Carlos Bob lives and sleeps in the backmost room of the modular addition of a trailer in the Whispering Pines Trailer Court. He’s a confused boy, not only because of his name, some ethnic mismatch his mama dreamed up with her girls before she fell asleep with the plastic tube around her arm still. He’s confused because his little sister is missing since this morning, and no one seems to want to find her. Mama’s girlfriends left a while ago, smirking among themselves and bumping into each other before peeling out in the dirt drive, and Sissy, the big one, patted him on the head and told him to be a good little hero. He said he would, but he doesn’t feel much that way right now, more like his belly’s shaking.

He huddles in a pool of blankets on the top bunk with his Spiderman comics and dreams of being able to rip the side of the trailer and walk into the storm of life out there, rain sheeting off his skin-tight red and blue suit like a movie. He will find her somewhere in a nameless city with dark foreboding streets and a garish street lamp where brain-dead lug-muscled thugs will try to stop him, no match for his web-wrapped fists and keen spider-senses. He will whip his way through them like Mama does the cobwebs when she cleans.

Tanya is not so little, he guesses as he jumps down from the bunk bed. She’s a big girl for her age, which is four. She doesn’t talk much yet, but likes to walk through the neighbor’s flower garden, and normally Carlos Bob goes with her, but today he has chosen to stay inside and draw Spidey and Doc Ock and Vernon, and Tanya has not come back. He’s worried too about Mama, who is lying in the middle of the sofa. It looks as if she’s thrown up a little bit, and he lifts the edge of her shirt -- pale fishy skin -- and wipes off her mouth.

Daddy Bill will come home soon from the university with Tanya, Carlos Bob hopes, and will turn off Mama’s weird music that she plays during the day, maybe take them out for thick cheeseburgers and fries not too hot to hold in your hand. By the time they come home Mama will be awake and will have cleaned the ashtrays of their gunk and pulled her hair back, and they will all sit on the couch together and drink pop while they watch cartoons on video. But he should get Tanya first.

Carlos Bob opens the screen door, holds it carefully and doesn’t let it slam for fear of waking Mama. He steps out onto the green long-haired lawn, still wet from the rain, and cuts across the board bridge over the drainage ditch, where he and Tanya floated his plastic boats yesterday. He can see the tugboat trapped at the edge of the fall, moving over and over. He steps into the knee-deep water and tosses the tiny boat onto the grass, and while he does he catches a hint of red at the corner of his vision, and steps over to the slight fall knowing already what he will see, the back of Tanya's tiny skirt bobbing madly in the brown water below.

He jumps down in to pick her up and doesn’t realize how deep it is, and he’s over his head and struggling a little. He thinks of what Spidey would do, imagines being able to capture air inside a balloon of spider-silk, imagines pulling his sister in and letting her breathe it, and he wishes it were true, he can almost touch her, and the water closes over his sight, when he feels a big hand on the back of his shirt and feels himself hauled into the air, and he coughs dirty water onto the grass.

When he wipes his eyes clear he can see Daddy Bill bent over Tanya a little ways away. Daddy’s cursing to himself, and she’s still there silent, her bag lunch still tied to her dress-sash. He can smell the banana in her lunch, and he knows it’s next to the PBJ and Little Debbie snack cake, because he packed it for her, with a smiling Spidey on a napkin, so she would know she would be safe. Carlos Bob wishes the thing would all end, wishes Mama would wake up and hold him and Tanya too, but Daddy Bill is just sitting there now watching the water run from Tanya’s mouth.

He remembers the music this morning, Mama and Tanya and him, swaying and singing about flowers and hairs and eyes, and the thought of Tanya walking through the water, the marigolds ticked behind her ears like two big orange eyes, like the antenna-eared aliens they saw on TV, would be more than OK. Would be cool. There is still a chance she will get up and walk to him, he thinks, and he will encase her forever in the protective cocoon of web he has prepared for the great responsibility sisters are, and there they’ll stay together telling stories until Mama or Daddy Bill come to unwrap them gently and put them to bed.