Just Like Home(52)

“Please—”

“I just wanted to come down and tell you,” she continues, ignoring the interruption, “not to worry.”

“What do you mean?” Arnold says, not whispering at all. Not even bothering to try to be quiet.

Vera purses her lips. After a moment of consideration, she concludes that her options have run out. Arnold is not being careful enough. He is not being quiet enough. He is not listening to her.

She pushes the rag back into his mouth. The stained cotton is damp with the sweat of her palms and with the smear of bile she wiped away from his face. Her fingers brush his stiff, matted-up moustache, and she wrinkles her nose, but she keeps pushing the cotton between his chapped lips until it’s nearly invisible.

The whole time, he tries to yell, thrashes around, makes an enormous racket. That’s how Vera knows that she is right to gag him: he wants to make noise, wants to get her in trouble even though she’s trying to help him.

When she’s done, she rocks back on her heels and regards him. His eyes are wide and pleading. He keeps making wet, gurgling throat-noises at her. “I’m sorry about that,” she says. “But I asked you to be quiet, and you wouldn’t. Anyway, like I was saying, I just wanted to tell you not to worry.”

She shifts her weight and stands up, her legs tingling. She picks up the yellow flashlight with both hands and points the beam at the cement floor between her feet and Arnold’s body. The light reflects off the floor, and she can see more of him in the ambient glow. His body is a broken landscape of mottled purple flesh and oozing round wounds. The soft mess of him is cradled by the dip in the floor, the dip that leads to the drain he’s perched on top of.

Vera decides that she’s sure that she doesn’t want to see all of him, not this close-up. She’s resolved on the subject now that there’s more light on him. It’s too much all at once. Her gaze keeps flinching away from his body, back to his increasingly red face. “He’s had you for thirteen days now. I know it’s been a challenge,” she adds, using the phrase her sixth-grade teacher uses to soften the blow when she fails yet another spelling test. “I know it’s been difficult for you, and you’re probably worried that it’ll keep going like this forever. So I thought I should let you know that he’s going to kill you tomorrow. It’ll be over really soon.”

This is true, but it isn’t why she came downstairs. She wanted to see, is all. She wanted to see the basement with both eyes, instead of just one. She wanted to look, instead of just peeking.

Arnold keeps on trying to scream. His face is a very dark purple now, and the sounds coming from his throat are raw and desperate, but not too loud. Not now that he’s gagged.

“Well,” Vera says awkwardly. “I just wanted to let you know.” She isn’t sure how to say goodbye to him, so she doesn’t. She turns around and pads her way back to the stairs, leaving Arnold in the dark.

When she gets to the top of the stairs, she presses her ear to the door for a long time before easing the key around her neck into the lock. In under a minute, the flashlight is in the kitchen and Vera is back in her bed.

The clock on her nightstand reads 03:15. Her heart is pounding. She is trembling.

She did it.

She went and looked for herself, looked up-close, touched the thing in the basement with her own hands. She didn’t get caught. She’s not going to tell Brandon about this, she knows without having to decide, and she won’t bring him down into the basement no matter how much he presses. This is just for her. No one will ever know that she went where she isn’t allowed, that she saw what she isn’t supposed to see.

In the morning, Vera will notice something dark and thick and sticky smeared across the backs of her hands, the back of her neck. She will scrub it off with the intimate, adrenal panic that comes with disposing of evidence. But for now, she is filled only with bright, burning triumph. That friend she imagines, the one who always believes in her, would be so impressed. They would be staggered. They would wrap her in a tight proud hug and tell her I knew you could do it.

Vera buries her face in her pillow, feeling the ghost of that hug, and she allows herself a wide, warm grin.

She falls asleep to the faint, familiar animal noises that come from beneath her bed, and she does not dream about anything at all.





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Vera woke up underwater. A lake had entered her bedroom in the night, while she tried not to dream about her dying mother or the artist in the cottage. A lake had entered her bedroom and the weight of sleep had dragged her to the bottom of it.

It was so dark. And the darkness had heft to it, pressing in around her on all sides. She had kicked off the covers at some point. It was so cold and that cold kissed every exposed inch of her skin with a stinging chill. Her limbs were too slow for the atmosphere she was in. Her lungs were not made for this. She was not made for this.

Struggling against the clutching, stifling panic that gripped her, Vera forced breath into her lungs and told herself that it was all okay. Whatever nightmare it was she’d woken from, it was over now, and she was safe in her bed, awake and whole. Everything was fine. There was air.

She blinked a few times. Shapes began to detach themselves from the darkness: the squat bulk of the dresser with her father’s letters in the bottom drawer, the fall of the curtains, the tall shadow of the open closet door.