Just Like Home(54)

Now it felt like readiness.

She was a coiled spring. She could not hear her own heartbeat. She could not hear anything. The only thing she could hear was the cold, a fast sharp rush of water slapping her again and again. She pushed her hair away from her face once more, yanking it back into an almost-ponytail, and she felt a trickle of icewater run down the back of her neck, so cold that she choked on her own breath.

She didn’t realize she was whispering until she accidentally bit her own lip. “No no no no no,” she was saying, a nonsense sound, a meaningless tap of her tongue against her hard palate.

Her eyes were locked onto that corner of the quilt. How had it gotten all the way under the bed? It couldn’t have simply fallen there, couldn’t have landed that way. Maybe it could have somehow fallen a little way under the bed, sure, maybe through some weird puddling of the fabric. But there were only a few inches of blanket sticking out from beneath the bedskirt, a tiny peek of fabric smaller than one of her hands, and it simply wasn’t possible that the blanket could have wound up like that on its own.

The bedskirt rippled steadily.

She looked back at the closet door. It was more ajar than it had been before, or maybe her eyes had simply adjusted better to the dark. It was as inviting as a bitten lip, and Vera wished she could return to the time when that closet was the safest place in the world, a place to climb into and tuck herself away from everything that was painful and frightening. That time seemed so far away, and so did the door to the bedroom, and she was so cold that she couldn’t think, and the air was rushing down into her throat too thick and fast to breathe.

She flexed her fingers trying to snap, not embarrassed, not resisting the impulse. She tried, but her fingers were half-numb and she couldn’t do it. She sat back on her heels, stuck her fingers into her mouth to try to warm them enough to move but the inside of her mouth was cold too. She tried to ignore the sharp, brassy taste of her skin. But the taste just grew stronger, more and more acidic, until her mouth was flooded with thick saliva and she finally recognized what she was tasting.

It was the tart, syrupy flavor of lemonade.

She pulled her hand away from her mouth, coughing, a sob building in her throat, a shiver winding its way from her lap to the base of her skull. Vera wrapped her arms around herself. The wet fabric of her shirt stuck to her arms and her chest. She kept her eyes closed tight, her mouth clamped shut, her head tucked down between her hunched shoulders. Cold water dripped from her forehead down her nose, dripped onto her clenched arms, only was it water or was it fucking lemonade, taptaptaptaptap—

An animal urgency gripped her, adrenaline slapping her brain with lightning, and she scrabbled over the edge of the bed with the kind of speed that can only belong to fear, folding herself double and reaching with a hand she couldn’t feel. She grabbed the corner of the quilt. It only took three tries to get a solid grip on it and then she yanked it hard as she could, yanked as if she were freeing it from beneath a stone.

She almost had it. She pulled one more time, straining, sure that the fucking thing would come loose from whatever kind of stuck it was.

Something warm folded over her fingers, giving her hand a gentle, tender squeeze.

Vera jerked and fell back hard on the mattress. Her head bounced back onto her pillows. Her quilt was in her arms, the whole thing, with the bedsheet wrapped up in it. Together, the two formed a tight rope of twisted fabric. She clutched them to her chest, panting hard, something between a wild giggle and a sob leaping from her throat. She pressed her hand to her mouth to cover it before anyone heard.

Silly, she thought. Who would be here to hear you?

Her fingers were warm against her lips, and her lips were warm against her fingers. She lifted a hand to her hair, and found that it was only a little damp, the kind of damp that comes from fear and sweat and sleep.

The breath in her lungs felt like air instead of water.

It was over. Whatever it was—a fit of insanity, a hallucination, a panic attack?—it was over.

Ridiculous. This was so ridiculous. She was alive and everything was normal again. The blankets had fallen under the bed somehow, that was all, and now she had them, and she could laugh as loud as she needed to. She could laugh at her own foolish, baseless panic.

She lay still, hugging the twist of blankets tight to her chest. She stayed just like that, ignoring the tingle in her fingers where some sudden awful warmth had touched them, until she couldn’t feel her heart battering itself against her sternum like a bird dying against a shut window.

Behind the curtains, the windows showed the thin blue-gray light that comes just before dawn.

Vera drank in that light as she untangled the sheet from the quilt. Not bothering to tuck anything in, she spread both of them out on top of herself and let the weight of the blankets settle themselves flat. The terror had drained out of her, leaving extra gravity behind. She was going to sleep, she decided, until she was done sleeping; if she didn’t wake up until noon, so be it. Daphne wouldn’t die if her lemonade was delivered a few hours late.

Or maybe, Vera thought vaguely, settling back into the pillows—maybe she would die. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to skip to the end of all this.

That was a Wrong Thought. It was the kind of thought Vera didn’t usually allow herself to have. But she was so tired, and her eyes fluttered shut before she could check herself. Before she could remind herself that she didn’t have thoughts like that.