Just Like Home(42)
She wanted to be angry. She wanted to rage and storm and she wanted to hurt Daphne, wanted to grab her and squeeze and squeeze until the flesh split open—but then, what would it do? It wouldn’t bring Francis back. It wouldn’t make it so Vera could go back in time and pluck up the courage to write him, the strength to risk visiting him and being turned away. It wouldn’t make anything that was her fault stop being her fault.
It wouldn’t get the box of papers sorted out.
So Vera did what she had so much practice doing: she took the hunger and the anger and she pressed them down into the empty aching void inside her where those letters should have gone.
And then she returned to sit heavily in the dining chair at the foot of her mother’s bed. She picked up the stack of envelopes, feeling the weight of them in her hand. “Why would you save these?” she asked, because it was the only thing she could think to say that wouldn’t feel like bleeding.
Daphne shook her head. “I thought someone would make use of them, maybe,” she said. She’d shredded the paper cup, leaving a snowdrift on the surface of the little rolling table. “I thought they’d come to some kind of good. It’s a ridiculous question, Vera. Why did I save those letters? Why did I save you? It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Maybe you’ll understand when you’re about to die. None of it matters.”
The lights in the dining room flickered then. Vera looked up at the light fixture that hung from the middle of the ceiling, the brass-and-ceramic semi-chandelier her father had hung there before she was born, and watched the lightbulbs stutter.
“It’s not as if I can undo any of what I’ve done,” Daphne continued. “It’s not as if there’s any way to turn back time and do things differently. I just have to live with it.”
Vera glanced down at her mother, then looked back up to the lightbulbs. They were still flickering, but there was something strange. They were going dark and then brightening in perfect unison. “Does this happen often?” she asked.
Daphne didn’t seem to hear her. “I have to live with it, and so do you, not that you care,” she muttered, her words flattening into a low monotone. “I’m the only one that hurts for all of it.”
“When’s the last time you had the wiring in this place looked at?”
“I have to sit here knowing what I know, all on my own, and you get to be out in the world—”
“Let’s just finish this, please,” Vera said, gesturing to the banker’s box of documents. She tried to cordon off the part of her mind that would need to decide what to do with the envelopes. Whether to open them, whether to read them. Whether to let herself think about her father as someone still-living who might miss her as much as she missed him.
All of that could come later, when everything was over, when her mother wasn’t looking at her anymore.
Vera bent double to tuck the envelopes under her chair and out of sight. When she straightened, the lights had stopped flickering. She made a mental note to have an electrician come and look at the house once her mother was dead.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Vera and Daphne spent most of the afternoon going through the box, the unopened letters burning beneath Vera’s chair like banked embers. Together, mother and daughter sorted through old tax returns, bank statements, an unsigned contract for a documentary project. Several of the papers were cut in places, or torn a little too strategically.
Vera was willing to bet that those shreds of her father’s history had found their way into collages and scrapbooks and wallets. Souvenirs for all the artists who had nursed themselves on the Crowder House over the years, turning Francis’s notoriety into their own. Maybe James Duvall had claimed a few scraps of his own.
Daphne’s energy flagged before they were halfway through the box, but Vera pretended not to notice. She needed answers about the documents. She couldn’t afford for her mother to fall asleep and never wake up again, not until they’d discussed what needed to be done with the accumulated paperwork of her life. Vera poured Daphne cup after cup of lemonade, hoping that the sugar would keep her awake long enough to finish their business. But by the time the kitchen windows started to darken, Daphne’s eyelids were drooping. Vera frowned at the half-full box of documents.
“Hey. Hey.” Vera dropped a binder-clipped stack of documents onto her mother’s lap, hoping to startle her into alertness. “What about these?”
Daphne’s eyes didn’t open, but her head rolled on her shoulders. “For so long, you had a soft skull without a single thought in it,” she murmured. “You were nothing but hunger. You were an animal.”
Vera froze. “I was—I was an animal?”
“You were simple,” Daphne sighed. “And it’s easy to love a simple thing.”
And then she fell silent, her chest rising and falling with slow, silent ease.
Vera wanted to scream. It wasn’t fair for Daphne to fall asleep, not now, not in the middle of what could have become an actual conversation that might mean something, connect something between them, reveal some hidden truth between them. It wasn’t fair that she’d hidden those letters. It wasn’t fair that she was starting to talk to Vera like a mother might talk to a daughter, not when she was dying so fast that parts of her kept erupting with black ooze.