Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “Nothing personal,” she said to the monitor. “I’m sure you’re a very good watch lizard.”

  Spyder checked the door again, rattled the sturdy knob, and followed the light down into the depths of the house.

  Three days after Spyder’s tenth birthday, her mother had died of uterine cancer. The irony had not been lost on her, that the creeping thing that had slowly devoured her mother from inside had begun in her womb, had grown itself there in secret like a seditious fetus. Her malignant, vindictive sibling, brother cancer, sister tumor. Her Aunt Margaret had kept Spyder out of school and together they had watched over her mother through the long last month. Spyder had washed her mother’s piss and blood from the bedsheets, had measured out careful doses of the tea-shaded morphine elixir, had held her mother’s head while she’d puked into the plastic garbage can that her aunt had moved from the kitchen.

  And Trisha Baxter had left her daughter the rambling Victorian house at the nub end of Cullom Street, the house her grandfather had built and the only thing she owned worth leaving behind. Spyder’s father had died years before, and her mother had kept them fed and clothed on what she’d made as a seamstress, that and the rare and grudging gifts from family members.

  So, after the funeral, after the Bible verses and carnation stink, Spyder had been packed off to live in Pensacola, handed down to cousins that she’d never met. And when she was thirteen she’d run away the first time, had been picked up by Florida state troopers, hitchhiking a few miles from the Alabama state line. Had finally spent a little time in juvie, and no one had really bothered to argue when she turned sixteen and dropped out of school. No one had come after her when she’d bought the bus ticket back to Birmingham with her own money. She’d walked from the Greyhound depot downtown, dragging an old duffel bag behind her, military canvas crammed full of her ratty jeans and T-shirts and comic books like some gigantic olive-drab sausage.

  But her Aunt Margaret had rented out the house, her house, and the fat woman who’d answered the door hadn’t even let Spyder come inside, had stood behind the latched screen, nervous, piggy eyes and children screaming over the television behind her. Had threatened to call the police when Spyder kicked the door and called the woman white trash. Spyder had dumped her clothes and junk out all over the front porch, had screamed obscenities while the terrified woman had frantically dialed the police and the children cheered from an open window. Finally, tired past exhausted, she’d sat down in the porch swing and waited quietly for the cops to come.

  They’d put her in handcuffs and had agreed with the fat woman that she was probably on drugs.

  Spyder had spent the next two months in the psycho ward at Cooper Green Hospital, courtesy her aunt and uncle’s signatures, had lost entire weeks in a gooey tranq haze of Xanax and amitriptyline, and once, after she’d punched an orderly, a needle full of Thorazine that had left her locked inside her useless body like a sentient corpse. But when they’d finally let her out, the fat woman and her children were gone, and her Aunt Margaret had handed over the keys and a savings account with the little money her mother had left and a third of what had come in from tenants over the years.

  “You’re on your own now, little lady,” her aunt had said, and Spyder had looked her straight in the eyes and laughed.

  “I always was,” she’d said.

  Most of her mother’s things had been parceled out to relatives or given away to the Salvation Army, and Spyder had spent the first night alone in the empty house, listening to the hardwood and plaster voices, the familiar settling creaks and murmurs. Like her, the house had remembered, remembered her, remembered everything. In the last hour before dawn, she’d finally fallen asleep, nestled into a musty pallet of quilts and one of her Uncle Fred’s mothball-scented sleeping bags.

  And in the house where she’d been born, where her mother had been born and died, Spyder Baxter had dreamed.

  Spyder was sitting at the kitchen table eating a cold Spam sandwich, washing it down with Buffalo Rock ginger ale, when the phone rang.

  “Yeah,” she barked into the receiver, gruff enough to put off anyone she didn’t want to talk to anyhow, firemen selling charity tickets or salespeople wanting her to switch long-distance companies. She took another sip of the cola-colored soda; Spyder loved Buffalo Rock, maybe because it was hard to find outside Birmingham and seemed sort of old-fashioned, or maybe just because nobody else she’d ever met could stand to drink the stuff.

