SPIDER MOTHER

I was humming on the walk home, forgetting for a moment that Fate is a Machiavellian asshole that likes to punch you in the gut when you least expect it.

A bottle of bourbon in one hand; two days of solitude in the other, I was all set for the weekend. Round the corner was a blazing Florida sunset and porch swing, the smell of cookouts and laughter wafting across the box gardens that were filled with families, dogs and baseball. Two days when rules bend, when people forget to be quite so judgemental and crack smiles at strangers across grocery aisles. Two days, when I wouldn’t be a stripper.

That was the plan, but rounding the corner I saw something that set my teeth to grinding.

It couldn’t be.

This is what happens when you dance for eight hours straight without a break, on nothing but coffee and dope. Sam the bouncer told me this would happen. ‘Theresa,’ he’d said as I took a toke by the backdoor bins, ‘this stuff is strong, just like your thighs. Go easy.’ I’d laughed at the time; I wasn’t laughing now.

She was lying on my white-washed stoop looking like she’d just dropped out a funeral in the sky – black lace dress, black pearl necklace and skinny limbs like a spider. With darting eyes she gathered herself at the sight of me but didn’t quite sit up, as if she couldn’t be assed with the effort or something.

The last time I’d seen this creature I was twelve years old, standing outside a Broadway liquor store, almost falling over backwards on account of the army issue backpack she’d strapped to my chest.

‘Ecouté moi, you keep it out in front until your soeur arrive, d’accord? Never put it down.’

Those had been her last words to me as she climbed into a cab. Then she gave me a thumbs up and mouthed, ‘Be brave.’ Words mothers say to their kids when they drop them at summer camp, not leave them on a busy street at three in the afternoon. That was ten years ago.

‘Hey! You can’t be there, this is my place,’ I called out.

The spider raised her head and smiled.

‘Chérie?’

‘Yo, lady! You need to get the fuck off my porch.’

I had to try and push her back to scuttling in my subconscious, not out here in time for the sunset. Red lipstick flatlined instantly. From maternal to business in a second, just like the old days.

‘You look like a stripper,’ she told the tiger tattoo prowling my thigh.

It was a shame to drop the bottle on the sidewalk, but this kind of surprise tends to make you lose your grip on things. She had to be mid-fifties now, and didn’t look like the straight-backed, pop tart-slinging, cheek-chewing, fear-inducing, absent parent I used to know, who may or may not have handed me medicine when I got sick.

Silver candy wrappers were strewn all around her scrawny body. Where had all the muscles gone, from those arms you needed to keep away from when she first got back from one of her trips? We always had to give her time to ‘decompress’, to clean the kit… to remember she’d given birth to small hands waiting with rags to polish gun barrels.

I counted the wrappers on the wood; she counted my tattoos and we both shook our heads. Maybe she’d been carrying around a snapshot in her mind all this time of what her daughter would look like – and hotpants and cowboy boots wasn’t it.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, were you expecting pigtails and Sunday school linen?’  

I knelt to pick up the broken glass, because it could hurt a dog or damage a kid’s bicycle tyre, not because I was looking for a big enough shard to hold on to – just in case.

My first words to her in a decade were petulant. She smiled like she’d won a round in a boxing ring. That was the Cecile I knew, the pugilist, buried under a costume of sagging skin. The truth was I’d been having a conversation with this woman my whole life. She’d lived in my head, giving her opinion on my clothes, my girlfriends, my life choices – most of them bad. I vowed that if I ever saw her again, I would walk by and not say a word. But now the past was blocking my present and there was no way of getting past it without literally touching it.

‘You have to show no fear,’ Dana used to say as we strode hand-in-hand past the neighbour’s ferocious dog. All teeth and chomping at the fence, that chain wasn’t going to hold much longer and one day it would tear us to pieces. Took me years to work out that my big sister wasn’t talking about the dog at all.

‘What you doing here?’ Better. Tougher.

