When it walks, its feet and joints make small, soft, clicking sounds, a rattling whisper like wind stirring dry leaves. Though it has lived with us now for months — no, that isn’t right, it doesn’t live — when I hear that sound, for a moment I still think I have left a door or window open. I look up. I see that it is just the spider, making its way across the floor or up a wall, taking its thousands of tiny mechanized steps.
I did not ever like having it around. But for a while it really seemed to work. Lisa started sleeping better with Spider curled beside her on her pillow. She stopped asking when her father would come back. During the day she was much calmer. Her fits of rage became less frequent, then stopped altogether. She has become, in fact, suddenly quite grown-up and independent for her age: some mornings she will dress and get ready for school all by herself; some evenings she will clear the dinner dishes and put them in the dishwasher without my asking her; and sometimes, recently, she’ll even go up to bed all by herself, leaving me to get on with the work I didn’t get done during the day.
True, we have had some arguments about whether Spider can be at the dinner table with us. I have insisted that he go into her room while we are eating. Dr. Clemens suggested that it would be helpful for me to set some boundaries like this.
And I do not like it when Lisa whispers to her spider so that I can’t make out what she is saying. Sometimes it sounds to me like they are speaking in some language I do not even recognize, much less understand.
And, when it first arrived, I would be sitting reading late at night and I’d look up and see it standing on the wall across from me, perfectly still, eyes glittering. I learned to close my bedroom door at night after this happened a few times.
But in general, Lisa’s companion seemed to be working just the way it should. Or at least it did until just a few weeks ago, when suddenly things started to go wrong and strange at once. It was on a Tuesday, I am pretty sure, yes, a Tuesday evening. That is when I found the web.
I had come home early from work that day, weary and frustrated as I usually am. I am a paralegal for a company downtown and I do not love my job. The lawyer I work for sometimes treats me like a secretary. She tells me to get coffee and make copies, and there’s not much I can do except comply; I can’t afford to lose this job now that I’m on my own.
I closed the front door after me, and the house wrapped me in its gentle quiet. Lisa was at her friend Kadesha’s house that afternoon and therefore so was Spider. For once, I had the place entirely to myself. I sat down at the kitchen table and was going through the mail when I heard, from upstairs, a sound I couldn’t understand: a soft but certain flapping like somebody was shaking out a bed sheet. I listened and it came again: a noise like a sail filling with wind. Was there a burglar up there making the beds?
I went upstairs and walked along the corridor looking in each room until I came to Lisa’s. The door was shut, so I pushed it open and went in. The room was arranged just as always: bookshelves and chest of drawers against one wall, bed against the opposite, the row of stuffed animals along the windowsill between. But as I looked I saw that over everything was a layer of thin, diaphanous threads connecting all the objects like a net. The threads were translucent and barely visible, but when I took a step inside I found that they were all around me, clinging to my skin and clothes. I stopped and tried to shake them loose, but they were sticky and would not come off. In the slanting afternoon light, they were silver, shimmering, and I could see that they all led toward one corner where they spiraled up into a dense silky canopy right over Lisa’s bed. It was billowing gently in the light breeze that came in through the open window; this was what I had heard from downstairs.
I stared around me, partly entranced and partly horrified. How long had the web been there? Why hadn’t Lisa told me about it? I felt a surge of anger, a feeling of betrayal. She had kept it secret. She knew I wouldn’t like it and she was protecting her Spider by hiding it from me. But then I thought: why hadn’t I seen it for myself? I tried to think of when I was last in my daughter’s room and, with a lurch of shame, I realized that it had been several days, almost a week. How was that possible? Lisa had become so self-sufficient, not even needing me to tuck her in at night. And I had been glad to let her take herself upstairs, to look in on her later and see that she was sleeping peacefully; in the small glow of the nightlight I had not noticed all the fibers that were crisscrossing her room.
I went downstairs and got a broom out of the closet. I came back and, brandishing it in front of me, began to try to sweep away the strands. Where there were just a few, they snapped and cleared away. But where they were denser they were strong, and in the corner over Lisa’s bed the broom got stuck. I pulled it but I could not get it loose.
It dawned on me how strange it was that until now Spider had not made a web. Why would it start all of sudden like this? I left the broom where it was and went down to get my tablet from my purse. I pulled up the owner’s manual for Spider on the site of the company that had manufactured it. I looked through the manual, but it said nothing about web-spinning, only that in the event of any malfunctioning you should bring your companion back to the facility where you got it as soon as possible.
This was a malfunction. Wasn’t it? It definitely was, and therefore Spider would have to go back to the facility. I remember that I stood there in the middle of my living room and almost whooped with unexpected joy. I had not known until then just how much I wanted to get rid of Spider. A strange thought came to me that Spider knew perfectly well how much I disliked it, that it had watched me and perhaps tried to find ways to keep me at a distance from my daughter so that she would keep it safe from me. But then I thought how ridiculous and paranoid that would sound to someone else. What had it done all these months except what it was meant to do?
As soon as possible, the manual said. That meant I’d have to break the news to Lisa when she got home. She would be upset of course. She would not like the prospect of letting Spider go. But what else could we do? We could not have it covering our house in a net of sticky threads. That would not be safe. I would tell her gently, calm but firm, and then we would drive together in the morning to the facility and she could pick out a replacement, a dog or gerbil or maybe that nice butterfly. I could already feel the contentment I would experience during that ride home, the sense that I was taking charge the way a parent is supposed to do. Lisa might not like it right away, but she would come to understand eventually that what I’d done was for the best.
Why had I lived for so long in a situation that made me so uncomfortable? At that moment, it seemed inexplicable.
I put the manual away and started thinking about dinner. I’d make one of Lisa’s favorites, macaroni-cheese maybe, which might make her less unhappy when I told her that Spider had to go away. I started taking ingredients out of the cupboard, mixing and combining them, as I waited for my daughter and her spider to come home.