Just Like Home(58)

She unclenched her right fist. Slowly, deliberately, keeping her eyes on the ceiling, she snapped her fingers.

Once.

Twice.

Three times.

At the fourth snap the noise came again, and Vera didn’t need to wait anymore. She ran. The instant she heard that sharp dig into the ceiling overhead her legs took her to the stairs.

She moved faster than she’d ever thought she could. The steps vanished under her feet three at a time. She unlocked the door with sharp quick movements of her hands, stepped out into the entryway, didn’t hesitate before kicking aside the plastic bins that still blocked the door to her bedroom. The door gave way to the slap of her palm. She let it slam hard into the wall.

Standing in the doorway, Vera looked around the room, panting. This was where the sound had come from. There could be no question of that. Her eyes tracked the dust motes that hung in the afternoon sunlight, the shadows that shifted behind her bedroom curtain, the rippling motion of the bedskirt.

The rippling motion of the bedskirt.

Something furious and animal had driven Vera up the stairs. She let that instinct pull her toward the bed with long, confident strides. In one fluid motion she knelt and yanked the bedskirt up to look beneath.

Nothing. There was nothing.

Vera sat back on her heels, suddenly dizzy, suddenly tired. Sweetness drifted across the back of her throat and she swallowed reflexively, her throat clutching at nothing. She unclenched her fist, dropped the bedskirt, flexed her fingers to get the blood back into them.

There was nothing under the bed. There was nothing in this room, nothing at all. There couldn’t have been—the bins had still been in place in front of the door, and how could anything have gotten out of the room without moving them? They had still been in the place where she set them down, she thought, the exact place.

She was almost certain of that.

But she was just as certain that someone had been in her bedroom.

She turned and sat, leaned against the mattress and let her head fall back. She closed her eyes and waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. It was the house, she thought. It was the house, liquefying her brain. Being back here, being around her mother, all that fucking lemonade—it was shaking her screws loose.

But she knew she hadn’t been hearing things. Not twice in a row. She might have imagined the way the bedskirt was moving, as if fingers had just brushed along the back of it—that could have been in her head.

But not that sound. That had been real.

She bent to lift the bedskirt again, slower this time, and took a longer look beneath the bed. The floor brushed her cheek, making her shiver.

There was nothing down there. Not even a shadow. Not even dust.

Vera frowned. There should have been dust under the bed. There had been dust under the bed last time she looked. But now, the floor shone clean. Not all of it: she let her eyes travel to the floor beneath the foot of the bed, and there was a matte blanket of dust there, gathering around the bedposts in little eddies. But the dust ended patchily just a foot or so into the shadows beneath the bed. It was a clear demarcation, the place where the gray ended.

And, she realized as she looked closer, she was wrong. There was something there. Something near the head of the bed. Something small and flat, something the size of a business card.

Something that didn’t belong.

Vera got up and shut the door. There was no lock on the knob, an artifact of her childhood: her parents hadn’t wanted her to have a door that locked. They said that it was in case something bad happened in the night and they needed to get to her. She wasn’t sure now if that was good parenting or bad. Maybe it didn’t matter. In a movement that still felt familiar even after all these years, she pushed the chair from her desk in front of the door, so that she’d at least have a warning if someone tried to come into the room.

She walked back to her bed and dropped to her belly on the floor. She wouldn’t fit under the bed, she didn’t think, but she might be able to reach the little rectangle anyway. She might be able to manage.

She lifted the bedskirt and edged under it.

Vera reached with her right arm, reached until her elbow popped. The lip of the bedframe dug painfully into the meat on the back of her shoulder. She wasn’t even close: that rectangle was at least six inches away from her fingertips.

She sighed, her breath stirring a few loose hairs that had fallen into her face. Every time she inhaled, pain flared in her shoulder.

Vera squinted at the small flat thing beyond her fingers. She turned her head to the side, pressed her cheek to the floor, exhaled hard. Then she shoved with her toes, pushing herself further beneath the bed. That nearly did the job. Emptying her lungs made her small enough to fit.

But she still wasn’t close enough.

She flexed her feet again and slid forward. The lip of the bedframe scraped her back. Almost, almost, another inch and she would have it. An oh-god-no-I’m-stuck panic threatened to rise in her chest.

She swallowed it.

Her eyes ached from looking up and to the side. Her ear was bending back along the side of her head because she was pressed so hard to the floor. Everything hurt, but she was so close to getting whatever it was.

She bit the inside of her cheek, reached hard as she could, and pushed herself forward one more time.

There—finally—she had it. She picked the thing up with clumsy fingers, dropped it, picked it up again. She slid her elbow back toward her face, keeping her arm flush with the floor—and then, pain, pain, pain. She gasped with the sudden bright heat of it. The gasp itself was painful, her spine crushed against the ribs of the bedframe that supported her mattress. But it wasn’t as painful as whatever sharp, stabbing thing had just happened to the soft meat of her arm.