  Nothing from the other end of the line for a second or two, and then Byron, his cultivated, slightly nasal Scar-lett O’Hara drawl, affected so long that it had become as much a part of him as his ferrety eyes or his pretty, tapering hands.

  “Spyder,” he said quietly, but it came out more like “Spah’da,” and she didn’t answer, listened instead to the parking lot sounds in the background. There was no telephone in Byron’s apartment, hadn’t been since his roommate had run up a four-hundred-dollar phone bill calling the Psychic Friends Network and gay sex numbers. Byron had to walk half a block to a Shop-A-Snak to use a pay phone; she pictured him standing there, shivering in the freezing wind, thoroughly, righteously miserable. Spyder took another bite of Spam and chewed deliberately.

  “I’m sorry, Spyder,” and there was the faintest ash-gray trace of regret in his voice, genuine regret, not the paper-doll remorse he usually tossed about like confetti.

  Or maybe he was just getting better at the charade.

  She swallowed, stared at the dirty venetian blinds covering the kitchen window.

  “I said I was sorry, Spyder.”

  “I’m busy, Byron.” She took a fresh slice of white bread, spread Blue Plate mayonnaise thick and added lots of black pepper. A car horn blared through the receiver.

  “You’re just eating,” he said, indignant, and there was no question about his sincerity this time.

  “Yeah, so I’m busy fucking eating, okay?” She sliced off a wedge of the spongy pink meat, wrapped the bread around it.

  “Just don’t be pissed at me, Spyder. Please? Just don’t be pissed anymore.”

  She laid the sandwich down on the tabletop and licked a dab of mayonnaise off her thumb.

  “Jesus, Spyder. Will you please say something?”

  “Stop sniveling, Byron.”

  Outside, a sudden gust of wind swept hard against the side of the house, wind that seemed to push itself slowly, painfully, against the old paint-flaky boards, pressing its insubstantial flanks against the windows.

  “Spyder? Spyder, are you still there?”

  The windows rattled and the wind thing slowly backed away, sighed itself roughly around the corners of the house and spread airflesh across the steeply pitched roof, over the cornices and gables. An icy draft leaked through the cracks in the window frame, winter breath oozing between glass and caulk and muntin.

  “Spyder?”

  “Yeah,” and she could hear the sudden flatness in her own voice, the gloating satisfaction drained away now. She closed her eyes and the world felt so thin, hammered down by the rumble and howl. Everything pressed into an onionskin moment, ready to tear and let the sagging, collapsing sky pour through.

  The blaze of Heaven bleeding through, no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “There was something in an alley, Spyder. On my way home,” and part of her was listening to him, still hearing anyway, registering the fear it was probably tearing him apart to show.

  “Just go home, Byron. Please, just go the hell on home before you catch pneumonia and die.”

  She didn’t give him time to answer, cut him short and left the receiver lying off the hook on the table. Spyder finished her supper with her eyes closed.

  This is the first time that Spyder’s father made them spend the night down in the cellar. She isn’t even Spyder yet, just plain old Lila Baxter. She’s six, barely, and at the end of the summer she’ll start first grade. Her hair is black, and there’s a filthy Band-aid on her left elbow where she fell off the swingse
t yesterday. She’s sitting with her mother at the kitchen table and it’s stickyhot July weather, dog day premonition, and still the supper is getting cold, the china bowl of butter beans and the greasy green tomatoes. She’s reading a Dr. Seuss book her Grandma Baxter gave her a long time ago, and the pages have dirty fingerprint smudges and the cover’s about to come off. She knows it by heart, can recite the words from beginning to end. Last winter, she had a black molly she named Sam-I-Am that died because she took it out of the water to watch it breathe.

  She’s thinking about Sam-I-Am, buried in a matchbox under her mother’s roses, deep so the cats can’t dig him up. She doesn’t really have to read the words anymore, spends more time looking at the pictures.

  The screen door slams shut (thwack), the way it does when she just lets it go, lets the spring snap it back. Her mother gets up, goes to the stove and takes the chicken out of the oven, is still standing there, peeling back the aluminum foil, when her father comes in. Her mother looks at him and frowns, wipes at a wisp of hair that’s slipped loose from her ponytail and is sweatplastered to her forehead.

