Just Like Home(59)

Vera scooted out from under the bed too fast, losing skin to the lip of the bedframe, knocking her head against the brass, dropping the thing in her hand. She left a thin smear of blood behind, a trail marking where her forearm dragged along the wood. When she was free of the bed, she stumbled backward on her hands, crablike, her back slamming into the dresser. She sat hard, sucking in air, pressing her spine hard against the wood that seemed to thrum with the promise of the letters within.

“What,” she panted, “what? What the fuck?”

She looked at her arm, which was oozing blood steadily. She wiped ineffectively at the blood with her thumb, trying to see the wound. There it was—an inch-long gouge, ending in a fat, jagged splinter. The splinter was buried deep beneath the skin of her arm. She couldn’t even see the end of it. She would need tweezers to get it out, and a bandage at the ready, judging by the amount of blood that was already welling up around it.

“Fuck,” she said, a little louder this time. This wasn’t just painful. It was offensive. There had never been any splinters in her bedroom floor before. Her father had laid the floors in himself, had sanded them smooth as satin, had finished and sealed them with infinite care. The presence of the splinter was infuriating, an insult, and looking at it put a knot into Vera’s throat. “Fuck this.”

Her eyes traced the streak of blood she’d left on the floor, followed it under the bed.

She exploded upright, her body taut with the primal rage of sudden injury. She shoved hard at the heavy bedframe with both hands. It shifted, the feet of it scraping across the floor with a bright ugly noise that was nothing at all like the sound she’d heard from the basement. She shoved it again. It moved a foot, eighteen inches, two feet, and then she could see the end of the trail of blood, could see where that vicious splinter had come from. Could see the thing she’d dropped.

It was the thin bit of wood that covered the peephole in the floor. It had been pried up somehow. The lens of the peephole winked up at her from the rectangle of black subfloor where it was usually hidden.

On either side of that gap in the floorboards, deep gouges had been dug into the wood—five on each side, ten in all, spaced like wide-set fingers. The long furrows were lush with splinters, some of them worse than the one that was burrowed deep into the flesh of Vera’s arm.

Without thinking, Vera bent to pick up the little piece of wood she’d dropped. She put it over the lens, pressed gently, waiting to feel it click into place. But it didn’t click into place. There was resistance, and when she pushed, something crunched.

She pulled the wood away, startled, expecting to see broken glass. But what she saw instead was the crinkled edge of a piece of paper.

It hadn’t been there before, when she’d pressed her eye to this peephole as a kid. She was sure of it. The page was wrapped around the old peephole, in a tight curl that only just poked up beyond the edges of the tube with the glass set into it. That’s what had crinkled under the pressure of the wooden cover.

Holding her bleeding arm behind her so as not to drip on the page, Vera reached into the hole with her good hand. She barely managed to squeeze her thumb and forefinger into the gaps around the peephole. Working the little scrap of paper up out of the hole required patience and a steady hand, neither of which she possessed in that moment, but after what felt like a long struggle, she managed to get a grip on it.

Vera stood up and immediately sat back onto her mattress, her head swimming. A thin stream of blood made its way from her arm down to her fingertips, and she let it drip onto the floor. She watched as it seeped into the cracks between the floorboards, thought distantly of how difficult it would be to get it up out of the wood.

Some of her blood had fallen onto the gouges in the floor while she was trying to get that bit of paper. They looked so much like the one along the stairway wall, the one in the basement ceiling. They were long and deep and hungry, and in the rawness of them, her blood looked right at home.

Vera knew she had to pull the splinter out of her arm and bandage it. But first, she used her good hand to smooth the scrap of paper flat against her leg. It kept trying to curl back into a tube, but it was small enough that she managed to hold it flat with one hand.

It was so tiny. There was only room for one line of text, one partial sentence followed by one full sentence. There was no mistaking her father’s handwriting, though.

There was also no mistaking that, yet again, this passage was about Vera.

Wonder if she watches? Wonder if she loves me the way I love her?

Vera swallowed hard, shivering at the tickle of warm blood running across the back of her wrist. The patter of it falling onto the woodgrain was like a quick heartbeat. She bit her lips against the smile that was threatening to overtake her face.

For a moment, it didn’t matter that she was bleeding. It didn’t matter where the scratches in the floor had come from. It didn’t matter that Daphne was dying.

Because he’d loved her. Even if that had changed in the time between when he wrote those words and when he died, this was proof.

He’d loved her back then.

He’d loved her so much.





CHAPTER TWENTY


Vera blinked hard against the fluorescent lights of the furniture store. She’d had so little sleep that her brain felt glassy, varnished by adrenaline and buffed to a high sheen by fatigue. The concrete floor was too hard beneath her feet, and everything was too bright, and everyone was too close together. She wanted to be at home.