I.

There was never a worse time for a hurricane. 

Mari thinks this, in the shower, pulling a clump of hair from her head.

Every day she learns, through harsh experience, another symptom of menopause. 

Or at least, that’s what she assumes this is, her hair, like a massive spider tangled up between her fingers. And yes, when she Googles, while sitting at her desk wrapped up in a towel, she finds menopausal hair loss. Just like she’d found menopausal libido loss and menopausal arthritis and menopausal suicidal ideation. 

Google is so honest, so forthcoming! No one, not even your doctor, tells the truth about how brutal THE CHANGE really is. Hot flashes, weight gain, mood swings.  

Ha! Tepid terms that didn’t begin to describe the dreadful stoned-on-hormones madness that descends, sinking fiery talons right down deep into your guts, sitting up with a gasp, 3 am, drenched and shivering, pulling the covers close, throwing them off, close, then off, all night long, an endless sickly, sweaty, tango, then rising, much like the southern sun, in a wicked hot fury, bumping your shin and wheeling, wildly, with a fuck you! to the chair, to the bed, to the town, and every single foul traitor of a human, and the whole garbage planet. You could burn it all down (and wouldn’t you like to!) with a single hot flash.

Menopausal rage attacks, Google tells her, then offers a consoling pat on the head. Be kind to yourself, forgive yourself, your estrogen and serotonin – the Great Mood Regulators – have bit the dust. You are bound to explode every now and then. 

Speaking of which – the hurricane. 

“What are they saying now?” Mari jogs downstairs, tugging her baggy t-shirt down over her most recent addition, a bouncy hormonal belly that not even the most zealous body- positive advocate can coerce her into loving. She finds Johnny sitting on the kitchen counter, long legs hanging, ankles crossed, thickly buttering a slice of toast. On the edge of burnt, the way he likes it, claiming that anything else is not real toast, but merely crispy bread. 

“Still a tropical storm,” Johnny says. 

“No, it upgraded! Cat 2, they were saying.” 

“It just downgraded.” Johnny takes a bite of toast so toasty that crumbs spray sideways. 

Mari shakes her head, flummoxed over an impossible equation. They both are Midwest natives. They’ve only lived in this coastal North Carolina town for two years, and do not have the hang of hurricanes. 

“Well, what if it upgrades again? Should we evacuate?” 

“Your call.” Johnny hops from the counter, swiping his hands.  

Of course it is because – Johnny needs a nervous system transplant. 

Mari’s oldest joke about him, rooted perhaps in minor resentment that he’s never remotely as rattled by anything as she is, even when she thinks he should be. Her supercharged nervous system is ready to pack up and flee this instant but then again –

They have a garden now. 

That’s where she heads, to sit and breathe her way back to some sort of calm – albeit a balding and bloated calm – amongst the leaves. 

Johnny built the garden from scratch, not long after they moved here, a prayer made of plants. He’d lovingly transformed the tiny, dilapidated, and weed-choked backyard into the closest thing the two of them had to a church anymore. 

Mari hadn’t even wanted to get out of the moving truck, the night they arrived, two summers previous. Forty years old and, unbeknownst to her, already steeped in perimenopause. 

She’d never heard that word – perimenopause. And her, a voraciously well-read teacher! She’d blamed her two periods a month on stress. Easy enough to do. Teaching 9th graders was enough to give anyone two periods a month. She was burned out, she thought, and this gave her the guts to apply for a Master’s in writing, though she knew it was a long shot. She hadn’t picked up a pen to do anything but grade papers in years. But when she’d found herself (miraculously) accepted, she’d backed out. “I can’t do it!” she’d insisted to Johnny. “We’d have to move 1500 miles and start from scratch! We don’t even know what that town looks like!” Then she’d burst into tears, or really, her child-self had. The child that had wanted nothing more than for Mari to become a real writer. That child was elated to have this chance! And devastated that grown-up Mari was telling her no. 

