Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

  Dion slipped through the dark back alley and up the fire escape to the window of the room he shared with Mina. He scratched his fingernails along the glass until she appeared and pushed up the window. “Meens,” he whispered. “Is she better?”

  Mina shrugged, a one-shouldered shrug that clearly meant not much better. “We’ve got Oreos,” she said, and disappeared. Dion leaned on the wall and listened to himself breathe.

  And then his father grabbed him by the arm. “Get yourself in here,” Niko said. But the angle was wrong from the window, and Dion sprang back. For once he was the faster jumper.

  “What are you doing?” his father demanded. Dion pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes and his coat collar around his neck. He didn’t want Dad to notice his hair was gone.

  Niko didn’t reach for him again. He leaned out the window and said, “You’re surviving, then?”

  Just about, thought Dion. “Where’d you find that doctor?”

  Niko shrugged. “Connect the knots,” he said. It was what he always said about reporting, how it was just a matter of making connections from one person who’d heard some information to another person who’d heard something else.

  “Where?” Dion asked again patiently.

  “In the OTB on Flatbush.”

  “Come on, Green Medicine is not in the phone book.” Niko Papadopolis knew how to trace a story. Dion used to listen to him putting connections together, before, back when he admired his father and was proud of him and thought maybe he himself would like to be some kind of writer or investigator. Green Medicine is not in the phone book. How many times had Dion heard his father say that? Niko had muttered it to himself as he dialed the phone or walked the bars and betting parlors and bocce courts and coffee shops and Curley’s diner and the other places where the kind of people who interested him congregated, swapping tall tales about themselves, spreading rumors.

  “You won’t come in?” It wasn’t like Niko to ask for anything; he usually just ordered Dion to do things. But Dion thought his father seemed nervous, jumpy in a new way. He didn’t mind the feeling it gave him, as if he, Dion, might have the upper hand. He shook his head and said, “That old man?”

  “Joke is what they call him,” said his father. He lit a cigarette, and leaned on the windowsill. “‘That your real name?’ I asked him. We were at the OTB window that day.

  “‘Giacomo,’ the guy says.

  “‘An Italian? What’s your last name?’

  “He says, ‘Verdi, up to the moment we came through immigration. Then we made a translation.’” Dion waited.

  “Greene. With a silent e.

  “So I go with him into Curley’s and sit beside him at the counter. He gives his order: grilled mozzarella sandwiches and curly fries with extra paprika.”

  Dion started to chuckle, turned it into a cough. “Enough with the journalistic detail.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s detail that saves the day, my friend.”

  It was almost like a nice conversation, except for the fact that Dion was outside freezing, while his Dad stood in the bedroom, which was warm and had Dion’s bed in it. Dion stood up.

  “Listen here,” his father said. He reached a hand toward his son. Dion stood still. “Details. Good shoes, Italian shoes, worn down at the heels. Baggy pants, as though he’d lost some weight. And his wallet seemed baggy, too.”

  “So what?”

  “So I thought maybe he was low on funds, that’s so what. And I knew he didn’t know what I knew about him.” This kind of convoluted sentence was typical of Niko Papadopolis in speech, if not in writing. “I asked him if he was retired. He was still a doctor, he said. I already knew it. So I say—you know what I said?”

  Dion was silent. A doctor without a hospital? A doctor with a failing practice? How did that happen?

  “I say, ‘Once a healer, always a healer.’ He says he doesn’t treat insured people. He’s a hero. He’s here to help the poor. He thinks I’m too smooth. But I tell him, ‘I recognize you.’ He doesn’t ask what I recognize about him.”

  Dion didn’t ask either.

  “‘We both love our wives,’ I say. ‘Our wives are both special people, with great natural gifts.’ He gets my meaning.”

  “He needed the money,” Dion said, testing. He was more than curious about the money. What did Dad care about the doctor’s wife, anyway?