‘Why you bald? Es-tu malade?’ she asked with motherly concern that picked at the absence scab in my heart that never quite healed.

‘Why you sitting on my property?’ I planted my feet hard on the decking inches from her bony hips. She flinched.

‘You startled me,’ she said with a fragility that I wasn’t about to believe. Maybe time made most monsters fragile but not this one.

‘Happy weekend, Miss O’Malley!’ The neighbour’s kid shouted, as he rolled by on his skateboard. A friendly kid, the kind who said ‘hi’ to a world that would one day stomp on him for it. The sound of my name made me jump and drop the piece of glass. It fell on the floor between us, sparkling in the sunlight like an uninvited guest at a party. She had the good grace to not mention it and tossed it over the neighbour’s fence without a word.

‘Alors, you changed your name?’ the alias queen asked.

‘None of your god-damned business.’

‘This place… it’s, quel est le mot? Claustrophobic, non?’

She was pointing at the flowers, the putt-putt-hiss of the lawn sprinklers, the gleaming cars, the world that had let me in even though I looked like trouble. Across the road, the net curtains of the maths teacher’s house twitched; I waved at eyes I couldn’t see and at a mouth that would tell tales in hushed whispers on the way into church come Sunday.

I almost reached the front door but my hands were shaking so hard I dropped my keys. Another reveal from me; another private smile from her. The cicadas in the tree above started clapping at the show; the sun dipped behind a house and the world turned a little darker. She stretched for the keys and jangled them in her bony fingers. I hesitated; she jangled again like we were late for school and oh, she was doing her best to stay patient, but I always did this, made her late and there would be consequences. Jangle, jangle, jangle.

‘You read the paper today?’ she asked.

‘Do I look like I read the paper?’ I snatched the keys. ‘I asked you a question. What are you doing here, Maman?’

She looked shocked. Maybe she’d got the wrong house because someone was calling her by a name she hadn’t heard for so long she’d forgotten she was one.  

‘I made a mistake.’

‘Too damned right.’

‘Non, I stopped the heart of the wrong person. Never before – ’ she looked into the middle distance in a way she might have done about abandoning her girls from time to time, but I doubt it.

‘You? Fuck up? Jamais!’ I couldn’t get the key in the lock fast enough.

‘Don’t speak to me in that tone of voice. I had good reasons.’

I would’ve laughed but couldn’t find the sound in my repertoire.

‘A scam, no doubt.’

‘Putain!’

‘Whatever your reasons for running this time, it doesn’t explain what you’re doing here in Florida, lying on my stoop like some crack whore.’

‘Theresa!’ She presumed to reprimand me, before my expression shut her up.

‘I was standing, waiting, but you took so long I had to sit down.’

‘How selfish of me –’

‘And now I’m lying here because I couldn’t stay standing.’

I ignored the vulnerability in her voice and swung open the mosquito net door. It creaked on its hinges. Before I could get safely inside a smaller, stupider part of me double-crossed my fury.

‘What d’you mean you couldn’t stay standing?’

The front door was hot and tacky, warmed by the sun that must have seen this thing coming, must have watched her creep the miles to me and did nothing to stop it. It burned up every other living thing on the highway, why not this bug?

‘I’m diabetic… That smirk is inelegant, Theresa.’

‘It’s kinda funny though, you got to admit. For someone obsessed with fitness and all that. Thing is Ma, I don’t give a shit. Now get off my porch and don’t come back.’

‘I just need a couple of days and then I’ll be fine.’

I doubt it was intentional, I doubt she cared enough to remember, but those were the exact words she’d used outside the liquor store that day. She’d left me with the heavy bag, that bullshit line and exhaust fumes for company. I coughed then, just as I coughed now.

‘Well, take all the days you need but not in my life.’

