Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [94]
“Hey there, you,” and Mary Ellen was sitting on a bench nearby, watching, and she must have been sitting there all along, but had kept very quiet so Spyder wouldn’t notice. “Fuck off, Ellen,” Spyder muttered, “I don’t want to talk to anyone tonight.” But Mary Ellen hadn’t fucked off, had left her bench and come to sit in the grass with Spyder, dragging the squeaky wagon behind her.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I won’t try to stop you. I know what that feels like, when you got some bleeding to do and they stop you and sew you up like a hole in a sock,” and she’d shown Spyder her wrists, then, bony bag-lady wrists and the crisscross of scars there.
“But ain’t nothing wrong with having some company, Lila.”
“Does it hurt?” Spyder asked her, and Mary Ellen had shrugged and nodded her head. “’Course it hurts. Shit, yeah, it hurts, but only for a little while. It’s not so bad after a little while.” And she’d taken something out of the heap in her wagon, handed it to Spyder: an old pickle jar, kosher dill spears, but half the label torn away.
“I got you something,” she said.
“I don’t need a jar,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen frowned, “No, damn it. Not the jar. Inside the jar.” And Spyder had held the pickle jar up so the closest streetlight shone in through the smudged glass.
“Found her out back of the Woolworth’s, under a box, under a big motherfucking box, and I didn’t mean to listen. I don’t talk to bugs, but she knew your name,” and there, inside the jar, a huge black widow spider, and Spyder’s mouth suddenly so dry, too dry to speak. “She said you might have forgotten her, Lila, said once upon a time she had a hundred black sisters and they saved a princess from a troll or an evil magician…”
“Thank you, Mary Ellen,” Spyder said, and Mary Ellen had stopped talking and smiled. Smiled her brown-toothed smile and hugged herself. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, that’s cool, Lila. Anytime. I find lost stuff all the time.”
And Spyder had gone home, left her razor blades under the dogwood tree with Mary Ellen and walked back up the mountain to Cullom Street with her gift; it didn’t matter that she wasn’t crazy enough to hear the voices Mary Ellen heard. She had her own, and the next day she’d taken the bus across town, carried the widow hidden down in her knapsack, safely sealed in a new and smaller jar with some newspaper crumpled inside. She’d shown the tattooist the drawings she’d worked on for hours, colored pencils on the brown back of a grocery bag. “Just like that,” she’d said, pointing, and the money from her savings, and she’d had all the time it would take.
The salvation ink bleeding beneath her skin, beautiful scar to stand against all the other scars, the one on her face and the scars past counting in her head.
Outside, the wind gusted and the white flakes buffeted the window of Keith’s apartment. Niki Ky made a soft sound in her sleep, like something a word might leave behind, and Spyder held her and watched the snow until she could stop remembering.
3.
In the morning, gray only a few shades lighter than the night, Niki was awakened by the sound of water, the distinctive spatter of boy piss on porcelain. While they’d slept, Spyder had moved closer, had gripped Niki’s right hand so tightly that the fingers had gone stiff and numb. She looked around the room, Daria alone now on the mattress and Mort lying on his side, still snoring. Theo in a cattight ball of strange and mismatched fabrics on the other side of the room, but no sign of Keith. Down the hall, a toilet flushed and then footsteps, and he strode through the doorway, twice as rumpled as the night before. Carnation splotches beneath his hard eyes, rubbing his big hands together.
“Mornin’,” he said. “You looked out the window yet?”
Niki glanced at the snow heaped on the sill, perfect cross section of the drift that had grown