  He stinks like work and whiskey (she wrinkles her nose), is still wearing his carpenter’s apron, pockets with three-penny nails and roofing tacks and little canvas loops for screwdrivers and hammers. “Quikrete” stamped across the front in pale red. He goes to the sink and washes his hands, scrubs them and scrubs and scrubs with the sliver of Ivory soap, stares out the window, up at the sky.

  “Is it looking stormy, Carl?” her mother asks, setting the chicken on the table, and she goes to the refrigerator for the watermelon pickles. “On the radio, they were calling for thunderstorms again.”

  And her father doesn’t look away from the window above the sink, lathers with the soap again, rinses his hands and dries them on a dish towel.

  “Maybe it’ll cool things off some,” her mother says and sits down, starts spooning butter beans onto Lila’s plate.

  Her father stands at the sink a long time, after she and her mother have begun to eat. Lila puts Green Eggs and Ham on the floor beneath her chair because he doesn’t allow books at the table. And he’s still watching the sky.

  “Come and eat, Carl, before everything gets cold.”

  He looks away from the window and slowly lays the towel across the edge of the sink. His eyes are bright and far away and look kind of scared. Lila stabs a butter bean and watches him while she chews it.

  Her father takes big helpings of everything, moves slow, doesn’t say anything or look at anyone. Takes two pieces of chicken at once, a drumstick and a breast, and doesn’t eat a bite. There’s no wind or thunder and it’s still sunny outside, and she wonders what her father was looking at in the sky.

  He takes a pack of Chesterfields from his apron, lights one and stares at the food, untouched, on his plate. Her mother doesn’t look angry anymore, worried, though, and a little scared, maybe. She wipes fried-chicken grease from her hands.

  “Carl, is something wrong? Did something happen at work?”

  He turns and stares at her, but his eyes are still not really there. And now Lila is scared, too.

  “Carl?”

  “I’m all finished, Momma,” Lila says, although she’s still very hungry.

  Her mother looks at her plate.

  “No you’re not, Lila. You hardly ate a thing.”

  “But I’m full,” and she pushes her chair (scrunk) away from the table.

  “You sit still,” and her mother is questioning her father again. He won’t answer, smokes his cigarette, taps ashes into his hand.

  “Momma, please, I really—”

  “I said sit still, Lila.” Her mother sounds very frightened now.

  “Leave the girl alone, Trisha,” and her father’s voice is smooth, sleepy, whistles out of him the way air leaks out of a balloon. She imagines her father getting smaller and smaller, drawing in, until there’s nothing left but an empty, wrinkled skin balloon draped over the back of the kitchen chair. “She said she was full.”

  She gets out of her seat and retrieves Dr. Seuss.

  “Did someone get hurt on the job, today, Carl? Is that what happened? Oh god, was it Jess?”

  Lila stands beside the table. Mr. Mouser is meowling and clawing at the screen to come in, and she thinks that if it is going to storm, she should let him inside. But she wants to hear. People get hurt a lot on her father’s jobs; sometimes they even get killed.

  Mr. Mouser is climbing the screen door. If she turns around, he’ll be hanging there like a big furry bug.

  “For pity’s sake, Carl, say something. Tell me what’s the matter.”

  And her father rubs his sunburned sandpaper cheeks with both hands, hides his face behind thick fingers, uneven yellowed nails. And she realizes that he’s crying, even though he’s smiling when his hands fall, plop, on his lap. Shiny tears and a gray-black streak of cigarette ash.

  “Lila, go outside and play.” Her mother grabs a napkin and is wiping her father’s face, and her father is smiling even more, showing all his tobacco-stained teeth in a huge Cheshire-cat grin.

  “What’s wrong, Momma?”

  “Right now, Lila.”

  And she’s turning around, hugging the tattered book, and there’s Mr. Mouser, claws and marmalade belly and dappled paw pads, clinging to the screen door, and it seems very, very bright outside.