  Niko took a quick puff from his cigarette and gazed at his son, though his hand on the cigarette shook a tiny bit. “A cynic at sixteen,” he said. “Yes, smart guy, he did. And he’s going to need more, if you see what I mean.”

  “I’m leaving,” Dion said acidly. He saw, all right. First the research was for his mother, but next it would be for the papers. And what would that mean to the girl? To his father, it was all just different kinds of business. He stepped lightly up the steps above his father’s head, going roofward.

  “Stay dry,” Niko said.

  That’s it? “What does that matter?”

  “Eh, you’re like me. You’ll be all right.”

  Like him how? As a finder of things? As a jumper? Or as a tough guy who was willing to overpower some old man who might have helped him for free if he was nice about it? What could Dad have to hold over an old doctor like this? If the doctor knew where the Wound Healer was, why wasn’t Dad paying the doctor to tell him?

  No, Dad always had to have a sense of winning. He might not be the biggest guy, but he was the strongest. He might not be the best basketball player, but he had the best jump shot. And he might not be the smartest reporter, but he was the most persistent. If his bosses at the papers still wanted stories on the Angel of Brooklyn, Niko would find them—and maybe some Wound Healer stories, too. But did he have Wound Healer stories? Dion wished he knew.

  “What do you care if I stay dry?” he asked his father.

  Niko bowed his head, and for a moment Dion felt remorse, and longing. “You won’t come back?” his father asked, then answered his own question. “No. Tough, like your old man. Well, I thought I could conquer the world, once.”

  “Dad, when did you ever stop thinking you could conquer the world?”

  Niko laughed a short, sour laugh. “Yeah, well…”

  Dion wished he had not asked the question. Knowing the answer was not going to make him feel any better about his mother. But once he’d started asking, he couldn’t stop. “Is she any better?”

  His father swore, then stopped himself. “It’s too soon to tell. The doctor only just left.”

  Dion could have gone to see his mother.

  He could have asked what the doctor said.

  He could have tried to pry more out of his father, maybe an invitation to come home.

  Instead he turned and kept going, up the steps.

  “You’ve got somewhere to keep the rain off?”

  The dryness question again. Dion didn’t answer.

  Below, Niko stubbed out his cigarette on the windowsill and called up softly, “It’ll be the making of you.”

  “Daddy!” From inside, Mina called. Dion stopped climbing. He watched the window for a moment. His father did not reappear.

  Dion slipped back down the steps, pocketed the Oreos Mina had left on the sill as he stepped over it. On tiptoe he sneaked into the hall where the phone was. Hit Redial and—yes!—read the numbers on the screen. The phone beeps drew his father to the hall, but by the time he got there, Dion had run away again.

  Dion could pounce on an idea as quickly as his father. Now he hit the Internet café on Atlantic Avenue, found the address that went with the phone number. It was in Carroll Gardens. So he went traveling. He found the doctor’s car parked on a street full of brown brick apartment houses, the kind of street that had crazy lights at Christmas and Virgin Marys in the front yards all year round, not a tasteful street like his parents’. Was this where the Wound Healer lived? It didn’t matter to Dion that most people thought the Angel of Brooklyn and the Wound Healer were as made up as other funky fantastic urb
an legends.

  Dion wasn’t sure the roof he settled on for the night was Nancy’s. That didn’t stop him from hunkering down there, his back against a chimney, trying to stay out of the wind. He missed his mother. Dion had always looked out for Rose, in the ways a good boy did for his mother in the city. He held the doors, he wheeled the heavy shopping basket all the way home from the grocery store, he walked next to the street and let her have the inside of the sidewalk, the way his father had taught him. He had walked her home from work every day all last winter. He said it was because it was dark so early, but really it was because her office was so full of people with scared eyes, people who had seen too much trouble, people who had lost their place and didn’t know how to find it. He didn’t know which day Mom had begun to lose her place herself. Did her bleeding heart bleed for him, too? He made himself think of the girl instead. In the courtyard in the back of the apartment houses, there was a greenhouse with a light inside. Someone was down there, but it wasn’t Nancy. He played with her name in his mouth a little. Nancy.

