by Jamie Mason
My mother was Spider. Spider was her. Whether the name came before the reverence for the creature or because of it, I couldn’t know.
“Are you okay?” Brian asked.
“I’m fine. My mother just had a thing about spiders. I didn’t know that it meant anything. I guess I still don’t know what it means. But it’s at least something to know that there was anything more to it at all.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t. Anyway, I asked. Thank you.”
“I did get to work with her again after that. But just little stuff. I ran some documents for a couple of different projects; facilitated a few interviews for her over the years. That sort of thing.”
“Why does that sound like you nabbed guys into white vans and dumped them on a warehouse floor at my mother’s feet?”
“Because I’m sexy and dangerous and I belong in the movies?”
“That must be it.”
“Then it was years and years before I saw her again. I was the last one who got to work with her, though, right before she died.”
“When did you see her last?”
“Just a few days before—” He hesitated. “Before she passed away.”
“Huh? You saw her then? Where? Did my mother meet you somewhere?” My mother, as far as I knew, had almost never left the house at all in the months she’d lived with us. She dug in, curled up in bed, or on the sofa, or on the porch swing, all day every day. She set to battle with an intimidating stack of books, and a catalog of films and television shows. She said she’d seen enough of the real world and wanted to wallow in fiction at the end. I bought comic books to add to the pile and brought her coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, and a nip of nightcap in the evening that she shouldn’t have mixed with her medicine, but did anyway.
“No, I came out to the house to talk with her a couple of times.”
“The house? You mean my house?”
“To be fair, it was her house, too, at the time. I mean, that’s where she lived.”
This was another of their shared traits. Both Brian Menary and my mother had the uncanny ability to deliver uncomfortable, even offensive, lines without squirming. My brother could do it, too. It was as if nothing, no matter how awkward, ever made any of them uncomfortable. The freedom was so breathtaking it leapt right over being obnoxious.
“You’ve been in my house? When I wasn’t there?”
“I promise I didn’t look in the medicine cabinets.”
“Okay, that’s more than a little unnerving.”
“You have no idea. They wanted transcripted interviews to close out her files. Actually, what they wanted—what Paul Rowland wanted—was for her to move into an agency-approved hospice facility. It would have been first-class care for sure. I mean, not that she didn’t get that with you. That’s not what I meant. It’s just that her comfort was more of a secondary concern for him.
“He sent me in to wheedle her about it at first, to try to convince her to go to one of these places when she first found out she was terminal. But she wanted to live with you. She was adamant. He was really annoyed with her. Those places are like the Ritz Carlton, only with doctors. And everybody from the janitor to the chef to the accounting manager has top-secret or better security clearance. They spare no luxurious expense in exchange for getting the drop on any deathbed confessions. But your mother refused.
“So instead of the Ritz, she got me nagging at her for the interviews. It was all so cold. I felt terrible about it, taping her when she was so weak. But she was utterly gracious. So patient with all the boring questions and the pointless prying. I would never have forgotten her anyway, but the grace she showed in those last interviews . . .”
“Paul punished her for not doing his bidding. Even at the very end?”
“Hey, I don’t know that I was her punishment exactly. I’m not that bad.”
“No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.”
“She was a great storyteller.”
“She really was.”
An empty space opened in the conversation. Empty of words, anyway, but more than full enough of unspoken questions.
“Is it always like this, do you think?” I asked.
“Like what?” He was already smiling.
“Like the more you know, all you really know is that you don’t know anything.”
Brian gasped. “Are you trying to steal my job?”
Brian had a plane to catch and I had my life, such as the state of it was, to catch. I dragged my attention out of the past, through the present and pleasant company across from me, and into the start of the rest of the day still ahead, anchored in an evening with Patrick. There was melancholy in the equation. My husband was less friendly by the hour, it seemed.
Brian double-checked that I had his card. I did. I double-checked that he wouldn’t have to lurk after me to get information about my curiosities anymore. He didn’t.
20
Patrick started leaving the lights on and having nightmares. In that order. He had always kept track of the utility bills in one brand of spreadsheet or another, and we had negotiated over the finer details of household maintenance. Mild debate on things like the merits of turning up the temperature on the hot-water heater versus its effect on the bottom line were what we used to have for nuts-and-bolts conversations instead of the thorny small talk we’d had to cultivate to fill up the echoing silences.
Growing up, the Aldrich family, with one income and six kids, had kept steadily (if only just barely) in the black with a tight hold over the little leaks in the budget. It was in Patrick’s blood to keep score on such things as gas mileage and credit-card points. I didn’t mind cutting coupons or stalking the sale racks for bargains. They were such easy brownie points to win with my husband. Such simple things to do to put him at ease. He appreciated it. It was responsible, and mature, an easy way for me to be like them. And it was my favorite: it was normal.
The first time I asked him about the lights, Patrick flinched and said that he’d run to get the phone and must have forgotten to switch off the lamp after the call. That didn’t quite work unless he’d run a zigzag through the house to do it. Lights were left on in three different rooms.