Johnny had reminded Mari that one of the reasons they’d remained childfree was to be able to do things like this – take risks, leap, be a little dumb and crazy if they wanted. 

Mari had turned in her resignation and reserved a moving van. 

The night they crossed the bridge into their new town, all the little lights shining on the river looked ominous. The church steeple was a sharp outline in the sky, dominating her view. The town reminded her of another town, the one she’d grown up in. The one she’d fled. So, when they pulled up to the rental, and parked, she couldn’t make herself get out. She closed her eyes and balled her fists and wished herself backwards, back over that bridge, over all those miles of interstate, all the way back to Kansas City and the classroom that she’d surrendered for a child’s dream. See? She should have heeded her supercharged nervous system! For some things, it really was too late. 

Finally, Johnny swung open the passenger side door with a squeak and said, “Mari, you’ve got to come see this tree.”

Leave it to Johnny to use a tree to entice her. 

And it was – the tree – astounding. 

She and Johnny had stood together in the street, holding hands, and looking up, up, up. A majestic mountain of a tree, covered in ivy, wearing the full moon like a hat. Her child-self had emerged from the dark, taking her other hand, clinging to it, full of wonder and awe. Look at us!  

Okay, fine, Mari had conceded. Maybe – it wasn’t too late. 

 

II.

As soon as Johnny sits down at his desk, he sees it. The envelope peeking out from behind the toolbox in his study/workshop/gym – and more recently, bedroom  – now that Mari is going through THE CHANGE, her voice and eyes and face when she says it – all caps. 

He sees the envelope, and he sighs, because he’d hoped by hiding it behind the toolbox, it would go away. Meaning, he would forget all about it, which, because he’d never quite achieved object permanence (a Mari joke) was as good as gone. 

Now that he sees it, the sinister white flash, he’s faced with the choice again. 

He rubs his face, hard. 

The fact is, it’s her choice, and he has no right to keep her from it. 

He plucks up the envelope, takes a breath, and thumps back downstairs. A sick feeling washes over him when he sees Mari, sitting cross-legged in the dirt, shaded by the Hostas which are brazen this year, enormous, and showy. She’s going through so much. Hormones, grad school, fickle hurricanes. He’d rather not add to the maelstrom, but – 

“Mari, this came for you.” He holds out the envelope and tries to make his face blank. 

She stands, brushes off her shorts, and tugs her t-shirt down. She eyes the envelope without taking it. “Who’s it from?” 

“Well,” His eyes drift to the side. 

She swallows. “That came just now?” 

“Well –”

“Johnny?” 

“A couple of days ago.” 

“And?” 

“I forgot about it.” 

Her eyes narrow. “Uh-hmm.” 

“I did. Happily forgot. Until just now.” 

“Will you read it?” 

“Mari,” His shoulders drop. 

“Please, Johnny? Just – tell me if there’s anything I need to know.” 

“Okay, fine.” He rips the envelope and slides the letter out. 

“Two pages?” Mari backs up a little. 

Johnny skims. He recalls a handwriting analysis brochure he’d once read, back when he was still a Christian. At the time, he’d dismissed it as devil-inspired mysticism. But now details surface, like words bunched close together, without spaces, demonstrate poor boundaries. Words spaced too far apart show disconnection, distrust. This handwriting has both. Too close, too far. Push, pull. Might hug you, might hit you. 

Yep, that’s Mari’s mother, all right. 

 “Well?” 

He can’t stand it. She looks as vulnerable as the night she met him at the top of the hill, twenty years ago. The image is vivid, Mari’s teeth chattering in the cold and snow, having fled her house without a coat. She was hauling a busted-up garbage bag full of books instead of clothes that had spilled onto the floor of his car. He’d driven to Arkansas, and they were married the next day in Eureka Springs. He’d been so happy. She’d been ripped apart.  

Johnny clears his throat. “She says she got your letter. She won’t be sending you any more packages. She’ll go ahead and…donate the rest of your stuff.” 

