“It isn’t true,” Spyder said, cloudy speech still slurred from her new medication. “What they say, about things being smaller when you grow up. It’s the same size it ever was…” and the last word fading like a radio turned down too low to hear. They stood in the wind and afternoon blurring into twilight, Niki waiting, starting to shiver.
Until finally, “Let’s go inside now, okay?” she said. “Get the heat on,” and Spyder nodded, blinked, and maybe there was the faintest ghost of a frown; at least that was something, communication and the hint of emotion. Niki carried her gym bag and the paper grocery sack with Spyder’s few things up the walk, Spyder a step or two behind her, and the house took them back.
There was no talking Spyder out of sealing off her bedroom, though Niki tried, something Spyder had to do that had nothing to do with practicality or sentiment, something Niki could see might as well be a matter of life and death. Spyder would not even step across the threshold into the mess, but Niki managed to persuade her to board up the windows first, that much at least, before she nailed the door shut, allowing Niki time to retrieve some things from the room. The portable stereo and the CDs, some clothes and a few posters and the glass cases that had not been shattered, protected beneath the bed. Niki felt like she was plundering an odd museum after a war, salvaging treasures, precious bits and pieces of old exhibitions from the rubble before bulldozers and wrecking balls leveled the treacherous ruin.
Spyder found plywood somewhere, gray and warped with age and what water and cold, heat and mildew, could do to wood, and while Niki picked through the glass and metal, shuddered when she had to brush aside another black widow corpse or some species she didn’t recognize, Spyder hammered and the walls rattled. It made Niki think of Amontillado, doomed Fortunato watching as stone after stone was lifted into place, and for a moment, she wanted to turn and run from the house, escape, as if this might be her last chance; instead, she lifted the last case of spiders pinned and labeled and carried it out into the hallway and stacked it there with the rest. There were mason jars and tanks that had not been broken, filled with torn and neglected webs and tiny things curled in on themselves, nestled in transparent corners or dangling like minute suicides; Niki left them, to be buried along with the rest, everything Spyder was burying at once in this mass grave, dead pets and memories she couldn’t stand.
When Spyder had finished with the windows, Niki watched as she mixed epoxy and smeared the honey-colored goo along the top and sides and bottom edges of the door, made sure the glue filled the old lock and the newer latch bolt before she shut the door for the last time. And then fifty-seven three-penny nails before Niki lost count, and last of all, more of the gray, bowed plywood nailed over the door, hiding it away completely.
“I’ll paint the boards later,” Spyder said. “To match the walls.”
And then she turned and stared at the neat stacks Niki had made of her belongings. While Spyder had been working, she’d seemed more alert, more alive, than Niki had seen her since the night of the storm. But now that life, driving urgency and purpose, was draining away, quick withdrawal and slack-faced again, the face that Niki had come to think of as a mask woven of shock and the antipsychotics. A mask growing out of Spyder’s flesh and so hard to fight through; now Spyder was exhausted, and the mask was back, shadowing the girl inside. What she’d had to do was finished, and now she could stop fighting the pain and the drugs.
And then Spyder stooped down, something held up so Niki could see. And yeah, Niki remembered picking that free of the glass, a dream catcher; had thought it might be something Spyder cared about. A couple of the strands that made its wood-framed web had broken, and Spyder began to laugh, just a soft chuckle at first, but then louder, and Niki saw the tears at the corners of her eyes. For a while, Spyder just laughed and cried and then, when she was done, she used her hammer to pin the dream catcher to the plywood she’d nailed over the bedroom door.
Robin’s funeral was something else that had come and gone, of course, had slipped past unannounced, like the snow’s incremental exit. Spyder hadn’t said a word to Niki about it, and nothing else about Robin, for that matter. Niki had found an obituary in the Post-Herald and clipped it, not knowing if Spyder would ever want it or not, but had thought she should anyway.
And then, their first night back and Niki too tired to notice how hard the floor was through the quilts and blankets she’d spread out for them on the living room floor, the phone had begun to ring.
