Pain then, little pain like someone pricking at her skin with a sharp sewing needle, and so she opened her hand again. But the spider was gone and there were only three pink Xanax, instead; Niki put the extra pill back into the bottle, set the bottle down on the floor beside her. She exhaled slowly and then took a deep, hitching breath. Her heart was racing, adrenaline-dizzy rush and beads of cold sweat, a faintly metallic taste like aluminum in her mouth.
You hold it all inside, you hold it all in, you hold it all inside you…
Niki chewed her lower lip and concentrated on breathing more slowly, breathing evenly, knew from experience she’d only wind up hyperventilating if she didn’t. She stared at her palm like a fortune-teller trying to divine the future from two Xanax; but there was something else there, something other than the pills, so small she hadn’t noticed it at first. A pinpoint welt, raised skin gone a slightly brighter shade of pink than her medication, and she closed her hand again, making a fist so tight her short nails dug painfully into her flesh.
The song ended, and this time Niki pulled the headphones off, let them fall to the floor among the CDs. The noise drew Marvin’s attention, but only for a moment. She forced a smile for him, something false but credible enough to pass for a smile, a strained charm against his questions, and he smiled back, relieved, and let his eyes drift once more to his book.
Not real, she whispered, not aloud but safe inside her head, the way that Dr. Dalby had taught her. Not real at all. Even if it meant something, even if I needed to see it and pay attention and remember I saw it, nothing real.
Like a memory or a ghost. Nothing that can hurt me.
But when she opened her hand again the welt was still there, the swelling a little more pronounced than before, and her palm had begun to throb slightly. The patient, faithful Xanax, as well, and four half-moon dimples left by her fingernails; any harder and she might have drawn blood, and that would have freaked Marvin out for sure.
Don’t you lock up. Keep moving, and so she pressed her lips to her hand; the small welt felt hot when the tip of her tongue brushed over it, and Niki dry-swallowed the pills. She snapped the cap back on the Xanax bottle, took the Elavil next, then the Klonopin last of all, this routine methodical as counting rosary beads, and she drank all the water Marvin had brought her, even though it was warm and tasted faintly of dishwashing liquid. If she hadn’t he might have asked why, and one question could have led to another, and another. She set the prescription bottles back on the speaker, pressed the OFF button on the CD player, and “I think I’ll go to bed now,” she said. “I’ll see you in the morning, Marvin.”
“Good night, dear,” Marvin replied, not bothering to look up at her. “Sweet dreams.”
“Yeah. You too,” she whispered, and then Niki took a deep breath and climbed the stairs alone.
Awaking from a dream of something she should have done differently, something lost, and Niki Ky stared up at the ceiling for a few minutes before she rolled over and looked at the alarm clock. LED numbers and letters that glowed the same murky yellow-green as cartoon toxic waste, 6:07 A.M., and the darkness outside the bedroom window in case she needed a second opinion. Niki watched the window, wondering what woke her so suddenly, so completely, and if she was going to be able to get to sleep again. Her dreams, especially the very bad ones, usually left her disoriented for hours, uncertain if this world was real or if the other might have been. She’d once argued with Dr. Dalby for an hour over whether or not anyone could ever know the difference, could ever be sure.
And then Niki realized that her right hand was still hurting, so maybe that was what had pulled her out of the dream place; she held it up and examined her palm in the darkness, the pale, reflected glow of the city coming in through the curtains, and so she could make out the welt, swollen as fat and dark as a red-wasp sting. Something she’d hoped had only been part of the dream, the white spider pill and her injured hand; she touched it gently, tentatively, with the fingers of her left hand, pressed the soft pad of her index finger against the swelling, and it felt hard and feverish. Niki winced and sat up, switched on the lamp beside the bed, a Tiffany-shaded reading lamp Daria had given her as a gift on her twenty-sixth birthday, blue and green and violet kaleidoscope glass and the bronze mermaid rising graceful from the base, the whole sea caught in her outstretched arms.
