by Lindsey Brandrup

Halloween arrived in August that year when my husband Charlie came up from fixing a dryer vent in the basement and tauntingly asked, “Who wants to see the spider I found?”

My son, Lincoln, who was five at the time, jumped up and over his Legos to where Charlie was standing. Janie, though only two, would have done the same had she not been napping. I was less enthusiastic. Our house was old; the basement had cracks that regularly allowed in a menagerie of insects, so another creature was both uneventful and disheartening.

Ignoring my silence, he held up a vibrantly patterned water jug directly in my line of vision. I looked for the spider, trying to see it through the design. A few seconds passed before I realized that I had been making eye contact with it the whole time. Shivering, I turned away.

“Oh my gosh! Can you believe that thing?” Lincoln squealed.

Charlie set the jug on the table and Lincoln held his hand up to it. The splayed spider matched the size of Lincoln’s hand.

“I think it’s a fishing spider,” Charlie said, looking it up on his phone. “They’re named that because they can catch fish off docks. Largest spider in Wisconsin.”

“That thing can catch fish?” For Lincoln, the news just kept getting better.

I heard it differently. “So they bite?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, scrolling, “but it’s not fatal or anything; it’s like a bee sting.”

“Was there a huge web down there? How did we not see this thing?” I asked, assuming this would be another measure of our inadequate housekeeping.

“It doesn’t make a web. It’s a predatory spider, so it pounces on its food.”

“Pounces?! Dad, dad, how did you get it?” Lincoln interrupted.

Charlie regaled him with the harrowing story. I half-listened, captivated by the hairy, spindly legs slowly lifting and dropping, a haunting pianist in search of keys. I snapped out of my trance when I heard Charlie say something like, “I took a chance,” at which point I said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t miss.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have told you if I had,” he said, and I giggled before thinking about the implications.

Lincoln wanted to get down to business. “Can we keep him, Mom? Please? As a pet? We don’t have a pet and it’s not fair!”

“You have a pet bird.”

“But not a pet we can hold!”

“NO ONE is holding that thing,” I retorted before drawing a big breath. I realized I wasn’t automatically opposed to letting them keep it, for a while. Charlie, sensing my indecision, chimed in, “It could eat the sprickets.”

The sprickets, or cave crickets, were named for their camel color, thickness, large antennae, and ability to jump up to three feet when threatened. They didn’t make pretty music like crickets, but they did hide in the most unassuming places and then frantically jump out when disturbed. Folding laundry had become terrifying. And, I guess the spider had been living here anyway.

“For a bit,” I said, and both the boys looked at me with surprise. “But you need to take it outside to feed it. And find something more secure for it to live in. And throw that jar away please.”

Naturally, my husband’s focus shifted from fixing the dryer vent to making sure the spider had a suitable home. The boys went to the basement to gather sprickets. It was upsetting how little time it took for them to gather enough for a solid meal for the spider.

A short while later they came back inside from feeding the spider, Lincoln proudly carrying a small reptile cage that Charlie apparently had laying around in the garage. He invited me to watch it devour a spricket.

Trying to be a tough mom, I looked. It was a scene that belonged on the tunnel walls of Gene Wilder’s Wonka Chocolate Factory: a spricket, so easily procured from our basement, frantically bouncing off the plastic walls of the cage, trying to avoid a huge spider’s twitching legs, all suspended above our dining room table by my son’s small sweaty hands.

I asked Lincoln to set the cage down somewhere. He walked to his room to put the spider on the dresser next to his bed. Barely a minute had passed before we heard him call for us. “Mom…Dad…” It was the first of many times that I would immediately brace for news that the spider had gotten out and somehow spun a Frodo Baggins-style cocoon around him. “...What should his name be?”

“It’s a girl, buddy,” Charlie said. “She should have a name, though.”

“Halloween,” I said without hesitation, not realizing that I cared enough to think of a name.

“Yay!” Link said. “Halloween!” And with that, the norms of our house had been revised to include catching sprickets and feeding them to the spider. I didn’t participate in the feeding, but I found myself checking on Halloween every day. At first I was ensuring she was still there, but as time went on, I found myself lingering.

The first time we got home from a weekend away from Halloween, almost a month after she crept into our lives, my husband walked into my son’s room and said, “Uh oh.”

“Did Halloween get out of her cage?” I closed my eyes as I waited for his response.

“Nope…” Charlie said, but then offered nothing more, so I walked into the room and immediately spotted the white sac clinging to Halloween’s belly.

“She’s with child,” Charlie grinned.

Lincoln couldn’t believe our luck. “Where are the babies? Right there, in that white thing? How many babies are in there? Do we get to keep them? Mom, do we get to keep them?”

“Hold on, buddy,” Charlie said, looking up from his phone. “It looks like she may or may not be pregnant. Sometimes they can create a false sac when they’ve had too much to eat. But if she is pregnant, it says she could carry the sac for about six weeks before they hatch.”

