Silk

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 go

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.

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 things 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 pi