“That’s it?” Her face looks like a mirror that’s been punched. 

Upstairs, Johnny crumples and flushes the letter. Who cares about sewage regulations!  

What Mari’s mother had written was: You won’t be hearing from me again since it seems you’ve got it in your head that I’m some kind of monster. I’ll trash all your things, seeing as you don’t care and never did. You’ll regret it when I’m gone but by then, it will be too late. You’ve made your bed, little girl, now lie in it. No skin off my teeth!  

No skin off my teeth? 

The kind of off-kilter phrase he’d probably found endearing when he’d first met Mari’s mother, and now, knowing what she was like behind closed doors – he shuddered. And little girl? If Mari’s mother writes letters like a Stephen King character, he can only imagine what Mari heard, growing up.   

He doesn’t like to imagine it. 

He hopes her mother is gone for good. 

 

III.  

Mari weeps a lot these days. Not always wild and ragged. Sometimes, instead, like this. A soft, quiet keening that feels depthless, endless, leading nowhere, to nothing, no solvable, fixable point. 

Mostly these days, she can’t sort out why exactly she’s crying. She’s unbearably tender. A walking bruise, pressed upon equally by the glory of evening light and the horror of the evening news. 

She’s always asking herself, is it the hormones – or the losses? 

Two years ago, right before she moved, Mari’s father had passed. He had refused to see or speak with her since the night she eloped with Johnny, age twenty-five. It’s a fresh shock, each time she considers how long she lived with her parents, dependent and weak, as though gravely ill. She thinks, in a way, she was. It’s a revelation to see where her young grad school cohorts are in life, and what they’ve achieved, compared to where she was. She couldn’t even drive a car at twenty-five!  

She finds herself, often unable to tell the story of her own life, drowned in the complexity. Mari had been raised in the Missouri countryside, within a prohibitive, and punitive, fundamentalist Christian sect. The religion, paired with the isolation, had played no minor role in the family’s problems. But looking back, the real cult, Mari often thought, was her mother. Mari and her father had lived and breathed, were sent to hell or heaven, by the tone of her mother’s voice, the merest twitch of her eye. Mari’s father was more devoted to his wife than to Yahweh. He had taught his daughter to sacrifice herself at the temple of her mother’s every whim, no matter how bizarre. “Love covers a multitude of sins!” Her father exclaimed after one of her mother’s rage outs, coaxing Mari back, every time, to forgiveness and loyalty. 

After she eloped with Johnny, her father had written: You not only deceived, you as good as divorced us. You are hereby excommunicated from this family.  

He was nothing if not true to his word. 

But then, after her father’s death, the packages began to arrive. Mari still isn’t sure how her mother sussed out her address in Carolina Beach. The packages, two or more arriving every week, were composed of Mari’s old bedroom.  

Baby books, photo albums, and diaries.  

Her beloved book collection.  

Her youthful earrings and bracelets.  

Her tattered notebooks, full of stories. 

Clothes she’d worn when she was twelve, washed and pressed.  

Pushed to the edge by this reappearance of her mother, her past, and her old bedroom haunting her as she tried her hardest to carve out a new life, Mari sought help from a therapist on campus. This was her first experience with counseling, since she had grown up believing that “worldly psychologists” were devil-deluded fools. 

Her therapist, a bold, kind, and tough older woman had helped her, over the course of many sessions, work up to writing her mother a letter, while coaching her on boundary setting.  

Mari now recalls only one line of her letter. The most crucial. 

Stop sending me packages. 

Her mother has responded exactly as Mari foretold. 

And yet – the pain! Lightning strikes. Teeth tearing. 

She is forty-three. She has menopausal everything. 

And look, her mother has broken her heart – again. 

 

IV.

“Johnny! Johnny!” 

He jumps to his feet. He knows she’s been down there crying. 

Even when she’s quiet, his radar ears can always hear her crying. 

