Her mother looked back at her and seemed to agree.
“I can’t believe your grandmother had that sitting in her closet. It’s a perfect fit.”
“I know, right? I think maybe she bought it for my birthday or something,” Maria lied.
“Right. Your birthday,” her mom said skeptically. She tried the doors, and, finding them locked, knocked loudly three times.
After a moment, the doors swung inward, and a short, white-haired man who looked entirely too cheerful stood waiting to greet them.
“Ah, look at you,” he said brightly, clapping his hands together. “Maria, I haven’t seen you since you were this high. And, Rafael, you were just a baby.”
“I go by Rafi now,” Rafi mumbled.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Mom said, sticking out her hand for a handshake.
“You’re right, of course,” the man said, taking Mom’s hand warmly in both of his. “I’m Winston Yarmuth, the pastor here. And you’re Sofia Lopez. I’ve just heard so many wonderful things from Esmerelda, I feel like I already know all of you.”
Mom smiled. “How can we help you set up, Mr. Yarmuth?”
“Help me? Oh, no, Ms. Lopez, everything is finished. Esmerelda had so many friends here. They all stayed late to help set up last night.”
They followed Pastor Yarmuth into the sanctuary and saw immediately what he meant. There were flowers everywhere. On the pews, on the front podium, even in the windows. There had been a brief moment on the drive over when Maria wondered what would happen if no one came to the funeral but Derek’s family and them. Grandma Esme always seemed to live such a solitary existence, and rarely talked to Maria about what she did when Maria wasn’t there, unless it was to tell her stories about the past.
With nothing left to do but wait, Mom, Rafi, and Maria sat in the very front pew. Rafi borrowed Mom’s phone and played a game that involved lining up pieces of fruit on a checkerboard. Maria pulled out a hymnal and turned to the back, where the stories behind many of the songs could be found.
Finally, around nine fifteen, people started to trickle in. Some people came as families, others by themselves, but all of them seemed to know one another. And all of them came first to Pastor Yarmuth, and then, after he pointed them out, to Maria’s family. Mom made Rafi put the phone away and stand up, and the three of them had to give hugs to one person after another, all of whom said they had heard so many wonderful things from Esmerelda.
“Wow. I guess she was pretty popular, huh?” Rafi said, when at last the church looked to be filled to capacity. Maria had to agree.
With five minutes until the service began, Derek’s family came hurrying through the doors. Derek’s dad spotted them right away and headed up to say hello, though there weren’t any more seats left in the front pew.
“Sorry we’re late,” Mr. Overton said. “Derek couldn’t find his tie this morning, and then I took a wrong turn by the bypass.”
Maria caught Derek’s eye and raised her eyebrows. She was eager to tell him what had happened last night with the ring and the dress. But he only offered her a weak smile in return, as if the morning had been even more hectic than his dad was letting on.
Then Maria noticed the woman standing next to Derek. Tall, slender, and stunningly pretty, this had to be his great-aunt Luellen. She wore a black hat with a brim that swept diagonally across her forehead, all but covering the right side of her face. Her posture made her look sharp but casual at the same time, like a cursive S. She looked the way Maria imagined all women in New York did.
“You must be Maria,” she said in a rich, smoky voice. She took Maria’s hands in hers and squeezed. “I was so sorry to hear about your loss.”
“Nice to meet you,” Maria said, pulling her hands back to her sides. She understood now why Derek’s mom had said Luellen was a little scary. But Derek’s parents were still talking to Mom, and Rafi was listening in, clearly bored. Derek stared off into space. Maria couldn’t decide whether or not he was avoiding her eyes. Well, fine, then, she thought.
“That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing,” Luellen said.
“Thank you. It was my grandmother’s.”
Luellen pinched the fabric of Maria’s shoulder strap between her fingers. After an uncomfortably long moment, she leaned in and said, “You know, I actually saw your grandmother once, a long time ago. Did you know she used to travel with a famous circus?”
Maria didn’t know what to say. Derek came out of whatever trance he’d been in, equally surprised. That was a relief, at least.
“You saw my grandma Esme do a show?”
“Oh, yes. Many years ago now, in a charming little village in Switzerland. I was there on business, and I was intrigued by an advertisement for the Amazing Arturo and Esmerelda the Magnificent. They were the headliners of the whole circus, you see. Your grandmother was the only lion tamer at that time — or since, as far as I know — who could control her beast with nothing but a whistle. Arturo, meanwhile, would do the most unbelievable things with just a handkerchief and a mirror. Their grand finale was to make the lion disappear. They really were quite extraordinary together. I’ll never forget it.”
Maria started to ask whether there had been any other animals involved in the act, but Pastor Yarmuth called the service to order then, and the Overtons had to make their way to the only pew still open, the very last one in the back.
Maria struggled to focus on Pastor Yarmuth’s speech. With each new warm story he told, she only missed her grandmother more.
She stared up into the tall ceiling of the sanctuary. She could see past the wood beams to the place where all the walls of the church came together in a point, the inside of the steeple. She was surprised — and then not so surprised — to see that a swarm of spiders had gathered in the rafters, their webs like thick clouds from the sky beyond.
