Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [28]
“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 swingset 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