He fears she’ll ask for the letter, wants to read it herself, wants to see her mother’s handwriting, wants to pore over it and obsess, talk about it for days, as has happened in the past, though a little less when she started seeing a therapist. But he’s nervous because if he tells her what he did to the letter, she might want to talk about that, and it might get rough, it’s already rough! And now he has to strategize how to defend himself when he doesn’t even know if he did the right thing – 

“Johnny, look.” He stands next to her in the garden, and she points. “Look at her.”  

The spider is a shock, so big! More like a tigress, black with patches of gold, and gold stripes on her legs, sitting in the center of her web, knit between the Acanthus leaves. 

He steps up close, leans in, clasps his hands behind his back, and whistles. “Wow! Look at those legs. The Rockette of spiders!”  

 

V.

 Orb Weavers are the Frank Lloyd Wright’s of web-spinning. 

Mari discovers that they are equipped with an additional claw (besides the two on each foot that most spiders have) for constructing their legendary orb-shaped mansions – the world’s largest, spanning three feet or more. They are so proud and protective of their webs that when they have enough food, they release larger prey, not willing to risk a struggle that might damage their home. 

Mari gets up from her desk, stretches, and takes her coffee back out to the garden. 

She sits cross-legged on the ground so she’s gazing up at the Orb Weaver. A breeze rocks the web gently  and the whole thing shimmers. The spider remains motionless.  

“What’s your name?” 

Mari’s child-self sits cross-legged beside her, with dirty bare feet. 

She still shows up, in spite of all the relentless body changes that scream old age. It’s her child-self that leans in, way too close, and asks the spider her name. And she gets an answer, too. 

Willa. 

 

Mari begins spending most of each day in the garden, trying to finish her Master’s thesis. Actually, trying to start. She thought writing her story would be easier than speaking it. But every word is a knife on fire that stabs through her. Writing asks her to relive and it’s… – her therapist had used the word retraumatizing. She doesn’t know if writing in the garden will help her complete a book, but it’s helping her in other ways. The plants, the sunlight, the ocean of sky, and most of all – 

Mari leans in and Googles Menopausal Spider Attachment. 

The Orb Weaver nearby soothes and steadies, calms her in a way that, for months now, nothing has. Not books, not writing, not even Johnny.  

Present, Mari thinks. Rooted in each moment. Attuned to herself. 

Mari watches the spider investigate a large leaf that’s blown down, snagged in the threads of her home. She attempts to remove it, bouncing the strands beneath the leaf with her leg. When that doesn’t work, she pushes her body under the leaf and uses force to try to buck it out. That failing, she circles the leaf and begins methodically snipping the strands of her precious web – to let the leaf fall away. 

She knows what she doesn’t want. 

Struck, Mari Googles orb weaver eggs. Sipping coffee, she reads about the clutch, laid under the protective underside of a leaf, the gold drops of spiderlings that emerge in fall. It is the first time Mari’s considered what menopause is – what it means – besides hell flashes and nightmare sweats. 

Mari hopes that now, along with periods, the public scrutiny dries up. 

Do you have children? 

Why don’t you want kids? 

You don’t like babies? 

Don’t you think not having children – is selfish? 

Exhausting. No one else could know your Pandora’s Box.

The dark places inside yourself you’d rather not get to know – maybe inflict. 

Sometimes, Mari had dreamed up a daughter. She pictured her with a sloppy ponytail, running around in bare feet and suspenders, climbing trees, and collecting bugs, a notebook tucked in her back pocket, and a pencil stuck in her curls. Mari cherished that image. But when she found herself pregnant, nearly ten years into her and Johnny’s marriage, she’d had to firmly take stock, lock eyes with reality, and ask herself, what did she want?  

Mari’s religious background, surprisingly, had not impeded her decision.  

Now, Mari watches the Orb Weaver draw one leg through her mouth parts, called chelicerae. The spider does this again and again. It is mesmerizing, how she cares for herself. Her every move is a declaration of love. 