These weren’t the black spiders with red hourglasses that meant your time was up. These were the brown spiders that had made Maria’s dress. These were the spiders that had been Grandma Esme’s friends. These were the spiders that had come to say good-bye.
Maria wished that she had worn her ring. She wanted to tell the spiders thank you.
The service itself was done in no time. It was the walk back to the car, and then the drive to the cemetery, that took forever.
The crowd at the gravesite was smaller than it had been at the church. Derek’s family had taken him on to school, and many of the church members had gone their separate ways. But a smaller crowd still meant a lot of people.
Almost everyone here was crying. Mom wept quietly, her back held straight and her hands bunched in a knot. Even Rafi had tears in his eyes.
Maria didn’t cry. She kept her composure. A shadow queen is still a queen, she thought.
Then, from behind a tree across the way, a moving shape caught Maria’s eye. The shape was black and seemed human at first, but the more Maria watched it, the less human it seemed. One moment it looked like a distant grave; the next it just looked like the thin shadow of the tree. Maria squinted her eyes and stared, and for a second she was sure that yes, it was a person — a man in a black suit who was very tall and very thin — but as soon as she’d seen him, he’d disappeared again.
And then Maria was being ushered forward by her mother. She was supposed to throw a handful of dirt on Grandma Esme’s grave. Maria hesitated. This felt like saying she agreed with the burial — that she wanted it to happen, or allowed it somehow. But she knew she’d start a fight if she refused to do it, so she picked up her handful of dirt and threw it in.
By the time she looked up, the man or the shadow was nowhere in sight.
As a final sign of how upside down the day was, Rob was allowed to spend the night with Rafi, even though it was a school night.
When Maria answered the door, and Rob dashed straight back to Rafi’s room with his overnight bag, Mr. McCormick handed Maria a bowl of banana pudding with an apologetic smile. Before she could say that they hadn
’t finished the first one, Mr. McCormick said, “Sorry about this. I guess Terry’s gone bananas from all the party planning this week.”
Maria laughed politely and thanked him for the pudding. She’d completely forgotten Claire’s birthday party was the next day.
“Will we see you at our house tomorrow night?” Mr. McCormick said warmly.
“No, I —” She’d started to say that she hadn’t been invited, since apparently he didn’t know. She liked the idea of Claire getting in trouble with her parents. But now didn’t seem like the time to shatter Mr. McCormick’s image of his daughter, right when he’d done her family a kindness. “I just have so much going on this week. Helping my mom and all.”
“Right, of course. Where are my manners? I’m so sorry about your grandmother.”
Maria shrugged. She still didn’t know how to respond when adults said this.
“Please tell your mother hello, and thanks again for putting up with Rob tonight. You call me if he gives you any trouble.”
Mr. McCormick winked at her and headed back to his car. He really was a nice man. A little silly — not at all like Maria imagined her own father would be — but nice. How he was the father of two such different children Maria would never understand. But then, she supposed she and Rafi didn’t exactly have that much in common, either.
Maria took the banana pudding to the fridge and found her mother at the kitchen table, staring off into space again.
“You okay?” Maria asked.
“What? Oh, yeah,” her mom replied. “Just thinking.”
“Mrs. McCormick sent over another banana pudding.”
“But we haven’t even touched the last one.”
Maria held up her hands as if to say, What did you want me to do? Send it back?
“So Rob is here?”
“Yeah, he went back to Rafi’s room.”
“Good,” Mom said. “I’m glad Rafi is able to do some laughing tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, nothing. I just worry about you kids sometimes. One death is a lot, but two? I don’t want you and your brother growing up thinking life is this big, sad thing.”
“I don’t think that,” Maria said. “I laugh all the time.”
“Do you?” Mom said, looking at Maria earnestly.
Maria laughed. “Yes, Mom. See?” She tugged at the edge of her shirt. “Derek makes me laugh,” she said quietly.
“That’s true. Derek is a good egg.”
“He seemed a little weird this morning.”
“At the funeral?”
Maria nodded.
“Well, he was very close to your grandmother, too, you know. Grief affects us all differently.”
“Yeah,” Maria said. She could hear the steady thwack thwack of two wooden swords from the direction of Rafi’s room.
Mom drifted back to thinking whatever she was thinking, and Maria left her to it.
She slipped back into her room and pulled down one of her favorite books, Agatha at Sea, about a royal kitchen maid who finds a sword in the castle moat and becomes a pirate. Rereading her favorite books always made her feel happy and safe, because she already knew what would happen in the end. She wished that real life could work that way — that she could see the future, and that the future she saw would be always happy.
Tonight, Maria was having a hard time focusing on reading. Her eyes kept drifting over to her nightstand, where the spider ring was hiding in its box. Finally, she set her book down in defeat, promising herself that she’d just look at the ring for a second and then put it away.
She took out the ring and slipped it on her finger. It was no longer warm, which was a small relief. Hopefully that meant it hadn’t tried to do any magic without her.
Maria made her breath as quiet as possible. She cupped her hands behind her ears, supposing that maybe she’d be able to hear the spiders the way she’d started to last night. But Maria heard nothing. Even the dueling sounds from her brother’s room had stopped.