I stepped inside and slumped down on the terracotta floor, exhausted like I’d just gone twelve rounds with a prize fighter – which I had really, even though she’d turn up dressed as an old lady. I sat and listened to the sound of Hershey’s Kisses wrappers crinkling in her fingertips. That same sound used to accompany us on drives over Brooklyn Bridge when we went to see Grandma, or on road trips to see one of several “friends”, whose names always made me want to eat spaghetti. Men who smiled only with their lips while the rest of their putty faces stayed shark-still. As her wingman on those journeys, all it took was a nod towards the glove compartment and I would jump to it. Making sure I didn’t touch the gun, I’d unwrap the chocolates for her and pop them in her pretty mouth, while we bopped to George Benson crooning about love. I was having the time of my life; I just didn’t know it yet.

The first year after she left was hard and the second. I’d crawled on my belly through them both, but as my grief trod over the threshold of adulthood, I got tough. I accepted that those Hershey’s Kisses were never coming back, along with the woman who taught me how to tie my laces, steal a wallet in under three seconds and say thank you in French as I did it. I’d taught myself a few other words, which I planned on using if ever I saw her again, but I forgot them now that she was lying on the other side of the door, all feeble and weak, no more frightening than discarded trash.

‘I’m here,’ she whispered, ‘because I need your help.’

I couldn’t answer her at first. It took a trip to the freezer, a slump back down, a twist of the lid and a gulp of vodka before I could muster enough energy to ask, ‘Why didn’t you just call Dana? You two always had it planned out.’

‘Because Little Miss Sunshine ­– ’ I floated in that pause, knowing there was a punch on the other side of it. ‘Dana is dead.’

I don’t know how it happened, but I was outside and slamming her bony shoulders against the wooden slats of the house before I’d had a thought. All I could hear was the blood in my veins and all I could see was the spider mouthing something, trying to comfort me. I threw her into the swing seat.

‘It’s you who’s dead. Don’t you come here and tell me she’s gone when you’re still alive. Don’t you fucking do that!’

‘When was the last time tu lui as parlé?’

‘Who are you? Are you even here talking to me?’

A couple of years, that was the last time Dana and I had spoken because fights like the one we’d had needed a cooling off period. I was always gonna go back, I’d been planning to, soon. Soon became last week, then it became last month but I was always gonna go.  Now the thing on my porch was telling me I couldn’t do that. It was shaking its head and saying sorry on repeat like some wind-up kids’ toy.

‘Take it back, all of it – your presence, your désolé, your lies. I’m gonna call her now.’

‘Elle est morte, Theresa.’

****

That day, way back, when Maman got in that cab and enough time had passed for me to believe she wasn’t just playing around – that she wasn’t going to surprise me with a tub of ice cream and a head rub hard enough to crick your neck – the first person I called was Dana. My hands shook so hard I dropped my phone a couple of times and when I did get through, I couldn’t speak. I didn’t need to. She said she’d be there to collect me as soon as her shift at the hospital was over.

‘You need to play it smart. Head to the library and pretend to read or write or something.’

‘What if she comes back? How will she know where to find me?’

‘Oh kiddo,’ her voice sounded brittle as old plastic, ‘she ain’t coming back. Dry your eyes and read. Look interested, real focused, like you’re studying for a test. No crying, you hear, or they’ll call the Socials.’

That had always scared the hell out of me when Ma was away. A neighbour would snitch and we’d be gone when she came back. She’d worry and that wouldn’t be right. I allowed myself one last tear, wiped my eyes and marched to the library to act like I needed words more than I needed people.

I’d waited in the fiction aisle labelled A-E, clutching that bag, scared to open it in public in case it contained a dead body or something – the neighbour’s dog for instance. I certainly weighed as much. I sat at a big table where sunlight reached down through tall windows. Eventually I fell asleep reading the Bible. I chose that story because it was so big and because I knew it would stop the polyester woman at the front desk from staring at me like I wanted to rob the place.

***

‘Theresa!’ I jumped and clutched the bag, ready to defend it with my life.

‘Wake up, baby girl.’ 

