Just Like Home(8)

She was already getting used to the small differences in the house where she’d grown up, the little injuries that weren’t hers to tend. Not yet, anyway.

Not until Daphne was dead.

All was quiet downstairs when Vera turned into the entryway. The light in the dining room was off, which meant that Daphne was either sleeping or lying silently in the dark, listening to the sound of Vera’s footsteps on the stairs and feigning unconsciousness to avoid conversation.

It wasn’t too dark to see, not with the thin wash of light from outside that made it into the entryway. But it was dimmer than Vera would have thought for so early in the evening this close to summer. She wondered if a thunderstorm was gathering outside, and she just hadn’t noticed.

Vera padded past the basement door to her old bedroom on quiet feet, nudged the door open with her shoulder, and then leaned back to close it. She bumped the lightswitch with the fist that held the screwdrivers and the overhead fixture blazed to life. Her eyes had already adjusted to the darkness of the entryway; the switch dazzled her for a moment, made her blink, left a shifting shadow across her vision.

She blinked again.

The shadow stayed.

It was next to her bed, a bunched-up thing, something like a man crouching to pick up a penny or tie his shoe. It was a blur in the center of her field of vision, something floating on the surface of her eye, a fingerprint on her retina. It was not there, couldn’t be there—but she couldn’t see through it or around it either.

Vera pressed the bedsheets to her chest and blinked again, harder this time. While her eyes were shut tight, the fingers of her right hand twitched around the screwdrivers. Her hand was full, so she couldn’t snap once, let alone four times, but her dust-smeared thumb and middle finger tried futilely to move toward each other anyway.

When she opened her eyes, the shadow was gone.

Vera exhaled hard through her nose. “Calm down, Vee,” she muttered, mostly to adulterate the stifling silence of the house. She told herself that this was fatigue. Maybe a visual migraine. It made sense. She’d been driving for four days, had come into an extremely stressful environment, had spoken to her mother face-to-face for the first time in … a very, very long time. Her stomach was hollow and she knew that she should probably find something to eat, but this—the shadow, the little hallucination or whatever it was—proved that what Vera really needed was sleep.

She leaned against the door, thumped the back of her head against the wood a few times. She closed her eyes and let fatigue wash over her. She wanted to cry. Surely that would help. A good long cry. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had one, which was probably a bad sign.

Her bones were so heavy. She knew she should go and see her mother again. It was the right thing to do, the reason she was here—a daughter should want to spend time with her mother. Plus, Daphne would be furious at her for missing dinner with their guest, the artist that had heralded Vera’s most recent unraveling. Whoever they might be.

Then again, Vera reminded herself, Daphne’s fury couldn’t do anything beyond kicking her back out.

It had happened before.

If it happened again, so be it.

She would not go to dinner, she decided. She couldn’t. Not tonight.

Tonight she would take five steps across the room to her bed, and she would put the sheets on the bed and lie down and go right to sleep. She could fix the bedframe tomorrow. She could put pillowcases on the pillows in the morning. She needed sleep, right away, thick rich dark sleep, and in the morning everything would be the same but she would be able to face it all without breaking.

Vera could have fallen asleep just like that, leaning up against the door of her childhood bedroom with her eyes closed. The wood of the door seemed soft against her weary shoulders, seemed to mold itself perfectly to the curve of her spine. She could have nodded off on her feet right then and there.

Until the bedframe rattled again.

Her eyes snapped open.

The noise was still fading, the bedframe still shaking minutely. Vera watched it move, her breath held tight, a wash of adrenaline burning the weight out of her bones and replacing it with a high harsh buzz of fear. Her mouth flooded with the taste of pennies.

She told herself she’d imagined the sound. But of course that didn’t work at all—her mind immediately rejected this as an obvious lie. The bedframe had rattled. Vera was across the room from it and it had rattled. She hadn’t touched it, nothing had touched it, but it had rattled anyway.

She took a breath. One of the Wellness Packets she’d completed as a teenager had advised breathing in moments of uncertainty. She’d given herself an A-minus on that packet. She took another breath.

There was nothing in the room with her that she could see. There was nowhere to hide other than the closet, and that door was still shut tight against everything that could possibly exist in a house like this. There was nowhere else to go—except for one place.

Before Vera could talk herself out of it, she stooped to look under the bed.

Nothing was there.

Of course nothing was there.

The space between the bedframe and the floor was thick with dust and shadows, uniform in coverage, unbroken by the solidity of flesh and undisturbed by movement.

“Come on,” Vera hissed. “You’re tired and this is childish. Don’t be childish. Just be tired.”

She made good on her plan: walk to bed, spread sheets out on mattress. Toss pants and bra onto floor to be reworn tomorrow. Get horizontal. Eyes closed. Sleep, goddamn it.