The Spider Ring Read online

Maria’s throat squeezed shut, like it had during her oral report that afternoon. It wasn’t uncommon for Grandma Esme to sound paranoid. She’d often warned Maria about “lurking enemies” and the best ways to stay hidden, and Maria had always assumed these warnings were leftover relics from her mysterious childhood. Maybe Esme’s own parents had used those same words when Esme had been forced to leave them. But Grandma Esme had never gone so far as to suggest that the lurking enemies were spiders. In fact, she’d always told Maria that the spiders were her friends.

  “Grandma, I think maybe we’d better take an afternoon nap —”

  “No, listen to me, Maria. I am not tired, I am not joking, and I most certainly am not confused.” She held out the whistle in her hand and shook it. “Do you see this? Do you? There is a reason I used this whistle to speak with Cocoa, when other lion tamers spoke with their whips. You cannot truly command a lion, Maria. You can give, and you can ask, and you can earn his respect. The lion tamer who uses a whip may find it easier to make an obedient animal, but he will never make a friend. And only a friend will help you in the end.”

  “I don’t understand, Grandma. Are we talking about Derek?”

  “The spiders, Maria! We are talking about the spiders. People with gifts like ours must always choose between doing what is right and what is easy. You must promise me that will you do what is right.”

  Maria wanted to ask, “What gifts do I have?”

  But Esme had said “promise me” in a voice so commanding it was scary. So Maria said, “I promise,” and left it at that.

  Esme nodded, her mouth a resolute line.

  “Good.” She slipped the whistle into her pocket and took another deep breath. Then she smiled. “Now, if you could just help me find my kettle in all this rubble, we can have a cup of tea and enjoy that story.”

  Maria left to walk home at half past four, allowing herself more time than she needed before it got dark. The rest of her visit had been calm enough, with no more strange warnings and Grandma Esme in good humor. They’d picked mint leaves from Esme’s garden for the tea, and then Maria had read aloud from a book of fairy tales — a story about a princess who, with the help of woodland creatures, defeats an evil shadow queen. Finally, they’d listened to old records on Esme’s gramophone.

  But through it all, Maria couldn’t shake the image of her grandmother’s haunted eyes as she claimed that the spiders were out to get her, warning Maria of the choice that lay ahead.

  For the first time in Maria’s life, believing in stories felt like a dangerous thing.

  The weekend went by as weekends normally did, with Rafi outside collecting rocks and insects from the creek, and Maria inside, tucked into her window seat with a book.

  Her mother used to beg her to spend more time out in the sun, but she finally stopped after Maria pointed out that she never tried to make Rafi come in and read.

  Maria spent Saturday night sewing the purple star patch onto her paisley shirt. It didn’t look as good as new, but then, it hadn’t been new when Maria had bought it. Grandma Esme always said that Maria’s personal touches made her clothes better than new, but she was the only one who seemed to think so.

  On Sunday, while she was cleaning her room as part of her weekly chores, Maria was alarmed to find a large cobweb blooming in the back of her closet. There didn’t appear to be any spiders left on it, so she didn’t hesitate to grab a broom and swat it down. She checked to make sure it hadn’t gotten onto any of her clothes. The last thing she needed was for Claire to find something else on her shirt the next day.

  The cobweb also reminded Maria of her afternoon with her grandmother. She hoped that had been a one-time incident, but decided she had better tell her mother about it, just in case. At dinner, she said, “Mom, Grandma Esme was acting kind of strange on Friday.”

  “Stranger than usual?” Rafi said, and Maria glared at him.

  “Strange how?” Mom asked.

  “I don’t know. She just seemed … scared. Like she really thought something was out to get her.” Maria didn’t specify that Esme had said spiders were out to get her. That felt like telling on her grandmother, somehow. And she hated to give Mom and Rafi one more reason to think Grandma Esme was crazy.

  “That’s just how it is when you get to be Grandma Esme’s age,” Mom said. “Especially when it gets late in the day, and the sun goes down. Something chemical happens in your brain.”

  “Like a zombie?” Rafi said.

  “No, zombies eat brains,” Maria said, rolling her eyes. “Plus, the sun was still out when I was there. Mom, can you please just check on her?”

  Maria’s mom scrunched her eyebrows together like she did when Maria tried to explain the plot of one of her books. It was the same look she got when she was paying the bills. Finally, she said, “Of course I will, mija. I’ll swing by her house before I pick you guys up tomorrow.”

  Rafi was quick to protest. “But, Mom, Rob asked if I could come over tomorrow. They’re getting a new waterslide put in this weekend, and it’s supposed to be finished by the time school’s out.”

  “Isn’t it a little cold to be swimming?”

  “Nah. We were in the pool last weekend and it was fine.”

  “Maybe I’d better call Rob’s father and make sure it’s okay that you keep coming over.”

  “He already said it was,” Rafi whined. “He said I was welcome anytime.”

  “I’ll call him after dinner,” Mom said firmly.

  Maria didn’t understand how Rafi could think about waterslides when she’d just said their grandmother wasn’t doing well. Not even Derek was that carefree.