Mari Googles, and finds –

Willa means valiant protector. 

 

VI.

Sometimes Mari still asks him – how did you know to use that word? 

Johnny never has an answer. When they met, he was a naive kid like her, raised in the same stifling, stunting church, one that turned real life into a sci-fi fantasy, featuring warring forces in the invisible realms. Battles for souls that took place in homes, behind closed doors, didn’t get near as much airtime in the pulpit.  

Johnny himself recalls with wonder, the way he looked Mari right in the eye that time when she broke, confided in him what her mother had been doing to her. He has no idea how he knew to say: Your mother is abusing you. 

Sometimes he tells Mari, “Who knows? Maybe it was God.” And they laugh. 

In the early days of their marriage, meaning, the first few years, Mari was inconsolable. He’d find her weeping in different places around the upstairs unit they rented in an old Victorian, curled up in the window nook, or slumped in the narrow stairwell. She would always startle him, looking up, her pale face wet with tears. He was reminded of a ghost that gets stuck in the physical world, unable to stop mourning the heartbreak that happened in life. “I chose you over my own mother,” she had wailed to him once, grinding her fist into her chest, over her heart. 

And he remembers saying to her (yet another radical thing): “No, you chose yourself.” 

She got stronger with time, and she really took off when she graduated college and started teaching. 

Then, her dad got sick. 

Mari was holding that phone, the night her mother called. 

It had been fifteen years. 

He’d seen it all there, on Mari’s face, the screen lighting up her frown, again and again. Johnny knew she was close, on the knife’s edge of a choice. That’s when it first occurred to him – his wife was an addict. She would always struggle with this. Harsh maybe, to think of loving a mother as a dangerous addiction, but he needed to think it, to be able to say, “Mari, you know why she wants you back, now that your dad’s dying. She thinks you’re still weak. Easy prey. She needs somebody to serve her. That’s all she wants you for.”  

He broke her, and he did it on purpose. 

The way she looked at him, with shock and repugnance, like he was the villain. 

But she didn’t answer that phone. 

Now with a hurricane hot on their heels, she’s looking at him that exact same way. 

It’s weird. When he told her the storm had upgraded to a Cat 5, a monster, predicted to make landfall on the town, he’d braced for panic mode. He wasn’t expecting her to shrug it off. “Let’s wait and see. It could change.” She’d kept typing away on her laptop, outside in the garden. She hadn’t even looked up, taking a bite of her apple. 

He’d said, “Well, they’re telling people to make plans.” 

“They said that before, didn’t they?” 

“I mean. Yeah, but –“  He peered up at the sky. He could feel, and did not like, the unaccustomed chainsaw buzz of anxiety. “So…we’re staying put? In a Cat 5?” 

 “It will probably downgrade.” 

And he thought she was right. But then he’d kept the Weather Channel on, and the chatter only grew more dire. Driving to work, he saw business owners out on ladders, boarding up their windows. The moment he stepped into his office, instead of calling a client, he’d called a hotel in Asheville. Then another, and another. They were booked, filled up already with evacuees. As soon as he found one with vacancy, he’d said, “I’ll take it,” reserving the room for a week. 

Now, leaving the city limits, hard rain pelting the windshield, Mari turns, absolutely levels him with that look. 

Villain.   

 

VII. 

It’s because of Willa. 

He’d talked her out of bringing Willa.  

“We can’t take a spider, Mari,” Johnny had said, finding her outside. She was measuring Willa against the largest jar she could find. 

“I don’t see why not.” This was her child-self speaking. Mari had grown up, collecting, and keeping insects of all kinds in her prized bug carrier, crafted to look like an iconic red Midwestern barn. Granted, she’d never caught a spider before, and even in the largest jar, Willa would be cramped. 

“How are you even going to get her in that thing? She’s not just going to traipse in.” 

