Just Like Home(61)

It had been a friendship born of proximity and convenience, pushed along by their mothers. Neither of them would have picked the other one for a best friend, given the choice. Still, that friendship had lasted for years. It had defined her childhood. She’d wondered as a kid if they’d date, get married, have children of their own, have a home. She’d wondered because he was the boy she knew best and that seemed like the likeliest path for the two of them, and because nobody had ever told her that not wanting to marry men at all was an option.

But now, here she was. Brandon hadn’t turned out to factor into her adulthood at all.

She couldn’t even remember his middle name.

“Are you finding everything okay, ma’am?”

The question startled Vera into a mortifyingly ragged gasp, her skin jumping up into gooseflesh in an instant. “Jesus,” she said, too loud for the small space, and the blue-shirted teenager’s polite smile vanished. He took a step back, an apology forming on his lips already, and Vera shoved herself into a state of composure. “No, I’m sorry,” she said, placating as could be. “I was just … lost in thought. It’s not your fault.”

The kid nodded, his eyes darting to the side as if there might be an escape route nearby. “Sorry,” he said.

Vera swallowed rising irritation. Her mother’s voice hissed at the back of her tongue. I already said it wasn’t your fault. Don’t make me say it again. Vera clenched her jaw tight to keep from saying the words Daphne was muttering inside her throat. “Can you point me to the grown-up beds?” she said instead, scraping a smile across her teeth.

“Just follow the arrows,” he said, not meeting her eyes. He stepped away fast, vanished into the mists of customer service before Vera could thank him.

She sat on the bed for another few seconds, letting the poor kid get a head start on avoiding her. Across the aisle, in the princess room, Duvall was resting one hip against a pale pink dresser, watching her. His head was cocked to one side. There was a little line between his brows, one that was surely meant to look like concern. She knew that expression—he must have learned it from his father.

His eyes glittered hungrily, moving over her as quick and subtle as a bedsheet settling.

Vera stood briskly, not meeting his gaze. Not wanting to know what she’d find there if she looked too long. Then she did as that employee had told her, following the arrows out of the bedtime wonderland of the children’s section, not looking back to see if Duvall was following or not. She kept walking until she arrived at the joyless grid of queen-sized beds that were meant for adults to sleep in.

All of the bedframes looked more or less the same—squared-off, low and bland, devoid of character. These beds didn’t belong in the same house as that awful, decadent yellow chair, Vera thought. They didn’t belong in a room that was next door to that spaceship-themed bedroom. They were sensible, austere. They belonged right here, in tidy rows under fluorescent lights with bare mattresses on top of them, not a pillow in sight. They were as sterile and uninviting as a hospital corridor.

They were perfect.

She walked between them, examining the place where each bed met the floor, until she found the one she wanted. Dark faux-wood print on particleboard, a narrow headboard, a flat white laminate platform for a mattress to rest on.

And it went all the way to the ground. There was no under-the-bed, not here. There was nowhere to sneak and lurk, no lair from which to grab at blankets and gouge at the floorboard. No drawers, even, to linger inside of or push out in the night. Vera took out her phone and snapped a photo of the little tag on the headboard with the aisle and shelf number she’d need to retrieve an identical, unassembled version of this bed.

She felt the heat of James Duvall standing behind her, a little too close and a little too quiet.

Hunger knotted itself tight around her middle. Vera breathed in the old-smoke smell of him, the closeness of him, the heat of him. She took him into her lungs and she leaned back into the warmth of his nearness, and she smiled at the bed she was going to buy.

She needed a bed that offered nowhere at all to hide.

This one would be perfect.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Vera is twelve and three-quarters years old and she can’t stop picking at the band-aid on her finger. It’s come loose at one edge, and the sticky underside of it is all dirty, and she wants to peel it off so bad.

While she’s helping with the dishes, her mother and father have a fight. They fight all the time these days. As soon as Vera hears her mother’s voice start to rise—where do you think you’re going, don’t tell me you need to do it again already, that one’s off-limits—she snaps her soapy fingers four times. Even though Daphne and Francis are just in the next room, with no door to come between their fight and Vera’s ears, the noise of their voices dies away.

Vera imagines what it would be like if she weren’t alone in this kitchen. She imagines her friend—no, her sister—no, her friend, her best friend—standing beside her, ready to dry the clean dishes. “He told me everything,” Vera murmurs, scrubbing sticky grease off the underside of a pan. “He told me all about the monsters, and how it works, even, when he drains them.”

It’s good that he trusts you, her friend says in a voice like the hum of the dishwasher. You could tell him that you know enough now. You could tell him that you don’t want to see it anymore.