Just Like Home(74)

Then again, Vera considers, it’s not as if she’s ever seen light leaking from below the door when her father is at work. Noise doesn’t leak out either. She can hear sounds from inside her bedroom, because of the hole in the floor, but she can’t hear anything from the entryway. She’s tiptoed out there dozens of times while her father worked, pretending to go to the powder room. It’s always been dark and quiet and still.

It’s a well-built house they live in. It absorbs noise, hides light, keeps secrets. It wouldn’t betray her. Not ever.

Vera decides there’s nothing to worry about. Still, she flinches when she turns the lights on.

She also failed to plan for the difference in size between herself and her father. She didn’t think to bring down a stepstool to stand on, so that she could secure Brandon to the big X. She can’t reach high enough to get his arms up where they’re supposed to be—it’s hard enough for her to lift him at all, much less hold him in place with one hand while the other straps him in—so she settles for spreading him out on the floor and tethering him with the bike locks.

She holds one of the locks up to examine how it’s supposed to go on his wrist. She’s never been able to see this part close enough to understand it, and she’s worried that it’ll be confusing. But it’s not confusing at all, because the bike locks are connected at one end to thick black cuffs with buckles on the outside and padding on the inside.

Vera smiles at this detail, at the padding. It’s nice to know that Brandon’s wrists won’t get hurt when she ties him up.

She hadn’t realized how nervous she would be. Her father always looks so confident, so focused, but her hands are trembling hard as she opens the top left drawer of her father’s toolbench to take out a pocketknife. There’s a whole set in there, laid out on foam padding so they don’t slip around. This one has a handle carved from an antler, white and bumpy, slim enough to fit in Vera’s hand.

She unfolds it until it clicks, locking into place. She’s not sure how she’s going to put it back, but she knows that Brandon will know. He can show her once they’re finished.

The stainless steel shines under the bright lights. The handle is cold, but it warms up fast against her skin.

It’s time. She’s delayed long enough. She has to do this.

She has to fix Brandon.

Then she turns back to him and stares at his prone body. She doesn’t know exactly where the grease is stored, where it comes from, where it builds up the most. She doesn’t know how much to drain out of him, so she figures she’ll just do a little tonight. Not as much as her father does. She won’t finish him, either. She doesn’t know how her father decides when to finish them, and besides, she wants Brandon to live. She wants him to get better. And unlike the monsters her father tries to help, she knows that Brandon isn’t beyond repair.

She may not know all the details of the work, but she does know where to start. Her father always starts in the same place—she’s seen it at least a dozen times now, her face pressed hard to the floor, her eye straining to focus on his every movement.

She always watches Francis. Her eyes are fixed on her father whether he’s in the basement or out of it. She watches the way he holds his fork and the way he rolls up his sleeves and the way he combs his hair and the way he bleeds the evil out of the men he helps. Watching is the only way to learn, that’s what Francis always says. Vera doesn’t know how to ask what the right way is to do things, so she watches, and she remembers.

He always starts with the belly.

She kneels on the cement, and she tugs Brandon’s shirt up from where it’s tucked into his jeans, and she presses the point of the pocketknife against the soft white skin just above his navel.

She takes a deep breath. She gives it a hard push.

It’s so much more difficult than she thought it would be. It’s so much harder than her father makes it look. Brandon’s belly is soft, and the skin doesn’t want to break. The blade makes a dent in his skin but it won’t push through to the well of foulness Vera knows must be just beneath the surface.

She takes a deep breath, imagining that Brandon is a stubborn patch of dirt instead of a boy. This, she tells herself, is not so much stabbing as it is digging. She rocks back on her heels and then surges forward, throwing her weight into her hands.

Brandon’s eyes fly open just as the knife breaks through the taut surface of his skin.

“Whatareyoudoing,” he gasps, his chin dropping as he strains to see his own stomach. “Vera Vera Vera what—”

“Shhh,” she says. “I have to concentrate.”

“No,” he says, and his voice is so small that Vera hesitates. But then she looks up at him, sees the raw white panic on his face.

In that moment, she loves him more than she’s ever loved anyone in her whole life.

He’s her best friend. She can’t let him rot from the inside. She has to save him.

She has to.

“Don’t scream. If you scream, we’ll get in trouble,” she says, looking into his shining eyes, eyes that don’t have even a trace of hate in them anymore. All that hate has been replaced by confusion and fear and pain. Vera smiles, because finally, Brandon looks like a person again. It’s working already. “I’m doing this for your own good. I promise. It’ll be over in a second.”