The Evening Spider (6 page)

Haverton, Connecticut

December 9, 2014

I
woke up a little before five—relieved that I'd gotten a few hours of sleep, but vaguely annoyed that my early waking had no apparent purpose. Lucy was not crying. What, then, had wakened me?

Shut up, please.

Yes. That was it. Those words had drifted into my head as I slept—a vestige of a dream that would otherwise have slipped back into my subconscious unnoticed—and woken me up.

Shut up, please.

I stared into the morning gloom, avoiding looking at the little green light of Lucy's monitor. I'd never been great at getting back to sleep in the morning. By six o'clock, I gave up trying. Lucy was likely to be up within a half hour, so if I was successful, it would only end in frustration. After briefly poking my head into Lucy's room to watch her chest rise and fall, I tiptoed down the stairs. In the kitchen, I started up some coffee.

While the coffee machine grunted, I sat in our cold kitchen and thought about Wendy. Wendy, my freshman roommate in college. Wendy, about whom I'd dreamt last night.

Shut up, please.

Wendy used to say that to me while I was sleeping sometimes—usually in a small and pleading tone. Probably she said it only two or three times, but my friend Kristin and I had such a great time making fun of it, it felt like more often.

The first time or two that it happened, I thought I imagined it—an almost elfin voice in my dreams asking me to kindly shut up.

The next time, I recognized Wendy's voice through the haze and asked her about it the following morning.

Well,
Wendy had said, blushing bright beneath her half-grown-out bangs.
You kind of snore.

And telling me to shut up . . . does that help? Does it make me stop?

Sometimes, yeah.

Those bangs drove me crazy. I knew that Wendy showered pretty frequently, and yet her hair always seemed wilted with oil. Maybe it was because she always fingered her hair so much, knotting and unknotting it while she studied or talked on the phone.

Do you want me to say something more polite?
Wendy sat up in her bed and pulled her skinny knees to her chest.

No,
I mumbled.
By all means, do what works.

Wendy promptly stopped. She never spoke to me again in my sleep—to my knowledge, anyway.

Still, my friend Kristin and I got a kick out of telling each other to
shut up, please—
and combining other polite turns of phrase with rude ones.

Go to hell, ma'am.

Pardon me, bitch.

You're so fucking welcome.

Kristin and I were such idiots.

But maybe
that
was what I was hearing in my head at night. The beginning of a
shut up, please.
Starting with the
shhhhh,
but never fully forming.

I poured a cup of coffee and opened my laptop. Closing the site about baby bruises that I'd searched the previous night, I opened a new tab and typed
Hoey.

That had been Wendy's last name.

Hoey
.

I remembered it well because when I first saw Wendy's name on my room assignment—all those years ago—I'd thought it looked like “hooey.”
Wendy Hooey? That's funny. Oh. No. Wendy
Hoey.

And her mother's name? Wendy had sometimes used her mother's first name when addressing her exasperatedly over the phone. It was something a bit unusual for her generation—Selena or Serena or something like that.

I heard Chad shuffling down the stairs. When I looked up, he was standing in the kitchen doorway with Lucy in his arms. He looked like a zombie, but Lucy was bright-eyed and ready for action. She squealed at the sight of me—a habit of hers that I still found disconcerting.
No one has ever thought I was all that great, ever,
I thought sometimes.
What's wrong with Lucy, that she isn't as discerning as the rest of the world?

“Hey, sweetie,” I said.

As I got up and took out a box of baby oatmeal, I realized that I hadn't greeted Chad at all. Maybe “sweetie” could cover him, if he wanted to read it that way.

“Hi, hon,” I added.

“Hey.” He yawned. “Here comes bruiser baby. Black eye and all.”

“It's not a black eye,” I snapped.

“I was just kidding. It really doesn't look that bad. I mean, the yellowish part is a little gross, but I think it's healing.”

“Yeah,” I stared at my computer screen.
Selena? Serena?
“You said you wanted to be more involved in Lucy's meals once she started on solid food. Remember that?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Well, here you are,” I said, sweeping my hand over the oatmeal box before settling back into my kitchen chair.

