Spider Brains: A Love Story (Book One) (28 page)

FIFTY FOUR - Child Abuse! Child Abuse! HELP!

Mom nearly tackled me at my bedroom door. "Listen. I need to know what's going on inside that head of yours." Then, she actually poked me in the temple with her finger... TWICE!

"Ouch!" I rubbed the spot. "That hurt!"

"Oh. Quit being so dramatic." She was on my heels and into my bedroom with me like a big cartoon snowball gathering girth and steam as it went careening downhill.

"Leave me alone!"

"I will NOT leave you alone!"

I jumped, butt first into a sitting position on my bed and folded my arms across my chest.
The silent treatment
. My last resort in order to deter mother was by using the silent treatment.

"I had to tell him."

I just pouted and tightened my grip around my chest.

"I HAD to, Susie."

I turned my head away from her and let my view absorb the spider scene. I could ignore mom by looking at my spider moving in space along a single invisible stretch of silk toward a corner of her wastebasket. She had just killed a moth, one that had fluttered in somehow from outside the bedroom window. Orville was sucking the living daylights out of it. I could relate. Mother was having the same effect on me, right now.

Her words went tinny, vacant, like someone speaking through a make-shift soup can phone and then I pressed my fingers into my ears and did what every smart teenaged girl would do at this critical juncture.

I blurted out, "La la la! I can't
HEAR you
!"

However, I did hear when she slammed my door, making the whole entire house tremble when she finally left my bedroom.

FIFTY FIVE - Sunny, With a Chance of Cold Shoulders

Sunday, my most favorite day of the week, came not a moment too quick.

The sun was still smiling at me. The weatherman, although educated in the "science" of meteorology, had, sadly, yet again, missed the mark. Not only did we not get any sleet, we didn't even see a sign of another rain or snow cloud, anywhere. With binoculars.

Back to school with you Mr. Weatherman!

Bundling up in my black powder pants, my lace-up rough-out snow boots and my ski mittens, the ones with the blue snowflake motif was definitely in order for the job at hand.

I avoided mom.

She was in the kitchen making snapping, maple-y bacon but I fought the urge to hug her around the waist. I'd already been up, early. Brushed my teeth, washed my face and dragged a brush through my hair, pulled it back and snapped a clip at the base of my neck, to keep it out of my eyes. Then, just for added measure, I pulled on my matching blue snowflake-motif snow bunny hat with earflaps. I needed to feed Orville, the girl spider. Snort.

I walked into the kitchen, past mom and out the front door onto the porch. I sensed her head twitch toward me, but come to a screeching halt, in my direction.

We were giving each other the silent treatment.

I walked past her and out the door--quiet as a titmouse.

Rustling through the boxwood proved desolate, barren, nada, zilch. I'd have to dig in the dirt today. These cold winter days, finding spider food proved exceedingly difficult. The fruit flies even had hit the hay. I dropped to my knees and immediately felt the subtle cold of the snow melting into my waterproof pants through my jeans.

I'd have to be quick about it. I carved out a pile of snow two-feet deep and two-feet wide. Then, dug the tips of my mittened fingers into the earth. It felt like solid ice.

No way José.

I stood and went to the porch where mom kept a pot full of her garden equipment--a hand trowel, a pair of green rubber gloves, and a nipper. I pulled off my mittens, dropped them on the porch, slipped on mom's rubber gloves, picked up the trowel and headed back to my digging area.

Stabbing at the ground like an ice pick quickly made bits of earth chip away revealing softer earth underneath. In fact, underneath was a muddy layer. After shoveling that from the hole, I lucked out. I hit PAY DIRT! Te he. No lie. There were like one google and a half, grubs and centipedes. I shuddered when I saw all those centipedes. Talk about a nasty lot of insects.

Heeby Jeeby Time. For sure.

I scooped up a trowel-full of them and, balancing it ever so carefully, walked back to the porch where mom's pot was. But, it had a hole in it.

"Mom!"

"What!" She yelled through the kitchen window. Her face still dented with doubt.

"I need a bowl or something."

She disappeared for a Nano-moment and then the screen door opened and mom materialized with a bowl. "Here."

"Thanks."

She didn't even say, the ever-so-polite, "You're welcome." I noticed.

We were communicating ala single words.

Fine.

After dumping my quarry into my bowl I went back to my hole in the snow. My knees felt the cold right away that time. No subtle melting then.

The bugs had dug themselves deeper too. They were all gone by the time I got back.

But, my search for bugs was cut short.

"Hey."

I looked over my shoulder. It was Matt. "Hey." I said turning back to my hole. Rethinking my plans, I stood up, bowl, bugs and all and turned to him.

"Watcha doin'?"

"Digging for bugs."