Even with the hallelujah of wattage lighting up every corner of the place, day and night, Patrick wasn’t seeing all that much. He regularly escaped our overbright rooms to the length of his thousand-yard stare. He went missing, more and more often, into the unfocused middle distance, overshooting his barely touched dinner plate, the television, or my face as I tried to stitch together a chat about anything.
“I’m just tired,” he said, and conjured up a self-fulfilling prophecy. His gritting teeth and midnight mumblings left the both of us groggy and dull in the mornings.
But he wasn’t too tired to drag us to baseball games and barbecues and any number of things offered up by the office and neighborhood cultures that, until recently, we’d never bothered with. He would say that it would be fun, but he’d say it without smiling. He would scrub at the dark circles under his eyes with the heels of his hands, then sigh and say that we needed to get out more. I couldn’t help but think that what he felt we actually needed was a stage.
He was courting approval. He always had in his own way, but over the years he had, just like me, lapsed into our hermited, comfortable routine, endorsed enough by his day-to-day successes to get from sunup to lights out without expecting a trophy for managing it. But now he was back, head up and keeping track of who was watching, and making up for lost time by all accounts. An anticipation was crackling in him, a nearly electric hum that buzzed under his forced chatter and big, un-Patrick-like laugh. He seemed to be pulling out of his usual patterns in a showy stride so as to be found far ahead of where everyone was used to seeing him if they ever bothered to stop and note his progress.
Was it a problem with midlife on the near horizon? Or was it more commentary on our life, right now and all around us? The math see
med simple enough: Patrick wanted to look like a good guy to these people. But I couldn’t quite make it all add up to his wanting to be a good guy, not to me at least. At home he was prickly when he wasn’t distant.
“What’s going on, Pat?” I slid my shoes off and faced him from the closet doorway. He looked as wrecked as I felt, with all the flint out of his spine, sitting there on the corner of the bed hunched over, scrubbing his brows with his fingertips as if he could work enough energy in through his skull to get over the last hurdle of brushing his teeth.
I was simply too tired to take the long way around the block to start the conversation I’d been dreading. He had gnashed and thrashed all through the night before, even more than had become his usual, and yet we’d still gone bowling with his boss and her husband, exhausted as we were.
“What?” he answered.
“I’m trying to see all of this—the bowling tonight, all the dinners and these get-togethers—I’m trying to see it in a good light, but I’m just not feeling it.”
“Seeing what? Feeling what? It’s late. I don’t want to play twenty questions, Dee. What’s the problem?”
I stepped up to the suspicion that had been tethered to the center of my thoughts for days, then I let it off the leash. “Are you getting ready to leave me?”
“What?” He launched from the bed and went from zero to shouting in two seconds. “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not trying to make you angry.”
“This is not trying to make me angry? What would trying look like, huh? I’d love to know what crazy shit you would say if you were actually trying to make me angry.”
“Stop yelling. I just want to understand what’s going on. You’re not eating. You’re not sleeping. We’re going out four times a week, at least, so that we can what? It’s like a circus around here. Something’s obviously on your mind.”
Patrick ground his teeth and took in a deep breath through flared nostrils. Whether he’d blow out the candles on his temper or breathe fire, I could only wait and see.
He came through his showy sigh in the hard, brittle mode of forced patience. “Are you actually concerned, Dee, or are you just looking for the exits? Let’s just go ahead and get it out there in the open, because I’m being accused—”
“Pat, I’m just asking, not accusing. You’re not yourself lately—”
“And what do you think ‘myself’ should act like for you to be able to recognize me? I’ll be honest, Dee, you might not have seen this me before, but that’s because it would have been kind of hard to predict what I would turn out to be when I got left holding the bag on our marriage.”
“This is nuts. I’m trying, you know. I don’t know what to say to you anymore. You’re so goddamned touchy—”
“I’m touchy?” He laughed without a shred of humor in his voice. “Come on, you’re setting me up. You have to be. Poor, mistreated Dee. Is that going to be the angle? Is that what you’re telling your friends? That I’m touchy and mean? That you think I’m going to leave you, even though you’re a perfect angel? You’ve got some big balls, lady, after what you pul—”
“Enough!” I rarely raised my voice and it slammed a full stop between us. “Enough! I’m not listening to one more roll call of your disappointments. I’m not sitting here while you tell me—again—how lousy it was for me to take birth control pills without telling you. You don’t get to run me over with that anymore, not without it coming back on you, you don’t.” I paced, sock-footed on our bedroom carpet, rolling up the cage on the storefront of my knowledge about our marriage. Careful, Plucky, I heard my mother in my mind. And I ignored her. “You fucking hypocrite! I have big balls? You’re amazing.
“Tell me, Pat, have you got anything you’d like to ‘get out in the open’ with everyone? Maybe tap your glass and make a big reveal about why you’re so psychotically cheerful in public and a growling son of a bitch at home? Anything you’d like to get off your chest instead of playing charades with your coworkers? Pat, the good guy. Pat, the devoted husband. Pat, the family man . . .”
“What are you talking about, Dee?”
“You must think I’m really stupid.”
