“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Catalina replied, appreciating the pink-gold hue of the sky melting into the indigo ocean waves below. It reminded her that despite her current situation there was still things that gave her the feeling of peace, like the feel of her husband’s hand in hers and beautiful landscapes.
They continued making their way toward the resort. It was an endless path of hills and valleys, making her already sore calves even more painful. Despite this, that single moment with Trey, to breathe and eat and talk, gave her a boost. Maybe they could succeed—they could do this because they had each other, and she didn’t have to do it alone. Maybe they could survive more than this, like the giant rift in their relationship.
And, yes, what he accused her of was horrible and uncalled for. How did the big goof not expect her to get angry? But even before the accusation, she had gotten good at not talking to him, shutting herself off because she didn’t have enough to give. What was she supposed to do? Tell her job she needed help, that she couldn’t do everything? That she couldn’t do her job, and the tasks of the two people who left the department earlier in the year, and also be a hundred percent at home? Tell him she was at a real crossroads with her work and couldn’t help but feel guilty? Because if she also gave up on the organization, she was abandoning the people who needed her work the most, the ones who benefited from the program. People who were in the same spot her mother and her had found themselves in after being abandoned by her father. All of these weren’t easy things to talk about, even to a spouse.
Things were already tight enough financially, both for the non-profit and at home. While she loved the mission of her work and was happy to be giving back to people whose situation she understood, there were a lot of people who needed help. The number grew every day, and, most of the time, it was like trying to bail a sinking boat with nothing but a thimble. There was no end. She had to keep going—to find new marketing and financial opportunities for theorganization. If Catalina didn’t, people, especially kids, would go hungry.
In the grand scheme of that, the problems between her and Trey paled in significance. It was easier to not talk about it, to go at it alone, rather than vomit spew all her greatest fears about failing everyone. Even so, Catalina didn’t like who she had become. She thought the worst of herself. She assumed Trey had begun to think the worst of her too. Every sigh, every one of his disappointed frowns, confirmed this in her mind. Then it was easier to turn to anger. Because how dare he treat her in such a way when she was doing all she could to hold it all together? How was it both easier and harder to take everything and stuff it into an emotional bag to lug around alone, one that was heavier than her literal purse?
But in her current situation, she no longer had the job or her stress causing problems. There wasn’t a lot she could do about her work at the moment. This new world consisted of only her and Trey, which simplified a lot of her emotions, especially those concerning him. She realized it wasn’t fair to treat him as though he was expendable. As though she’d be better off without him, rather than depending on him to be there if she needed someone to lean against.
If today proved anything, it was that he would fight not only everything else but also her in order to be by her side. She was embarrassed the pressure had caused her to give up instead of meeting the same level of effort as him. Catalina had been looking for a way out from the constant, seemingly unattainableneed to do it all, and as soon as he gave her a legit excuse, she latched onto it. It was the ideal scenario she could point to and say,See! He is a horrible human being who doesn’t love me! I don’t need to feel guilty for cutting myself off because he unfairly accused me of having an affair.Despite using this as a reason to pour liquid steel down her spine and lock her determined jaw into place, the relationship breaking apart around her hurt. It crushed her—made her want to crumple to the floor in an agony of emotional pain because she didn’t want Trey to stop loving her. No matter the reasoning, she lost a piece of her heart, and being self-reliant would never make up for that. Her consistently unhappy mother was further proof on the matter.
Honestly, she didn’t need all his weird reasons to love him. She already had her own list building in her mind. Ever since that first moment they’d met, when they found themselves sitting next to each other in a chilly lecture hall in college, it was as if he’d seen her on a deserted island of her own making. He built a bridge from his island to hers because that was what Trey did. And then he never stopped building that bridge. At first the connection between them was a small tether, then a rope, then planks. He kept building even when she broke out an axe and tried to do as much damage to the bridge as she possibly could. Today, he was still building, even in the face of impossible situations.
