Just Like Home(97)
“No. No. I’m sorry. I kept her together for you as long as I could,” the House rasped before apologizing again. “You should never have had to see me at all. You were supposed to be gone before it got to this point. I’m not—I’m not meant to be seen. I’m sorry, Vera.”
Vera shook her head. She knew that Daphne was more than gone. “Don’t be,” she said. “There isn’t a place for Daphne here anymore. And you—you don’t have to be her in order to talk to me. I don’t care whether or not you were ever meant to be seen.” The House gave a soft gasp as Vera gripped her mother’s chin between her thumb and forefinger. “I want to see you.”
Vera gave a gentle tug, pulling the loose jaw free from its old cage with only the slightest resistance from the papery flesh that had held it in place. Dark ooze dripped down the front of the Crowder House’s now-bare cheeks. Vera let the rotted jaw fall to the floor and stroked the sharp, warm angles of the Crowder House’s face with her fingers. Its flesh was velvet-soft and as warm as a true promise.
“Do you want out of there?” Vera asked, her voice still cracking painfully.
“Please,” the Crowder House replied.
Vera clawed at the thin skin that her mother had once worn, the skin that had hung empty for so long now. The expired flesh that was left was now as thin and soft as canned asparagus, and Vera pulled it away with the kind of passion she’d never once allowed herself to indulge before Duvall. Her fingers went numb with the work of pulling apart a woman she’d never truly known. Viscous fluid sprayed across Vera’s chest, her throat, her face, leaving the taste of sweet bottled lemonade behind.
It didn’t take long for the disguise to slough away. Vera felt the strength drain out of her alongside it. Her limbs were endlessly heavy, her fingertips throbbing from all the different things she’d been trying to hold on to.
The Crowder House had hollowed Vera’s mother out almost completely. But now, it was loose of its cocoon—and finally, finally, Vera could see all of it at once. She looked into those shining eyes, and they looked back at her with a kind of all-encompassing affection she had never seen anywhere else.
But there was a question there.
One without any words behind it.
The Crowder House was waiting for an answer, and Vera knew that there was only one answer she could honestly give. So she opened her arms, and then she stepped forward, wrapping them tightly around the monster that had lived beneath her bed, beneath her house, beneath her life—from the moment of her birth, right up until the moment she’d left this place.
That beautiful monster was still for a moment. It was still for just long enough. And then the Crowder House raised its arms, and it embraced Vera right back.
She let her palm rest against the side of the Crowder House’s neck, let her fingers land on the place where there might have been hair if the Crowder House had taken on a different shape. She breathed in the turned-earth, sweet-lemon, old-blood smell of it. She drank it in: this companion who had been with her always, who had protected and loved her, who had brought her here at last.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” the Crowder House asked. “You must have been so afraid. I’ve always tried to keep you from having to be afraid. And that was so awful, what you had to do to him.”
Vera bit back a smile and tried to decide how to answer. Because the truth was that this, the way she felt in this precise moment, was what she’d been looking for all along.
Vera had spent her entire life trying to figure out what made a person good. Trying to add that essential element to herself, trying to stamp out the badness inside her. Trying to make up for the foulness that she’d been taught to hate. And then, later, trying to resist the temptation to discover whether or not she really wanted the things she thought she wanted. Trying not to explore the emptiness inside her that only seemed to fill up when she saw things that weren’t meant to be seen.
But now she knew.
Good, bad, foul, clean—none of that mattered. Not really. Because she was Vera Crowder, and she wasn’t good, and she wasn’t bad.
She was hungry.
And now she knew, for the first time in her life, what it was like to be sated.
She sighed into the embrace of her best and oldest friend, letting herself smile into the Crowder House’s neck. Nothing could come between them now.
Nothing could stop them from being together.
“Don’t you worry about me,” Vera Crowder said, and she meant it. “I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Hello, reader.
I often write acknowledgments as though they will be nailed to a church door for everyone to read. But right now, in this moment, before everyone else shows up—it’s just you and me. These words, as I write them, exist solely between my mind and the page in front of me; as you read them, they are all yours. We are alone on the page together, the same way two people can be alone together a world apart, connected only by a telephone line and the not-quite silence that comes before the word ‘hello.’
So: Hello.
I hope you are safe. I hope you are happy, if not all the time then at least here and there. I hope that you are treated with love and appreciation by the people you care about most. I hope there is never a moment in your life when the love of a monster feels like the only option you have.