Just Like Home(71)

Nothing took the blankets away.

Nothing touched her.

Nothing bothered her at all.

Vera woke to soft sunlight falling across her face. She smiled, her eyes still shut. That sun would mean that the thunderstorm had rolled over her in the night, and she’d slept so deeply that she hadn’t even noticed it.

Today would be better. Everything outside would be washed clean, an explosion of green glittering with rainfall. She would finish cleaning out the mudroom today, she decided. All those old coats and scarves and boots would go to the secondhand store. She’d oil some hinges around the house, too. The house deserved some taking-care-of, some tenderness. It had held her safely all night, after all, had let her breathe its air and soak in its quiet.

It was the house her father built, and she needed to treat it right.

Maybe she would go into town, too, get a milkshake for Daphne. If Daphne could drink milkshakes. She’d have to ask about that. Or maybe she wouldn’t ask. Maybe she’d just show up with it and sit down with her mother, just her mother, no James Duvall. Maybe they could share milkshakes and talk about the way her mother had always hated her and the way there was love in that hate somewhere.

Maybe they could really talk, before Daphne was gone forever. The way Vera had always yearned to talk to her. The way she’d never let herself wish they could talk.

But not yet. Her bed felt so good, and the sun was so warm on her cheek, and the feeling of having finally gotten some decent rest was too good to leave behind just yet. Vera rolled over to nestle her head deeper into her pillow.

But her pillow wasn’t there.

Vera opened her eyes slowly, not wanting to see anything but knowing she needed to look. Her face was pressed into the fitted sheet. It still smelled faintly of laundry soap. She stared at the floral pattern, her own breath loud in her ears.

She didn’t bother to tell herself that she was being silly. She didn’t bother with the notion that she could have knocked her pillow to the floor in her sleep. She knew better than that.

But she didn’t want to look up. She wanted to stay in that perfect pocket of victorious sleep for as long as she could. She didn’t want the rest to happen, whatever it was going to be. She didn’t want it. She squeezed her eyes shut tight enough to squeeze out the tears that were building there. Whatever it was going to be, she didn’t want it.

But it didn’t matter if she wanted it or not. The bed wasn’t comfortable anymore, wasn’t safe and luxurious. She could feel every place where the tight-tucked covers were pressing close against her skin. She didn’t feel snug anymore—she felt trapped.

She bit back a sob and, with all the clench-jawed effort of yanking out an ingrown fingernail, she sat up in the bed.

At first, she thought she was dizzy. Everything was tilted at a bizarre angle, just off-true, and the bedroom door was too close, and the angle of the light was all wrong, disorientingly bright. She gripped the bedsheets instinctively, waiting for the room to spin.

But it didn’t spin. She didn’t feel faint, her vision wasn’t swimmy and gray. In fact, everything was perfectly sharp. The room stayed just as it was, and Vera quickly realized that it wasn’t the room that was at a strange angle.

It was her.

She tried to jump out of the bed, to escape the room, to get away from whatever was wrong, but she immediately fell, because the floor was farther away than it was supposed to be. There was a yank in her belly as she fell through the six inches of empty air. The feeling was that of missing a stair, and then her knees hit the wood with a painful thunk and all her breath was gone.

She scrambled to her feet and ran to the door. It was close, much too close, so close to her, because her bed wasn’t where she’d left it.

Nothing was where she’d left it. She’d woken up feeling like everything was right again, and now nothing was right, nothing at all.

She wrenched the door open but she couldn’t stop herself from looking back. She had to see. She had to know for sure.

There was her brand-new bed, the mattress wrapped with blankets as tight as a birthday present. Her brand-new bed with the frame that went right down to the floor. She’d gone to sleep with that bed tucked into the corner of the room, flush against two walls.

Now it was in the center of the room. Right in the middle. The head of the bed stood a good two feet away from the peephole in the floor. And the foot of the bed—the foot of the bed was propped up, high and proud.

It was resting on the bottom drawer of her dresser.

The drawer had been pulled out all the way, leaving a bare, ugly hole behind it. It was wedged beneath the lower right corner of the bed, along with her missing pillow and the quilt that she’d lost her grip on two nights before, the quilt that she’d misplaced, the quilt that had disappeared beneath that old brass bedframe even as she’d tried to hang on to it. The quilt she hadn’t been able to find in the meantime.

The drawer should have contained Francis’s letters. But even with the bed covering part of the drawer, Vera could see from where she stood that it was empty.

The pulled-out dresser drawer lifted the bed just high enough to create a shadowy nook that the balled-up quilt and the thin pillow did not fill. The room smelled like turned earth and sweet lemon.

From the doorway, Vera peered into the space between the bed and the floor, hoping to see a flash of white, the corner of an envelope, anything to indicate that the letters weren’t gone. She didn’t know what she would do if the letters were under the bed—her stomach twisted at the thought of reaching into that darkness, toward whatever might be hiding in there—but she looked anyway, desperate to see something that would answer the questions she didn’t know how to ask about what had happened in the night.