The Evening Spider by Emily Arsenault Page A

hand up to it to push it open.
    It wouldn’t go.
    It wouldn’t open.
    â€œLucy!” I cried and kicked at the door, which promptly swung open.
    OOOOOAAAHHHR-eeeee.
    I stepped past the door and to the crib, then lifted Lucy up to my shoulder. She put her hand on my shoulder and made a little noise that sounded almost like “AHA!”
    â€œJust wanted to make sure I was still here?” I whispered, taking a deep breath.
    Lucy gurgled and pushed her face into my neck. My pulse stopped racing
    â€œDon’t you want to sleep a little more?” I asked.
    Don’t you want to sleep a little more so Mama can read more about arsenic and disembodied stomachs?
    Another contented gurgle.
    â€œNo? You want to play?”
    I sat in the rocker and grabbed a board book from the floor.
    The Touch and Feel Farm was the title.
    â€œOooh. Just what I need. The touchy-feely farm,” I said, and chuckled at my own joke.
    Lucy smiled at me just slightly—as if trying to understand my laughter, or trying to humor me. Her face crinkled a little bit, bringing her bruise into focus. Patty had been right that it was “almost perfectly round.” And there seemed to be a perfect spiral of yellow forming inside the purple.
    Lucy stopped smiling, apparently bored or perplexed by my silence. The bruise seemed to fade back into formlessness.
    I opened the book. I took another deep breath.
    â€œThe cow says moo,” I announced.

 
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    Chapter 18
    Northampton Lunatic Hospital
    Northampton, Massachusetts
    December 20, 1885
    D uring that time that I was made to rest in that little upstairs room, I didn’t have enough physical activity in the day to allow me to sleep soundly at night. At night, my mind was often in chaos.
    On the worst of those nights, a particular memory troubled me—an incident that had occurred approximately a year earlier—in the summer of 1878.
    A goblet had broken at Matthew’s feet, and a shard had cut him in the leg. It had been an accident, had it not? Lying half-mad in that bed for days on end, however, I no longer felt certain of anything.
    He had been reading and asked me to pour him some water. As I’d approached him with it, I’d felt a bit light-headed. I know now—and knew soon afterward—that it was the pregnancy. For a moment, the air in front of me speckled pink and orange, and my stomach was gripped with a sudden pain. The crash of the goblet swept away the pink and orange spots, and I managed to grip the wall to keep from falling.
    Ahhh! Frances! What in God’s name . . .
    Oh, Matthew! Oh, I’m so sorry! Let me have a look . . .
    And what made me lie awake now, worrying over a cut that had long since healed? (Should I not be thinking of Martha’s, which hadn’t yet?) Had Matthew perhaps suspected some wicked intention in my clumsiness, that time and this more recent one with poor Martha?
    I troubled over this for the rest of the night, and by daylight my mind was numb with the thought. That was the day I might have gone mad, completely and forever.
    But that very day, fate left me a gift—a distraction. The nurse—whose name I cannot recall, and don’t wish to—left her book on her chair when she had gone to procure my lunch from the kitchen. I snatched it up and jammed it under my mattress without looking at the title. She was, for the hour after that, so occupied with the feeding of her patient—buttered bread and then two monstrously tall glasses of milk —that she seemed not to notice the absence of her book. Later that afternoon, I saw her peering under the table, under the bed. Since I played so passive when she was present, it apparently didn’t occur to her that I could’ve taken it. Perhaps she was simply afraid to cause a stir by accusing me and thus alerting Matthew to the length and frequency of her absences from the room.
    I looked at the book before suppertime, when the nurse