Niki leaned back against the tall oak headboard and squinted at her hand; the lamplight hurt her eyes and she closed them for a second or two, opened them and blinked as her stubborn pupils began to adjust. The swelling was almost as big around as a quarter now, a purple-red hill disrupting the familiar topography of her hand, an ugly new obstacle for her troubled lifeline, and Niki touched it again. The solid center of the bump seemed to roll very slightly, as though a steel bead had been inserted just underneath the skin. She pushed at it a little harder, stopped when the pain made her eyes begin to water, tried to close her hand so she wouldn’t have to look at it anymore, but the muscles ached too much to make a fist.
“Shit,” she whispered, thinking that she should go to the bathroom down the hall and put something on the swelling, Bactine or Neosporin cream, maybe a Band-Aid, too. That she should probably show it to Marvin in the morning; no need to tell him about the tiny white spider, but surely this was real enough that even he could see it.
“Maybe you should cut it out,” said the boy standing at the foot of the bed, and when she looked up at him he smiled and his teeth were the color of polished hematite. He must have been there all along, watching her, waiting; his thin, solemn face was dirty, dirty face and dirtier hands, black grime beneath his nails. He held his head at an odd angle, like it was too heavy or his neck too weak to support it properly, and there was a ring of bruises circling his throat. The boy was dead.
“It might start to fester,” he said. “You should find a razor and cut it out before it does.”
“Maybe. I’ll ask Marvin about it in the morning,” Niki said, talking to a dead boy with a crooked neck, a dead boy standing there in her bedroom, and she knew she wasn’t that crazy, so she was still dreaming, same act, different scene, that’s all.
“You shouldn’t wait that long, Niki. It might be too late by then. It might eat in too deep and you’ll never get it back out.”
“How do you know my name?” she asked him, and the boy smiled at her again, a cold, secretive kind of smile, she thought. A smile because she didn’t understand and he did, that sort of a smile.
“You take too many pills,” he said, his dark, iron-ore teeth moving up and down, something nestled at the corner of his mouth that might have been a scab or an insect. “You don’t remember things you should. You don’t remember me.”
And then she does, and Niki closes her eyes, lies down hoping that she can force the dream to change again, some less tangible nightmare, some lesser regret or failure looking to settle the score with her.
“You never even told that fucking shrink of yours about me, Nicolan,” Danny Boudreaux said. “Daria pays someone a hundred and fifty dollars an hour just to listen to you whine, and you don’t even have the guts to start at the beginning.”
“Go away,” Niki whispered. “Leave me alone,” and she reached for Daria’s pillow and put it over her head, dim hope that he would go away if he couldn’t see her face anymore.
“You’re never going to be able to run that fast,” he sneered, and Niki felt all the sheets and blankets yanked suddenly away, the violent flutter of cloth like a fleeing ghost, and a damp gust of air washed over her. Heavy, smothering air too dank even for a San Francisco autumn morning, the stench of mold and mushrooms, stagnant water and vegetable rot, and she would drown in half the time it took to scream.
“Yeah, you should definitely cut it out now,” the dead boy said, and when she opened her eyes, Niki was standing at the center of the bed, naked and shivering, staring down at the discarded bedclothes strewn across the floor; polished hardwood and clean white sheets, the purple wool blanket they
’d had since Colorado lying in a rumpled wad near the closet door, and there was no one in the room but her.
“Wake up,” she said, but nothing changed, not the shadows or the cloying, mildew stink that still hung thick around her, the frigid, syrup-thick air that seemed to cling to her bare arms and legs, her exposed belly and breasts, and she couldn’t even remember taking off her T-shirt. But there it was on the floor, tangled up with the sheets, and her panties almost all the way over by the bedroom door.
Her hand throbbed, and when she called for Marvin her breath fogged in the freezing air.
He can’t hear me, she thought. Marvin isn’t anywhere in this dream and he can’t hear me and he’ll never come to wake me up.
There was a high, scraping noise at the window, then, and Niki turned too slowly, caught only the very briefest glimpse between and through the curtains, mercifully brief sight of whatever had been looking in at her, whatever had seen her scared and naked and talking to herself or Danny Boudreaux. A lingering, animate pool of night mashing itself flat against the glass, and then it was gone, and she could see the sloping rooftops and the predawn sky again.
