Just Like Home(83)
“What is it?” Duvall demanded. “Tar? Plumber’s grease? Get rid of it. Fix this.”
Vera shook her head, biting back a smile. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “I didn’t do this.”
He wheeled around on her, a vein starting to stand out in his temple. “Don’t fucking lie to me,” he growled. “You’re the only person who could have done this. It’s not like your mom hauled her carcass out here—”
“Careful,” she murmured. “You’ll stop being her favorite if she hears you saying that kind of thing.”
“Just tell me what it is,” Duvall said again, breathless. “Tell me what you did. Tell me, Vera, goddamn it, stop laughing, this isn’t a game!”
But she couldn’t stop laughing, because here it was. Here was Duvall’s anger. Here was his violence. Here was the thing she’d been trying to avoid this whole time, the thing that she’d run away from last night, the thing that had made her weep in her bed with fear and hunger and urgent need.
He was no bigger than the men who’d died beneath her bed when she was a child. His anger was no greater than their fear had been. She’d been so afraid of what his anger might unlock in her, but here it was, pointed right at her, and it was so small. He was clenching his fists and stomping his feet and shouting as if that could touch her.
“I can’t help you, James,” she laughed. “I didn’t touch your shit. Maybe…” She bit her lips to stop from smiling, tried her best to look sincere, gave a little shrug. “Maybe it was the ghost.”
“Get back here,” he called as she started back toward the house. Vera heard him take a few steps after her. When she looked back, she saw him standing there in the center of the lawn, his face flushed, his mouth half-open. He was radiating all the fury he had to offer. “Don’t you fucking walk away from me,” he added, his voice low and dangerous. “Don’t you go back into my house. Not until I’m done with you.”
The laughter died in Vera’s throat. Not out of fear—not because Duvall was trying to threaten her—but because he’d called it his.
He thought this was his house.
Clarity struck Vera like a knuckle to the eye.
She knew, knew in her bones, that the smartest and most logical thing to do would be to leave. She could get into her car and drive away from the Crowder House, away from Marion, New York, away from the smell of sweet lemon and the relentless intrusion of thick dark grease. It was the obvious thing to do. Why should she stay? Why should she make herself remain in this house, with a mother who seemed to be a different person every day and a man who wanted so badly to be frightening, and a thing that came in the night to whisper into her ear? Why not walk out the front door and never return? None of this was worth the fight, none of it.
Her mother didn’t deserve an easy death, and Duvall didn’t deserve her fear, and the thing under her bed didn’t deserve the bites it was taking out of Vera’s sanity.
She could go. She should go. The thought tapped itself against the inside of Vera’s skull, insisting on its own logic.
But Vera knew now: she wasn’t going to leave. On some level she’d known it since she arrived. She’d been telling herself the whole time that she was only here to fix up the house and sell it, but some part of her had known the truth all along. And now that Duvall thought the house was going to be his, she was certain.
She was never going to leave. Not now that, after all these years, she was finally where she belonged.
The Crowder House was hers. Francis Crowder had created this place for the family he wanted to build, for the demons he needed to exorcise, for the life he needed to live. It was the last place she’d ever felt his love. It was the last place anyone had ever hugged her and told her that she was worth something. And maybe Vera would never get to see her father again—she would never even get to read his letters, Duvall had made sure of that—but at least she could have this place.
She could have a home. She could. And James Duvall, this little man with his soft skin and red blood and pitiful rage, couldn’t stop her.
She walked back to where he was standing and seething at her. She approached him so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to move out of her way. She got close to him, too close to deny, too close to evade, and she knew the same power he’d known the night before when he loomed over her in the garden shed and she felt the you-could-leave slough away like so much dead skin, replaced by a shining sense of purpose.
“You will not drive me away from this house,” she said. “You will not be the last one here. I don’t care what you think you know. I don’t care what you think you’ve seen. I don’t care what you think you have.” She leaned even closer and she spoke directly into the tender hole of his ear so he couldn’t miss a word. “This is my home,” she said. “And you’re just passing through it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Vera is thirteen and she must not move from the place where she is standing. She’s square in the middle of the front porch, at the top of the stairs, with the front door of the house her father built at her back and the whole world in front of her.
Nobody told her not to move, but she knows. She knows from the weight of her mother’s hands on her shoulders. She knows from the weight of the guns on the hips of the tall skinny Black police officer and the short fat white police officer.