Just Like Home(49)
Tonight is the night.
She counts in her head at first, and then out loud, whispering into the floorboards. Once she’s out of mississippis, she’s sure her father isn’t going to come back downstairs. He hasn’t forgotten anything, isn’t going to need a glass of water, isn’t going to double-check the lock on the door to the basement.
“Okay,” she breathes. “Okay, Vee, you can do this.”
She imagines—as she imagines so often these days—that someone is with her, a friend who believes in her, who admires her, who knows that she’s capable of more than anyone thinks. Like Brandon, but nicer. That friend would whisper of course you can do this, you can do anything. Vera would smile at them and say watch this, and then she would do something that would leave them wide-eyed and wondering.
That’s how she builds up the courage to slide out from under the brass frame of her bed, reaching her arms out from under the bedskirt and dragging herself forward with the fluid ease of long practice. She’s almost too big to fit under the bed now—her back scrapes painfully against the bedframe as she emerges, making it rattle loudly—but she doesn’t let the squeeze slow her down. She has to show that friend what she can do.
Her breath is coming faster now.
She is already wearing socks, thick ones that will keep her feet quiet because her parents insist that she wear socks all the time in winter even though the house has central heating. She’s wearing her flannel pajamas so that if she gets caught she can say she was sleepwalking. She doesn’t know if anyone will believe her, but it’s the best excuse she’s been able to come up with in all her planning.
She rises into a crouch, tucks her hair behind her ears, flexes her toes. She will have to walk slowly to keep from slipping on the hardwood. She would be walking slowly anyway, though.
Vera runs her fingers along the chain around her neck. It’s a long ball-chain, long enough to hang almost to her navel beneath her shirt. She stole it from Alan & Sons Hardware while her father was cutting lengths of cord from a big spool. He was measuring the cord attentively, his lips moving in a silent conversation with himself, and he was not paying attention to Vera as she slipped the precut ball-chain off a pegboard hook and into the pocket of her corduroys.
The metal slides between her thumb and forefinger with a series of tiny soundless pops. She lifts the chain to her mouth and grips it in her teeth, tasting the greasy tang of the metal.
Her hair has already fallen from behind her ears. She tucks it back again, wishing she had a barrette. But all her barrettes are upstairs in the big bathroom, in an old Altoids tin tucked into the middle drawer of the countertop. Too bad—she’s not going to risk sneaking into that bathroom, waking up one of her parents, having to answer questions about why she’s not just using the powder room downstairs.
The bedroom door doesn’t make a sound as Vera opens it. Her lip is starting to swell beneath the chain as she chews on it. She worries the swollen place with her tongue, tasting raw flesh and metal together. It feels like a fat lip.
She’s only ever had the one. She’s never had a black eye, either. Lately, she’s been starting to feel as though she’d like to get into a fight. Just to try it out. Just to see how it feels. She is pretty sure she’d be good at it.
Closing a door silently is trickier than opening it but Vera has been practicing. She turns the knob slow and careful, lets it go without a rattle. It works perfectly.
That, she thinks, was the hard part.
Vera lets the loop of chain fall from her mouth and slowly pulls the full length of it out from under her shirt. The metal is warm where it was next to her skin, but cold and wet where it was between her teeth. At the end of the chain is a key, a small gold key with a round top and sharp teeth. The chain is stolen, but the key is stolen twice over—first, from when Vera took her father’s keychain from his nightstand and slipped it off the ring, and then again from when she told him she was going to the bathroom at the hardware store and went to the key-cutting station instead.
She’d put the key into the machine and watched as it cut her a replica, looking over her shoulder once every few seconds. The machine spat out a little receipt that you were supposed to present to the cashier when you checked out, so they could charge you. But Vera had crumpled up the receipt and dropped it into a bin full of long, blunt-ended screws on her way back to where her father was having a length of iron pipe cut to measure. The key had gone into the big pocket on the front of her red denim overalls, and she’d felt it burning there like a beacon until the moment she’d gotten home and tucked it into the torn lining of her music box.
The door to the basement is right next to her bedroom door, separated by just a few feet. The lock is as well-oiled as the hinges. This is a quiet door in a quiet house, and it yields to her with the unhesitating cooperation of a devoted accomplice.
The stairs are very dark. Vera has a moment of doubt—should she turn on the basement light, or should she go to the kitchen for a flashlight? Both options mean risking discovery. She decides that the flashlight is safer; if she’s caught in the kitchen, she can claim to be getting a glass of water, and she can save her trip into the basement for another night.
She eases the basement door nearly-shut, leaving the tongue of the latch out to keep the door from closing. She tiptoes to the kitchen and takes the big yellow flashlight from its in-case-of-emergency place beside the refrigerator.