“Well, I know–“ 

“And it will scare her.” 

Mari was gripped by “low estrogen” fury, and simultaneously, charmed by his focus on Willa’s psychological well-being. “But I can’t just leave her, Johnny! You don’t understand…” She’d shaken her head, blinking. Even she didn’t understand.   

“C’mere.” Johnny had pulled her in, kissing the top of her head. “She’ll be okay. She’ll use her Spidey sense. She’ll figure it out.” 

But now as they break away from the city, the rain starts, big merciless plonks! 

That’s why she turns and glares at Johnny. 

He is not only infuriatingly calm, he is absurdly optimistic. 

 

VIII. 

The hurricane weakens before landfall, but still – a Cat 3 is nothing to play with.  

Johnny hasn’t prayed in years, but he whispers a thank you, his chin tucked on Mari’s head as they rest together on the twin bed in Hillbilly Haven Hotel. Outside, a sign in the shape of a banjo blinks and flashes neon purple on the walls, like a disco. He’s lucky to have this. Too many people can’t leave. 

He jabs the remote. The TV flashes a reel of hurricane images, and it looks like the town’s getting slammed. Jim “Dr. Doom” Cantore has arrived. In the thick of the storm, he grips the hood of his rain gear, rain slashing and wind whipping him around on a sidewalk downtown. He’s interrupted by breaking news. 

Mari, who’s dozed off, sits up with a gasp.  

The screen shows a sickening image. A pine tree, uprooted, fallen on a house. Firefighters push against the storm, trying to get to the people inside. 

Beside him, Mari sinks. She burrows under the covers, then curls into a ball. 

Johnny flicks off the TV. Watches the light show on the walls. 

 

IX.

Mari is wired and bushed and scrambled. 

They’ve spent the whole day at a bookstore, reading, or pretending to read, looking out at the rain. She can’t stop picturing the fallen pine, the house, the roof caved in. She can’t stop thinking about the family, wondering who they are, how they are. Please let them be okay! Her mind keeps reaching for prayer, like an ex-smoker’s hand searches for a cigarette, patting down pockets, riffling drawers, before realizing, oh wait, I don’t do that anymore. Then, the emptiness. And worse. Mari squeezes her eyes shut and still, she sees it – battered, shredded, threads hanging. No amount of hope, or grief, will ever restore. 

Mari’s hand moves to find Johnny’s across the table. They lace fingers. She squeezes. His face is drawn, too, and pained. He squeezes back, then stands, heads with their empty mugs to get them more coffee. The only thing he knows to do. They’ll be up all night, the two of them, bouncing off the walls. 

A little burst of giggling draws Mari’s eyes to a young woman and an older woman seated nearby. They both have the same dark eyes, the same gleeful curls swooped into ponytails. Leaned in close, they flip through a magazine together, then squeal and point at the same time. “That’s it, that’s the one!” the older woman exclaims. Ah, Mari thinks, a wedding, catching a glimpse of the page, a white dress. She watches the young woman rest her head on the older one’s shoulder, and hears her say, “I’m so glad you’re here, Mom.”  

Oh, that’s so nice! Isn’t that so nice? 

It is. 

So nice. 

Mari is blinking and blinking and, fumbling to find her purse, she pushes out her chair, and heads to the restroom. 

She sits on the toilet, examining the dark red stains on her underwear. She’s been cramping and spotting since arriving in Asheville, and her breasts are sore and tender, like she’s about to get a period. But she hasn’t had a period in 11 months. 

Is this normal? 

Mari recalls the day she got her first period when she was twelve. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t done being a kid! She went to her mother, fat tears rolling down her face, and showed her darkly stained underwear, wordlessly, as though confessing. “What are you crying for?” Her mother had shouted, slamming down the iron. She’d grabbed Mari by the arm, pulled her into the bathroom, and literally threw a bag of pads at her. “Grow up and take care of it!” For Mari, shame and grief had fused, and thenceforward, surrounded the arrival of every period, through the years, with a thick fog of disgrace. 