“What do you usually mix it with?”

I took a patient sip of my coffee. “A couple of ounces of Red Bull.”

“Pumped milk from the freezer?” Chad asked.

“Water's fine this time,” I said “She gets plenty of milk.”

“Are you okay?” Chad asked, mixing the oatmeal.

“Yeah,” I murmured. “I just had a bad dream.”

“You seem tired.”

Lucy gurgled at me, and I fluttered my fingernails against her high chair table in response.

“Well, I
am
tired. I couldn't go back to sleep.”

Returning my hands to the keys, I Googled Selena Hoey and Serena Hoey. I found no Selena Hoey, but a couple of Serena Hoeys. One in Ireland. One in Rhode Island. Wendy had been from Massachusetts, but of course her parents might have moved in the past decade and a half.

“Was I in it?” Chad asked.

“In what?”

Chad sat across from Lucy and began to feed her. “Your dream, Abby.”

“No,” I said, staring at the computer screen. So I knew where Serena Hoey lived now. What exactly did I think I was going to do with this information?

“Do I snore?” I asked.

“Maaaaah!” Lucy squealed in wild anticipation.

Chad fed her a large spoonful of oatmeal. A blob of it stuck to her cheek. “Not generally. Why? Are you trying to tell me that
I
snore?”

“No.”

“You getting enough sleep, you think?”

“Actually . . . yeah. Since Lucy doesn't wake up at night as much as she used to.”

This was another reason I'd felt uncomfortable at that mothers' group at the library. I was the only one who didn't nurse at night anymore. Sure, Lucy still had her occasional two
A
.
M
. wakeups. But usually she only required a replaced pacifier and a bit of rocking. She was a healthy weight and was learning the basic human skill of surviving a night without a meal. Why mess with that? Of course, I'd never say that to the other mothers.

She doesn't eat at night anymore?
That mom Sara had asked me that. The red-eyed but perfectly coiffed one. The one with the very bald baby—so bald that her head practically sparkled.
Are you worried about losing your supply?

No,
I'd said, vaguely unsettled by the word “supply.”
Should I be?

“I'm not sure I should admit this,” Chad said. “But I dreamt about pennies.”

I smiled. “Filthy, Chad.”

“I had this armor . . . like chain mail. It was all pennies.”

I laughed, looking up. “You didn't dream that. You made that up.”

Chad shrugged and fed Lucy another oversized scoop of oatmeal. “Maybe I did, yeah. But at least I made you laugh. Hey—I forgot I was going to ask you about something.”

He flipped through the mail on the counter and handed me a folded piece of plain white computer paper.

“This was in with the mail,” he said as I opened it. It said
Gerard Barnett
in blue ink. Following that was a phone number.

“Oh!” I said. “Patty must've left this. Patty our neighbor. She and I were talking about the Barnetts, who used to own this house, and . . . anyway, she thought I might want to call him. He's got some old genealogical stuff about the family, or something like that.”

Chad bobbled his head back and forth, considering this. “Huh. You know, you might enjoy a history project right now. That might be good for you.”

I clicked on a White Pages site. The Hoeys lived on a street named Willow Road. Well, wasn't that memorable? Since Wendy and Willow were alliterative? And since Willow was so very close to
weeping
?

“What do you mean, good for me?” I said.

“I just meant, since you're not teaching this year. Something that's not baby related.”

“A history project,” I said, closing my laptop. “Sure.”

Wendy. Willow. Weeping.

Unfortunately, I'm unemployed at the moment,
Gerard Barnett had told me over the phone.
I can meet pretty much whenever you want.

Gerard suggested we meet at an Arby's near his house. I told him that was perfect. I didn't imagine that very many people dined in at Arby's at two in the afternoon, and anyone who did wouldn't likely be offended at the presence of a potentially screaming baby.

We met at the side door, as we'd agreed. Gerard was about fifty, with a very pink face, a receding hairline of close-cut blond-white hair, and a firm but sweaty handshake.

