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.

The Crowder House clung to the soil the way damp air clings to hot skin.

Vera wondered if, in the destruction of the old front steps, anything had been found. But of course, the thing Vera hid there must have been destroyed. She would have seen on the news if they’d found what she tucked beneath those old boards so many years before.

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.

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.

As a child, she’d assumed that the rattle was predetermined—that it was just how beds were supposed to be, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent the noise that rang out every time she turned over in her sleep or snuck in and out of her room. But she’d slept in a lot of beds in the intervening years, and she could now recognize the loose shimmy of the metal. It could easily have been silenced: a simple matter of tightening a couple of screws loose in the frame, where the headboard was joined to the platform. Why hadn’t Francis ever fixed it? She only wondered for a moment before the answer came to her. He wanted to be able to hear.

She tells herself that she isn’t scared of the dark. She’s too mature for that kind of thing. She’s outgrown it.

Vera’s father kisses her goodnight and pulls the covers all the way up to her chin. It’s not how she likes to sleep—she prefers her arms on top of the covers—

Only psychopaths sleep like that

Mrs. Gregson laughed mirthlessly, a short sharp bark that made Vera’s skin jump. “Burn it down,” she said.

“Burn it down,” she said again. “If you’ve got any decency anywhere in you, you won’t make some unsuspecting family live in that house.”

“I hope she dies tonight, so you’ll both be gone tomorrow,” she hissed. “I hope she dies fast, but I hope she suffers when it happens. It’s what she deserves. It’s what you both deserve.”

Jeez lady lol

“Me and him were best friends when I was a kid. Not a lot of people know that.” Vera flinched inwardly—she hadn’t meant to give this man anything of herself. “She still … she’s mad at me. She holds me responsible. For all of it. Not like you can blame her for how she feels.”

She didn’t know whether or not he’d been waiting for the acknowledgment of who he was, of who his father was. Of how his father had consumed hers. But she couldn’t stand to pretend that she didn’t know. She couldn’t let him think he was getting away with something. “He doesn’t know I’m here,” Duvall said easily. “Doesn’t know I’m not twelve years old, these days. Alzheimer’s.” “Rough,” Vera snapped. “What a loss.”

“I don’t date men.” “Men like me, you mean.” “Men as in men,” she replied. “But you can tell yourself that it’s about you, if that’ll make you feel better.”

VERA IS GROWING UP SO CREATIVE AND SO SMART. SHE IS STILL JUST A KID BUT I’VE NEVER LIKED ANYONE SO MUCH AS I LIKE HER. SHE IS GOOD AT MATH AND AT SCIENCE BUT NOT SO HOT ON READING. JUST LIKE ME. I KNOW THAT SHE WILL STAY GOOD SO LONG AS I REMEMBER TO KEEP BAD THINGS AWAY FROM HER. DAPHNE DOESN’T AGREE BUT WE DON’T HAVE TO ARGUE ABOUT IT. I HOPE VERA KNOWS HOW MUCH I LOVE HER AND THAT I’LL ALWAYS

This is s vague

“I’m here to commune with the house so it can grant me permission to express its trauma through the medium of—”

“I suppose that was when they took him away.”

“James, please. She didn’t even try to visit him while he was still alive. Why would he reach out to her now?”

“I’m a spiritual rendering artist.” She shook her head. “What does that—” “It means I incorporate aspects of the metaphysical into my paintings,”

“Wait—history, geography, and emotion. Are you saying that you paint haunted houses?” “Haunted is a loaded word,” he said smoothly. “And it’s not just houses. My series on abandoned hospitals in rural Canada—”

“What about yours, James? What kind of places do you think Hammett’ll haunt once he assumes room temperature?”

“Dad will cross over peacefully. All his business here was finished by the time he started to get sick. There’s no reason to think he’ll be haunting anywhere. Your father, on the other hand—his business was never really finished, was it?”

“The grease,” her mother hissed. She was on the far side of a tunnel, at the bottom of a well, a voice traveling along a string between tin cans. “The grease that’s in you, the filth, they saw it and so did I. I locked you up to protect everyone from your foulness.”

She’d assumed cancer. Was this what cancer looked like? Daphne’s eyes were coated with a patchy gray film that shifted every time she blinked, every time her gaze twitched to Vera’s mouth.

Dark gray mucous gathered at the corners of her mouth, rimmed her nostrils, and she was tapping her index finger faster and faster on the lip of the last empty cup, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, tap tap tap tap, taptaptaptap, taptaptaptap.