“I’ll get it,” she volunteered, reluctant to break their embrace, to leave the sweaty, safe smell of Spyder, but Spyder was already up, already on her way to the kitchen. Niki lay still, listening, but nothing else from Spyder after “Hello” and “Yeah.” Just her medusa silhouette in the kitchen doorway, construction-paper cutout framed and backlit with dim moonlight through the windows. Spyder saying nothing, standing perfectly still, as Niki’s heart beat like a slow second hand, five minutes, ten minutes, and finally Niki got up.
“Who is it, Spyder?” she asked, feeling like it was none of her business, hoping Spyder would tell her so. But Spyder said nothing, held the receiver pressed to her ear and stared into the dark kitchen.
“Spyder,” and the house was so quiet that Niki could hear the angry voice on the other end of the line, speaking hard and fast, and she reached out and took the phone from Spyder, no resistance.
“Hello?” Niki said, and the voice paused a moment and then, “Who are you?” it asked.
“A friend of Spyder’s,” Niki said. Freed of the weight of the phone and the voice flowing through it like acid, Spyder sank into one of the kitchen chairs and laid her head against the tabletop.
“Yeah, I bet you are,” the voice said, a man, maybe drunk, from the way he talked, and Niki trying to sound brave and strong, “Tell me who you are or I’m going to hang up,” firm, watching Spyder at the table.
“Robin’s father,” he said. “And what the fuck difference does it make to you? I guess you’re her replacement, though, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” Niki said, straining for calm. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“Don’t you dare fucking hang up on me, goddammit. I’m not-” and Niki set the receiver back in its cradle on the wall. Within seconds, the phone was ringing again, shrill and angry as the man’s voice had been, and she followed the wire to the jack above the baseboard, an old style she couldn’t simply disconnect, the wire disappearing into a metal plate.
“Make it stop now,” Spyder whispered, so low Niki almost didn’t hear her over the ringing. “Please, Niki.”
Niki grasped the cord, wrapped it tightly around her hand and tugged once, hard but not hard enough, jerked again and the wire snapped free of the wall, the phone silenced in mid-ring.
“Thank you,” Spyder said, and Niki looked down at the severed phone cord dangling from her hand.
“I didn’t kill her, Niki. I wasn’t even here,” Spyder said, “I was with you,” and Niki dropped the cord to the floor. “I know,” she said, nothing else she could imagine saying that wouldn’t sound trite or stupid, and then she led Spyder back to their pallet.
After breakfast, fried slices of Spam and scrambled eggs, Spyder’s so runny they were hardly cooked at all, Niki’s like India-rubber nuggets. Blueberry Pop-Tarts and Coke. Niki busy with the dirty dishes and Spyder reading a comic at the table.
“Do you want to live here?” Spyder asked, and Niki stopped drying the dish, one of Spyder’s multitude of mismatched china plates. Plate back into the sudsy water sink, and she laid the dish towel aside, stood with her back still turned to Spyder.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” she lied. “I didn’t think you should be alone right now, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Spyder asked, and Niki stared out the dirty kitchen window, steamed over and the tangled backyard soft-filtered, tall grass winter brown and untended shrubs blurred together between the trees.
“No,” she
said, “that’s not all.”
“Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think so,” and Niki had no idea what came next, what her line was, how to say what she thought she wanted to say. Terrified of the words themselves, of saying something she might want to take back or have no choice but to deny further along, time-release lie. She’d been going somewhere, a long time ago now it seemed, that wild flight west, and maybe she could have lost herself and the sorrow somewhere uncluttered, deserts or prairies, all sky and clean wind; someplace with a Spanish name, Los Angeles or San Francisco, maybe, and now she was here, instead, with Spyder Baxter. Birmingham, Alafuckingbama, and she hadn’t even made it as far west as New Orleans.
What’cha gonna do, Niki?
“I’m not an easy person to live with, bein’ crazy and all,” Spyder said. “That’s why Robin never moved in with me, you know?” and that was the first time she’d said the dead girl’s name since they’d kneeled together in the pelting snow and Spyder had screamed it over and over again at the falling sky while Niki held onto her.
Gonna keep running?