  “Bad cat,” she scolds, and now her father is sobbing. And he’s laughing, also, and in her stomach something starts to wind itself up tight, like a rubber band. She thinks that maybe she’ll barf up the butter beans. The screen swings open when she pushes it, but Mr. Mouser is still hanging on, looking at her through the tiny wire squares.

  “I can see angels,” her father says.

  She steps into the late afternoon heat. Closes the door carefully, pulls the cat loose one foot at a time.

  “Bad Mouser. Bad, bad cat.”

  Lila sits down on the back steps, Dr. Seuss open to page one on her knees and strokes Mr. Mouser until he forgets about wanting inside and begins to purr in his loud, ragged tomcat voice.

  Spyder swallowed the last bite of her second sandwich and opened her eyes. There was no globe on the kitchen light and the naked bulb jabbed needles at her. Somewhere, there was a globe, full of spare change, mostly nickels and pennies, left in a corner after the first time she blew the light, years and years ago. The globe was old, maybe as old as the house, frosted glass etched with a ring of grape leaves.

  And it should be here to stop the light from hurting my eyes. It should be here to…

  Spyder slammed her fist down hard on the table, hard enough to hurt and snip at the voice in her head. The empty Buffalo Rock bottle jumped, fell to the floor. Rolled away into a dark place.

  Get up, Spydie. Get up and do something easy, something normal.

  /but she smells red, nasty cloying crimson, and gags, thinks that she’s going to puke but/

  She stood up too fast and knocked the chair over.

  “No.”

  /and her voice smells like sour little crab apples and millipedes/

  “I’m not going down tonight, I won’t fucking go down tonight.”

  Spyder gathered up the supper stuff, the plate with the leftover chunk of Spam, the mayonnaise jar (screwed the lid down so tight it’d be a bitch to open next time), the dirty knife. She dropped the knife in the sink, put the Spam and mayo in the fridge. More careful than careful, paying perfect attention to each necessary step. Twist-tied the bread closed, set it on the countertop.

  She fished the the ginger ale bottle out from under the table, ignored the dry scritching beneath the floorboards.

  /ignores the red smell/

  Spyder put the bottle in the trash, counting her footsteps. Got the noisy carton of crickets off the top of the relic Frigidaire and the styrofoam cup of mealy worms from inside. Carried them back to the sink and set the crickets down.

  /but she’s slipping now, for sure, and Dr. Lynxweiler is telling her to relax, rid
e it out, don’t let it freak you out this once, Spyder, don’t let it take you down/

  There was something in an alley, Spyder, he’d said, and On my way home.

  Spyder pulled the plastic top off the worms, stirred the sawdust inside with her finger to be sure they were still alive.

  /she’s in Alice time, and crimson smells like the sound of starling wings/

  She found a dead worm and washed it down the drain. The others seemed healthy enough, just sluggish from the cold.

  “It’s all right, Spyder,” she said and closed the mealies, picked up the crickets.

  She turned off the light above the table and stood a minute in the darkness, fighting to anchor herself, to nail herself feet and hands and cold spike between her eyes, into this moment, clinging to the sound of the nervous crickets and the growling wind outside.

  This is the first night that they waited in the cellar for the bombs to fall, for the trumpets and hurricane buzz of locust wings.

  Her mother lights the oil lamp and warm orangeness floods the cellar, eclipsing the pale beam of her father’s flashlight. The cellar smells like wet earth and mushrooms, sulfur from the match. There are rows of old boxes, cardboard and wooden crates, stacked high along the dirt walls. Sagging shelves crowded with forgotten Ball mason jars and old newspapers. Rusty garden tools. She can see scraggly goblin fingers poking out of the dirt, but knows they’re only roots.

  Her father is crazy drunk, and her mother has finally stopped crying. They sit together, cast their three long shadows, and her father talks about the angels.

  Her mother is crocheting, trying not to hear the things he’s saying over and over again. A sweater out of green yarn from Woolworth’s, and the yarn makes Lila think about the cats, Mr. Mouser and Sister and Little John, all locked outside at the end of the world. She set their supper on the back steps, asked her mother if cats went to Heaven, and her mother too quickly told her yes, they go to Cat Heaven. But at least it’s cool in the cellar, like air conditioning.