  Sleep crept up on him.

  Dion hunched his shoulder against the chimney and pulled up his hood to cushion his head. Down in that greenhouse he noted the rhythmic motion of some machine working. It nearly put him to sleep.

  And then the sound of a door opening below brought him to his feet. A glance over the roof edge sent him dashing toward the fire escape. He found the alley he’d scoped out on the way in. Let the girl think he could appear and disappear. He liked to think that she’d think about him at all.

  13

  When Nancy awoke on Granny’s couch, a crick in her neck and the stitches slipping off her knitting needles, the bedroom door was shut and the light was out, and Ned stood at the kitchen window. She knew what he saw: Rachel, weaving down there in her bubble of light.

  From above, the warp threads looked as lacy as those white cobwebs that shone in patches on the grass in the courtyard on spring mornings. “Look!” Granny had told Nancy once. “The fairies are doing their laundry.” That’s what the webs had looked like: white fairy dresses, drying on the grass.

  Mama had knelt in the grass and peeked under a little white piece of laundry. “Who’s there?” she called. Nobody answered.

  In her faded sweatshirt and flowered pajama bottoms, Rachel hunched cross-legged on the floor, her arms reaching to her many threads, arranging them among the heddles as calmly and sedately as an old eight-leg in the corner of an attic. “She Who Cannot Be Disturbed,” Nancy said, slipping under Ned’s arm. He wrapped her in his long arms and stood with his chin on her head, watching Rachel. “Did you just come in?” Nancy asked.

  “Yeah, I went out for a while. Some work to do.” Nights, Ned often went to visit people who wanted their roofs done, in order to give them estimates of what their jobs would cost. “Ready?” He fished in his pocket for his Metrocard.

  “The house call tonight was strange,” Nancy said as Ned opened the door to the stoop. The street glowed dark green this late at night, the leaves of the bushes lit up by people’s stoop lights.

  “Holy Saint Chris,” said Ned to the doorway saint, a hand on the statue’s foot.

  “Amen,” answered Nancy, as always.

  “Strange how?” Ned picked up the thread again.

  “It took a really long time,” she said.

  “How long?” The wind was cold. They hurried up President Street.

  “Dad, it was like they weren’t going to let Granny leave.”

  “They did,” Ned said matter-of-factly But his eyes darted around more than they normally would, checking the traffic on Court Street before crossing.

  “Yeah, but… Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Oh, the healing process,” Ned said vaguely. “Whatever works, I guess.”

  “What kind of work is it?” Nancy asked.

  “Just medicine,” he answered.

  “What kind of medicine? Voodoo?”

  He stared. “Voodoo it certainly is not.”

  “Then—”

  “Then stop it.”

  But she couldn’t. “Dad, those people scared Grandpa.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  She was careful in her response. “Well, I don’t think it’s just the money he owes.” She thought her father was more surprised than he showed. “Dad,” she said. “Granny said tonight that there was more than one way of being a spider. What do you think she meant?”

  “They’re not all our kind,” said Dad tensely.

  “What all?” she asked. “Who?” The Greene kind? The Kara kind? And what kind was Grandpa Joke? What kind was she?

  He said, “You must know it’s hard to identify them.”

  “Why?”

  Dad waved his hands at the low Brooklyn buildings around them. “It’s the way this city is. People come here from all different places, and they all turn into New Yorkers.” That meant: Fast walkers. Subway riders. Multicolored crowds. “Some groups don’t fit in so well. They hang together more than others. Most are underground, trying to stay unnoticed until they get their chance.”

  “Get their chance to what?”

  “To—” He stopped. “Nothing.”

  “Dad, come on!”

  He shook his head, a tense movement that hardly moved his dreads. “It could cost us too much,” he said.

  “Is that why Grandpa Joke needs money?”

  He looked confused. “Not that kind of cost.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nancy, we’re not the only roof dwellers, and not the only ground dwellers. But this other thing—”

  “Medicine?” She stood still on the sidewalk to say it.

