Just Like Home(65)

Vera crosses the entryway, goes into the little powder room with the two doors that won’t lock. She braces her foot against one door and keeps an eye on the other behind her in the mirror as she washes her hands.

She takes her time, scrubbing the rot from beneath her fingernails. It pools in the sink, taking forever to drain. She frowns, pokes at the dark water trying to dislodge whatever’s clogging the drain, but there’s nothing to find. It vanishes steadily, but slowly.

Even the house doesn’t want it.



* * *



Vera’s father is in the basement that night until well past three o’clock in the morning. Vera’s elbows ache from propping her up on the wood floor beneath her bed. Her cheek is numb from being pressed right up against the peephole for hours. She holds her breath as heavy footfalls pass her bedroom door—Francis on his way to the kitchen to wash his hands in the sink. She breathes again, ten times in and out, before she hears his footfalls again, passing her bedroom on the way to the stairs.

Vera knows she should wait awhile longer—knows she should wait for him to wash up, brush his teeth, put on his pajamas, climb into bed, start drifting off, sink all the way down to the sandy bottom of sleep, deep enough that little sounds from downstairs won’t wake him. She knows she should wait.

But she can’t. She can’t stand it. She waits for a scant fifteen seconds, long enough for Francis to get up the stairs and walk down the hall to his bedroom, and then she bolts out from under the bed and shoots to her bedroom door. She stumbles over something she can’t see, something as firm as hardwood. When she turns to look, there’s nothing to see, but the blankets on top of her bed are folded back invitingly and a hint of guilt twitches in her belly.

“I’ll only be a minute,” she whispers. “I promise.”

She doesn’t wait for a reply. The key around her neck is still humming against her breastbone and that hungry need to know is gnawing at her insides, and when she gets to the basement door her hands are quick and sure, no sweaty palms, no clumsy fingers. She’s already got the flashlight. She planned ahead.

She takes the stairs down into the basement two at a time and she doesn’t slip even once.

The thing in the basement isn’t fully restrained with bike locks. Only one ankle is chained up, and that doesn’t really seem necessary. The thing is propped up against the wall, slumped to one side, not moving around too much.

The smell is awful.

“You stink,” Vera whispers. The man doesn’t seem to hear her, but she can hear ragged-edged breathing. She’s sure the man is awake, just like a minute ago, when she watched her father put the chain on that ankle. “You stink and you look gross. You look like meatloaf.”

She knows she’s being mean, but she’s so mad. She should feel afraid—she knows, distantly, that if she saw this man in any other context, she’d be terrified. But this is her house, where she never has to feel afraid of anything, and so instead she just feels angry.

And the feeling isn’t fading like it usually does. It isn’t working its way into sadness, isn’t fraying at the edges. It’s hardening. It’s sticking. It’s a sharp thing that’s lodged between her back teeth and it’s making her mean. It’s making her want to hurt this thing that her father is keeping down here in the basement.

She steps closer. The man wheezes, a high whistle from low in the chest that ends with a popping sound like when Vera blows bubbles into her milk with a straw at lunch.

Vera aims the flashlight beam at the man’s face. At the thing’s face.

The eyes are shut tight. The mouth hangs open, a long strand of pink saliva hanging from the full lower lip. The moustache has something foul and muddy caked into it. There are holes in the cheek and the lip.

The rest, below the face, is well past raw. The man was pink and fresh a day or two ago, but now Vera suspects things are starting to turn. She doesn’t look too closely, because she’s pretty sure the man is still naked, and she doesn’t want to see nakedness. She just wants to see the face.

She takes another step. Her heart is pounding hard, she can feel it against the weight of the key around her neck, and she’s within reach of the man now, within reach of a long arm and a grasping hand. She squats down, still shining that light into that slack, pale face. One blond mustache-hair catches the light, glinting through all that filth.

“You’re full of grease,” Vera hisses. “You’re full of gross sticky gunk and that’s why you’re here.” It isn’t enough. “Foulness,” she adds, remembering the barbs that word had when it came out of her father’s mouth. The man doesn’t react. The angry tooth that’s growing through the roof of Vera’s mouth isn’t satisfied by the bites she’s taking out of him.

She tries again.

“You’re gross and it’s your own fault you’re here. Maybe if you were a better dad, you would have been able to get away.”

That does the trick. The man lets out a hiccuping little sob. Pink foam gathers at the corners of the mouth, and something inside Vera flushes with heat. This. This is what she wants.

She crouches down so she’s at eye level with the man.

“Do you like it down here? Do you like what’s been happening to you?”

The head droops to one side, then another. The mouth pouts into an “O” shape. It’s the closest she’s going to get to a definitive “no.”