Just Like Home(10)
She’s not trying hard enough. A thin whine escapes her throat.
She can’t be alone in the room with the thing under her bed. Whatever it is, whatever it wants, whatever it’s planning—she can’t face it alone. She’s too small. She’s too scared. This is the first time she has ever felt ashamed of that. In the past, whenever she felt too small or too scared, it was okay and she asked for help and she usually got it. But now she is eleven, and soon she will be twelve, and after that she’ll be a teenager, and she knows from the bigger kids at school that she has to get rid of her fox pillowcases and her nightlight and her small bony fearful body.
She isn’t there yet, though.
What she needs is her parents. She really wants her father because he’s bigger and stronger than her mother and Vera isn’t sure how big the thing under the bed is. Either of them would do, though.
But not both. Both would be too complicated.
Her mother, Daphne, is a tight perm with highlights in it, skinny arms with freckles on them, and a full mouth that’s always pressed into a thin line. If she comes into the room, she will look at Vera with tired disappointment. She’ll still sit on the edge of the bed and tell Vera everything’s okay, but she’ll add that this can’t keep happening, that Vera’s getting too old for this, and she’ll bring it up next time Vera wants to watch a television show that starts after nine p.m.
Vera’s father is a lot easier about these things. He’s a big wall of clean soap smell with curly brown hair that’s thinning in the back, a crooked smile with a chipped tooth in the front, big ropy muscles in his arms from cutting lumber all day. He’ll scoop Vera up close into a hug after he’s checked the bed and the closet and the curtains and the corners. He’ll tell her that no monsters are there. He’ll check twice if she asks.
But either of them is fine. Really. Just so long as somebody comes.
The wet slapping noise comes again, followed by a thick gurgling gasp. Vera squeezes her eyes shut so tight that they ache and she grips her quilt hard, and she decides that the time has come to be as brave as she can, because if she isn’t brave it will get her.
She sits up in her bed and screams.
By the time she has run out of air her father’s footsteps are outside her door, and then he’s in the room and the lights are on and he’s standing there, solid and breathless, looking at her with wide fearful eyes.
“What’s wrong? What is it? Are you hurt?” He looks around the room fast, his gaze hitting every corner of the room before jumping back to her.
“There’s…”
Her voice fails her. The noises have stopped and the lights are on, and what if there’s nothing? What if she tells her father what she heard and he thinks she’s being some overdramatic kid? She wonders if she should lie and say there was someone looking in the window, or that she had a nightmare.
But then she imagines her father turning the light off and leaving her alone in the room with the wet scraping sounds from beneath her bed. Her stomach drops. She can’t do that. She needs help, even if asking for it winds up making her look like a baby.
“There’s something,” she says. “Under the bed.”
Her father’s shoulders drop, and some of the fear drains from his face. “What is it?” he asks, entirely serious. He always does that—takes Vera seriously even when he could roll his eyes at her like Daphne would. “A monster?”
“A person, I think,” she says. She only says that because she thinks that it would sound immature to say yes, definitely a monster. “A murderer,” she adds, because she’s not sure if a person seems scary enough to justify a middle-of-the-night scream.
Her father nods gravely. His eyes are bloodshot and his cheeks are flushed. Vera figures he must be tired, must have jumped out of bed and run into the room fast when he heard her screaming. “How do you know there’s a murderer?” he asks, his voice soft and somber.
“I heard him,” she whispers. “He’s under the bed. I heard him.”
“Let’s take a look,” he says.
Vera’s gut clenches. She bites the inside of her cheek to keep from saying “don’t.” What if there is a murderer under the bed, and they get her father? But if there’s a murderer, someone will have to be the first to see them, and Vera believes that her father is the best one to do that job. So she clenches her toes under her blanket and she doesn’t say anything as her father crosses the room with deliberate steps, his boots falling heavy on the smooth wood of the floor.
She wonders, distantly, when he put his boots on—shoes aren’t allowed in Vera’s mother’s house—but that thought is quickly swept away by the rapid current of her fear.
Vera’s eyes stay fixed on him.
His eyes stay fixed on the bedskirt.
He arrives next to the bed and slowly, cautiously lowers himself into a crouch.
Vera takes a deep breath and holds it, ready to scream again.
Her father locks eyes with her. He lifts a finger to his lips.
Vera releases her grip on her quilt and claps both hands over her mouth to keep herself from making a sound because if her father thinks she should be quiet, then she will be quiet.
He nods at her, then looks back to the bedskirt. He reaches out with one huge, steady, scarred hand, one of the hands that he used to build this bedroom, one of the hands that cupped the back of her skull when she was a baby. He reaches that hand out and with sudden fluid speed he whips up the bedskirt and looks at what’s behind it.