Just Like Home(6)

Two doors in each bathroom, and none of them locking. Vera was never sure of the exact reason for the dual entrances. Maybe Francis had just forgotten to take bathrooms into account when he’d been drawing up the plans.

It was a thing best left unconsidered, Vera thought. Some questions don’t want answering.



* * *



Vera stayed in the bathroom longer than necessary. She stood under the weak spray of the shower, losing herself in a chip in the tile on the wall until the hot water started to run out. She lingered for a long time, letting drops of water slip across her flesh and trickle down into the drain, where they’d slide down along the warm metal of the pipes. Letting the house drink her down.

Her skin was still damp as she dressed. Her clothes darkened in places and stuck too close to her, but she didn’t want to use the towels in this bathroom without knowing which ones were clean. She braided her overlong brown hair while it was wet and then twisted the braid up into a loose bun to keep it from dripping onto her shirt.

It was how she always did her hair after washing it—out-of-the-way, easy, automatic. But this time it felt wrong. Too tight, too heavy, too close. Before she could think about why, she took her hair down, combed it out, and picked up her mother’s ancient pink hair dryer.

It was clumsy work. Vera had a lot of hair and she almost never did anything with it that wasn’t a braid and a bun. Daphne had styled it for her on special occasions and picture days before that awful year. And then after that awful year, it didn’t matter so much anymore.

It would have been easier to cut it short, but Francis had always liked it best long.

Coordinating the brush and the blow-dryer at the same time was tricky and it took her ages but she managed to do a not-terrible job. Over the course of thirty minutes or so her hair went from a wet, ropy ink-slick to a too-dry fall of deep brown. Loose strands littered the cool tile at her feet, fluttering in the draft from the floorboard vents, drifting toward the grate.

Vera pinned her now-dry, now-straight hair away from her face using a few old clips she found beside the sink. She took her time smoothing down the stray frizz at her hairline.

The loose hair on the floor gathered next to the baseboard vent, which had steadily sucked the steam out of the air until even the little haze of fog at the edges of the mirror was gone.

Vera made eye contact with herself and was captivated by how different she looked in this mirror now than she had the last time she’d looked into it. She’d seen herself thousands of times in hundreds of different mirrors, had looked at her face under so many different kinds of light—she was accustomed to nothing so much as herself. But this mirror, and this light.

She hadn’t seen herself like this since the day she left home.

Her eyes had sat deeper in her head back then; her jawline had been softer; her skin had been worse by some measures, and better by others. But the changes didn’t register. In this mirror, now and always, she just looked like Vera Crowder. A combination of Daphne and Francis, a girl and then a young woman and now a woman—just a woman, without ‘young’ attached. Pale the way a person gets when they’re indoors all the time, and tired the way a person gets after they’ve lived too many lives.

But the soft fall of her hair seemed to shine in this mirror. The line of her neck seemed more elegant than usual. She could not help but give herself a little smile. The Vera in the mirror smiled back.

She didn’t want to leave this room, the one room that had escaped her mother’s efforts at preservation. The one room where there was nothing for visitors to chew on. But it would take a very bad daughter, she decided, to hide in the bathroom ignoring her dying mother. And Vera was trying to be better.

She headed down the dark stairs toward her waiting bags, not bothering to turn the light on. All her earthly possessions were in those bags, not counting whatever her mother was going to leave behind. As Vera approached them, something snagged at the edge of her vision—something unfamiliar in this too-familiar landscape. Something new.

There were photos on the wall. That hadn’t been true before she left home. In a fit of rage and spite Daphne had taken them all down one day; for all her furtive searching, Vera had never been able to find them again. Daphne must have had fresh ones printed and framed and hung. Something to give her houseguests, so they could stare into Francis Crowder’s eyes and try to find something to sate their relentless hunger for him.

The new photos were notable, but they weren’t what caught Vera’s eye.

No—the thing that stopped her short was just below where the photos of Vera and Francis and Daphne were hung.

A long, dark line.

Vera ran her palm across it, squinting in the dim light of the closed-up house. It was rough, deep, a gouge that cut through the wallpaper and dug into the plaster. It stretched most of the length of the staircase. It was deep and cruel and strangely smooth at the edges, more of a scoop than a scratch.

Frowning, Vera pressed a finger into it, feeling the way the plaster cupped her fingertip.

She tried to remember walking up the stairs, tried to remember if she’d felt this gash then. Hadn’t the lights been on? And hadn’t she trailed her fingers along the wallpaper as she’d gone up?

Or had she simply remembered the sensation from a thousand times feeling it? That must be true, she thought. She couldn’t have missed this injury. Not if she’d felt it on her way up.