"Cool."

"Yeah." I agreed.

"Wanna go to the cemetery?" I dropped my bowl. "I'm going. I thought you might too."

He looked down, dropped to his knees and began scraping the bugs back into it. "I got it." He said. "Sorry." He rose up, bugs in tow, and handed the bowl to me. "I didn't mean to upset you."

"You didn't."

"You dropped your bowl."

"I know I dropped my bowl, ace." I jerked it out of his hands. They were bare. No gloves for Matthew. "Where are your gloves?"

"Don't have any."

I rolled my eyes and moved back to the porch up the steps and to the door. "Well? Come on." I tipped my head to the door for him to follow.

Matt took two giant steps and was onto the porch.

"How did you do that? I can't do that."

"I'm like a foot taller than you. You're a shorty."

"I'm not a shorty."

"Yes. You are."

"Am not."

"Are too."

"
Shut..." I turned hard around to him as I opened the screen. "Just get in here."

FIFTY SIX - Hand-Me-Downs

With dad's gloves on, Matt clutched a bunch of pretty flowers.

Mom drove us to her work and let us go in and pick out two dozen Costco roses. His, a dozen perfect peach ones, his mom's favorites, wrapped in crinkly seamed cellophane stapled with a flower preserver in a small, two-inch sized packet attached at the rim of the clear thin plastic. Stems, thorns and serrated leaves all bulging and packed in, tight.

My roses? All white, like the snow.

He bent over, brushed the snow from the steel plaque that identified which person's body laid under the earth, and he wedged his mom's roses into a prefab flower slot close to her marker on her grave. Then he knelt down in a squat and just stared. His eyes scanned the area that I figured was the top of her casket, to the middle where her waist might still be, then to her feet.

"That last day," It had to happen, this purging of pain. Matt bravely went first, "she looked sooooo pretty." He turned and smiled at me. "Ya know? I mean, the doctors had carved her up so bad but they hadn't touched her face. Nothing could. She looked," He paused as if seeing her again for the first time in five months, "angelic."

The cemetery hadn't yet gotten up her headstone. Matt's mom's name was Elizabeth. Elizabeth Ann. She was only thirty-three. She must've been eighteen when they had Matt. She was four years younger than mom. Panic gripped me when I thought how close their ages were.

"What's taking so long?" I asked about the headstone.

"Don't know." He stood up and turned to me.

I could see he was fighting back a wave of tears when he pressed both fists into his eyes, covering them. But, his chin did this give-away and quivered in-between where his hands didn't hide. When he released them, his arms fell stiff as if swinging them down to his sides, enraged. He made an audible groan, trying to shake the onset of crying, of crying in front of me.

"Let's go." He walked past me. I skipped up to meet his step and we ambled through a perfectly manicured landscape of dead people, all with headstones--some small plaques laid flat and grass high. Others erect, like billboards on a highway reminding visitors, those passers-by, that someone had lived, that someone was once there, physically, and would continue to be loved and missed for a lifetime.

Flat or erect, they all told the same sad story. Someone was dead.

We walked until it came my turn.

"Here." I said. Looking down, I stood there just staring forever. It seemed like forever. But, Matt coughed into a balled-up hand, into dad's glove. Somehow that seemed fitting.

I gave Matt a pathetic grin then sat next to dad's graveside, chest high if you happened to be lying down next to him.

I almost did. I felt weak there, by this snow-covered knoll that used to be my father.

It was the first time I'd visited him since last year. It had been exactly eleven months, three weeks and two days.

I had refused to go anymore with mom on her daily trips. She just cried. And, I couldn't stand the sight of that.

Dad's headstone, looked wet with rain that bled into dryer concrete near its base.

The stone had enough snow trimming it to make it look like it was wearing a white top hat. It looked elegant.

Loving hu
sband, father, son.

Gregory Speider.

June 1, 1971 to December 5, 2009.

No mention of how the guy driving the snowplow that night thought no one would be out during a blizzard.

No mention that he had had a few nips of spiced rum to warm him up for work.

No mention that he basically got his hand slapped for driving under the influence and no, he wasn't 2.5 but he
was
1.1, enough to be impaired.

And! No mention that the attorney who prosecuted him said that they planned to collect all of
these
cases into one big
example
for future offenders to "beware." The attorney said, making quotation marks with his fingers. The dweeb.

Matt had been completely respectful of my silence. He was standing behind me.

Then I did what I had wanted to all this time.

I laid down.

I laid down flat on my back next to dad.

The flowers tumbled out of my hand.

Matt turned his back away from us and let me cry.

His plaid shoulders jerked with every gulp of sorrow I drew in, with every raw wail I let out.

Then, he turned to me, his eyes wet. "Come on." He reached out his hand.