At thirty, when she had the abortion, she and her mother had been estranged for five years. After swallowing the pill, Mari had been slammed by dizziness like a brick to the head and had nearly blacked out. She’d soaked thick pads, one after another, and wished her mother would show up, if only to shout at her. “What a mess you’ve made! Thought you were so grown up, didn’t you, running away to get married! Well, look at you now, little Missy!” The aloneness was so profound, so searingly painful – it was almost a teddy bear, in comparison, to imagine her mother’s familiar scorching rants.  

Now, Mari digs in the bottom of her purse, hoping to find one tiny pad curled up in the corner, or in a pocket, one she missed when throwing them all away. She’s scared. And she’s tired of asking Google. And she wonders if her mother knows there’s a hurricane and has even the tiniest seed of worry. And then, Mari can barely breathe because it’s there, the feeling that climbed inside her the night she eloped, and stayed, a thick, inky accusation lurking in her for years, that everything she’s supposed to look out for and love – her home – she’s abandoned. 

 

That night, Mari dreams. 

Johnny is driving and the rain is a wild fever, and settled on Mari’s lap is a jar, and in the jar, is Willa. Willa is in the jar and she’s not in the garden, battered by hurricane-force winds, torn from her web, and carried away in the downpour. No, Willa is in the jar, in Mari’s lap, and she is safe. Johnny pulls the car over and Mari ducks out, into the night, and she hurries, slips down a grassy incline, toward a forest, and the forest is welcoming. The rain has stopped, little drops tink tink-ing on leaves. The forest breathes and opens her arms as Mari twists the lid off the jar. Mari doesn’t see Willa leave, but she knows when she does, knows when she is free even before she lifts the jar to the sudden flash of moonlight, and sees that it is empty. 

Valiant protector. 

 

Menopause is diagnosed after 12 months without a period. If another period shows up before the 12-month mark, you are not officially in menopause yet, and – sorry to say – you must start the count down all over again. 

Mari palms her forehead, exits the web page, and returns to studying the route back home – a series of maze-like detours meant to bypass flooded roads, but in contrast to her ever-shifting biology, is far less convoluted. The narrow, twisty backroads are crowded with returning evacuees. 

At a diner, in a tiny town called Hazelnut, Mari orders a slice of rhubarb pie. Although, this is the first time she does so, without the old, aching hope. She knows now with sad certainty: I’ll never have rhubarb pie like my mother’s again. Oh, her mother could bake! And how Mari had loved to watch her, sprinkling the flour on the kitchen counter like magic dust, rolling out the dough. 

But one time she remembers, with a poignant stab. Mari’s eyes had caught on her mother’s hands, clasping the rolling pin. Mari must have been strangely fixated. Her mother had taken note, and said, “What are you looking at, Marigold?” Mari hadn’t wanted to say, or couldn’t say. “You’re looking at my hands, aren’t you?” the clack of the rolling pin, moving this way and that, roughshod over the dough, had quieted. Mari’s mother, with gentleness, had met Mari’s gaze. “I remember the first time I realized my mother was getting old. It was her hands. It’s a shock, isn’t it?” She’d held up a hand then, displaying it – the blue veins risen, lined with flour. “I know exactly what you’re thinking, Marigold. You’re thinking, oh no, someday my mother won’t be here.” 

Her mother’s hands, the blue veins. 

That’s what Mari sees when they enter the city limits, and the trees, everywhere the trees, stripped bare, skeletal, like a brutal winter at the end of August. 

 

X.

Johnny never knows what to say to Mari’s pain. 

She left home twenty years ago, and the grief continues.   

Her love remains, with nowhere to go. 

Nowhere safe, anyway. 

