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 stood with one foot on the lawn and one foot on the driveway, sweating, straining as if she might be able to make out the sound of Daphne dying inside. But the house was built to keep the wind out and the sound in. It stood there, patiently waiting for Vera to come inside, and it did not reveal a single one of its secrets no matter how long and hard Vera stared at it.

The air was thick with the smell of jasmine and lilacs and wisteria, overpoweringly sweet, so dense Vera wanted to bite into it. It was like trying to breathe fresh sap, relentlessly spring in a way that reached down into Vera’s lungs with clawed fingers and nested there.

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. It was always on the news when something fresh came to light.

The smell of fresh lumber gave Vera what she needed: a reminder of how things really were. A reminder of how little she had been welcome here until this moment. 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.

As she took her foot off the top step, Vera snapped the fingers of her right hand four times fast. It was an old habit—a childhood tic that she’d dropped when she left the house. She looked down at her hand with surprise, shocked that it would betray her 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. Vera’s fingers knew that snapping four times had gotten her this far.

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

Her voice came out hoarse, as though she’d let out all the screams she was swallowing.

Vera went back the way she’d come, from the dining room to the entryway, and all around her, the Crowder House exhaled a long-held breath.

But she hadn’t lived in any of those places long enough to stop bumping into things. She hadn’t lived in any of them long enough to feel tenderly toward them.

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.

It was a thing best left unconsidered, Vera thought. Some questions don’t want answering.

Vera tucked the feeling back away where it belonged, into the spaces behind her back teeth and between her knuckles and under her kneecaps. There was room for it there. She’d found that she could almost forget it entirely.

Vera let herself feel how good it was to be back in this place. She didn’t smile—that would be too much—but she did run her fingers along a cardboard display of paintbrushes as she passed, feeling the stiff bristles beneath her fingertips, remembering the part of her life when things had been good.

Vera met her mother’s eyes then, compelling herself to bathe in the cold disdain there. It was the loveless regard of a landscaper eyeing a weed. It was so familiar, so much more familiar than the rest of this conversation, that it was almost comforting.

The truth of her mother’s isolation should have pulled Vera up short. 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. It should have reminded her that Daphne had been alone for nearly two decades, trapped in a notorious house in a town that hated her.

“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.”

She stared at the road in front of her and tried to have a thought, but none would come. Snatches of songs swam through her head, none of them catching. She was far from herself, far from the idea of a self, far from the thing she had seen and the things she had heard and the thing she had cleaned off the woman who she could not, in this moment, pretend to know at all.

Nobody in a bar wanted to look at her. In the right bar, she could be alone without having to be alone. In the right bar, she could move among people without having to pretend to be one of them.

She needed a moment alone that didn’t feel like a punishment.

His smile was the kind of sharp that made Vera think the word amateur without knowing what, precisely, she was judging him for.

This what happened isn’t like the what happened Vera’s imagined friend would say, the friend who would comfort her and listen to her. It isn’t a what happened that anticipates unfairness, that invites the telling of a slightly-embellished story. It’s a what happened that’s already tired of the answer.

Her mother pours capfuls of liquid over both of Vera’s knees, the heels of her hands, her elbows. It hurts every time, a raw, immediate kind of pain that makes her suck air through her teeth. The hurt carves a deep valley into Vera’s heart because it’s braided together with Daphne’s attention, Daphne’s gentleness, Daphne’s care. Maybe, Vera thinks, this is just what love is like.

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

“He wouldn’t,” she says again, and it comes out stronger this time. “It’s a lie. He’s lying.” The part she can’t say aloud, even to the walls of the empty bathroom, is how badly she needs it to be a lie—because she knows, in her bones, that her father loves her. He would never betray their family. And if that’s not true, then nothing can be true ever again.

There had been nothing in her father’s office. Nothing but a few dime-sized burn marks and a lot of smudged fingerprint powder and a smell like bitter cocoa. That room had the same gutted feeling as his side of the bedroom, the feeling of a half-rotted baby blanket by the side of the highway. It was something worse than abandoned. Seeing it like that had left Vera furious and hollow.

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 where those letters should have gone.

“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.”

She turned off the light and crossed through the darkness to her bed. As she sat on the edge of the bed, in the darkness, with her feet planted solidly on the floor, she told herself that she was safe. As she pulled her feet up after herself, tucking them beneath the covers, she told herself that nothing could hurt her. 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.

She twitches her fishing pole up and down, smiling at the way the lightweight line rests on the surface of the water for a few seconds before it disappears. She wonders what the fish think when they see the line touch the water like that. But then she smiles to herself, knowing that the fish don’t think or feel anything at all. Probably ever. After all, they’re only animals.

