“Daria! There’s someone out here to see Spyder!”
“Oh!” the witch said, eyes round and hands clamped over her ears. “Oh, please don’t shout so.”
“Sorry,” he said, and made it out onto the porch before he had to sit down. The fresh air helped a little, drove back the claustrophobia, washed soothing cool across the cuts on his hand and face. He sat on the steps, top step clean of snow or ice, head down, waiting for the sick, spinning sensation to pass.
“Terrible business,” the witch muttered again somewhere behind him; despite the clouds, it was too bright out here, too much white, and he squinted at his feet, old shoes like the old woman’s leathery skin.
He heard Daria now, questions in her voice and the witch answering them, and he looked up, slow and his eyes shielded from the murky day.
“They found her laying right out there in the street,” the witch said, and he heard her just as clearly as if she were standing next to him, heard a sharp breath drawn, and then the day seemed to brighten around him and he risked looking up through the branches, looking up for the sun breaking through the clouds.
“Someone called,” the witch said. “There wasn’t nothing they could do, though.”
The sky was still as overcast as it had been all morning, scraping its insubstantial violet belly across the mountaintop. So he looked away from it, counted the braid of footprints in the snow, five separate sets, coming together and splitting apart again, all except his own, the biggest, apart from the rest. He could count each individual print, each a pool of gloom now as the air shimmered and grew bright around him.
“You shouldn’t a had to hear it this way, Lila,” the witch said, the old woman who looked like a witch and his footsteps looked like a trail of giant and moldy bread crumbs in the snow. So we can find our way back, he thought. So we don’t get lost in the woods.
And then Spyder screamed again, and the air crackled, electric tendrils pricking at his skin and hair, ozone stench or burst fluorescent bulbs, and the sky flashed like a hundred thousand cameras snapping the same shot at the same instant, like a film he’d seen once about Hiroshima and this was just before the fireball and the mushroom cloud. And riding on the light, a brassy trumpet blare or simple thunder.
“Spyder…” and that was Niki Ky, pretty Niki Ky from New Orleans.
He barely felt Spyder pushing him aside as she rushed down the steps, barreling headlong into the darkness left behind after the flash, wanted to say something to her; a warning, or that he’d cut himself on her goddamn booby-trap, but she was screaming too loud to hear him and the cuts were sizzling.
Niki followed Spyder, across the sepia snow, between colorless trees, negative world, and he closed his eyes, calling out for Daria, calling her name as loud as he could, over and over until she was beside him, until she was close enough that he could put his arms around her.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here, Keith.”
He opened his eyes, and it was all just snow again, all just clouds, just Niki and Spyder kneeling in the street and Daria’s green and saving eyes.
“Spyder’s girlfriend’s dead,” she said. “Christ, what a mess,” and then she let him hold her.
PART II
Ecdysis
“I’m gonna kill you in my sleep
Hold a pillow over my face until you die…”
“Su(in)cide”
Stiff Kitten
CHAPTER TEN
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
1.
And a week later:
After Niki and Spyder had been taken from the house on Cullom Street in a noisy ambulance with snow chains on its tires;
After Spyder had spent six nights in the psych ward at Cooper Green, no one in to see her but Niki and a psychiatrist and the nurses in their squeaky white nurse shoes, paper cups of pills;
After Niki’s hand had been stitched, twelve silken loops across her palm, lifeline, heartline, soulline severed and the rift pulled neatly, deceptively, closed again;
After the police had asked everyone their urgent police questions and there’d been no answers good enough to satisfy them, and no one had found Byron Langly yet;
After Daria and Keith and Mort and Theo had each gone back to their respective routines, day or night jobs; Daria to the healing smell of roasting coffee beans, Keith to the needle and spoon, Mort to his crankshafts and busted transmissions, all three to Stiff Kitten, and Theo left somewhere around the edges.
A warm front, lighter air washed up from the Gulf, had melted almost all the snow, just scabby white patches left behind, hiding in places the sun rarely or never reached. Spyder went home and Niki went with her, Niki’s one bag retrieved from Daria’s apartment and she’d left Daria’s extra key with Jobless Claude, a few more things from the Vega she couldn’t afford to have fixed, couldn’t even afford to think about and so it was parked out back behind the service station to wait.
Consequence and fading shock.
False bottom in a treacherous box of shattered glass and spider legs.
Daria and Keith began to have nightmares that left them wide awake and coldsweating in their beds, dreams they never mentioned to one another, never talked about; the white-haired old woman who’d always lived next door to Spyder had a heart attack, three o’clock in the morning the night after Spyder came home, and they took her away in an ambulance, too.
Papers signed and the doctor looking over the rim of her expensive spectacles, skeptical narrow eyes, telling Niki again when Spyder should take which pill, Mellaril and she couldn’t ever remember what the other was called, which hours and how important it was that she not skip a dose; the Suicide Crisis Line and other numbers scrawled on a pale pink page from a gummed memo pad and pressed, sticky, into Niki’s hand. Keep these, like they could protect her, could protect Spyder, like holy beads or dashboard saints, keep these close.
Spyder never asked Niki to stay with her and Niki never asked if it was what Spyder wanted. Unspoken, unagreed, Niki had visited her in the hospital every day, had brought her candy bars she didn’t eat and comics she didn’t read, and when it was time for Spyder to go home, she paid their cab fare back to Cullom Street. Spyder stared out the window of the cab, no words, her face so blank, so calm it still frightened Niki, nothing in those eyes but the cold reflection of the buildings and winter-bundled people and the other cars they passed on the streets, nothing getting in, nothing out. She worried at the white plastic ID bracelet the nurses hadn’t bothered to remove.
Short ride and then Niki counting out a five and ones to the driver, the stingy tip, and Spyder stood staring at the house waiting patient for them under its naked mourning veil of pecan branches. The cabby turned around in Spyder’s driveway, spitting a little gravel, like maybe he was anxious to leave them; spooky, silent Spyder or the solemn house, or maybe he just had another place to be.
“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 thi
ngs 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 k
now, 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.
Silk Page 24