“But if you want to, you know, if you want to, I’d like that, Niki. I just want you to know I’d like that a lot. And it ain’t ’cause I need nobody to take care of me, or just because I don’t want to be alone.”
Grab this brass ring, Niki, because there might not be another. Or. Let this distract you and you may never know… More than that, though. Irony like an evil joke she was playing on herself, that she’d run from Danny partly because she hadn’t been able to imagine herself with a woman, knee-jerk repulsion. Other reasons, but that one so damning huge. And now Spyder, vicious edification, the fairy-tale punch line too brutal not to be real.
“I’m not afraid of being alone,” Spyder said almost whispering.
“I am,” Niki said, not turning around, had to say this fast before she chickened out. “I would very much like to stay with you for a while, Spyder,” and the sex they’d had the night before, furious and gentle, and the doubt like hungry maggots. But it was out. She’d said it, had decided, and behind her Spyder breathed in loudly.
“That’s good,” she said. “I was gonna miss you.”
The new bedroom would be the room that had been Spyder’s parents’ and then just her mother’s, the room where Trisha Baxter had died. It had been Niki’s idea, and she didn’t know, like Robin and the basement, and Spyder had surprised and frightened herself by saying yes, yes Niki, that’s a good idea. It was much bigger than her old room, crammed full of boxes and crap, most of which she could just set out on the curb for the garbage-men. Old newspapers and clothes, magazine bundles and broken furniture, an old television that didn’t work. They could get a bed from the Salvation Army or the thrift stores and import stuff from other parts of the crowded house.
And then Spyder had Niki drive her downtown, and she made a sign from poster board and a squeaky purple Magic Marker, taped it to the window of Weird Trappings-“Closed Until Further Notice”-had shown Niki around the shop, picking out a few things to take back to Cullom Street with her.
It was Niki’s idea to go to the Fidgety Bean afterwards, wanting to keep Spyder out a little longer, wanting to see Daria and be out herself. Spyder shrugged and nodded yes.
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said.
“Not ever?” Niki asked, incredulous, and suddenly she was thinking about Danny for the first time in days, Danny whose love of coffee had bordered on the religious. She pushed his ghost away, reached out and held Spyder’s warm hand as they squeezed down an incredibly narrow alley to Morris.
“It always makes my stomach hurt. Makes me nauseous, sometimes. Big-time handicap for a member of the caffeine generation, I guess.”
And then the alley opened, released them to the cobblestone street, and they were under the dreary sky again. Three doors down to the Bean, and Niki changed the subject, talked about going thrifting for a bed, tomorrow perhaps, and maybe a new lamp, too.
Early afternoon and the coffeehouse was almost empty, nobody but a rumpled wad of slackers in the back smoking and talking too loud. Niki sat down at the bar before she saw Daria, bleary-eyed and a big coffee stain down the front of her little red apron. She smiled, a genuine glad-to-see-you smile, and put down the tray of glasses she’d been carrying. Spyder took the stool next to Niki and stared out through her dreads.
“Hi there, stranger,” Daria said and hugged Niki across the bar and a cautious “How you doin’, Spyder?”
“Okay,” Spyder said, and turned her attention to a jar of chocolate biscotti. “I want one of those,” she said.
“Sure,” and Daria reached beneath the counter for metal tongs, the lid off the jar and then a big piece of the biscotti on a napkin sitting in front of Spyder. “You gonna want some coffee with that, right?”
“I never drink coffee,” Spyder said again.
“Makes her barf,” Niki added.
“How about some hot chocolate or tea?” But Spyder shook her head, and then she took a loud, crunchy bite.
“Christ, Spyder,” Daria said. “You’re gonna break a tooth or something.”
Spyder smiled, and there were cocoa-colored crumbs on her lips.
“And you want a Cubano, right?” she asked Niki, who was examining the long list of exotic coffee drinks chalked up behind Daria, neon chalk rainbow on dusty slate.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure, and I want you to make Spyder an almond milk.”
When Spyder started to protest, Daria held one finger to her lips, shhhhh, “I promise, it won’t make you barf. Just steamed milk and a shot of almond syrup. Unless you’d rather have hazelnut or caramel, or vanilla.” And Daria pointed to a row of tall bottles behind her, lurid shades of Torani syrups, and Spyder looked at Niki.
