“Uh,” and he tried wiping the blood on his jeans, “Uh, I’m a friend of Spyder’s.”
“Where’s Lila?” the witch demanded. “I have to talk to Lila right now.”
“She’s, uh, right back there,” and he jabbed a thumb at the shadows over one shoulder. “In her room, I think.”
“I have to speak to Lila right now, young man.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the fresh cuts were stinging, the one across his nose making his eyes water. “I’ll go get her.”
“You gonna leave me standing here to catch my death?”
The cuts stung like alcohol or iodine, like salt rubbed into the wounds.
“No,” he said. “Of course not. Come on in,” and she crept past him, hugging close to the wall, as much distance between them as she could keep, just in case.
“Terrible business,” the witch said, shaking her head, her shaggy, tousled white hair. “And you know, I might have fallen and broken my hip coming up that hill. I could have broken my neck. But I promised the police I’d be here to tell Lila what happened,” and then Keith shouted for Daria, because he felt suddenly ill and dizzy, the world pressing its callused thumbs at his temples like a hangover or a bad fix, and he couldn’t imagine making it all the way back to Spyder’s bedroom.
“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
“I’m gonna kill you in my sleep
Hold a pillow over my face until you die…”
“Su(in)cide”
Stiff Kitten
CHAPTER TEN
1.
A nd 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.