Patrick scowled and took one slow word at a time “What—are—you—talking—about?”
In which our hero takes a stick to a hornet’s nest, my mother would say when Simon or I were about to go too far in an argument. I pulled the punch on my mother’s oft-given warning. I looked at Pat’s face. The anger there didn’t surprise me, but the electric aura of fear around him snagged me off the trigger. My shoulders sank. “We need to see somebody; talk to a professional or something. We’re falling apart.”
“I think you said it all at ‘enough.’ ” Patrick snatched the pillow from his side of the bed and pounded down the hall to the living-room sofa.
• • •
I didn’t read anything into our not speaking. I wouldn’t have known what to say to him anyway. But the silence left a clinging weight to the quiet days as they dragged on. The dread of the silent house jousted with the dread of picking up the fight where we’d left off it. It hurt.
But if time heals all wounds, then distraction heals the insult of time’s sluggish pace. And nothing is quite so distracting as finding your belongings rifled through. Again.
When Simon was seven years old, his best friend told him that Santa Claus wasn’t real and that it was only our mother hiding all the presents, every year, somewhere in the house, until she, not Saint Nick, put them under the tree on Christmas Eve. Simon checked with me and I didn’t deny it.
He accepted the challenge and deployed his second-grade sleuth. He soon dragged me to his prize find and we squealed out our discoveries as we nudged each package aside for the next one. When the stack ended at the back corner of our mother’s closet, we retraced our burrowing, tidying everything as we went, all the way to the screen of boxed books and folded blankets that she had set up to hide it all.
In the days that followed up to Christmas, the galloping anticipation we normally rode dragged its hooves a bit. The fever of counting down the days only simmered on low with no danger, for the first time ever, of boiling over. Even Simon realized our mistake, and we agreed without having to speak of it that we’d never spoil a surprise again. Lesson learned, we welled in maturity and contrition—safe and undiscovered. And on the bright side, after all, there were still presents to look forward to, even if the big reveal would be a bit of a song and dance on our parts.
Only on Christmas morning, the scant flat packages arranged around the tree didn’t match up with the bulging mountain that would have held all the goodies we’d found in the closet. Simon fought tears as he unwrapped puzzle books and Val-U packs of underwear. My cheeks bloomed red as Burl Ives sang “Holly Jolly” and my mother watched me, over the rim of her coffee cup, open a box of assorted teas.
“Would you guys like a tip for all future snooping missions?” she asked.
We nodded at the carpet, unable to meet her eyes.
“There are two things you can’t leave disturbed when you go through people’s stuff: the stuff and your face. So, if you ever again get the urge to poke around in closets and whatnots that are not yours, I would suggest a big deep breath and a good, hard think beforehand. If you look, you’re going to find, and once you find, you can’t unfind, so you’d better have your face well in order.”
We did get our presents later in the day, but Mother drove home the point by moving things in our rooms, just an inch or two out of place, so that we could see how clumsy our attempt at slyness had been. Spot-the-difference became a new favorite game for points, and my brother and I got wicked good at it.
• • •
Whoever had been in my house was more careful than Patrick would have needed to be. That everything was so close to the order I’d left it in spoke to stealth, and the air still fluttered in the fading wake of someone else’s path through the halls. Forgive us our trespasses. Right. Will do. As soon as I figu
red out who needed forgiveness for what, I’d get right on it. The light sting of chills surged over me as I walked the rooms, playing the game for no points this time. Or maybe for all the points if the person turned out to be still lurking somewhere inside. I grabbed one of Patrick’s golf clubs from the front closet.
I held my breath and cocked an ear for any sounds that didn’t fit. The attic fan whirred its sigh through the vents. An airplane grumbled overhead. It didn’t feel as if I had company. Whatever that meant. I made my rounds, rolling my feet to tread as quietly as I knew how, my palms sweating into the little divots in the rubber grip on the putter, ears ringing, straining for any indication that I wasn’t alone, and having no idea what I would do if I found out that I wasn’t.
The stack of bills on my desk was only a shade to the left of where it should have been, and my prescription eyedrops were in the back part of the front bin in the drawer, instead of in the front part of the next bin where my hand would automatically have set it. Amid a few more scattered incongruities, nothing appeared to be missing.
I even looked in the pantry and pushed every door that stood angled open in its jamb, dreading that each would stop against a firm someone behind it. But no one was there.
The three obvious possibilities were that my husband had lost his cool to an attack of rather pointless sneak, or a burglar had come in and not found anything worth taking, or Brian Menary was still poking around. If it was Patrick, the basicness of the search confused me. If it was a burglar, my untouched jewelry and the intact $300 in cash in the desk drawer confused me. If it was Brian, it wasn’t all that confusing. Only infuriating.
Since I’d left a message at Hoyle’s Pharmacy, I was fairly certain who would be on the line when the display showed unknown caller.
There was a smile in Brian’s voice. It irritated me that I felt a tug of willingness to be cajoled as he said, “I’ll tell you, Dee, I don’t know whether to be concerned or flattered. Now that you’ve met me, you can’t seem to stay away from me for very long.”