“How would she even be pregnant?” I interrupted. “We’ve had her in there for like a month.”

“Apparently they can hold spider juice for several months after mating,” he grinned again.

I recoiled. “Please don’t say ‘spider juice’ ever again. So how will we know if she’s pregnant or not?”

“Well, if thousands of spider babies come crawling out of the sac, we’ll know she was pregnant.”

I murdered him with my eyes.

He recalibrated. “So from what I read, she will create a nursery for the egg sac. A web. That’s actually where the saying ‘nursery web’ came from. We’ll know then.”

I moved my face closer to the cage to look at the sac. It looked like a piece of crumpled up tissue paper. That there could be thousands of baby spiders in there was, well, cool. And apparently incredibly scary because I jumped when Janie grabbed my leg.

“Uppy, uppy, Momma,” she uttered, “see ‘pider.” I picked her up and she looked at the cage too.

“Hi ‘pider!” She waved, then lifted her palm, “‘Pider doing?” Janie asked.

“She’s growing bab…,” I started to reply, but Janie had already started squirming, unappreciative of the miracle of producing offspring. I returned my gaze to the spider, to Halloween, hanging upside down from the fake log in the cage, putting herself between the outside world and her precious cargo.

I began every new week by talking to my husband about what we were going to do with Halloween and her thousands of future spiderlings. We both knew that we couldn’t let her hatch the spiders in the cage. They’d be so tiny, there would be no way to keep them from getting out.

“I’ll take care of it,” Charlie said. I asked him few questions before giving up and trusting him.

The next day after work, I came home to find Halloween without her egg sac. I felt my stomach weaken.

“How’d you do it?” I asked him, not wanting to know but feeling like it was my responsibility.

“Well, let me tell you, spiders are much stronger than you’d think.” He went on to tell me how he settled on using chopsticks to get in there to remove the sac, how Halloween had struggled and pushed back, how he was sweating, and how it had taken him over twenty minutes to remove the sac from her. He had put the egg sac in a jar and sliced it open, curious as to whether there were spiderlings in it. There were.

I felt ashamed. I walked into the bedroom to face her. She sat, unmoving.

The week carried on uneventfully and before we knew it Friday had arrived. I got home with the kids and Charlie met me at the door to help haul the diaper bag, the backpacks, my work bag, and all the other luggage of parenthood. He set everything down, then watched me unpack.

“Sooooo….” he said, walking away from me.

“What, Charlie?” I said, exhausted. Instead of responding, he carried Halloween’s cage out.

“She’s got more babies, Mom!” Lincoln hollered before I could process what I was seeing.

“Another sac? How?” I noticed even before Charlie had pointed it out that she had already begun constructing a nursery.

We finally broached the topic of the new egg sac at the end of dinner.

“I feel like we can’t keep her in the house when it seems like she could be getting close, somehow, to having the babies. Can she be outside safely?” I asked Charlie.

He considered it, “She could probably be fine on the west side of the house. She wouldn’t be in direct sunlight. It’s not too cold at night yet. It would give us some time to find her a home.”

That night Charlie and Lincoln put some extra leaves in the cage and set Halloween on the side of the garage behind the garbage can. They covered her with some additional leaves and said goodnight.

The weekend sprinted past us. Monday morning was a rush of dressing, eating, brushing, packing, carrying, and coaxing. I slowed down enough to make sure Jane’s car seat carrier double-clicked into place and then I walked around the front of the car to do a visual check on Halloween without really thinking about it.

She wasn’t there. I stopped, ignoring the time, and looked around the garbage can before hustling back inside to ask Charlie if he had moved her.

“No?” he said, more inquisitively than definitively.

“Someone stole her then!” I replied, angry. “This neighborhood is ridiculous. I have to go!”

Back in the car, Jane was crying that I had left her. I drove with one hand, twisting my back to reach her with my other one. As I held her soft, pudgy hand, I started to sing, “Mama loves Janie,” and she stopped crying to listen for her part as I continued, “…more than anyone in the…” and she belted out, “wo-rold!”

I smiled but tears crowded my eyes. I forced them away to drop her off at daycare and upon re-entering the car, I turned the radio up to redirect my attention, but that just brought new iterations of similar horrors to focus on, so I turned it off. I decided to check my phone before finishing my drive to school, and saw that Charlie had texted me.

“Today is garbage day.” He kept it short, letting me put the pieces together. Halloween wasn’t the victim of malicious intent, but rather tossed in with the trash by an overzealous garbage man. I was surprised by my own reactions. Trying to lighten my mood, Charlie joked that we could probably find another one in our basement if we wanted to. When I didn’t laugh, he tried to maintain that the dump might be the best place for her and her thousands of babies.

I tried to keep that vision in my head, but the reality of how easily and quickly the poignant drama of Halloween was thrown away clung to me for a while, like the thread of a web you unknowingly walk through.