Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [106]
“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