Catalina wanted to throw her axe down and start building the bridge back to him. She wanted to believe she could do anything, even that, which somehowseemed scarier and harder than facing a horde of angry seagulls while inside a partial empanada.
She opened her mouth to tell him some of what was on her heart, but all she got was, “Trey—”
“What the fuck is that?” he said, stopping short.
By this time the sun had nearly slipped beyond the horizon of the ocean, and dusk was settling in. Things became harder to see. She squinted in the direction of his finger, trying to decipher the strange movement in the distance. “What is that?”
Above the surface of the sand was the scampering of movement, tons of them all over. The separate individual movements were similar to each other but not coordinated.
“What the fuck?” Trey said again, his grasp on her hand becoming tighter. “Are those spiders?” His free hand scrambled for his pocket. “Where’s my phone? I need my phone.”
“What for?”
“I need a flashlight. Spiders are scared of the light, right?”
She wasn’t sure this was the case. She’d never heard of spiders being scared of light before. They weren’t cockroaches. But she wasn’t about to argue with him if this was what he needed to feel safe.
“Do you have a flashlight in your bag?” He grabbed at the purse clutched to her chest, and it dropped to the ground. “Shit!”
“I don’t have a flashlight in there.” She fell to her knees to claim her bag before he spilled everything out in his panic. “It’s okay. Maybe it’s not spiders,maybe it’s just…” She attempted to come up with something pleasant and not at all scary, but when a person is tiny, almost everything is terrifying, even things that used to be okay. Before she could think of something, a skittering of movement happened just behind them, the sound of it growing closer.
She sucked in a breath, her heart racing. “Oh shit,” she whispered before slowly raising her head to peer over Trey’s bent body.
Chapter 18
Trey
The first time Trey had an existential crisis involving spiders was when he was ten and his dad sent him into the garage to get a tool needed to fix a broken sink in his mom’s house. He didn’t remember what specific tool it was, probably some kind of wrench, but this situation was the reason he preferred all tools to live in a large Tupperware inside their actual living space and not in any outside storage area.
After his parents divorced, the garage had become a dumping ground for whatever junk his mom didn’t want in the house but wasn’t quite ready to donate or throw away. Many of the things she claimed were his father’s and, for some reason, his dad didn’t want the items either. So by the time the broken sink incident happened, the garage was a mess of dust and grunge.
When getting the tool, he’d knocked over a small box of old cables, and along with the mess of cables also came an explosion of spiders. They spread everywhere like a writhing mass until one spider sprang toward him, sending him falling backwardsover another box of old shoes. He screamed in a panic, convinced all the spiders were about to consume him for their afternoon feast.
His father ran into the garage, yelled at him for creating chaos and scaring his mother half to death, and then roughly dragged him into the house. As he tried to explain to his parents what happened, a wayward spider crawled from somewhere behind his shoulder and down his arm, sending him screaming once more.
It was an origin story of how he came to believe spiders were the devil’s animals and why he was fastidious in keeping all his living spaces as clean as they could be. As a grown man, he wouldn’t admit to being terrified of them, but he preferred they stayed in their world and he stayed in his. As long as these boundaries were respected, there wouldn’t be any issue.
Of course, this was before the whole shrinking thing happened, and he was in their world now and, even worse, below them in the food chain. As soon as he saw things on the horizon moving, some of them doing jerky hops, he knew in his heart it was the spiders coming to finally get him and finish him off.
“Uh, Trey,” his wife said, sounding more alarmed as she looked behind him.
“Please don’t be spiders. Please don’t be spiders,” he said in a low chant, preferring ignorance like it was a blanket he could throw over his head and remain safe. But he knew he had to look because life didn’t work that way and he had to know what he was about to face. Also, he wasn’t going to let Catalina fall victimto spiders either. Bracing himself, he slowly rotated, fully prepared to throw his wife over his shoulder and sprint away.