  He had to stop, too. He cocked his chin sharply, not wanting to answer.

  “Why won’t you—”

  “I won’t,” he said. He cut dead the conversation. He walked on, and she followed. She felt hot behind her eyes, but if he was going to hold back because she was too young, the last thing she was going to do was cry. Whatever this is, she thought, it’s something else they’re waiting to see if I have. It’s something else I don’t have.

  Ned’s long legs stretched out. Nancy hustled to keep pace. But they didn’t move so fast that she missed the eyes of the boy on the dome as he turned to watch them pass. Ned didn’t seem to notice him as he hustled toward the station, hurrying in part to get away from her questions, Nancy figured.

  “Dad, I think there’s a train coming into the station.” The slightest jiggle in the sidewalk clued her in. She began to run.

  “How’d you know?” Ned ran along, keeping pace.

  “The ground shakes.” Everyone in New York knew that. People five stories up—or even more—took it for granted that they could feel the subway passing in certain areas.

  “I didn’t feel anything,” he told her.

  “Guess I’m just lucky,” Nancy said, thinking nothing of it.

  “It’s a gift,” Ned agreed.

  Nancy felt irritated. Some gift, compared to what he wanted her to have. She fell silent, and let her knees bounce along with the bumping of the train, more than was necessary. She walked her hands up and down the steel pole, not wanting to be in one place, seeking the cold places in the metal. Seeing that boy again had made Nancy all jangly. She didn’t know what it meant that he had seen her dad. It felt like another step closer to … what? In her head, she asked him, What’s your name? He didn’t reply.

  Their subway car had a lot of empty orange seats and a dirty floor. Ned loved the subway this time of night. He hated it at rush hour, couldn’t stand touching strangers as a rule. “Do this, Nancy,” he said. He reached for two metal straps, one for each hand. Hauled himself up and flipped over backward, feet in the air, skinned the cat with his feet on the silver-gray ceiling of the subway car. “What a feeling,” he said. As the subway came aboveground to cross the canal, the city rose up huge and sparkling, making the train seem tiny.

  Nancy glanced at the platform of the station they pulled into, saw just
one old man Grandpa Joke’s age waiting for their car. She dropped her backpack onto the seat. Leaped to catch the straps in her hands. Walked up the wall and window and flipped (good thing she was wearing tights, not just kneesocks) and landed, “Ta da!” on her Docs.

  The old guy, entering, let out a tsk of irritation.

  Ned caught his eye. “You ought to try it,” he said. The man snorted, smiled. Ned and Nancy spun and flipped, shooting along through the dazzling New York night.

  Ned’s station had no playground outside, no playground inhabitants, just the Uprising Bakery on the corner, darkened for the night, leftover rolls in the window. “I’m hungry,” Nancy said, throwing her pack onto her shoulder, running up all the stairs.

  “Rice Krispies and raisins,” Ned said. “Then sleep.”

  Nancy jolted awake in the middle of the night.

  It was never really dark in the penthouse, not with all those city lights out there. Ned was out cold—she was absolutely certain this time—in his bed in the corner, snoring most convincingly under his mosquito netting. “Lends a romantic air,” he’d said, and lent privacy for Nancy.

  She pulled her black sweater over her pajamas, opened the door without the least creak, and hesitated, breathing in the night. Here’s what I’m going to do, she directed herself: Walk straight and slow across the roof to the ladder, and up and over it and down to the first landing. There would be no pause in the rhythm, no pause in the pace. She’d been there already, she’d lived through it twice. Let three times be the charm.

  Some charm. She was wet with sweat before she was halfway across the roof, nauseous and dizzy before she mounted the edge of the wall, and her knees were so jelly-useless by the time she reached the final landing that they collapsed beneath her.

  Holy Saint Christopher! Would she ever get over this fear?

  Her toes sank between the metal slats as if they were monkey toes, trying instinctively to reach around and hang on.