Her pain sits in his chest like stripped trees and downed powerlines and debris, everywhere debris. Johnny’s way is to bring out the cleanup crew, the linemen, the garbage trucks, and get to work, fixing. He used to believe that Jesus could heal anything, everything. When Johnny was eighteen, his father was found to have inoperable pancreatic cancer. Johnny’s dad acted unconcerned. He told the family, he’d had a Word from the Lord. Jesus will heal me. Johnny, his two brothers, and his little sister had faith. Even as their dad wasted away to nothing, they carried on like all he had was a bad cold. Because, any day, Jesus was coming to fix it and heal him. 

None of them had ever gotten over the shock of finding their dad dead in the living room. How much had he suffered, waiting for that healing? 

Johnny doesn’t think he believes in healing anymore. 

He thinks a town can be repaired, but maybe not a person. 

So, he tries hard not to fix it when Mari cries, just to listen. To be there with her. No remedies, no answers, as she talks about pie and hands and her mother turning seventy soon, and one day, Mari won’t be there when–

They pull up to their townhouse, and the first thing they do, climbing out of the car, is look up, up, up, together. Just like that first night. 

Only, she’s their tree now. 

She still stands, grand as ever, though her leaves are gone – scattered, all over the parking lot, the cars, the sidewalk, the rooftops.  

Johnny’s picking up leaf litter when Mari, who has gone inside, calls for him.  

He hurries in, imagining their books, floating in a pool of stagnant water. 

But Mari’s in the garden, and when Johnny joins her there, she points. “Look.” 

There, between the Acanthus leaves, the web shimmers. And she does, too. 

Whole. Unbroken. 

They are quiet and then. “Told you so.” 

He can’t help it. 

Mari digs her elbow into his ribs, laughs. 

Then, she throws her arms around him and buries her face in his chest. 

They hold onto each other, solemn and thankful, dancing in the light of the orb weaver. 

 

XI.

Classes are canceled and the campus is closed. So, Mari spends the next few days pitching in with a cleanup crew, getting to know the town, and the people in it. Letting the place close. She’s been afraid to care. In the midst of crisis, that fear is eroding. Every evening, worn yet heartened, she returns to Willa. 

Sits with Willa. 

Willa is changing. 

Mari tries to fathom how. Perhaps she’s molting again. Mari had watched her do this once, break out of her old skin, into a new, bigger version of herself, colors brighter, legs longer, fangs more pronounced, more fierce. 

One late afternoon in September, when the light is too gold to be borne, Mari comes home to find Willa hanging, mostly detached from her web. She is holding on with only two front legs. Her web is wispy, and tattered. She hasn’t been preening, Mari realizes, nor keeping up with her fastidious repairs. 

And then Mari knows, what is next. 

She doesn’t get up, though she wants to. 

She doesn’t turn away, though she longs to. 

She sits there and holds Willa, firm and tender, with her eyes. Mari feels her gaze becoming a cradle, in soft silence, remaining there with her, even after the spider has fallen to the garden floor. 

 

XII. 

Mari asks him why. 

She cries to him, “She shouldn’t have survived the hurricane. But she did! She held on. Only to die two weeks later?”

He says, “Maybe she waited for you, Mari. Maybe – she gave you a gift.” 

Johnny doesn’t know why some things come out of his mouth the way they do. 

 

XIII. 

Mari leans over her notebook. 

She writes – she gave you a gift. 

She’s restarting her thesis, with that line. She doesn’t understand, but writing has always helped her to understand. She’ll write the whole thing by hand, like when she was a kid, sitting cross-legged and barefoot in the grass. She feels it. Something true. If she keeps writing toward that line, she believes, she’ll find it, eventually. 

Illuminated by late evening light, her hand, scratching across the page, makes her stop, and catch her breath. Her child-self steps in and stands beside her. Together, they stare at Mari’s hand. The veins risen, like blue rivers overflowing the banks. 

Her child-self presses her small hand to Mari’s, so that Mari can see the contrast. “Valiant protector,” she says.  

Mari does not set down her pen. 

She holds it tighter.