Nothing that can hurt me. Nothing real.
Niki had begun to shiver, and she stepped down off the bed, stepped past the purple blanket and opened the closet door. There were small, murmuring things hiding in there, back behind the coat hangers and her dresses, behind old shoe boxes, things that bristled like hedgehogs and watched her with painted, porcelain eyes. But she was pretty sure they wouldn’t bother her, not if she left them alone, that they were almost as afraid of dead boys and the fleeting, voyeur shape at the window as she was. They let her have what she needed, a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, so she ignored them. Niki pulled the jeans on, wrestled the sweatshirt over her head, not bothering with underwear, no time, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.
Where you going now, Nicolan? someone whispered, someone hiding under the bed; at least it wasn’t Danny’s voice, wasn’t anyone else she recognized. What will we say, if they come looking for you again? They have the keys, you know?
Niki finished buttoning the fly of her jeans, and by then her hand was hurting so badly, raw and pulsing ache like a rotting tooth, like cancer, and she had to stop and lean against the wall for a moment. Violet-white swirls of living light behind her eyes, inside her head, brilliant, twitching worms that would devour her if she let them.
The Lady of Situations, the dusty voice beneath the bed purled, except now Niki was pretty sure it was two voices, or three, speaking in almost-perfect unison. She wanted the keys, but they stole them from her and locked them all away in gray towers of fire and barbed wire, didn’t they?
The heart keys, the soul keys, the Diamond Key to the Third Day of June and Lost Faith.
She opened the Pit, Nicolan, and now He counts all the nights of your life on the fingers of dead whores.
She didn’t tell them to shut the fuck up, wanted to but she didn’t, because perhaps those were all things that she needed to know, or maybe it would be worse if they stopped talking and came out from under the bed. Niki Ky stood still, sweating, giddy sick, her stomach gone as bitter as arsenic, and she listened to the voices while the pain ebbed and faded slowly down to something that couldn’t pull her apart if that’s what it decided she was there for.
Do you even know the way down to her? The road beyond the whistling dogs, Niki, and never mind the bricks. Those bricks aren’t gold, no, they’re only yellow so you’ll think they’re gold.
Yellow is the color of decay and duplicity, the color of broken promises.
Yellow is the man with your heart.
And when they were finally done, when she was sure that she’d heard every single word, Niki crossed the bedroom to the telephone sitting on the dresser. “Wake up,” she said, hopeless, but she said it one last time anyway, just in case, and then she picked up the receiver.
A rainy, cool summer afternoon, four months before that night of ghosts or memories gone as dry and tangible as ghosts, and Dr. Dalby watched her and fiddled patiently with one end of his meticulously groomed salt-and-pepper mustache, stared out at Niki through the glasses that made his eyes look much too big for his wrinkled face.
“You take your time,” he said, smiled his storybook grandfather smile, and glanced at the clock on his desk.
She nodded and watched the low, gauzy clouds drifting above the city. The psychologist’s office had one big window and a view of the bay, a stingy glimpse of Alcatraz if Niki stood on the couch. Nothing like a real doctor’s office, velvet wallpaper the bottomless color of evergreen forests, hemlock green walls and Edwardian antiques, old books and the cherry-sweet smell of his pipe that always reminded Niki of her parents’ tobacco shop in New Orleans. There was a small brocade pillow on the sofa, woven anemones and silver-leafed geraniums, and she hugged the pillow while she talked.
“Spyder hung herself,” Niki said, finally. “While I was asleep, she hung herself.”
Dr. Dalby took a very deep breath and chewed thoughtfully at the stem of his pipe; she didn’t have to take her eyes off the window, the slate gray bay and the clouds, to know that he was watching her with that expression of his, trademark therapist face that was part concern and part curiosity, part studied courtesy for crazy girls. Waiting quietly to see if she was done (he’d never interrupted her, not even once) and then, “That’s not what you told me before,” he said.
“I was confused before. What I told you before was a dream. But I know the difference now.”
“What did she use to hang herself, Nicolan?”
