Just Like Home(76)

Vera opens her mouth to say something, to ask who’s there, but then her father bumps into her and she stumbles down the last few stairs, and when she looks back up, the thing is gone. “Did you see…?” she starts to ask, but she doesn’t know how to finish asking.

“See what?” Francis asks, and then, without waiting for an answer, he runs to Brandon. “Oh, no. Oh, Vee, what happened?”

“I was trying to help. It didn’t work.” Brandon’s eyes are closed and his face is so pale and so still and Vera has no idea how much of his blood has already disappeared down that drain in the floor.

Her father crouches beside Brandon. “You tried to bandage it already?”

“No, I just came to get you,” Vera says. But then she looks at Brandon’s belly, where a bundled-up kitchen rag is already soaked through with blood. Wherever his skin isn’t covered in blood, it’s smeared with some gray matte substance Vera doesn’t recognize. “I don’t … I don’t know where he got that,” she adds weakly.

“You used this one?” Francis picks up the antler-handled knife from where it rests next to Brandon’s head.

Vera nods. She’s certain that isn’t where she left it, and she’s certain that she didn’t fold it up before running to get her father, because she doesn’t know how to fold it up, and she’s doubly certain that she didn’t leave it pristinely clean because how could she have? But there’s nothing for her to say because her father is scooping Brandon up under the knees and the shoulders, lifting him up the same way he used to lift Vera when she fell asleep on the couch and needed to be carried to bed.

“Brandon?” Vera whispers, and his eyelids twitch. He looks at her with unfocused eyes.

“Vera,” he whispers back. “We’re gonna get in so much trouble.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “no, I didn’t—I didn’t put the knife all the way in, I think you’ll be okay. Dad’s here,” she adds.

“Hey, buddy,” Francis says softly. “I’m gonna get you up the stairs, okay? It might hurt a little as we go. Think you can stay quiet?”

Brandon shakes his head, giving Vera a faint approximation of a smile. “It doesn’t hurt at all,” he says. “I can’t feel a thing.”

Vera smiles back at him. It doesn’t hurt. That, she thinks, must be a good sign.

She flies up the stairs ahead of her father and opens the basement door, then the garage door, then the back door of the car. Francis loads him gently into the backseat and eases the car door shut. Vera is about to head for the passenger seat when he catches her by the shoulder.

“You stay here,” he says.

She shakes her head. “I’m going with you.”

“Going where?” Vera and her father look to the open garage door in unison, where Daphne is standing in her big pink bathrobe, her arms crossed over her chest. “What on earth are you two doing awake? Do you have any idea what time…” She trails off, her eyes falling to the blood on Francis’s shirt and hands, on Vera, smeared on the car door.

Vera watches her mother’s face drain of color, watches her mother’s mouth fall open, watches a shiver of violent disgust climb her mother’s spine. She watches her mother’s eyes for love and doesn’t find it there, and Vera is sure that it’s because of her failure tonight.

“I got it wrong, I—I messed it up,” Vera says, but she never gets to tell her mother what she messed up.

“Don’t say anything,” Daphne hisses. “Don’t say a single word, Vera Marie Crowder. You go inside. I need to talk to your father.”

“Mom,” Vera says. Just the one word. It comes out as a thin wobble of sound, barely a mew.

“Inside. Now.”

Vera sidles past her mother and hovers just inside the garage door, listening to the hushed, heated conversation she’s been cut out of. She can only make out bits and pieces no matter how hard she strains. She can catch her father whispering the word hospital, and her mother saying just get rid of him. Her father’s voice rises above a whisper when he says only a kid and then the conversation must be over because the car starts with a sudden growl.

Daphne storms back into the house, slamming the garage door. She looks at Vera for a long time, her eyes flat and cold. “Fine,” she says at last. “It looks like you won. I hope you’re happy. This is going to be a nightmare.”

Vera doesn’t know what it is that she’s supposed to have won, and she doesn’t get a chance to find out. Because before she can ask—before she can ask what’s happening to her best friend, where her father is going, who was in the basement hovering over Brandon—Daphne is halfway up the stairs.

“Mom?” Vera calls after her.

Daphne doesn’t look back, but she does pause for a moment, her hand resting on the banister. “Oh, no,” she says softly, thoughtfully. “No, Vera. I don’t think you need to call me that anymore.”

And then she turns off the light, leaving Vera alone in the dark.





CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN


Vera stood in the kitchen in the clear light of morning, leaning her full weight against the edge of the sink. The scratched-up white porcelain lip of it dug painfully into the small of her back. She drank a too-hot cup of instant coffee and reviewed the things she was certain of.