Normally I didn’t like that infant name she used – making out that I wasn’t almost thirteen and grown – but that day I didn’t mind so much. She scooped me up and sort a carried me to the bus stop where we waited in the dark, not talking. The sun had given way to night rain. Car tyres cracked glassy puddles and people marched by with hoods up and heads down. New York: a place where no one gets noticed unless they want to be.

‘What’s in the bag?’ Her voice sounded light but her eyes were as jumpy as carpet fleas. I tightened my grip.

‘Maman’s stuff.’

‘Did you open it?’

I shook my head. She didn’t try to take it from me but she did unclip it. Without even looking inside she pulled out Bear, who had been lying on a bed of money all that time. Dana nuzzled him under my chin and that’s when I knew the goodbye had been planned without me, between the two people I trusted most in the world. I was too exhausted to feel big emotions like betrayal. That would come later.

This tall guy called Fionn, who Dana referred to as ‘Ma’s special friend’, gave us a studio apartment just off Pleasant Ave in Harlem. No one questioned the fact that there was a twenty-one-year-old Latino woman raising an anaemic teenager, mainly on account of the way the ‘special friend’ looked at people from under hooded eyelids. He was always smartly dressed when he came to take us out for dinner once a week and people said, “Hi,” to him like it really mattered that he heard them. The neighbourhood rallied round and became family – from old Mr Lancieri at Patsy’s Pizzeria to the nuns at Our Lady of Mt Carmel, who made sure I got Confirmed whether I wanted to or not. I did not. Money was never an issue on account of the backpack. Funny how a certain kind of material can offer protection but no consolation.

When Dana worked nights at North General, I read books in her bed until I fell asleep, the sheets smelling of that dewberry oil she rubbed in her hair. I didn’t make friends because I didn’t have a backstory I could share. There were no hangouts or sleepovers. Our special friend, who I grew to look so alike it became embarrassing not to acknowledge just how special he was, said it was better that way. ‘Everyone lets you down in the end anyway, kiddo.’

Over the summers that came round too quickly I watched the backpack lose shape and hunch like an ageing army vet who, once so essential, was now ignored in a corner armchair. Dana was always on the phone when I got back from school, trying to find the reason we were where we were, trying to find the thing that was now lying within punching distance on my porch.

What would Dana do? She’d tell me to dry my eyes and head straight to 124th Street and wait for her in the fiction aisle marked A-E. But that was nine states and a day’s drive away. I didn’t have that kind of gas money.

‘How do you know? For certain?’

‘She was in the same apartment Fionn gave you,’ she laughed as if Dana staying was either courageous or stupid and she couldn’t decide which. ‘There were cops everywhere. I wanted to run in and find out, but you know –’

‘I know.’

‘Jamaica Pete, the man with the jerk shop, he didn’t recognise me,’ she sounded as disturbed by this as by the police tape surrounding the entrance to her daughter’s apartment block. ‘He said they brought out two body bags. Two gun shots; two bags. So, you know…’

‘Is this because of you? Something you’ve done?’ I was trying very hard not to give the curtain twitchers something else to talk about.

‘Well, of course. Listen, we are both upset,’ she didn’t look it; she looked bored, ‘but we don’t have time for your hysteria. So just calm down. We need to act.”

‘We? There’s no “we”. Get the fuck outta here.’

She sighed as if she was trying to teach me to write my name, but I still wasn’t getting it.

‘This is compliquée. I am afraid you have to come with me.’

‘With you?’

‘Oui. It’s all very boring but there is a bounty on my head and I may have just crashed my car in some swamp filled with alligators. Honestly Florida is Jurassic, non?’ I didn’t need to look at her to know she was smiling. ‘So, we can travel together and you –’

‘Can save you? Get you out of the merde you got yourself into? I don’t think so. Where were you when I turned fourteen, when I hit twenty-one, when I was homeless at twenty-two?’

‘Protecting you.’

