Just Like Home(67)

Vera looked out the window, tried to find things to look at that didn’t make her feel like a single yawning urge. There was a smudge on the glass that looked like someone’s head had rested there. Some other passenger, some other time. “Trade me what?”

“I’ll tell you how I work, if you’ll tell me how he worked. My father, I mean. If you’ll tell me how he got so much out of you.” He let out a soft laugh. “God knows I can’t seem to figure it out on my own.”

They drove through town. Vera kept her eyes on the sidewalk as they passed Alan & Sons, looking for familiar faces. Looking for just one familiar face. She thought she saw him a block away from the store, sitting on a park bench and reading a book—but then he was gone.

“Brandon,” she murmured.

She wasn’t looking at Duvall but she could feel him perk up, twitching and attentive as a well-trained dog.

“Your father’s final—”

“Hammett told me things about him,” Vera interrupted. “He made me think that maybe there was a chance I could have my friend back, even after everything. He saw how lonely I was and he used it to get what he wanted.”

“You seem lonely now, too,” Duvall ventured. He rested his hand between them again, a persistent invitation. “You don’t need to be.”

Vera shook her head, keeping her eyes away from the smooth, thin skin of his wrist. “You have no idea what I need.”



* * *



Getting the bed into the house on her own was awful, but Vera wasn’t willing to invite Duvall into her bedroom, not even to drop off the unbelievably heavy set of boxes that had all the necessary parts inside.

Putting the thing together was even more painful than the ride home had been. In spite of the helpfully illustrated instructions that came in the cardboard flat-pack boxes, Vera kept mixing up the directions of the bed components, getting them upside-down and failing to notice until three steps later, having to backtrack to fix her errors.

The entire time, the bottom drawer of her dresser throbbed at her. She bargained with herself, deciding that she could open it up and read those letters from Francis after she’d had a good night’s sleep. That, she decided, would be the healthiest thing to do. Building the bed needed to come first, and then resting, getting out of the strange paranoid mindset that made her keep glancing at the bedskirt on the old bedframe to make sure it was still.

One hard thing at a time. She’d done a packet once, on balancing a difficult workload, and that’s what it advised. She’d given herself a C-minus on that one.

One hard thing at a time.

She stopped four times to check on her mother, who was fast asleep with her chin resting on her chest all afternoon. Vera wanted, desperately, to wake Daphne for some lemonade and maybe some kind of conversation—but it seemed like a better idea to just let her sleep. Vera was hungry for the strange new tenderness that had risen up in her mother, but she was afraid of it, too.

By the time the bed was fully assembled, all the way against the far wall of the bedroom across from the door, Vera was sweating, irritable, and clumsy-fingered. She was sick of Allen wrenches and had a nasty bump coming up on her elbow where the headboard had fallen on her. But at least that part was over.

She stared at the old bedframe. Her fingertips kept returning to the edge of the bandage on her arm. That splinter had been deep and ugly, half the length of the tweezers Vera had used to pull it out. Seeing the wood slide out from beneath her skin had been uniquely nauseating—it had just kept coming, and the more of it she removed, the more she felt aware of the fact that it had been inside her.

That floor’s probably been dug up for ages, she thought. Mice. But she knew that mice did not cause the kinds of grooves that were in the floor under her bed, knowing that the grooves had not been there for ages, knowing that the wood of the floor had been as warm as flesh when she’d felt it.

She hadn’t looked under the bed again, not since she’d shoved it aside in that moment of primal rage. The thought of it—of kneeling beside the bed, of bending over until her nose was nearly touching the floor, and then lifting the bedskirt—sent cold, sour fingers walking up the knobs of her spine. No, she hadn’t looked, and she wasn’t going to. She wouldn’t be lifting the bedskirt.

She’d be lifting the whole goddamn bed. She’d be dragging it out of the room, like lifting a board away from a patch of mud to see the nightcrawlers twisting underneath. Daylight. That’s what the patch of floor under that bedframe needed.

She rolled her neck a few times, trying to ease the stiffness that had been setting in over the course of her time here at home. The bedroom curtains were already flung wide to let in as much sunlight as possible, and all the lights were on, but she still wished that she had a way to make it brighter—a floodlamp, maybe, the kind the cops had used to light up the basement when they were in there with their boots and their cigarettes and their gloves. Something that would eliminate every shadow and leave no place hidden.

For a moment—a bare, desperate moment—she considered opening one of those windows, leaning out, shouting for Duvall to leave his unsettling canvases behind and come join her. Just so she wouldn’t have to do the thing alone.

“Enough,” Vera whispered to the room, furious with herself for even having the impulse. “I’ve had enough of this.”