Just Like Home(43)

It wasn’t fair that this was the first time Daphne had ever spoken to Vera in a way that made Vera long to listen.

She didn’t bother to be quiet as she cleaned up the paper cups and documents. She purposefully knocked into the bed, rattled the papers that remained in the banker’s box. She wanted Daphne to wake up. She wanted to be able to pretend that she’d been trying to let her mother sleep, that she’d been respecting Daphne’s need to rest—but she didn’t want the conversation to be over.

That was what stopped her, what made her catch herself. “God, Vee, what’s wrong with you,” she muttered to herself. She couldn’t be the selfish person her mother had always accused her of being.

She couldn’t do that.

Vera stooped to get her father’s letters from under her chair, half-expecting them to sting her fingertips. But they were just old paper. They weren’t heavy, even though she felt sure that they should have been.

By the time she got to her bedroom, all of the myriad emotions of the day had settled into a sense of deep loneliness, like spilled water seeping into soil. The Crowder House had none of the satisfied warmth of a house with two people in it, of a house that was full. It was even worse than it had been when Vera was that quiet, almost-invisible teenager. Even back then, during all the long hours she spent in her bedroom with the door held shut by the weight of her mother’s contempt, the house hadn’t felt quite this empty.

Vera’s breaths had an inescapable echo to them. Every exhalation was oppressively loud in the locked-up quiet of her bedroom, and each one seemed to be doubled, like the stutter at the end of a heartbeat with a murmur. Maybe it was her imagination running rampant in the space left by her solitude—or maybe it was the house breathing behind her, absorbing whatever breath she expelled, sighing along with her exhaustion.

Maybe, she thought, the Crowder House missed Francis too.

She put the letters into the bottom drawer of her dresser, alongside the pair of jeans she wasn’t wearing. The envelopes were a perfect white bundle of whatever it was her father had wanted to say to her. Vera pulled the jeans out and tossed them onto the top of the dresser, then shut the drawer too hard, letting the noise fill the room so she wouldn’t have to listen to her own breathing.

There. Now they were put away, and that drawer wouldn’t need to be opened again until she was ready. If she was ever ready. The sentiments in those letters were aimed at a girl she hadn’t been in a long time. Vera didn’t know if she could bear to read her father’s long-overdue disappointment, his reproach, his resentment. Knowing that his old vision of her, his love for her, had been tarnished by what she’d done.

Of course, the alternative was worse. If he had already forgiven her, if he had still loved her after all, if he had missed her and thought that she had just been ignoring him all the way up until his death—it would be so, so much worse than anything else she could imagine. Vera didn’t have to think about it even for a moment to know that she wouldn’t be able to survive his kindness. It would break her heart.

She would never know what might have happened if her mother had given her the letters. She would never know what kind of relationship she could have had with Francis before he died. What she could have asked him. What he could have taught her.

Either way, those letters were a gamble, and not a safe one. They’d stay in the drawer, where they might say anything as long as she left them unread.

The smell of cheap tobacco and artificial strawberry drifted through the room. Vera startled hard, as though the smell had stroked the back of her neck. She crossed to the window, trembling, and looked out to see James Duvall leaning against the side of the house, just outside, a cigarillo between his lips.

He was staring at a tall, thin board that was propped against the garden shed. The surface of it had a ragged, aggressive texture, like ripped-up fiberglass insulation rendered in wet clay.

Duvall’s white T-shirt was streaked with bright, harsh ochre, and something of the same shade was caked around his fingernails. Paint, Vera thought. The canvas was white, but that had to be paint all over the man.

With one quick twitch, he turned his head to meet her eyes.

Vera jerked back, slamming the window shut. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to breathe in the smoke he exhaled, didn’t want to feel it clinging to the underside of her tongue. She didn’t want any of it. Not tonight. Not ever. Vera decided to skip dinner.

She changed into a clean T-shirt and fresh underwear. She left the clothes she’d worn that day in a pile on the floor in front of the dresser. She checked that the window was closed. She took her hair down and then put it up again, wished she could lock the bedroom door. Folded the clothes from the floor and stacked them on top of the dresser.

As she checked the window again, she recognized what she was doing, chastised herself for being silly. There was no need to circle the bed like a wary dog approaching a stranger. It was just a bed. It was the same bed she’d slept in for the entirety of her childhood. She was shaken up from the revelation of her father’s letters, and from being home. That was all. There was nothing to be afraid of.

Except that her eyes kept dropping to the bedskirt.

She flinched away from the memory of her dream. The memory of squatting on the floor and pulling icy coils of intestine from her own abdomen. Pulling all that cold out of her belly had felt just as necessary as removing a splinter from her palm.