His voice was horribly gentle. “If you notice anything out of the ordinary tonight, I hope you’ll tell me. You could be an integral part of my work here. You could really help me understand this place, if you just open your mind a little.”

“Maybe you won’t have to see it, Daphne,” she murmured. “James’s collection, I mean. The paintings. When they come out, maybe you won’t have to know.” She warmed as she said it, as she finally let herself give in to the dark fury that had been twisting between her teeth the whole evening. “Maybe you’ll be dead by then.”

Francis Crowder Murders

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.

The man in the photo is an adult. He’s got brown hair and a brown moustache and he’s wearing a striped shirt in the photo. He looks like someone’s dad, or maybe someone’s math teacher.

Vera stares at the policeman, uncomprehending. She feels that she’s probably seen the man in the photo before, but the truth is that he looks like so many of the adult men she’s met in her life. He could be almost anyone. “I don’t think so?” Vera says, and the policeman’s face

Her mother’s voice slices into the quiet like the blade of a shovel opening up the earth—trying to hurt me? You won’t be able to save—and then Vera firmly shuts the door again, and the silence returns.

They will know each other for fifteen more months.

VERA’S GROWING UP TOO FAST. WE WENT FISHING TODAY AND HAD THE TALK. I WONDER IF SHE KNOWS I’D DO ANYTHING FOR HER. I WONDER IF SHE UNDERSTANDS HOW I JUST WANT TO PROTECT HER AND KEEP HER SAFE. DAPHNE TOO. SHE’S SO GOOD INSIDE AND I NEVER WANT TO LET ANYTHING HAPPEN TO HER, NO MATTER WHAT. I THINK SHE’S STARTING TO GET IT I JUST HOPE SHE DOESN’T EVER HATE ME FOR WHAT

“Do you know,” Daphne said softly, staring down at her own trembling hands, “that my life began the moment I laid eyes on 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.”

She couldn’t remember her mother ever saying I love you, even in the time before it all went so wrong. She couldn’t remember her mother talking to her this much, either.

An uneven stream of dark gelatinous tissue fell from between her parted lips. It was threaded with something black and dense like veins under skin. Daphne sighed with evident relief as she released it from her mouth, her shoulders sagging as the clinging wet mass rolled down her chin and dropped into her lap.

The stench of the room was close and choking. It was an amphibious smell, like turned earth and rain, dark mold and half-rotted wood. There was an undercurrent, too, of sweet lemon.

Why is Vera not asking what’s killing her mother??

“No, Vee,” he said with a smile that Vera couldn’t quite read. “I think we both know you had another friend.” Vera let out a low laugh. “I really didn’t. Not a real one.”

“Fuck you,” he said. She could tell from the way he said it that he’d been practicing in his head. “I didn’t want to kiss you anyway. You’re ugly, and anyway I told you I don’t like you like that.”

Ah.. the classic male rejection reaction..

Brandon looked like he was going to spit, or maybe cry. But instead of doing either of those, he added, “You know what, Vera? My mom says that your mom’s a loser to believe your dad’s out sugaring in the summertime. Nobody sugars once it gets above freezing at night. She says”—he gave a wet sniff—“she says he’s off having an affair and he probably has a whole other family somewhere because you and your mom suck so bad. I bet that’s what he keeps down in that creepy basement you’re too scared to go in,” he added, his eyes bright with cruel inspiration. “I bet it’s pictures of his real family that he loves more than you.”

But when Daphne speaks, she doesn’t sound mad. “He pushed you down and he … kissed you?” Her voice is gentle in a way that’s more frightening than her anger would have been. “Did he hurt you anywhere else? Tell me exactly what happened, sweetheart.”

“Vera fell off her bike,” Daphne says softly. “Going too fast around a corner, I bet. I keep telling her to slow down, but she never listens. Just bad inside, I suppose.”

“Don’t tell your father what really happened,” Daphne hisses. “Don’t tell him what Brandon said about him. Do you understand me?”

“It’s not true, though, right? Dad loves us.” “He loves me,” Daphne says crisply. “Your relationship with him is your own business.”

????

It was really cool how you didn’t even cry when you fell off your bike, her friend would say. And Brandon was wrong to push you.

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—

Daphne didn’t seem to hear her. “I have to live with it, and so do you, not that you care,” she muttered, her words flattening into a low monotone. “I’m the only one that hurts for all of it.” “When’s the last time you had the wiring in this place looked at?” “I have to sit here knowing what I know, all on my own, and you get to be out in the world—”