“She used an extension cord,” Niki replied. “An orange extension cord from the kitchen,” and she hugged the brocade pillow a little bit tighter, hugged it the way a drowning woman might cling to a life preserver.
“Look at me, please,” and she did, looked into his pale blue eyes behind those thick bifocal lenses, forced herself not to turn away again when he leaned towards her.
“You won’t ever get better by lying to me,” he said.
“But I’m not lying.”
“You’re not telling the truth, so what would you call it? If Spyder hung herself, why didn’t the police find her body? Why did you and Daria and your friends run away, if she only hung herself?”
“We were scared,” Niki said, trying hard to sound convincing, like she, at least, believed what she was saying. “They were afraid that I’d get in trouble.”
Dr. Dalby chewed his pipe for a moment, glanced at the clock again, then back at Niki. He was frowning, and she wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen him do that before.
“The first time I saw you and Daria, I said that I would listen to whatever either of you needed to tell me,” he said. “And that I would always be open to the possibility that you were telling me the truth, no matter how bizarre or unlikely that truth might seem, as long as I thought you believed it yourselves.”
“I don’t know why the police didn’t find her,” Niki said intently, almost whispering. “I don’t know,” and she did turn away from him, then; better to watch the formless, shifting clouds than the doubt gathering on his face.
“I want to be well and I can’t if I believe the things I told you. I don’t think I can even be alive if I have to keep believing in the things I told you.”
“You’re frightened,” he said.
“Yes, I am. I’m afraid,” and Niki bit down on the tip of her tongue, pain to fight back tears she didn’t want to cry, didn’t want him to see; too much like surrender, her sitting there sobbing while he reached for tissue from the big box of Kleenex on his desk.
“What happened to Spyder that night, don’t you think that it’s over?”
“No…I don’t.”
“But if she hung herself, Nicolan, like you say, like you just told me, if that’s all that happened, then there’s nothing in the world for you to be afraid of now, is there?”
“You don’t know,” Niki growled at him. “You don’t know shi
t, old man. Maybe, when I’m dead—” and a trickle of blood and saliva leaked out with the words, slipped between her lips and dribbled slowly down her chin. Her whole mouth filling up with the salty, warm taste of blood, but if Dr. Dalby noticed he didn’t say anything. Didn’t move, didn’t even reach for a Kleenex; Niki wiped her chin with the back of her hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said, forcing anger and fear into something shaped more like calm. She stared back at him and swallowed blood. “I was confused, that’s all. I’m not going to talk anymore today, Dr. Dalby. I bit my tongue and my mouth hurts. I’m not going to talk anymore.”
He nodded, leaned back in his chair, but didn’t take his eyes off her, didn’t turn away or let her go early, and Niki sat silently on the couch and watched the rain until her hour was up.
Niki waited on top of the low, concrete wall surrounding Alamo Square, bundled warm in blue fake fur and hiking boots, waiting for the taxi she’d called before leaving the house. She faced dawn, and behind her the last violet and charcoal scraps of night still bruised the western horizon as the world rolled slow and infallible towards the sun, towards the next compulsory day; firelight orange already flashing off the glass and steel husk of downtown, and Daria’s out there somewhere, she thought. Someplace beyond the white church spires and skyscraper slabs, the gaudy monolith of the Transamerica Pyramid, past the bay and the distant, fog-bound Oakland hills. In some other place, a thousand or two thousand miles away, another world filled up with other people, and Niki wondered if she could find her if she tried, if she told the driver to take her straight to the airport, if she could be half that brave, would she even be able to find Daria, then?
But that’s not where you’re going, not today, and Niki turned quickly, startled and heart racing, because the voice sounded so close, almost right on top of her. The same voice she’d heard speaking to her from under her bed only an hour before, or someone imitating that voice perfectly. But there was nothing there now except the park, the lanes leading into the tall and shadowy trees set farther back from Steiner, towards the wooded center of the square. A few blackbirds and sparrows pecking determinedly at the dew-beaded grass, but no sign of the speaker; a deep puddle of night still hanging on beneath those old trees, though, and Niki stared at it, at the gloom between the trunks and limbs. It sees me, too, she thought.
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