Rooms(25)

Or something I hadn’t done.

By junior year she was hardly coming to school and I’d got my first boyfriend—a dipshit named Barry, but he had a Chevrolet Impala and a decent laugh and a nice way of touching my lower back when we were walking—and Cissy and I barely saw each other until we didn’t see each other at all.

One time I passed her when we were driving in Barry’s Chevrolet; she was walking on the side of the road away from town, away from her house, toward nothing I could think of: just swampland and crowded forest, fat mosquitoes and wild hogs as big as heifers. Maybe on her way to get more spiders. Our eyes met for a second, and on impulse I raised a hand to wave. Maybe she was going to wave back—but Barry had just finished his beer and chucked the can, and instead she flinched and had to sidestep to avoid getting hit. I reamed him out for that one.

The last time I saw her was just before Christmas, 1969. I came home and found her standing on the porch, leaning against the door with her long legs crossed at the ankles, just exactly like she had so many times before. In her coat she looked even skinnier, like she was being swallowed by the fabric.

“Hey,” she said, peeling away from the door, like it hadn’t been almost a year since we’d actually hung out. “I wanted to give this back.”

She was holding a red sweater of mine. I’d loaned it to her once when we’d been caught in a downpour and then forgotten about it. It was ugly as shit, a gift from my mother’s mother, who I saw once a year.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, taking it from her. Even standing right next to her it was like there was a big barrier between us, hard as an elbow.

She didn’t seem uncomfortable, though. “It’s yours,” she said.

For a second we just stood there. It was cold for Georgia, near freezing, and the sky was low and white-gray, the same color as Cissy’s skin. Her eyes looked like two bits of chipped ice, and she looked like she’d aged a hundred years since I’d last seen her. Her hair was fine and cut real short, and I could see patches of her scalp.

I was trying to remember what to say, how to talk to her. How you been? I was about to ask, when she smiled and said, “Take care of yourself, Sandy.”

“You, too,” I said.

Would it have made a difference? If I’d said, “How you been, Cissy, come on in, why don’t you sit down?” Probably not. Still: something to feel awful about.

She was found by Zulime on Christmas Eve morning. Cissy’s parents had gone north for some reason and weren’t expected back until that evening. I can still picture it: the bloated purple face against all that white, her skin puckered around the rope. Cissy had obviously planned it that way. She’d left a note with Zulime’s name on it, which Zulime recognized, although she couldn’t read a single word but that one. So a frantic Zulime took the letter to a neighbor, and that’s how the information got out, finally.

I’d had it all wrong. Cissy’s stepdad wasn’t hurting her, at least not in that way. He’d been crawling into her bed at night since she turned six and her mom had been punishing Cissy for it since she found out. All of it in that house as white as snow.

A few days after I heard the news, I woke up in a panic about the spiders, and what would happen to them. It was just barely dawn when I set out, all quiet except for a dog that started up in the distance. I don’t know what the hell I thought I was going to do when I got there, but I kept thinking how Cissy would be so sad if all her spiders froze to death over the winter. But when I got to the Barnaby Estate, I found the basement totally empty. The books, the flashlights, all the terrariums and jars—everything was gone except for that awful beach chair, and a single spider spinning a web between its metal legs.

Want to know something nuts? I took the damn thing. The spider, I mean. Cupped it in my palms and carried it all the way home and into my bedroom and put it on the windowsill where it could watch the world outside and spin. I figured it would eat flies and ants if any dared to come in, and, besides, it was almost kind of like a sign from Cissy. I know, signs are bullshit. But that’s how I felt—like maybe she didn’t blame me after all.

All of January it stayed by the window, and I was careful not to let my mother in the room since I knew she’d freak. She was pretty much always at church, anyway. And I watched it spin this enormous web that looked like frost on the pane, and finally I knew what Cissy had meant when she told me you could never really get away, just like the spiders.

Because it wasn’t just spinning, it was forced to spin, and so it was just as trapped as any of the bugs it managed to catch.

In early February, I came home and saw my mom scrubbing the kitchen, and without looking over her shoulder she said, “I cleared out a spiderweb in your room. I don’t know how it got so big.”

A week later I got a train to Raleigh, and from there to New York City. I don’t know what happened to any of the rest of them—Zulime, Cissy’s parents. Alls I know is I hope that Cissy isn’t stuck in that godforsaken place, trapped like residue on the lip of a glass.

That’s what we are now, me, Alice, and the new ghost, whoever the hell she is: smudges, crusty bits, fingerprints, like stains left over from a faulty dishwasher.

Who knows. Maybe this is the price we pay. Penance, like my mom believed in.

You want to know what we’re paying for?