Just Like Home(44)
“You’re being ridiculous,” she whispered to herself, needing to say the words out loud to make them louder than the memory of the dream. She was talking to herself more and more often the longer she stayed in the Crowder House.
The lights flickered.
She wrapped her arms around herself, gripping her own elbows. Goosebumps peppered her bare legs. She was, she admitted to herself, afraid. She was afraid to get into the bed. She was afraid to fall asleep, to dream again, to wake up paralyzed with a sweet, tender voice whispering in her ear.
“Okay,” she whispered. “Enough. You just have to look.” Her words were reasonable, and her brain believed them, but her body did not respond. She tried again. “You have to look. Just check and then you’ll know.” The muscles of her abdomen felt unearnedly tired, as though she’d been doing crunches all day instead of trembling at her own bed for the past ten minutes. She tried to breathe, to make herself relax, but the breath came out shaky and the sound of her own fear made her somehow more afraid.
She decided to startle herself into action. She clapped her hands purposefully—the sound of the clap was too loud and she regretted it right away—then stalked to the closet and flung the door open.
The light overhead flickered, casting strange shadows in the closet. It was empty except for her suitcase and duffel on the floor. She looked over her shoulder, then crouched and opened them, looking inside, telling herself that she was checking for mice. Of course they were empty.
You never thought there would be mice, she chastised herself, and then she paused, because she’d said it out loud without meaning to, without noticing that she was doing it.
She licked her lips. She’d heard the words, that much was certain. She’d heard them spoken aloud. That could only mean that she’d been the one to say them.
Except that the voice she’d heard wasn’t her own.
“You never thought there would be mice,” she said softly. The sentence was familiar and yet unfamiliar in her mouth, like the time she’d eaten an underripe strawberry without noticing what she was doing, not until the texture and the flavor didn’t match up to what she’d been expecting. “You never thought there would be mice,” she repeated, and then she slammed the closet door shut. The sound of it was as loud as her too-loud clap. Before the noise could fully die, she was on her knees beside her bed, lifting the bedskirt.
“God, Vee,” she hissed to herself, saying the words out loud so her own voice would be the only one in the room, surveying the emptiness beneath the bed. “Being in this house is fucking with you.”
She was getting herself worked up because of a nightmare and some vermin, that was all. She pulled the sheets back and looked at the bed, not wanting to slide her feet beneath the covers without looking for—what? For mice, she told herself again, and this time she almost believed it.
She looked around the room once more. The door was shut, and the windows were latched. There was nothing behind the curtains, nothing in the closet. Nothing under the bed, nothing in the bed.
She turned off the light and crossed through the darkness to her bed. As she sat on the edge of the bed, in the darkness, with her feet planted solidly on the floor, she told herself that she was safe. As she pulled her feet up after herself, tucking them beneath the covers, she told herself that nothing could hurt her. As she compelled herself to lie back with her head on the pillow and her throat exposed to the open air, she told herself that she was the only living thing in that room, and that there was no reason she shouldn’t sleep peacefully through the night.
She was almost right.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Vera is twelve and a half years old. She has a mostly-healed scar on her lip and a stick in her hand. The stick is long and sturdy. There is a string wound around it and knotted at both ends. Vera’s fingertip is bleeding, and the rock she’s sitting on is digging into the backs of her thighs, and she can feel the skin on her nose cooking in the bright afternoon sun, and she has never been happier in her entire life because she is learning how to fish and her father is the one teaching her.
“That’s all right,” he’s saying. “Everyone jabs themself with the hook their first time. Try again.”
She sticks the bleeding fingertip into her mouth and smiles around it. It only takes her two more tries after that to thread the fishing line through the eye of the hook. While she ties a knot with clumsy fingers, she asks her father questions about their shared project. She asks, even though she remembers the answer from the drive here, when he told her what they’d be doing. “Why can’t I just tie the string at the end of the stick, again?”
She knows that her father enjoys explaining things to her, enjoys teaching her. He likes to be the one who shows her how the world is. So she asks questions she already knows the answer to.
She does it to be kind to him, but she also does it because some part of her always wonders if she’ll get the same answer as last time. She wonders when he’ll stop telling her the little-kid answers, when he’ll stop softening reality for her.
The approach of that day feels a lot like the approach of her first period—she’s not sure if she’s excited for it or dreading it, but she knows that she should be on the lookout.
He reaches out a big hand to correct the knot she’s botching; a quick few flits of his fingers, and it’s almost done. He hands it back to her to finish. “Well,” he says patiently, “you don’t want to tie your line at the end because if you catch a big fish, he might snap this little stick right in half. If you wrap the line around the stick, though,” he adds, tracing the string with a rough fingertip, “it doesn’t matter if the stick breaks, because you’ve still got the line handy. If you don’t do that, the fish might get away. You never want to let a big fish get away.” He looks at her somberly. “Fish are big old gossips. They’ll tell all the other fish to stay away from where you’re standing.”