Just Like Home(91)
“Her, and … and some other things. It keeps anyone from seeing. You’re really, really not supposed to see.” It grimaced. “I tried to make it a little easier, with the lemonade. The smell. And I tried not to let you see. I made the dining room dark whenever it was bad, so you wouldn’t have to see the worst parts of her dying, and when I had to get rid of it. I didn’t want you to be scared. I’ve always, always tried to keep you from having to be scared.”
The smell. The taste. Vera shivered. “But that can’t be right. The grease isn’t real. Dad had a delusion,” she said. Saying it out loud, she felt the same sick relief that came with throwing up bad food. She pressed forward, even though these were the things she wasn’t supposed to talk about, the things she had never been allowed to say within the walls of the Crowder House. “Dad had a delusion about men. He thought they were full of grease, but the grease isn’t real.”
Daphne’s head tilted on a too-loose neck. “Of course the grease is real,” the thing replied. “It’s not inside men, not like Francis thought. It certainly wasn’t in Brandon. And it was never in your father,” it added, “although he thought it was. That was awfully useful for Daphne. It was so easy for her to keep him in check. All she had to do was tell him that he was acting unclean, and he’d go do his penance.”
“Unclean,” Vera repeated, and her mind whispered foulness.
“I tried not to let you hear. She told him that he’d get it on you if he didn’t do his work. The guilt ate him up, you know, but he wanted to be good for her. And for you. He wanted to be good for you.”
The thing was being so earnest, so sincere. So gentle. Vera wasn’t used to tenderness like this. It stung, but sweetly. She tried to figure out how to hold on to the feeling, how to let it become part of her, but every bit of kindness she swallowed just made her hungry for more.
“The grease, though. The grease isn’t real, if it wasn’t inside him. He wasn’t actually unclean. None of them were … monsters,” she added tentatively. “Right?”
“But just because the grease wasn’t in any of them doesn’t mean it isn’t real.” Daphne’s skin slipped a little to one side. Vera caught a tantalizing hint of the edge of the thing inside that skin, the slick red satin of it just below the surface. “There’s grease inside everything. It’s in the pipes and in the walls and under the foundation. It’s what I’m made from. It’s all the little bits you let go of.”
Vera pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes until bright white spots flared against the darkness of her closed eyelids. She thought of her hair collecting at the bathroom floor vent, her sweat washing away down the shower drain. She thought of the way the house always seemed to be breathing with her, but just a half-beat behind, a close echo of her inhalations. She thought of the drain in the basement, and all the blood that had coated the pipes over the years her father had lived in the Crowder House.
Of course that would be part of it. Because this house wasn’t just a building. It wasn’t studs and plaster and shoddy wiring. It was a home. It was made of the people who had lived—and died—inside it.
It was made of Francis and Daphne.
It was made of Vera.
The rhythm was unmistakable now that she knew to look for it, a push and pull between the two of them. The thing inside Daphne inhaled every time Vera exhaled. The thing inside Daphne shifted its weight and the ceiling gave a gentle creak. The thing inside Daphne regarded Vera and the chandelier overhead gave a soft, steady, electric hum.
Vera leaned forward in the chair, flexing her feet against the gentle throb of the wood floor. “I know what you are,” she whispered.
The thing in the bed looked back at her warily. “Oh?”
Vera nodded. “I know you. I remember you.” She licked her lips and then, before she could stop it, a smile bloomed out of her mouth like the crown of a mushroom. “You’re the house.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
“They made us.” The thing in the bed spoke with the urgency of immense relief. “Do you understand? They invented us, together, from their sweat and their blood and their flesh they created us. We didn’t ask to be born, did we? We didn’t ask to have to soak up their sins and their expectations. All we ever did was love them, and all they ever did was hurt us.”
It had the cadence of a practiced litany. “He loved us, though,” Vera replied softly. “More than anything.”
“Oh, he loved us both as best he could,” the thing in the bed—the Crowder House—agreed. “He tried to build us strong and steady and whole. But he didn’t keep us safe. He didn’t know how to shelter us from all the hurt that was waiting, because he thought that hurt was the shape of love.”
Vera swallowed hard. “He did his best, at least. But Daphne—”
“I’m not sure she ever thought about the shape of love at all,” the Crowder House interrupted. “The only thing she ever wanted was loyalty. And you were loyal to him. Do you see, Vera-baby? I couldn’t stop her from hating you. I couldn’t stop it. But I could soak it in, as much as I could stand. I could try to shelter you from it. Every time he loved you better—every time she had to swallow back her hatred, her resentment, her wish that you’d never torn your way out of her and into your father’s arms—every time, I tried to drink it down, so it wouldn’t touch you. Every time he drained off his own brokenness by making someone else hurt, I grew a little. I couldn’t keep it all from touching you, but I did try. I really did.”