It must have been an hour or so later that the doorbell rang to let me know my girl was home. I went to get the door, looked outside, waved to Kadesha’s mother, who was sitting in her car. She waved back then drove away as Lisa came inside.
There was Spider on her shoulder, with its legs folded together so it looked even more like a strange inhuman hand than usual. Lisa was in a happy mood. She had spent a lovely afternoon at the playground in the park. She twirled into the living room, telling me about how they fed the ducks, got ice cream, played on the swings and on the slide. She was cheerful all through dinner, sent Spider up to her room without being asked, cleaned her plate and even ate her broccoli. I gave her ice cream for dessert and waited until she had almost finished it before I cleared my throat and said:
“Lisa, sweetheart, there’s something that I have to talk to you about.”
She looked up at me with her enormous, lovely eyes and I thought I saw a flicker of alarm pass through them, but I might have just imagined that.
“I saw what Spider did up in your room,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. She looked down at her plate.
“I’m not mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, although you probably should have told me. But we can’t have Spider making that kind of mess inside the house. It’s not okay.”
“But I like it,” Lisa said. “Spider made it especially for me. He can take it down if I ask him to. And he promises he won’t do it again. ”
“Sweetheart, even if he did promise not to do it again, Spider isn’t supposed to make a web at all. It means there’s something wrong with him. Like he’s sick and needs to go to the hospital. We’re going to take him back to the place where we got him so that they can make him better.”
Lisa looked stricken, a deer caught in the headlights of a car.
“Spider has to go away?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Perhaps not forever. But for a while at least.”
I saw my daughter flinch and her eyes darted upward in the direction of her room where Spider was. Then she looked back at me. In her expression, there was something I’d never seen before. Her eyes were narrowed like she was angry but also like she was suspicious, like I was someone she had to watch out for. It was a look that I’d seen a few times on her father when I started to find out about the secrets he had kept from me, the money he had used without my knowing, the late-night phone calls to a number that I didn’t recognize. But I’d never seen it on my daughter until now.
“Mama,” she said, “you don’t like my Spider do you?”
Don’t lie, I told myself. “No, sweetheart. I don’t really like him much.”
“What did Spider ever do to you?” she said.
“Nothing. It’s just. ”
“You can’t,” Lisa interrupted. “You can’t take him away!”
In her voice I heard the rising swirl of panic, the trembling frantic sound that used to come before she went into full-fledged hysterics. I had not heard it in the last few months. I could see that her shoulders had gone rigid and her fists were clenched down by her sides. In a moment, I thought the tears would start gusting through her like a storm. But then, instead, she stood up from the table and ran upstairs.
I let her go. I sat and listened to her small footsteps climbing the stairs, then pattering down the hall. I heard the door of her room open and slam closed. All right, I thought, I’ll leave her for a few minutes, let her cry. Then I can go upstairs and try to talk to her again. I cleared away her bowl of melting ice cream. I started the dishwasher. A strange feeling came over me and I realized that of course Spider was up there in her room, perhaps waiting at the center of its web over her bed. I felt suddenly on edge, though I could not have said exactly why. I listened for the sound of sobbing, any sound that might be coming from upstairs. But I heard absolutely nothing.
I climbed the stairs two at a time and strode down the hallway. I banged on Lisa’s door and called her name. No reply came and so I pushed the door. It moved an inch or so, but then it stopped and would not open any farther.
Through the gap between the door and the frame I could see a thick crosshatch of sticky, pallid threads so dense they were preventing it from opening.
I called my daughter’s name again. I pushed against the door and it moved this time, but only a few inches. I got scissors and tried to cut the threads but the scissors just got stuck. All the time, I called to Lisa and heard nothing in reply.
Finally, exhausted, I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’ll call the fire department, the police. They’ll know what to do. I stood up and was about to go downstairs to get the phone when I heard, quite close to me on the far side of the door, Lisa’s voice.
“Mama,” she said. “Mama?” She sounded small and young. I came and put my face against the door to get as close to her as possible.
“Lisa, sweetheart. I’m right here. Are you okay?”
“Yes, Mama, I’m okay.”
“I’m going to call the firemen to come and get you out,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “No, mama. Don’t do that.”
“But we have to get you out of there.”
“You don’t have to call the firemen. Spider can fix the door,” she said. “He didn’t mean to make it not open. He was just making more webs to cheer me up.”
“Well, in that case, tell Spider to make it open right now.”
There was quiet for a moment and inside the quiet, the sound of whispering.
“He doesn’t want to do it,” Lisa said, “unless you promise. ” She trailed off.
“What? Unless I promise what?”
“All you have to do is promise that he doesn’t have to go away. He can stay with us forever.”
“Sweetheart, I don’t know if. ”
“Mama, please!” I thought she sounded suddenly afraid. “Just say that he can stay.”
What could I do? “All right. Your Spider doesn’t have to go away.”
“Promise?”
“Yes, I promise,” I replied.
On the far side of the door I heard what sounded like somebody snickering with mean, dry laughter, but as I listened more I realized that it was the sound of many legs moving back and forth across the wooden surface. What was it doing? I could picture it: scuttling this way and that, gathering the threads up and consuming them, taking them back into its gut, material to be stored for later use. Finally the door swung open. Spider scuttled over and perched on the windowsill. Lisa was sitting on her bed looking little and bereft. I gathered her into my arms and hugged her and she hugged me back, but not with the enthusiasm or relief that I’d anticipated. She pulled away after a moment. I looked at her and now, instead of seeming young, she looked very old and tired.
“Why did you get so scared, Mama?” she asked. “My Spider would never do anything bad to me.” She sighed. “If you want to take him back to where he came from, that’s okay I guess.”
I looked at her astonished. She sounded so sad that suddenly I could not bear to do it, not that night anyway.
“All right,” I said, “but not today. We’ve all been through enough already.”
That night I woke to find myself swaddled in a pale and sticky substance that made it difficult to move or breathe. I struggled to free myself but the more I struggled, the more tightly bound I got. Something was moving above me in the dark, back and forth, but I could not see well enough to know for certain what it was. I panicked and woke myself for real this time and found that it was morning. Light was slanting in between the blinds. Everything in the room was as it had been when I went to bed.
As I lay in bed, I decided what I was going to do: the next time that I found Spider on its own, when Lisa left it by itself at home or when it crawled out of her room one night, I would drop something heavy on it, a cast-iron pan or our big dictionary. I thought with satisfaction about the crunching sound its shell would make when it collapsed, the sight of it, cracked and broken on the ground, looking finally like the machine it always was.