Each time she presses her hook down into tender flesh—each time a worm turns into a tense thrumming fighting thing in her hand—she feels that same lush thrill. Here is something that she controls. Here is something that responds to her with the kind of frantic immediacy she’s always wanted from the world.

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

The bedskirt gently fluttered, wafting in some invisible current of air as the house breathed. Vera stared hard at that fluttering, but it remained even and steady, and she decided not to let it bother the part of her brain that knew to watch for movement in the tall grass.

That was a Wrong Thought. It was the kind of thought Vera didn’t usually allow herself to have. But she was so tired, and her eyes fluttered shut before she could check herself. Before she could remind herself that she didn’t have thoughts like that.

There was a scream inside Vera, one that she’d been swallowing since the moment she’d first felt the pop of stitches under her fingers. But if she screamed, Duvall would surely hear it and come running. And besides—more importantly, she insisted to herself—she’d spent too much time screaming since coming home, too much time letting animal fear tenderize her in the night, and she would not do it again. She was standing in a room that was full of daylight, a room that belonged to her, in a house that had been built by her father’s hands for her breath and skin and laughter to fill, and she was goddamned if she was going to scream inside that house even one more time.

“I loved you. I’ll always love you. But I hated you too, at least for a time.” There it was, and it struck Vera like a quick, brutal kiss on the mouth. I hated you. “I think I had to,” Daphne continued in that same low, rolling rhythm, her neck still folded at that impossible angle. “Is one possible without the other? I think you have to know someone in order to truly love them, and you have to love someone in order to really hate them. There’s the thin hate we have for strangers.” At this, so fast Vera almost didn’t catch it, Daphne’s eyes flicked for just a moment to James Duvall. “And then there’s the thick, true, smothering hate we have for those we know best.

She crossed the room in the dark, slid herself between those tight-tucked covers, and slept with the bottomless intensity of true exhaustion. Sleep slipped over her mind like an opera glove enrobing an elbow and even in unconsciousness she recognized the luxury of it, the decadence of true rest. Her sleep wasn’t precisely dreamless, but her dreams were simple visions of endless, satiny blackness, perfect and unbroken.

It was the obvious thing to do. Why should she stay? Why should she make herself remain in this house, with a mother who seemed to be a different person every day and a man who wanted so badly to be frightening, and a thing that came in the night to whisper into her ear? Why not walk out the front door and never return? None of this was worth the fight, none of it. Her mother didn’t deserve an easy death, and Duvall didn’t deserve her fear, and the thing under her bed didn’t deserve the bites it was taking out of Vera’s sanity.

Sometimes, moms just need to be mad like that, he’d said. Sometimes they need to say and do things that hurt you. It’s how they love you. It’s part of what being a mom is all about. You’ll learn someday, he’d added, laying an affectionate hand on her head.

The sound of Daphne moving through the house disappears. It’s dark and quiet and safe. Vera presses her back into the corner of the closet, where two walls meet. She imagines strong, steady arms holding her, a friend who understands that she didn’t mean for any of this to happen, a friend who will let her cry as much as she needs to. A friend who will tell her that she is good. She knows it’s childish to depend so much on an imaginary friend, but she needs someone, anyone. She needs to not be alone. So she snaps her fingers four times again, and she is not alone. It’s okay, her friend says, wrapping her up in warmth as she sobs. Hush now, Vera-baby. Hush now.

Once Daphne was gone the house would belong to her and her alone. James Duvall couldn’t have it, and neither could whatever else was inhabiting it. She’d informed Duvall of this reality on the lawn. Now, she was going to inform the other resident. She just had to catch it first.

She could feel, deep in her bones, that it didn’t matter what she did, didn’t matter if the lights were on or the bed was new or the house was being actively torn apart by wild beasts. The thing would come.

In the room outside the closet where Vera was trying not to cry, the bedframe creaked. It was a long, slow creak. It was the creak of a lover settling onto the mattress in the night, heavy with liquor. It was the creak of wood begging to break.

“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.”

“Please,” he said, his eyes wild with terror. “Please, you’re—you’re better than this. You’re not the kind of person who would do something like this. You aren’t like Francis. You’re a good person, Vera.” She clenched her fingers around those silky fistfuls of his hair, and she breathed in the smell of him, all foul smoke and clean sweat and smooth soft skin, and she finally let herself feel the hunger she’d been fighting since the first moment she’d laid eyes on Duvall. She let herself feel it, every inch of that starved yearning, that hollow pit of need. She let herself want him exactly the way she’d been trying not to want him. “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. 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.