A Web of Black Widows Read online

  Martin dropped the record on the counter, preoccupied by the clock on the wall behind the clerk. Ten to noon. The Salvation Army sometimes put out their stuff about that time on Tuesdays, and it was on the other side of town. He was going to have to push it. That would be tough with the snow.

  All she said was, "You got a Goodwill card?" But it was enough. After listening to that voice for months, Martin would have recognized it if all she had said was you. It was Laura. Definitely Laura. She had a young voice, a child's voice, but there was a hint of weariness there that spoke of years of hardship buried in her past. He didn't know anything about that past. Hours and hours of her talking, and he still didn't know anything about her, not really, but he knew the weariness.

  She was thin, but not delicate. There was a toughness to her bony arms and legs, as if she was solid all the way through. Skin almost as pale as the snow. Her hair, as straight and shiny, fell to her chin where it curved in and nipped at her neck. He knew how hard she worked to straighten it.

  "Sir?" she said. One eyebrow went up, and it was like a revelation. All those hours of listening and he had never seen that eyebrow go up.

  It was then that he finally laid eyes on the nametag pinned to her blue apron, a shiny silver one slightly askew and smudged with fingerprints. Anne. He felt a moment of confusion until he remembered something she had said: I always go by my middle name when there's another Laura around. Besides, I kinda like it. He remembered there was another Laura who worked the store, an old bulky woman with white hair who always punched in the wrong prices and called him "sugar."

  "I really gotta get going," the man behind him in line said, in the urgent way a kid says he has to go to the bathroom. Martin knew this voice, too. It was Freddie, the schizoid kid who frequented many of the same thrift shops and smelled like he lived in them.

  "Sorry," Martin said, and fumbled for his wallet inside his leather jacket. All the while he couldn't take his eyes off of Laura. He couldn't have been wrong, could he? She was tall, nearly at his eye level, which would make her close to five ten. Never would have guessed that in a million years. Freckles on her nose. Long fingers. No wedding ring.

  The woman's voice faded, replaced by a murmur of an infant. Martin stared at his junk box, then laughed.

  The transmitter may have had no power, but the receiver must have been picking up a signal from another transmitter nearby. He dropped the dolls and scooped the baby monitor out of the bin. When he saw the red light on the receiver, he knew his hunch had been right.

  "That's right," the woman said soothingly. "Shhhhh . . .You're all right now. You're just fine."

  The voice wavered, mixed with static. He heard the baby whimper, start to cry, then fall silent. He heard a tapping that he guessed was her patting the baby on the back. She began humming, though he didn't recognize the song. Curious, he took the receiver inside the condo to see if the signal was stronger. In his galley kitchen the static was even worse, and strangely, the angel fish on the mantle squirmed at the sound. The signal was the same in his room, but in the second room, the room that was once his mother's and was now filled with industrial shelving and cardboard boxes full of inventory, the signal was crystal clear. No static at all.

  He sat on the folding chair in front of the computer and set the receiver on the gray metal desk. The woman and the baby were both quiet. The room was cool—he usually left the heat off in the house while he was out scouting. He peered out the blinds. The rain had stopped, and the sunlight was bright on the glistening road. He didn't think any of his neighbors had children. The place was full of mostly retirees, young dinks, and the occasional divorcee like himself.

  He heard a creak of wood, footsteps on carpet, a screech of metal. He heard the rustle of blankets, the whisper of air rushing out of a mattress. The baby started crying, softly at first, then louder. He heard the woman mutter damn. Another screech, another rustle, and then her humming. The baby's crying grew louder.

  "Shh," she said. "Shh, you've got to go to sleep now, honey. It's very late. You've got to go to sleep. Momma's tired and you've got to go to sleep."

  Martin knew nothing about babies, but he still felt sympathy for the woman. He also felt mild relief that he had never been foolish enough to go down that particular path himself, and he had certainly come close with Rita when he lived in Minnesota. He sighed and reached for the receiver.

  An instrumental version of Jingle Bells played overhead, scratchy and faint. As Martin stared at Laura, the annoyance in her eyes changed to guardedness, and finally she glanced down at her cash register. Oh, no. He was losing her. He finally managed to get the Goodwill card out of his wallet and he dropped it on the counter. The laminated plastic was wrinkled and worn, his handwritten name nearly smudged off. He was suddenly embarrassed by this fact.

  "I guess I come by here a lot, huh?" he said, laughing. Humor was good. Humor could win her back.

  He watched her. She picked up his card and scrutinized it like a bartender checking an ID, then looked at him again. Her eyes softened, not much, just a touch, but it was enough to send his heart soaring. He wanted to ask her phone number. But there was the other part, too, the part that urged him to run out the door and never look back. The feeling was like a bank of storm clouds in the distance on a sunny day, and it made him hesitate.

  Martin had his thumb on the power switch when he heard another voice in the room, a man's voice.

  "You want me to take her, dear?" he said.

  Martin froze, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. The room suddenly felt colder. There was something strangely familiar about the voice.

