could scrape together, demanding it all for yourself without giving any back at all. You came into the world on a wave of pain and exhaustion and that was just the beginning. All you knew then was needing and wanting and getting. There’s nothing so pure as a yawning pit of need, and that’s the kind of animal you were.”