Just Like Home(90)

The thing laughed, and Vera didn’t know if it was Daphne’s laugh or not. She hadn’t heard her mother’s real laugh in so long—how was she supposed to remember what it sounded like? “Vera, I won’t. Please don’t ask me again.”

Vera shook her head. “I saw you,” she said. “I—I saw you go in there. How long have you been pretending to be her? Are you the reason she’s dying?”

The smile fell away from Daphne’s face, leaving her expression slack. Her skin hung loose at the jowls. She blinked again, and when she did, a slick of thick black slid over the surfaces of her eyes, leaving her gaze liquid and deerlike. “Oh,” she said, “no, it’s not like that. I would never do that.”

Vera’s breath was coming fast and shallow. A thousand possibilities raced through her mind. This creature was killing Daphne, was eating Daphne. It had always been inside Daphne and this was why Daphne had never ever felt like a mother was supposed to feel, had always seemed consumed by some kind of deep, bitter indifference that Vera couldn’t penetrate no matter how hard she tried.

But the thing that was currently inside Daphne’s skin had touched the bedsheets so tenderly. It had arched over what it thought was Vera’s sleeping form with all the steady watchfulness of a bird inspecting the movements of a hatching egg. And now, in this moment when Vera couldn’t seem to move, it sat behind her mother’s eyes and looked at her with velvety patience.

Vera had never seen that kind of patience from Daphne before. Not once. Not ever.

“Okay.” Vera looked down and saw that the wood had softened like clay, cupping the contours of her foot. “It’s not like that. So what is it like?”

A trickle of what looked like old brown blood ran from Daphne’s left nostril. She rubbed at it with the back of one wrist. She swallowed with a dry click. “Hm.” Daphne’s lips were pursed tight, their flesh gray, a thin line of black peeking out between them. “What do you want to know?”

Vera made herself meet those glossy black eyes. “How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long has she been dead?”

The pause extended well past the point of discomfort. “That depends what you mean when you say ‘dead,’” the thing finally replied.

Vera frowned. “How long has it been you talking, then?”

“We were … trading, for a little while. When a new part of her started to rot, I’d help smooth things over. When it got to be bad, when I was handling things most of the time. That’s when I called you.”

Vera’s head was swimming, and then there was pressure at the backs of her knees, and she sat back hard into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before.

“You called me?”

The thing in the bed nodded. “I knew I’d need your help once I couldn’t keep this up anymore. That’s coming soon, by the way. We should talk about—”

“Why is it coming soon?” Vera gripped the edges of her seat. “Is it because she’s going to be gone?”

The thing pursed Daphne’s lips, looked down at the hands it kept wringing. “Oh, Vera.” It sounded sorry. “She’s been gone for a little while now. Ever since you asked me to do it.”

“Since I—what?”

The thing’s head tilted to one side. The skin of Daphne’s face followed a moment later, catching up with the movement. “At dinner. That first dinner you were here for. She was saying terrible things about you having foulness in you, and you asked me to stop it. So I let her go. She was almost all gone anyway. A day at the most, I think, and then she would have been done.”

Vera remembered, of course she did. Her mother hissing at her about grease, while Duvall rummaged around in the kitchen looking for paper towels. She remembered snapping her fingers, her old superstition. She remembered asking Daphne to stop it.

So that had been it. The moment of her mother’s death.

“This is why you didn’t need anything. Food, water, help going to the bathroom. This is the system you were talking about,” Vera said slowly. “I knew it couldn’t be right.”

“I can’t do any of those things,” the thing said softly. “I didn’t want you to know. I can’t soak everything up, not always,” the thing continued. “You remember. In the basement that night, with Brandon? I couldn’t soak it up fast enough. I’m better with light and sound than I am with blood. I had to try to stop the bleeding instead. I’m sorry.”

Vera wanted so badly to know everything there was to know about that night, about what this thing had done, about how it had saved Brandon. But she needed to know something else first. “Is … is there any of Daphne left?”

“Just the skin,” the thing replied, its voice so, so gentle. “She’s been rotting inside for a long time, but almost all the rest is gone now. I’m almost done getting rid of it.”

Vera pushed the memory to one side like a sodden pile of paper towels. The dark rot that had poured out of her mother’s mouth, that had stopped her midsentence just when she’d been about to say the very worst things. The earthy smell that had filled the dining room. It had been Daphne all along.

Parts of her, anyway.

“So that’s what the grease is? It’s her?”