Maria was shocked to discover that she knew why. Rafi and Rob were on their way to her room.
She followed the faint tremors of their footsteps as they tiptoed down the hallway and up to her door. It wasn’t that she could see them, exactly, or that she’d had a premonition of something that would happen soon — it was that she could feel the vibrations, actually, physically, as if the house were her web and Rob and Rafi had stumbled into it.
She stared at her door a full second before Rafi pushed it open. Instantly, her brother took a step backward and gasped.
“What are you doing?” he said, his voice cracking. Rob stood beside and a little behind him. Both boys looked terrified.
“What do you mean?” Maria asked, smoothing out the blanket on the bed next to her, mostly so she could hide her hand under her pillow and slip off the ring.
“You were staring at something, and your eyes …”
“My eyes what? What are you talking about, Rafi?”
“It looked like your eyes were totally black,” Rob said. Rafi seemed to have gone mute.
“Very funny,” Maria said. She didn’t think the boys were kidding, but she hoped if she could convince them she did, they would drop the subject.
After a long pause, Rob smiled, and Rafi said, “Don’t do that again, whatever it was. It was creepy.”
Maria laughed, doing her best impression of someone who wasn’t afraid. “Whatever you say.”
“Hey, look at that,” Rob said, pointing at something over Maria’s shoulder. She followed his finger and saw, in the far corner of her ceiling, the biggest spiderweb she had ever seen. She didn’t know how she’d missed it earlier.
“Man, Maria, Mom’s going to be mad when she sees you didn’t clean your room,” Rafi chided.
“I did too clean my room,” Maria said. “And if you tell her about this, I’ll tell her you snuck in my room and tried to scare me.”
Rafi stuck out his tongue at her.
“It’s a good thing my sister’s not here to see this,” Rob said. “She hates spiders. What’s that thing called when you’re afraid of them?”
“Arachnophobia?” Maria said.
“Yeah, that’s it. Claire is totally that.”
Maria felt something click in the back of her brain. An idea was forming there, and she was a little ashamed of it, but she told herself it was more of a dream than a plan. At least, for now.
“Are you going to her party tomorrow?” Maria asked Rob.
“Ew, no,” he said. “I heard Claire tell one of her friends that she was hoping they’d play truth or dare. I don’t want to be anywhere near that party.”
Maria started to ask something else, but Rafi seemed annoyed that his friend and his sister were having a conversation without him, so he grabbed Rob by the arm and said, “Come on, let’s go back to my room.” Just like that, they left Maria alone.
She jumped up and looked in her mirror. Her eyes weren’t black, except in the middle where they were always black. They were brown and normal. She’d really been scared for a second there.
She decided she wouldn’t grab the broom and take down the spiderweb on the ceiling. As strange as it was, she had to believe the spiders were her friends. And if she was going to pull off her idea, which was seeming less and less like a dream and more and more like a full-fledged plan, she was going to need her new friends’ help.
She brushed her teeth quickly and got ready for bed. She pulled out the ring from under her pillow and slipped it back on, climbing under her covers.
She turned out the light and closed her eyes. In the darkness, she began to imagine another beautiful dress. This one wasn’t for a funeral, though. The dress in her head was a party dress.
As Maria made her way to English class the next day, she was playing a little game in her head. The game was like one of those books where the story changes based on the choices you make — if you open the locked chest, turn to page fifty-three. On page fifty-three, a snake
jumps out and bites you. The end.
The choices that were playing in Maria’s head had to do with whether or not Claire was nice to her today. If Claire was nice to her, Maria would forget her whole plan. But if Claire was mean …
Maria smoothed out the folds in her new dress. She’d decided that it was too pretty not to wear to school, even though that meant wearing a jacket to cover her arms, and getting the knee-length skirt a little wrinkled on the bus.
She reached her classroom. She walked through the door.
She saw Claire’s face.
For the tiniest fraction of a second, Claire’s eyes went soft and her mouth turned down, registering sympathy for Maria’s loss. But then, like one of those movies they’d watched in science that shows a flower dying in fast-forward, Claire’s face twisted into jealousy before decomposing into a quiet rage.
Maria could guess why Claire was jealous. She got to the front of her row and did a confident twirl, letting the hem of her dress spiral out like a movie star’s. Her classmates all locked their eyes on her, enthralled. It was the first time they’d seen her since Grandma Esme had died.
But for the moment, the only reaction that really mattered was Claire’s, and Claire’s face looked like the snake from page fifty-three, ready to strike.
“Nice dress,” she sneered, although she was unable to hide all the envy from her voice. “Where’d you get it, the dollar store?”
“It’s from Europe, actually,” Maria said, sitting down.
Claire choked on a laugh, then lapsed into silence for a full ten seconds. She turned to Mark and Tina. “Don’t forget, my party’s at six thirty,” she said. “All the cool people will be there.”
Mark and Tina smiled, but they looked a little nervous, too. They — and the rest of the class — could feel that something had changed in Maria. Something that went deeper than just a strange and expensive new outfit. Maria had power. Claire’s insults practically bounced off her.
The Spider Ring Page 5