Just Like Home

by Sarah Gailey

This is the story of monsters and what they do to those who love them, those who fear them, and those who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, from a different perspective, those who are in the right place at the right time. Serendipity is just as cruel as it is kind. This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever loved a monster.

Vera had anticipated that coming back to her childhood home would be difficult.

I’m really busy at work. I don’t have time to come watch you die.

Hope was a liability

She breathed in the redwood smell and she spread the last of her hope out on those brand-new steps and she watched it die writhing, watched it without pity, watched it until it was still and cold.

It was the right thing to do, giving up that little bit of hope. It was the only thing to do. Some things, Vera knew, were made to die.

like this, but her fingers did not apologize. They remembered what they were supposed to do to keep her safe, remembered from when she was young enough to develop a superstition without reasoning herself out of it.

The house swallowed the sound immediately, because it was a house that knew how to stay quiet.

the voice that had always been flat and loveless but had turned hateful the year Vera turned twelve. It was her mother’s voice.

before that situation went bad the way things always did.

Some questions don’t want answering.

She knew better than to talk to a Duvall.

tf did i do

There was no point in dwelling on this, on what was and what might have been, on the relationship she and her mother would never have. It was a distraction. There was work to be done

Her mother has told her several times not to sneak, as if it’s Vera’s fault that nobody pays attention to the sounds of her life.

It was a vicious loneliness Daphne must have experienced, a loneliness with rows and rows of teeth on it. It should have stopped Vera in her tracks, that thought; it should have brought up some kind of compassion.

She’d learned to stop thinking of her mother as a person a long time ago, back when it still hurt to want Daphne to love her. Forgetting that her mother was human had been necessary. It had been the only way to survive

“Everything you’d ever known had just been torn away from you. Everything was cold and everything was awful and you didn’t understand what had just happened to you. I saw you there in that bedroom, raw and miserable, and I loved you more than I’d ever known I could love anything.”

“Please,” Vera whispered. “Don’t.” Because this was familiar. Daphne had called her selfish and thoughtless and burdensome more times than she could count.

Then she drove, because it was the only thing to do in a car that was running.

So Vera did what she had so much practice doing: she took the hunger and the anger and she pressed them down into the empty aching void inside her

“Boys are just like girls, in almost every way. But men … men are demons, Vee.”

“Maybe God puts it there to punish them for being what they are. Maybe it’s just that they’re made wrong. All I know is, Vee, men are just filled up with it. It’s what they have instead of blood, and instead of guts. They just have the grease in them, dirtying their souls up, rotting and ruining them.”

“I have a system. I save the other men. I keep them from turning into monsters. When they start to go bad, I help them.”

“I know it’s been difficult for you, and you’re probably worried that it’ll keep going like this forever. So I thought I should let you know that he’s going to kill you tomorrow. It’ll be over really soon.”

The basement door had a pulse in Vera’s memory. She thought of it as swollen, thrumming, coriaceous.

“Nah, Vee. That house would never let you leave.”

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.

“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.”

“I’m not sure she ever thought about the shape of love at all,”

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.

“No,” she said at last. “I’m not a good person.” And with that, she gave in. With savage satisfaction, she slammed his face forward into the floor. She put her full weight into smashing his head hard as she could, trying with all her might to break the floorboards her father laid back before Vera was born.