Just Like Home(77)
There were, in total, three of them.
The first thing she knew was this: She knew that there was something under her bed. Something real. Real enough to sneak. Real enough to take. Real enough to lift the bed with her on it, so smoothly that she hadn’t woken up at the movement.
The second thing she knew was this: She knew that it didn’t matter what bed she was in. What mattered was that the bed was hers. What mattered was that she was in it. Maybe it wouldn’t even matter if she was in the house her father built. Maybe when Daphne was dead and the house was sold, the thing under the bed would follow Vera out into the world. Maybe it would find her wherever she rested and pull the covers from her body and whisper tenderly into her ear and reach long fingers down into her throat to stroke the root of her tongue.
The third thing she knew was this: She knew that she wanted to see it.
Acknowledging that final point was comfortable in a way that made Vera feel strangely guilty. It had been a long time since she gave in to the urge to look at something that was meant to be hidden. It took the edge off her fear. It felt gorgeous, like slipping into her own skin again after half a life spent as raw flesh. She smiled into her coffee cup as she rolled the feeling over her tongue: I want to see.
The luxuriant moment was disrupted by movement outside the kitchen window. Vera looked out and saw a shirtless James Duvall opening the door to the garden shed. He was hauling out tall painted boards, like the ones Vera had seen him with before. He leaned them up against the outer wall of the shed, one by one, lining them up in the morning sun.
Later, Vera would wonder what possessed her to go and look closer. In that moment, she followed the impulse without questioning it, carrying her coffee out to the yard and treading barefoot through the dewy grass.
“Morning, early riser,” Duvall called without looking up at her.
“Morning,” she replied. “These your paintings?”
“No.” Duvall braced a board against the side of the shed, the wiry muscles of his back standing out with the effort of balancing it. The board was easily ten feet long. It was scabbed with layers of paint and something else, something thick and gray. Plaster, maybe. “These aren’t mine. They’re ours.”
Vera could smell him now, sweat and cheap tobacco and something sharp and oily. “Ours?”
He stood next to Vera, staring up at the painted board with her, and shoved his hands into his pockets, tugging his already-drooping jeans a little further down on his hips. “I told you, I’m collaborative. Me and the Other, we worked together to make this. It’s a distillation of the essence of the memories that suffuse this place. A pure rendering of the haunting of the Crowder House.”
He said it like he was rehearsing, which, Vera realized, he probably was. These boards would go on display in a gallery somewhere—New York, maybe, or Vancouver—and Duvall would need to have his little speech ready to go. He would need to explain the pieces to buyers so that they would know what chunks of Vera’s life they were buying up.
“How do you do it?” she asked.
“Aren’t you going to tell me that the house isn’t haunted?”
Vera peered up at the board. It looked familiar, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. “It’s not just paint.” She reached out to touch the bumpy surface of the not-a-painting—but Duvall intercepted her, catching her wrist in one hand.
“Don’t touch that,” he said. “It’s still curing.” Vera tried to pull her hand back but Duvall didn’t let go right away. His grip was firm, but not painful. There was something gray caked around the edges of his fingernails. One corner of his mouth eased up into a smile, slow as butter melting. “You can’t say it, can you?”
His face was close enough that Vera could make out the threads of red just beneath the surface of his eyes. He’d been up all night working, while she’d been fast asleep. “Can’t say what?”
“Can’t say it isn’t haunted.”
“I can say all kinds of things,” she said, pulling her arm away from him again, sharply enough to break his grip this time. “But I’ve gotten out of the habit of saying what Duvall men want to hear.” She wanted to leave, wanted to stalk into the house and slam the door behind her—but as she turned to walk away from Duvall, something caught her eye.
Something high up on the board.
She pointed at it. “Wait, what’s that?”
“I think it needs a little more work, actually,” Duvall said, stepping between Vera and the board. “Excuse me.” He picked it up slowly, carefully, and before Vera could think of a way to protest, he’d disappeared into the garden shed and closed the door behind him.
So Vera waited. She bagged up dusty stacks of fabric in her mother’s old sewing room, moth-infested scraps that had been there for as long as she could remember. She washed laundry in the rattling old washing machine that was and had always been inexplicably located in the mudroom. She took lemonade bottles out to the recycling bin.
Once, while she was carrying a basket of laundry from the mudroom to her bedroom, Vera caught the sound of murmuring from the too-dark dining room. She paused, leaning against the wall, listening to the soft, scratchy sound of her mother’s voice.
“Everything was easy before you started acting like a person,” she was saying, low and steady, muffled, like she was reciting a prayer into the cave of her own clasped hands. “Secrets and resentments and opinions. You didn’t like things and you had reasons for not liking them. You’d say the reasons out loud instead of just crying about whatever hated thing was in front of you. You demanded all the love anyone had, but you started giving it back, and that made the ones who loved you double their efforts. You harvested love as if you’d ever done anything to nurture it, to tend to it, to raise it up strong and bind it…”