  Then it came to him. It sounded like his voice. The resemblance was so close it was uncanny. He knew that most people probably wouldn't recognize their voice if they heard it, but he was a special case: when he was still teaching history back at Mankato State, he had spent the long commutes in the car dictating his thoughts into a handheld voice recorder, transcribing the tape when he reached his office. He knew that voice well. Either someone was imitating him as some kind of joke, or it was just an eerie coincidence. Then the woman answered.

  "No, Martin, I got it. Go back to bed."

  She was still smiling when she picked up the record off the counter. Martin liked the way the light pooled in her eyes. The irises were deep brown, almost as black as the pupils. They said so much, those eyes, so much that her voice never did. He saw both shyness and fierceness there.

  "It's got a blue tag," she said. "You get an extra ten percent." She rang it into the cash register. "Your total comes to four twenty-five after the discounts."

  "I got that one," Freddie said, one of his fingers coming into view, pointing, grease under the yellow fingernails. "It's a good one. Not his best, but good."

  Martin paid Freddie no mind. If you believed Freddie, he owned everything and he was just buying things at thrift shops so he could have duplicates. Martin was mesmerized by Laura. Her hair looked as smooth as silk. He knew that she brushed it religiously; he had heard the whisk-whisk of her brush moving through her hair while she talked to the baby. Momma's gotta get out these curls, sweetheart, she had said. Momma's gotta get out these stubborn curls. Her nose pointed up a little at the end, showing her tear-drop shaped nostrils. The nose made him think of a teddy bear. She had three moles that he could see, tiny ones, one under her left eye, one on her neck, and one on her chin.

  That eyebrow went up again. "Sir?"

  "Oh, right," he said. He pulled a wrinkled twenty out of his wallet and handed it to her, holding it just a half second longer than he should have. My name's Martin, he thought. You move here recently? It's a great town. Maybe you'd like somebody to show you around.

  "That bill's seen better days," she said. She punched in the amount and the cash register dinged open.

  She handed him his change. He smiled at her. She smiled briefly, then looked down while she pulled out a blue plastic bag from underneath the counter. He was aware that he must have looke
d like a total dork. Say something, idiot. The moment was slipping away.

  "You're new, aren't you?" he said. Oh, brilliant.

  She hesitated. He could see it on her face. She was measuring him up, trying to decide if he was genuine. She opened her mouth, but in the end it was Freddie who piped in with an answer.

  "She started Tuesday," Freddie said, edging close enough to Martin that Martin couldn't escape the alcohol or the pretzels on Freddie's breath. "Her name's Laura but she goes by Anne cause we got a Laura here. She came down from Washington. That's Washington the state, not the capitol of the United States." He said it like it was three words, you knighted states.

  Martin felt a flash of jealousy. He hated that Freddie knew things about Laura he didn't. "Is that right?" he said, forcing himself to chuckle. He kept his gaze fixed on Laura.

  She laughed. "That's right. Freddie comes in here a lot."

  "So does Martin," Freddie said. "Just not every day like me otherwise you would have seen him by now. He buys things and then sells them to other people on the computer and stuff. He's real good at it."

  Shut up, Martin thought to himself. Just shut the hell up.

  "Really?" she said, looking at Martin. She sounded interested.

  He shrugged. "It's a hobby." It was much more than that, though. It was a way of life—a life with freedoms and possibilities he had come to love. He'd given up the tedium of academia to do it. No more teaching stone-faced freshman about the Monroe Doctrine and other events they could care less about. But when he told most people that, they thought less of him than when he told them it was just a hobby.

  "Like, on eBay?" she said.

  "That’s right. And other places."

  "Any money in it?"

  Martin was on his turf now, and he was enjoying the conversation. "Some. More than you might think." He tapped the record, which was now bagged and sitting on the counter. "This one will probably fetch twenty-five dollars, and it will go quickly."

  "It's a good one," Freddie chimed in.

  Martin ignored him. "It's not exactly big money, but some finds are better than others."

  "I've always kinda wanted to do that," she said. "I just don't know anything about what stuff's worth."

  He saw the invitation on her face. Here was his opportunity. Here was where he could embrace the possibility of a new life. All he had to do was say, well, I'd be happy to talk to you about it. She would give him her number. They would go from there.

  "Well," he said, and that was all.

  She handed him his bag. Her smile had changed to one of politeness, a practiced smile. He watched her a few seconds, but she had already turned to Freddie. He could feel that other life rushing away from him, like a train disappearing into the fog.

  "I know you got a Goodwill card," she said to Freddie.

  Martin walked out of the store.

  For a few days Martin didn't go out, listening with rapt attention to every sound that came from the baby monitor. He didn't hear the voice imitating his as often as he heard Laura's and Penny's—that was the baby's name, also his mother's name—but he heard it often enough to be convinced that someone had spent a lot of time learning to mimic him. That's what he believed at first, but then there were details that could not be explained, things that were spoken that nobody would know except somebody who lived in the house.

  Like how the washing machine would sometimes leak: Dear, are you ever going to get that fixed?