“You getting anything?” he asked after we went inside and selected a table by the windows. “Cuz I'm not.”

I felt one of us had to order something, so I got a coffee—plus a plastic spoon for Lucy to hold. By the time I returned to the table, Gerard had shed his jacket to reveal a Bruins T-shirt that was slightly too small for his blush biceps.

“Cute kid,” Gerard said, a smile spreading across his fleshy cheeks. Up close, I saw that his face wasn't a robust sunburn sort of pink. Rather, his skin seemed thin and delicate, with a surprising rosiness bursting through. In general, he had sort of a football coach way about him. I wondered what his job had been before he'd lost it.

“Thanks.” I lifted Lucy out of her car carrier and positioned her to face Gerard.

So,” he said. “Give me an idea of what you're looking for
here. Old-timey history, or like when was the last time Ed and Shirley replaced the roof?”

“Most of the structural stuff we know about from the sale documents.”

“Uh huh. So you're wondering about . . .
what
part of the house, exactly?”

“Well,” I said hurriedly. “I don't know if Patty told you in her text that I'm a history teacher. So maybe it's just a personal quirk of mine. But when a building is that old, I just start to wonder about everyone who passed through there. A lot of the time you wonder but you're not going to get to find out. But in this case . . . well, Patty told me you found some very old materials relating to your family as you were cleaning the house out.”

Gerard nodded. “Yeah. There was a little trunk in the storage space behind the wall.”

“Didn't you find a whole bunch of old letters, or something?”

“Old letters? No. Books. Mostly old law books. They belonged to a guy named Matthew Barnett—who lived in the house in the late 1800s. I remember my grandfather talking about him—he was a pretty well-known lawyer, I guess. His name was in some of them. Anyway, I got a few hundred dollars for them, total, on eBay. I think that's what I mentioned to Patty.”

“Didn't you want to keep them?”

“I kept
one.
One with his name in it. They didn't all have it. Just the one in case I get sentimental in my old age. I'm not a big reader, and I don't have a kid to pass this kind of stuff along to.”

“Oh.” I said. I tried to hide my disappointment. I'd hoped Gerard would have a stash of letters and photographs he'd let me look through—as Patty had implied.

Lucy pumped her plastic spoon up and down like a drunken drum majorette. Gerard watched her for a moment and chuckled before speaking again.

“Now, I have
one
thing I thought you might like to have, though. Thought of it right away when Patty texted me. Stacked in with all those law books I found this one thing . . . this little book of handwritten recipes, baking notes, stuff like that. I've got it in the trunk of my car.”

“Who wrote it?” I asked. “When?”

“Lady named Frances. Frances Flinch Barnett. She wrote her name on the inside cover. She dated some of the recipes. Eighteen seventy-eight, mostly.”

“Well.” I hesitated. “That sounds cool.”

“Doesn't it? Recipes of a real lady who lived in
your
house. You and your daughter could cook some of that stuff together.”

“Yeah, maybe. I'm kind of a crappy cook, but—”

“In the same kitchen,” Gerard interrupted. “Think of that, huh? It'd be a real experience for you.”

I realized in that moment that I had walked into a sales pitch. Uncertain how I wanted to handle it, I shifted the subject.

“Did you ever spend much time in the house?” I asked.

“My aunt and uncle's house?” Gerard puckered his lips, considering the question. “No. Just holidays. My parents usually had Christmas at our house. Thanksgiving was at my uncle Eddie and aunt Shirley's, though.”

“Did you ever stay overnight?”

“No. My folks lived in Hamden then. Close. No reason to sleep over.”

“Never?”

“No. Never. My sister lived in the house for a little while when
we were teenagers. Stephanie had a little falling-out with our parents and stayed with Eddie and Shirley for a couple of months.”

“Oh,” I said. Lucy dropped her spoon, and I reached down to pick it up.

A falling-out with our parents.
These words made my arms stiffen, and my fingers seize up. Lucy would be a teenager someday. Maybe she'd find me intolerable then. Maybe she'd want to move in with my brother. Maybe, in fact, my head would explode.