Just Like Home(7)

“What did you do,” she whispered, not wanting an answer.

The word inspiring sat as bitter as old bile on her tongue. Vera reminded herself that nothing ever happened inside the Crowder House without Daphne’s knowledge and permission. This injury to the wall had been inflicted by someone who knew they were allowed. There was no sense asking why.

Whatever had caused this—whoever had caused it, whichever one of the monsters and parasites that her mother invited into their home—Vera didn’t want to know. She didn’t need to know. Daphne was dying, now, and the time for answers was long gone. This was just something to be gotten through.

Vera skidded down the last few steps. She could patch up the wall later, when her more immediate work here was over. When the house was hers to sell, she supposed. She picked her things up and walked past the door to the basement again, staying out of the sightline of the dining room.

Her suitcase was in her left hand. The doorknob was in her right. It resisted her, and then it didn’t, and then the door was open and she was inside.



* * *



Being back in her childhood room wasn’t as bad as she’d feared.

Smooth wood floors, just like in the rest of the lower level of the house. The closet she used to hide in when she felt lonely. Chest of drawers against one wall, the top covered with a dusty plexiglass shield. Desk beside it. Rickety wooden chair for doing homework in, pushed all the way under the desk to make walking space.

This room, more than any other, was always the safest place in the house for Vera. This room had been hers.

She’d spent so many years sitting in that chair, listening for her mother’s footsteps, waiting for the door to open. Waiting to be forgiven.

And there, in the middle of one wall—there was her old bed. It was a queen-sized brass half-poster, familiar despite the bare new mattress resting on the ancient box spring. Vera put her bags down, nudged the duffel halfway beneath the bedframe. She rested her palm against one of the short bedknobs at the foot of the bed and pushed gently.

The whole frame rattled, metal-on-metal. It was even louder than she remembered.

Vera frowned. As a child, she’d assumed that the rattle was predetermined—that it was just how beds were supposed to be, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent the noise that rang out every time she turned over in her sleep or snuck in and out of her room. But she’d slept in a lot of beds in the intervening years, and she could now recognize the loose shimmy of the metal. It could easily have been silenced: a simple matter of tightening a couple of screws loose in the frame, where the headboard was joined to the platform.

Why hadn’t Francis ever fixed it? She only wondered for a moment before the answer came to her. He wanted to be able to hear.

Well, he wasn’t here anymore, and Vera could handle this without him. She just had to tighten the screws and then the bed would be quiet. That and some bedsheets, that’s all Vera needed to make this bed feel like her own.

Back upstairs, then, past the unfamiliar gash in the wall, to the hall closet where the extra bedlinens and the toolchest had always resided together, united in their utility. Francis had always left his tools there, at the bottom of the linen closet, tucked in next to a big basket of cleaning rags, for as long as Vera could remember.

It was still there—a matte black case with bright orange clasps to hold it shut. It didn’t look like something that was his, and so it had been left alone, too boring for visitors to the house to inspect. Vera bent and snapped the clasps back, lifting the plastic lid of the case, her hands smearing years’ worth of thick dust away from the top of the lid.

The tools inside the chest were mismatched and oddly sized. There was a flathead screwdriver with a smooth wooden handle, a large hammer with a worn gray grip, an ancient tub of spackling putty but no putty knife. Vera could remember watching Francis spackling over a thumbtack-hole she’d made in the wall—he’d used a butter knife to do it, leaving tiny parallel grooves in the patch.

There was a pair of work gloves in the bottom of the case. Vera pulled them out and straightened, letting a few loose penny-nails fall to the floor. The gloves were gray and heavy, striped at the cuffs, discolored and unevenly worn.

Her bare toes curled into the carpet absently, feeling for the sudden cold resistance of the dropped nails, as she lifted the gloves to her face. Vera buried her nose in the palm of one glove and inhaled her father deep into her lungs.

The gloves had been alone in that toolbox for such a long time, but they still hung on to him. Must and mildew dominated the bouquet of the old gloves, but Vera concentrated hard on the whisper of her father underneath the age and decay: wood and sweat and sun. He was still here, in this place that he made, in this place that made her.

He was still here.

The moment of longing she allowed herself was an excess, a once-a-year indulgence. It was all she could permit herself in this house, where remembering Francis was compulsory, but missing him was forbidden.

Vera tucked the feeling back away where it belonged, into the spaces behind her back teeth and between her knuckles and under her kneecaps. There was room for it there. She’d found that she could almost forget it entirely.

She didn’t bring the gloves with her when she returned to her bedroom.

She carried two screwdrivers in one hand—a flathead and a Phillips-head, since she couldn’t remember what the screws on her bed looked like. Under her other arm she’d tucked a set of sheets and pillowcases, light blue cotton with a fine pattern of white flowers. She used her elbow to turn the light off when she got to the bottom of the stairs. It didn’t take so much effort to ignore the gash in the wall this time.