“Almond’s fine,” she said, mumbling around her second noisy mouthful of biscotti.
“Coming right up, ladies,” Daria said and turned her back, went to work with coffee grounds and sugar, almond syrup and the shiny silver Lavazza machine.
“So,” and Niki wasn’t looking at Spyder, speaking to her but watching the kids at the back table. “How’d you get the shop going, anyway?”
Spyder wiped her mouth with the napkin, picked up stray crumbs from the polished countertop, each one pressed down until it stuck to her fingertip and then transferred them to her tongue.
“A friend helped me,” she said.
“But didn’t you have to get a loan from a bank or something?”
“No,” Spyder said. “I tried, to start with, but nobody’s gonna give me a loan, Niki. I had a friend.”
And Niki was looking at her now, a soft smile on her Asian lips, and now she was holding Spyder’s hand again.
“A friend who loaned you the money?”
“No, a friend that died and gave me the money,” she said, and Niki’s smile faded a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That your friend died, I mean.”
“Yeah. He could look just like Siouxsie Sioux, except you never called him a drag queen. You had to call him a ‘performance artist’ or a ‘female illusionist’ or he’d get pissed off at you. Andy hated to be called a drag queen.”
Too close, sick irony or coincidence, and Niki hoped nothing showed on her face. “You guys were real close?” she asked.
“Yeah, I guess,” and Spyder released Niki’s hand, laid both hers palm-up on the counter, empty offering to no one and nothing in particular. “We hung out at Rush-ton Park when I was still a kid, you know, hanging out on Highland with the hustlers and runaways. It was nice, in the summer.
“Andy didn’t hustle, though. He had money, money his mom had left him when she died. Just enough to keep him going until he started getting sick…” and she paused, looked up at the ceiling, ornate plaster molded and painted a green so deep it was almost black.
“Andy’s mom was great. She knew he was queer and all, that he’d gotten AIDS, but she was still great. She used to cook us these big-ass Sunday dinners, used to let him bring
home street kids on cold nights and shit. It’s unfucking believable, Niki, that anyone ever gets parents that cool, you know?”
“Yeah,” Niki said, and how many months now since she’d seen her own mother and father, anyway? She’d called her mother twice from motel rooms, just to let them know she was okay, but never stayed on the line long enough that home could sneak its way through the connection and find her.
“Anyway, he left me a whole bunch of money when he died, enough to start Weird Trappings and keep it going a while…
“I stayed with him, you know, at the end. He went blind finally and toxo got his brain. But he’d made me promise that I wouldn’t let him die alone, and he didn’t.”
Niki swallowed and wanted to hold Spyder, but instead her eyes wandered away, afraid: Daria noisily steaming milk, an old photograph of a trolley car on the wall, finally down to her lap. Anything but beautiful, unfathomable Spyder, simple as a single thread knotted over and over and suddenly too much to grasp, like particle physics or her own mortality. And then Daria was setting their drinks on the bar, Niki’s in a crystal demitasse, pitch black and a perfect skim of créma on top, Spyder’s in a tall glass and the color of a quadroon’s skin.
“Hey, you guys okay?” she asked, and Niki nodded, but Spyder only looked out at the street and wrapped her tattooed hands around the warm glass. “Christ, it’s this fucking depressing-ass music,” and Niki noticed it for the first time, blues she didn’t recognize. Could tell from Daria’s eyes that she knew it had nothing to do with the music, but she changed the CD, anyhow. Exchanged the blues for Joan Jett, and one of the kids in the back stood up and yelled, “All right! Goddamn right!”
“Dork,” Daria muttered under her breath.
“Thanks,” Niki said.
“No problem. Listen, how’d you guys like to come to our show this weekend? We’re part of this big deal at Dante’s Saturday night, in Atlanta. Three or four bands, and someone from Atlantic is supposed to be there, so I’m fucking freaked, you know? It’d be really cool if you guys could come. I’ll put you on the guest list.”
Silk Page 24
