Just Like Home(41)

Vera’s heart caught at the sound of her mother’s voice. Alive. Awake. Unpleasant relief pooled under Vera’s tongue. She wasn’t ready for Daphne to die. Not anymore. Not after that strange conversation.

I existed for you.

Vera stalked past the bed and into the kitchen, trying to give herself time to abandon the idea—the fear, if she was honest with herself—that it had all been over. She opened the refrigerator and took out a glass bottle of lemonade.

She stared at it for a moment, feeling the cold wet weight of it in her hand. Vera had never been a praying type, but just then, she begged whoever might be listening for a favor. She prayed that the acid in the lemon would wash away whatever was in her mother’s throat, whatever was making her voice sound like that. She prayed that the lemonade would wash it away so it wouldn’t have to come up.

So it wouldn’t interrupt them again.

Daphne didn’t speak again until after she’d finished three tiny paper cups of lemonade. “It’s that time, is it?” She nodded to the banker’s box.

“Just some things to sort through,” Vera said, fetching the box and working the lid off it. “There’s not too much.” That was a lie—the box was packed as full as she could get it without tearing the cardboard at the corners. It contained everything she hadn’t been able to figure out on her own. All the papers she’d found in her parents’ bedroom, her mother’s sewing room, and the kitchen.

There had been nothing in her father’s office. Nothing but a few dime-sized burn marks and a lot of smudged fingerprint powder and a smell like bitter cocoa. That room had the same gutted feeling as his side of the bedroom, the feeling of a half-rotted baby blanket by the side of the highway. It was something worse than abandoned. Seeing it like that had left Vera furious and hollow.

She began to pull out stacks of paper instead, laying them out in neat piles at the foot of the bed. “Is it okay with you if I sit?” she asked, gesturing to an empty spot near the very end of the mattress. Daphne replied with a strange shiver that seemed to lift her skin from the flesh beneath. “Nevermind,” Vera said quickly, and she pulled a dining chair from its place against the wall.

Sitting in that chair took Vera back to the family dinner table of her childhood. Trying to remember to keep her elbows off the table. Getting scolded for fidgeting. Catching her father’s wry smile as her mother tried to teach her table manners.

Daphne let an empty paper cup fall from her hand to her lap. “There’s no point sorting through whatever you’ve got in there. It’s all trash,” she said. There was no venom to her words—she said it as if it were a plain fact, free of judgment, immutable.

“Let’s make sure,” Vera said. “How about these?” She held up a stack of sealed envelopes. Each one had her mother’s name and address written on the front in pen.

“Trash,” Daphne replied.

“You don’t want to know what they are?” Vera asked, pulling an envelope at random and starting to slide her thumb under the flap. She was looking at the envelope in her hand when she heard the sound again, that faint noise that had come from her mother’s throat before.

She froze, her eyes locked on the envelope, and listened. That sound—a low, muted, metallic clicking—was definitely coming from Daphne. It went on and on, growing in volume, and Vera could place it now.

She could place it, because it sounded just like the plastic-coated links of a bicycle chain sliding through an O-ring, rattling against a cement floor—

She looked up at Daphne, and the noise cut off, leaving the room heavy with silence.

Vera’s ribs felt too small for her lungs. The walls felt too close. She struggled to blink, to swallow, to breathe.

“No, thank you,” Daphne said evenly. “I don’t need to open any of those. I already know what’s in them.” She lifted the last paper cup of lemonade to her lips, swallowed loudly. “They’re letters from the penitentiary.”

“From Dad?” Vera asked. “He wrote to you?”

Daphne shook her head, her eyes sliding to a far corner of the room. “He never wrote to me, no.” The next words she spoke were so casual, so off-handed, that Vera almost didn’t understand them. “No, those aren’t for me. They’re from back when he still used to write to you.”

Vera dropped the envelope as if it had breathed in her hand.

“What,” she said. It wasn’t a question, wasn’t even really a word so much as a sound that her mother had knocked out of her. “He used to—what do you mean, when he used to write to me? He never wrote to me,” she added, even though she suddenly knew that her words weren’t true, felt ridiculous even bothering to say them.

“Of course he did,” Daphne replied. “He loved you more than anyone. He wrote to you every month that first year.” She pursed her lips, still not meeting Vera’s eyes. “He got … upset, when he realized I wasn’t passing his letters on. He stopped accepting my calls. And then he died, so.”

Vera was standing in the kitchen doorway and she didn’t know how she’d gotten there, only that she was gripping the doorframe in both hands. She turned around slowly, saw Daphne picking at the lip of the paper cup in her hand. A violent wind swept through her then, leaving her goosebumped and empty. Everything she could think to say felt hollow, ultimately answerless. How could you? What could her mother possibly say to that?