Just Like Home(86)

She needs to not be alone.

So she snaps her fingers four times again, and she is not alone.

It’s okay, her friend says, wrapping her up in warmth as she sobs. Hush now, Vera-baby. Hush now.





CHAPTER THIRTY


Strictly speaking, Vera did not have a plan.

She tucked herself into the closet in her bedroom with her father’s thermos. It was full of scalding coffee. That was the furthest ahead she could think: the coffee would cool off by the time she needed it, and then she would drink it. She was ready for a long night.

Everything beyond that was a blank-eyed question.

She sat in a nest of fresh blankets from the linen closet, trying to keep her ass from going numb. She had her father’s gloves with her for luck. It was nine o’clock, and she was going to claim the house her father had built. Once Daphne was gone the house would belong to her and her alone. James Duvall couldn’t have it, and neither could whatever else was inhabiting it. She’d informed Duvall of this reality on the lawn.

Now, she was going to inform the other resident.

She just had to catch it first.

She’d left the bed in the center of the room, to maximize visibility. The quilt was back on it, tucked-in and smoothed-down. There were a few pillows under the covers, a trick she’d seen on television as a kid but never tried for herself. She’d added the sweat-damp clothes she’d worn to clear out the sparse contents of her father’s old office, too, just in case the thing under the bed relied on smell.

It was a blatant invitation.

Vera went back and forth several times about the matter of the overhead light. The debate felt old and familiar in a way she didn’t care to remember. In the end, she decided that it was best to leave it on. She could feel, deep in her bones, that it didn’t matter what she did, didn’t matter if the lights were on or the bed was new or the house was being actively torn apart by wild beasts.

The thing would come.

It was ten o’clock.

The inside of the closet was dark and close. Vera felt a familiar sense of claustrophobic exhilaration; she’d spent so many of the nights of her childhood tucked into a place that was too small for her body, waiting to see something she wasn’t meant to see. Although there was always, always the part of her that wondered whether she was meant to see. Not that she’d ever know for sure, now.

Had her father left the peephole under her bed by mistake, thinking she would never find it? Or had he left it on purpose, knowing that she would watch? Had he wanted her to see, wanted her to learn? There was so much, she was sure, that he’d meant to teach her. Surely he’d seen something of himself in her, something that deserved to be loved and nurtured.

He went away and she never got the chance to learn what she’d gotten wrong on that horrible night when Brandon nearly died. She never got the chance to learn how she’d messed everything up so badly. In the daylight, when she felt like a grown-up with her own car and her own life and her own morals, Vera knew that the grease wasn’t real—that it was something her father’s mind created, a figment that drove him to kill again and again.

But at night, in her bed, with the blue light of her laptop stinging her eyes—and there in that closet, with her father’s gloves and his thermos and a pile of old blankets that had once warmed his lap, too—Vera wasn’t so sure. In the dark, when she was alone, she couldn’t help but wonder what she would have learned if they’d only had more time together. What she could have fixed.

It was twelve thirty.

The decision not to visit her father had been easy enough back when she’d thought that he didn’t want to talk to her. She spent so long, when she was a teenager, wanting to see him. Wanting to hear from him. Wanting anything. But then—nothing. No letters, no requests for visitation. She’d cried and fought with her mother, and then she’d cried and fought with herself. She’d gotten angry at her father, and then she’d processed the anger, digested it, and let it go.

She’d accepted it. Her father blamed her for his arrest, and he didn’t want her anymore. She’d decided to not-want him right back.

But now she knew better. Now, after all these hours in the dark closet, she was certain: the monster in the dining room bed was to blame, had kept her and her father apart for all these years, had stood between her and a true understanding of what was just below the surface of the world.

And now he was dead.

She didn’t want to have to make peace with anything else. Vera had spent enough time not getting to learn the truth of the world, enough time not understanding the monsters of the world and where they came from and what they wanted. Tonight was going to be different.

It was three o’clock in the morning.

She unscrewed the lid of the thermos and sipped at the coffee. It was turning sour already, but it was still warm, and that was enough.

She shifted in her nest of blankets. Light peeked through the slats of the door, striping her lap with soft yellow. The bedroom on the other side of those slats was perfectly quiet; the shadows beneath the bed were perfectly still. The night was warm and the air was humming with insect-noise.

She heard the front door ease open, heard Duvall’s footfalls across the entryway floor, heard the basement door open and then close again. She chewed on the inside of her cheek.

It would come. It would come, and then her lack of a plan would be irrelevant, because she would finally know it. No matter what it was—a spectral shadow in the shape of a small boy, or the ghost of a man who had worn heavy boots, or a few dozen half-rotted men with dark-brown hair and moustaches and holes perforating all the most vulnerable parts of their bodies—she would know.