  On the way back to her room, Maria discovered another large, abandoned spiderweb, this one strung up between the ceiling and the wall of the hallway. She shivered.

  “Rafi!” she called. “Rafi, come look at this.”

  “What is it now?”

  “Have you been leaving the back door open when you go outside? This is the second spiderweb I’ve found today.”

  “Well, it’s not my fault. I didn’t leave the door open. Maybe the spiders at Grandma Esme’s house rode here inside your book bag. Did you think of that?”

  “Fine, be that way,” Maria said, leaving him in the hall and all but slamming the door behind her. She knew she wasn’t really that mad at her brother, but it was like her anger was getting wrapped up inside her fear, and the two were becoming a tangled black knot that filled her head. If it was a coincidence that these webs were appearing now, after what Grandma Esme had said about the spiders returning, it was the worst coincidence in the history of coincidences.

  Still, Maria hoped that it was a coincidence. The spiders had no reason to be here.

  Right?

  When Maria got to her seat in English, Claire was already at her desk smiling brightly, as if it weren’t first thing on a Monday morning. Maria got nervous when Claire McCormick smiled. Her smile showed too many teeth, like a lion’s.

  “Hey, Maria. How was your weekend?” Claire asked through that smile.

  “Fine,” Maria said carefully.

  “I’m so glad to hear that.” It was almost convincing.

  Was it possible Claire had been the one behind the cobwebs in her house? Maybe she’d planted spiders on Rob, counting on Rob to pass them accidentally to Rafi, who had brought them into the house without realizing it. But that was ridiculous. Maria was starting to sound as paranoid as Grandma Esme. Claire wasn’t some villain in a fairy tale. She was just a girl in Maria’s English class.

  As soon as the bell rang, Ms. Wainscott began passing back their vocab quizzes from Friday. When Maria got hers, she was relieved to see that she had gotten all ten of the words right. She’d almost blanked on the definition of disputatious, until finally she’d realized it looked a lot like dispute.

  “Wow, Maria, you’re so smart. I wish I was as smart as you,” Claire said, looking over Maria’s shoulder. The sarcasm in Claire’s voice was slick and dark, like oil. Everyone
laughed as if Claire had said something clever. Maria’s hand went self-consciously to the purple star on her sleeve, like maybe she could hide it before Claire noticed that, too.

  “I told you not to mess with her,” Derek said at lunch. He’d already finished his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and now he passed a big silver dollar back and forth between his hands. At times, it vanished from sight completely.

  “She started it,” Maria said, shrugging. She stared down into the beefaroni and orange slices that lay untouched on her tray. It was kind of sickening how they were almost the same color. “I keep thinking I just need to be mean right back. Let her see how it feels.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s a fantastic idea.” Somehow Derek managed to sound kind even when he was teasing her — the opposite of Claire, who sounded mean even when she gave Maria a compliment. “Just talk to Ms. What’s-Her-Name about it. I’m sure if she knew, she’d at least put Claire in a different seat.”

  For Derek, every problem in the world could be solved by talking it out. But Maria wasn’t Derek. As she’d tried to explain, if she told on Claire, Claire would just get back at her in other ways, likely much worse than her usual teasing.

  “So how is your aunt?” Maria asked, very much wanting to change the subject.

  “Great-aunt. And fine,” Derek said. “I mean, you can tell she’s from New York. She’s very fancy and she never, ever laughs, not even when my dad did that thing where he acts like he’s going to shake your hand and then pulls a coin out of your ear. But she’s nice enough. She liked it when I showed her the shop.”

  “Oh, I almost forgot — Grandma Esme says hello.”

  “Hello, Grandma Esme,” Derek replied, which was exactly the right response.

  “I found this old poster that proves all her circus stories are true. It showed her and the lion, just like she always says.”

  “Wow, really? I bet my dad would love to have that for the shop.”

  “Well, he can’t have it — it’s Grandma Esme’s.” This came out more forceful than Maria meant it to. Derek’s eyes widened, and he stopped passing the coin, but the thing about Derek was that he never took anything personally.

  “My bad. You know I just meant it sounds cool, right?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m sorry,” Maria said. “Grandma Esme was just a little out of it on Friday, so I’ve been a little out of it since. This thing with Claire definitely isn’t helping.”

  “Does this help?” Derek asked, cupping his hands as if he were holding them over a fire. Maria didn’t understand what he was doing at first, until suddenly she realized the silver dollar was in her hands, impossibly.

  “How did you do that?” Maria asked, amazed.

  Derek grinned.

  “You really want to know how I did it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s easy,” Derek said. He leaned in like he was going to whisper the answer in her ear. Always the performer, just like his dad.

  “The secret,” he told her, “is practice.”

  When Maria went to get her books at the end of the day, there was a terrible surprise waiting for her at her locker. She didn’t see it at first because there was a crowd of people in the way. She figured they must be waiting for that eighth-grade girl Kim Thomas, who seemed to have even more fans than Claire. But no, she realized. They were staring at her locker, on which duct tape, stickers, and even a few cloth patches had been plastered so thick she couldn’t see an inch of the gray metal beneath.

  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.