  Or how the heating vent in the spare bedroom, the room that would become the nursery, made a ticking noise when the furnace was running: That sound is going to wake the baby, I swear.

  And little things like how he had a tendency to leave his bathroom towel on the floor: I can smell that thing in here, Marty. It reeks.

  So it was not long before he became convinced that it was not a trick, at least not in the sense he had been thinking. Maybe God was playing a trick on him. There was always that. His relationship with the Almighty—and he had always said the word with a sneer, especially when his mother had gotten after him about how he never attended mass—had been rocky since his father had died of a sudden heart attack when Martin was an undergrad. But if it was a trick, he didn't know what the joke was. Was he hearing another life he might have lived? Or was this a future that was waiting for him somewhere around the corner?

  It didn't take long for him to begin hoping it was that last possibility. He wanted that life. He wanted it more than he thought he ever would. It wasn't all laughter and ice scream, either. For three months he listened to the baby monitor, keeping his routes as short as possible, on some days avoiding them altogether, so he could spend the majority of his time listening. He shut the blinds in the spare bedroom, covered them with a heavy blue sheet, and sat in near-total darkness, both day and night, so he could better visualize what was happening. He did hear good times, Laura singing, the baby babbling what sounded like words, but he heard the tension in Laura's voice, too, especially when she was woken in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was him—or the other him, the future him—who came into the room to comfort the baby. Sometimes he sounded happy, and other times he sounded tired, defeated.

  There were fights—horrible fights when the two of them screamed at the top of their lungs, shouting every profanity he knew and even some he hadn't yet learned. Sometimes they fought in the baby's room, with the baby screaming through all of it, but mostly he heard the fighting going on in another part of the house, the actual words lost in the translation through the nursery door. But the fierceness, the callousness, the sharpness to the tone, he heard all of that. He imagined they thought the baby couldn't hear it, or that if she did she would sleep through it, but he heard her fidget. He heard her quiet murmurs.

  But there were plenty of good times, and he began to crave hearing his own voice because most of the time he sounded happy. It was Laura who wasn't. It was Laura who whose voice was growing more and more desperate, whose words were becoming harsher and crueler.

  "You're always complaining," he heard himself say, and from the sound of his voice, it sounded like he was in the hall. "I don't know what happened to you. You're different."

  What followed was the most violent stream of hate and vileness flowing from her mouth that made everything else she had said up to that point tame in comparison. "You made me this way!" she screamed at the end, right before he heard their bedroom door slam. "I was fine before I met you! You made me this way, you son of a bitch!"

  The baby started crying, and then heard his own voice shushing the baby, and the shushing was broken and ragged, as if the other him was trying not to cry. Even then Martin wanted that life. Even then he thought it was better than his life, a life which had become more meaningless with each passing day. And even though things were bad in the world inside the baby monitor, that the word divorce had been hurled back and forth a few times like a ping pong ball, Martin believed they could work things out. They could make things better.

  There was always a way to make things better.

  There had to be.

  The automatic doors whisked closed. Martin stopped at the curb, his hands shoved deep into his jacket, his breath misting. The snow was still falling, the flakes as big as quarters, the parking lot draped in white. The sky was gray, and the sun was a muted yellow dot in an otherwise monotone world. He was shaking, and he knew it had nothing to do with the cold.

  You made me this way, you son of a bitch!

  Her voice echoed in the shadows of his mind. He felt the cold seeping into his tennis shoes. His Honda Civic was parked a short distance away, but he couldn't get himself to move. That car lead back to a still house and a still life. An empty life. Even the angel fish had died, forgotten.

  Martin, listening through the monitor, was still hoping they could work things out all the way up until that last awful fight.

  It happened during a storm, both in their world and his. The reception on the receiver was bad. He heard the rumble of thunder be
tween their shouts, but it was mixed with static. In the spare bedroom, where he sat in the darkness, lighting flashed at the edges of the heavy sheet that covered his window, and thunder followed.

  It was as if the two storms were competing, each trying to outdo the other. In his world it was November, and the rain hadn't let up in weeks. In their world, from what they had said the week earlier about the azaleas blooming, he guessed it was March. A fall storm and a spring storm, both sounding the same. He heard the overgrown juniper scratching against his window, and sometimes he wasn't sure if it was coming from the monitor or from outside. Through it all they went on shouting, screaming until they were hoarse, and then he heard himself slam the front door, her shouting epithets at his back, car tires screeching seconds later. Penny was crying through all of this.

  Then Laura was in the room, trying to comfort her, her voice softer but also louder because she was closer to the monitor.

  "Shh, shh," Laura said. "You've got to be quiet. It's very late."

  But the crying would not stop. It only grew louder, so loud that Martin had to turn down the volume on the baby monitor because the sound was really getting to him.

  "Please stop," Laura said. "Please, please stop."

  Her pleas became sharper, the words ringed with ice. Still the baby cried. Martin didn't see what was coming, not until the cries were suddenly muffled. He was confused, and his confusion quickly turned to dread when the crying stopped and the only sound was Laura's rapid breathing.

  "No," he said, and he realized she had said the word at the same time.