Her face burned as she pushed through the crowd and tried to peel the junk off. No one was rude enough to laugh at her. But none of them moved to help her, either.
Of course this had been Claire’s doing — the duct tape alone was all it took to know that — but Maria would have a hard time proving it to her teachers.
It took Maria so long to collect her things, she was sure her mother would be outside worrying when she got to the pick-up area. But not only was her mom not outside, she didn’t arrive after five or fifteen minutes, either.
Soon, Maria was one of only a handful of students left waiting for their parents. The other kids all looked like they were used to this. One boy had pulled out a deck of cards, and he and his friends were settling down to play without anyone having to explain the rules. But Maria’s mother always arrived on time. The fact that she wasn’t here could only mean something bad.
Just as Maria was thinking she should either walk home or else call her mom from the front office, the school secretary, Ms. Vinita, came shuffling outside. Her eyes darted around frantically until they landed on Maria.
“Oh, honey,” she said, hurrying over with her arms outstretched. Maria could almost predict what was going to come next, word for word, as if she’d heard it all in a dream. She let Ms. Vinita hug her, knowing that it was as much for the older woman to feel better as it was for Maria. “I’m so sorry,” Ms. Vinita said, and the words sounded odd in her gruff voice, which more often could be heard doling out tardies and unexcused absences. “It’s your grandmother. She’s — well, she’s … Your mother is still there. At her house. She wondered if you would feel okay to walk there by yourself.”
Maria nodded.
“Okay, then,” Ms. Vinita said, and that was the closest she could get to a good-bye. She turned to go back to the front office, while Maria walked, and then jogged, and then ran all the way to her grandmother’s house.
The air was different on Spinneret Street.
It was thinner somehow, as if Maria were at the top of a tall mountain and couldn’t get enough oxygen into her lungs. Maybe that was because she’d just run twenty blocks, and now her legs burned and her breath came in deep gasps. Or maybe it was because the gray clouds swirling overhead were filling the air with moisture, threatening rain.
There was an ambulance in her grandmother’s driveway, and Maria felt a sudden swell of hope that pulled her forward. Ms. Vinita had gotten it wrong. Or maybe she hadn’t said dead because Esme wasn’t dead at all. Maria ran through her grandmother’s front door like it was the finish line of a race.
“Grandma Esme?” she called.
Maria sprinted into the living room, convinced she would find her grandmother there waiting for her. But sitting amid the scattered wreckage from Friday was her mother, looking like she’d just woken up from a nap and had no idea where she was. Maria knew immediately: There hadn’t been a mistake.
Grandma Esme was really gone.
Maria went and sat down in the rubble next to her mom, who put her arm automatically around Maria’s shoulder. Maria took off her glasses and wiped them on her sleeve.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” her mother said. It was strange the way everyone kept apologizing to her, as if she were the one who had died.
Two EMTs, a man and a woman, came out from the kitchen, and Maria nearly jumped out of her skin. She’d already forgotten about the ambulance in the driveway.
The man nodded somberly in Maria’s direction, then turned to her mom.
“Well, Ms. Lopez, I think that’s everything.”
Mom didn’t even bother getting up from the ground. She just said “Thank you. I guess I’ll call if I have any questions,” and the man nodded again before he and the woman left.
Maria waited until she’d heard the front door click shut, then she said, “What happened?” Her voice was soft and scratchy from crying.
“Where to start?” Mom sighed. “Well, I came to check on Grandma Esme, just like I said I would. She wasn’t coming to the door when I knocked, but she’d left it unlocked, so I popped my head in for a quick hello.” Maria remembered that her grandmother had left the door unlocked on Friday, too. She had been forgetting more and more of the little things lately. “She still wasn’t responding when I called, so finally I came back to the kitchen, and … Oh, Maria.” She leaned her head on Maria’s shoulder and cried.
Maria had seen her mother this emotional once before, but that was years ago. From the little she remembered, that time had been much worse. That was the time when the man from the army had shown up at their door, and said that her dad wouldn’t be coming home after all.
“And she was already … gone?” Maria found that she couldn’t bring herself to say the word dead, either. It was too real, too final. The word gone could just as easily mean that Grandma Esme was at the grocery store.
“Actually, no,” Mom said. Maria gulped. “No, I found her right after she’d collapsed. But it was very peaceful. The EMTs said it was a heart attack, but she didn’t seem to be in any pain. She sounded like she was ready to go, Maria. She led a very full and happy life, you know.”
“Wait — you talked to her?” Maria said.
Her mother frowned. “Only a little.”
“What did she say?”
Her mother sat up, then re-crossed her feet. She seemed to be stalling, as if she hadn’t wanted the conversation to take this turn.
“Maria, your grandmother has been so confused these past few months —”
“Mom, what did she say?” Maria repeated anxiously.
“Oh, well, you know how she always was with spiders.”
Maria felt goose bumps on her arms and legs. On Friday, her grandmother had warned her that the spiders were after her. Three days later, she had died, and with her last words she’d tried to warn her mother, too.
“There was one strange thing, though,” her mom continued. She turned to face Maria, to watch her reaction. “She said she had left you something. She said it was in the seashelf. Does that word mean anything to you?”
It did. It meant a lot to her, in fact.
Once, years ago, Maria and Rafi had been playing hide-and-seek. They’d been at the beach all day with Mom, but Mom had dropped them off at Grandma Esme’s so she could have a girls’ night out. Grandma Esme’s house wasn’t big, and there weren’t many good hiding places. But Maria had snuck into Grandma Esme’s room and crawled under the bed, sure that Rafi wouldn’t find her there. When he’d called, “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she’d felt the peculiar thrill of knowing that someone was looking for her. That there was nothing she could do now but wait and hope she’d chosen the right hiding spot.
Then, lying on her stomach, she’d spied a strange crack running through the wooden bedpost by her face. She’d reached out to touch it and let out a little gasp when a whole chunk of the wood came off in her hand. It hadn’t been a crack at all, but the opening of a small shelf hidden right into the bedpost. This wasn’t the first time Maria had come across a false door or a secret compartment in Grandma Esme’s house. Once, in a hidden drawer under the bathroom sink, she’d found an old whistle with an anchor painted on the side. But each new space was like a delicious new secret. Maria wondered if even Grandma Esme knew about them all.
There hadn’t been anything on the shelf under the bed when Maria had first discovered it. But it looked so empty and inviting, it gave Maria an idea. She reached into her pocket and palmed a seashell she’d found in a tide pool that morning. She set it on the shelf and replaced the wooden door.