The spider nodded, convincing herself – arms and legs twisting themselves into a knot of something I’d never seen on her before: fear. The creature had reached the end of the road that she’d been paving all these years.

‘I’ll take my chances on my own, merci all the fucking same.’ I walked down the steps towards my car. She didn’t argue because that would be to admit weakness. It was only when I opened the driver’s door of my salt-rusted Ford that she called out.

‘You have a mouth like a stripper.’

I could congratulate her on her assessment but she didn’t deserve to be right when all she’d ever been was wrong. She didn’t bother to ask me where I was going – why change the habit of a lifetime – so I told her anyways.

‘I’m going to find out what happened to my sister. Sorry, there’s no bag of money to tide you over, Ma.’ I slid in, wound down the window and mouthed, ‘Be brave.’

As I turned the key in the ignition, I allowed myself one last glance, just like she knew I would. A sneer of satisfaction crept across her lips. She knew I wasn’t going anywhere now that I had found her. I turned the engine off, defeated by my need for explanations.

‘God-damn it, lady! You’re killing me here!’ I yelled.

‘You always were so dramatic. If I was coming to kill you, you’d be dead already.’

Call me paranoid, but curtains in several houses starting fluttering like butterflies. And that’s when it happened. I’d forgotten her height, made more terrifying by her elegance: the black pearls, the diamante hairpins, the perfect lipstick. She was not a weak woman but everyone’s adversary, who stretched and stood in one smooth movement before striding towards the car, her heels barely disturbing the sandy soil as she reached me. I was in control of the situation, and I proved it by turning my head towards the windshield.

Perfect nails tapped playfully against the passenger window, against my better judgment. I wound it down, letting those fingers grip the glass. Eight spider legs crawling into my interior.

‘You have to take me with you, parce que this is how we find out what happened to your soeur and because your future boyfriend is the one who is trying to kill me.’

‘Ma, I hate to break it to you–’

‘Ah, stop it. I already know. But this time you have a boyfriend and if you don’t stop him in time, I will be forced to kill him. And I know how you feel about killing.’

I’d forgotten about the madness.

‘Yo, crazy lady, I’m a nobody. I can’t help you. I’m a nobody.’

‘You most certainly are not.’

‘Then who am I? You tell me.’

‘You are Barbara Kinsworthy, I good girl from New England, looking to start a new life in Tenesse.’ She handed me my new driver’s license.

‘Of course, I am,’ I sighed. ‘Tell me something, is this Barbara Kinsworthy a pick pocket these days too?’

‘She will still have that habit, sadly.’ She reached into the car and slapped me across the back of the head. ‘Honestly Theresa! A stripper of all things, how could you?’ She opened the door, slipped into the passenger seat and put her bare, pretty feet on the dash.

‘Allons-y, you have a cult to join.’

‘No! Dana first.’

‘It’s all the same thing, trust me.’

I wasn’t about to trust her. I started up the engine again, envying a dead bug on the windshield.

‘You don’t have a bag.’

‘Neither do you. See, we are much alike. I always told you that. We will buy new things,’ she said like the magician she was. ‘I’ll explain on the way. First, you drive. They were ten minutes away the last time I checked the tracker.’

‘Who?’

‘The men who think they are coming to kill me.’

She knew I’d take her. She’d let me stomp around, slam doors, cry like a baby on the floor and yet she’d always known what the outcome would be. Even more than that, she’d stayed steady knowing killers were on the way, checking her phone from time-to-time like she was waiting for an Uber.

‘That smirk is inelegant, Theresa.’

‘OK Ma, we’ll go.’

I pulled into traffic, taking one last look at my white-washed life, knowing I’d probably never see it again. After about ten minutes, when I couldn’t take the silence any more I blurted out, ‘It’s been too long. On the way, maybe you can tell me what the fuck happened, where you been?’

I glanced over, but my mother, the spider mother, was already asleep.

***

(Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash)