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.

She had come home in spite of that hope and she couldn’t make herself go inside until she had sloughed it off. She couldn’t afford to bring it inside with her. Hope was a liability at the Crowder House.

The key landed with a bright chime. The house swallowed the sound immediately, because it was a house that knew how to stay quiet.

This house, though. The outside of Vera was shaped like the inside of this house. This was the house her father had built with his two strong hands. This was the goldfish tank where she’d grown to the size she would always be, even after her mother gave her away to the world. There was a space for her here, an indentation she’d left years ago that still held a little of the warmth of her body. No matter what Daphne thought of her daughter, no matter how hard the next few days or weeks or months were going to be, Vera had once belonged here.

just a woman, without ‘young’ attached. Pale the way a person gets when they’re indoors all the time, and tired the way a person gets after they’ve lived too many lives.

That did it. Vera’s entire body flashed hot with adrenaline and her limbs got the fucking memo and her voice unlocked itself and finally, finally, she could move. She ran. She scrambled across the bed away from the voice, half-fell on her way to the door. She screamed and it was a real scream, one that tore out of her, and the long weedy roots of it were wrapped around her pelvic bone and she meant it.

She knew better than to let herself get annoyed. She’d worked so hard to crush that kind of feeling out of herself for so long, because she needed to be the kind of person who could lure love out of someone.

“You didn’t know it yet,” Daphne said, her voice taking on a rough edge, “but you were mine and I was yours. I knew right then that we’d always have each other. We’d be tangled up together until the day one of us died. I remember thinking that maybe we’d both die at the same time, and wouldn’t that be the best way for it to happen? Both of our lights snuffed out at once, so I’d never have to imagine a world where there was you without me or me without you. Of course I knew that wasn’t how things would go—we’d be pulled apart by time, by circumstance, the way the world works. But that seemed so far away back then. It seemed impossible.”

“The night you were born, the doctor had to come here because it was the middle of the night and the hospital was so far away. He handed you to me and you didn’t know what love was yet. You were the most selfish thing that ever was,” Daphne added, “claiming every inch of love your new family could scrape together, demanding it all for yourself without giving any back at all. You came into the world on a wave of pain and exhaustion and that was just the beginning. All you knew then was needing and wanting and getting. There’s nothing so pure as a yawning pit of need, and that’s the kind of animal you were.”

She was looking at the envelope in her hand when she heard the sound again, that faint noise that had come from her mother’s throat before. She froze, her eyes locked on the envelope, and listened. That sound—a low, muted, metallic clicking—was definitely coming from Daphne. It went on and on, growing in volume, and Vera could place it now. She could place it, because it sounded just like the plastic-coated links of a bicycle chain sliding through an O-ring, rattling against a cement floor— She looked up at Daphne, and the noise cut off, leaving the room heavy with silence.

Daphne’s eyes didn’t open, but her head rolled on her shoulders. “For so long, you had a soft skull without a single thought in it,” she murmured. “You were nothing but hunger. You were an animal.” Vera froze. “I was—I was an animal?” “You were simple,” Daphne sighed. “And it’s easy to love a simple thing.”

You never thought there would be mice, she chastised herself, and then she paused, because she’d said it out loud without meaning to, without noticing that she was doing it. She licked her lips. She’d heard the words, that much was certain. She’d heard them spoken aloud. That could only mean that she’d been the one to say them. Except that the voice she’d heard wasn’t her own.

As she compelled herself to lie back with her head on the pillow and her throat exposed to the open air, she told herself that she was the only living thing in that room, and that there was no reason she shouldn’t sleep peacefully through the night. She was almost right.

But men … men are demons, Vee.” He tugs hard on the line, and the fish twitches in a way that doesn’t give Vera the thrill that she got when it was fighting to live. “You can tell because they’re filled with a, with a foulness, a kind of grease, that makes them evil. It turns them into monsters. It’s a dark, sticky, rancid oil and, and it’s in men’s bones and in their bellies, and it, it, it corrupts. Do you understand?”

“Thanks. I’m glad you can tell. See, I get rid of mine.” “How?” His smile softens a little. “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.”

Vera decides that she’s sure that she doesn’t want to see all of him, not this close-up. She’s resolved on the subject now that there’s more light on him. It’s too much all at once. Her gaze keeps flinching away from his body, back to his increasingly red face. “He’s had you for thirteen days now. I know it’s been a challenge,” she adds, using the phrase her sixth-grade teacher uses to soften the blow when she fails yet another spelling test. “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.” This is true, but it isn’t why she came downstairs. She wanted to see, is all. She wanted to see the basement with both eyes, instead of just one. She wanted to look, instead of just peeking.

In the morning, Vera will notice something dark and thick and sticky smeared across the backs of her hands, the back of her neck. She will scrub it off with the intimate, adrenal panic that comes with disposing of evidence.

“They’re probably all about how much he loved you,” Daphne murmured. Vera looked to her mother with weary suspicion, wary of a trap. “Why do you think that?” The air in the room grew heavy, and Daphne’s voice took on a slow, rhythmic timbre. “Because I watched it. I watched you eat up his love like a crab eating a seafloor corpse, one pinch at a time. You devoured the way your father would light up whenever you walked into a room.” “Now, Daphne,” Duvall interrupted. “You don’t need to—” Daphne didn’t seem to hear him, seemed to have forgotten that he was there. She stared at Vera with bottomless black eyes. “You brought home your failed tests and your skinned knees and your certificates of participation, and you exchanged them for his attention. You sat at the dinner table and you made him laugh with your unfunny jokes, jokes that only the two of you seemed to understand, and you took it, you took the laughter. I saw you take it and knit it into yourself so it could never leave you. Do you understand? I saw. I saw it all.”

“I loved you too,” Vera whispered quickly, unwilling to let Duvall into the conversation she’d wanted to have with her mother for as long as she could remember. “And I hated you. I’ve always hated you.” Daphne smiled, a slow, soft smile that Vera had never once seen on her face before. She straightened her neck just as a gray, clotted tear slipped from her eye. It left an uneven trail on the loose skin of her cheek. “I wish I knew how to separate the two out for you,”

But Vera knew now: she wasn’t going to leave. On some level she’d known it since she arrived. She’d been telling herself the whole time that she was only here to fix up the house and sell it, but some part of her had known the truth all along. And now that Duvall thought the house was going to be his, she was certain. She was never going to leave. Not now that, after all these years, she was finally where she belonged.

The Crowder House was hers. 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. And maybe Vera would never get to see her father again—she would never even get to read his letters, Duvall had made sure of that—but at least she could have this place. She could have a home. She could. And James Duvall, this little man with his soft skin and red blood and pitiful rage, couldn’t stop her.

She walked back to where he was standing and seething at her. She approached him so quickly that he didn’t have a chance to move out of her way. She got close to him, too close to deny, too close to evade, and she knew the same power he’d known the night before when he loomed over her in the garden shed and she felt the you-could-leave slough away like so much dead skin, replaced by a shining sense of purpose. “You will not drive me away from this house,” she said. “You will not be the last one here. I don’t care what you think you know. I don’t care what you think you’ve seen. I don’t care what you think you have.” She leane...

She was not going to spend another day in this house wondering what the night might hold, hungering for something just beyond her grasp. She was a Crowder. She’d finally gotten a taste of the thing that lived under the bed, and she wouldn’t rest until she’d gotten her fill.

The lightswitch resisted her like a stuck zipper. She pressed on it, firm and steady, the pressure of her fingertip the kind of promise she’d only ever made to herself. After a long moment of hesitation, the darkness in the room receded away from her like a tide going out, and the lights flickered on, bright and strident.

“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.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He built me to keep you safe and warm. I did my best. I tried not to let you hear the fights they had about you, the times your mother told your father he was full of filth, the times he cried in her arms because he just wanted to be good and he only knew one way to get there. It worked until you made him choose between the two of you.”

“I miss him too, Vee. I do. He hurt me sometimes, making me hold all of what he did, but I know he didn’t mean it. He was just trying to make things right. Just like you. I miss him the same as you do. I miss him every day. But I’m glad he went away instead of you. And I’m so, so glad you came home to me.”

The rasp was coming from the basement. It didn’t make any sense. Vera had never been able to hear noise from the dining room before, not noise from the basement anyway. But then she remembered the Crowder House telling her about how it tried to soak up everything bad, how it tried to insulate her from all the hurt that happened inside the house. It was letting her hear now. It was letting her know. Like a child calling out in the night because there’s a monster in the room—it was asking for help.

Vera thought of the gouges in the walls and the floors and the ceilings. She thought of the fruit-rot smell of the cigarillos Duvall liked to smoke. She thought of the little burn marks scattered throughout the house like freckles across bare shoulders. She thought of that gray plaster he used to add texture to the boards, and she knew where it came from, and her mouth flooded with saliva. Instead of screaming, she whispered. “He hurts you.” The House looked away again.

She flailed out with her hands, grabbed at the walls. The arch her father had built was too wide and she shouldn’t have been able to get purchase, but the Crowder House reached out a hand from the bed as if to catch Vera, and the frame of the passage flexed inward with a soft groan and a flurry of plaster dust. Vera dug her fingers in hard and held fast, letting her nails sink into the thick, gummy layer of white paint that frosted the trim around the doorframe.

He yanked at the door and the motion jerked Vera’s feet out from under her. “The fuck,” he grunted. He yanked at the door again, hard enough that this time a deep splintering sound resonated from somewhere within the frame. “It won’t open.” The rasping voice seemed to come from everywhere. As though someone were standing just out of sight up the stairs, and also behind the door of the powder room, and still in the shadowy dining room. Standing in all those places at once, and making a promise. “Not for you. Not anymore.”

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. But of course, the floorboards were strong and the joinery was tight and the spaces between the wood were filled with decades of dust and skin and blood and sweat and breath, and the Crowder House held strong. James Duvall broke first.

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.