Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

—John Dryden, Marriage à la Mode

  17

  Dion, it seemed, was everywhere now. Not just on top of the geodesic dome, but drawn down off it. By her? Not just outside the subway station, but inside on the platform. Far away at first, then nearer, then in the same subway car, then getting off at the same place Nancy did for school. Not just on the street corner, but following her down the street, loping along as if he were stepping on springs.

  It felt a little scary. It felt a little pleasant.

  Nancy would have walked the whole way to school if it hadn’t been raining that Monday morning, and he might not have found her at all.

  She noticed him as she stopped to put up her umbrella, then he disappeared among all of the umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalk of Atlantic Avenue. Nancy glanced back once, and saw his face getting wet under the too-narrow brim of his hat. Of course he didn’t have an umbrella.

  Last night, over a dessert of Ned’s coconut pie, Grandpa Joke had said, “Tina? Tell Nancy about the fly on the wall.”

  “Fly on the wall? What fly?”

  “You know.” He smiled at her, encouraging.

  “Ask me again later,” Granny said, “When I’m not feeling so doo-lally.”

  “The poor little fly on the wall?” Rachel suggested, wanting to help her old mother.

  Then Granny Tina said in her slow-motion way,

  “Poor little fly on the wall.

  Ain’t got no clothes on at all.

  Ain’t got no petti-skirt,

  Ain’t got no shimmy-shirt.

  Poor little fly on the wall.”

  Nancy thought it was cute, but now, walking along with Dion getting wet behind her, she felt differently. Poor Dion, in his blue-gray clothes, making me nervous back there. What does he want? Calmly she folded her umbrella and dived ahead, ducking under and around people.

  She skidded around the corner of Hicks Street to Joralemon, darted into the little grocery, stood there breathing deeply, looking into the drink case, and chose V8 juice, lured by its warm redness on this gray day. She stopped under the awning outside to poke a straw into the bottle, and Dion appeared beside her, pulling a big bottle of Welch’s out of the crook of his arm. No bag. Had he stolen the juice, straw and all? Horrible thought: Does he have any money? What’s he living on? Rainwater?

  “Going to school?” he asked, blue eyes staring.

  She sipped her V8, narrowed her eyes at him. Other kids were walking along toward the old brick building around the corner. She turned a shoulder to shut out her view of Shamiqua passing. She didn’t answer Dion. See what he does, she told her chilly-calm self. And stop thinking his name!

  He walked along beside her. It’s my hair, she thought, in its usual rat’s-nest condition, that’s got his attention. But then Dion plucked the end of a strand of wool from the flap of Nancy’s backpack and pulled it, so it looked like she was working a spinneret.

  “Watch it, Dennis!” She stopped walking. “You’ll unravel my work.”

  “It’s not Dennis,” he said. “It’s Dion.” He stared at the wool as if trying to identify the animal it came from.

  “Oh yeah, right,” she said carelessly, pretending.

  “Dionysus,” he said. “I’m Greek. And Navajo.”

  She thought, I could love him. She felt raw around the edges, unfinished and uneven. She liked the feeling. “Are you homeless?” she heard herself ask him.

  “What if I was?” He straightened. His voice held warning, and patience.

  “Then—”

  Then, a shelter? Or city services? At school, the guidance office? Or, if he was hungry, should she bring him food? Maybe he was safer not going home. Who knew what his home was like? Who was she to say, home good, dome bad?

  “It’s just a word,” she said.

  Shamiqua tore past, going into the store with a homeroom buddy, making big eyes at Nancy. Nancy turned aside, blocking out the view of Shamiqua, who raised her pointed nose and went on.

  Nancy blew out her breath at Dion. “Why are you always hanging around me so weird anyway?” She grabbed for the yarn, trying to get it away from him without pulling it. She pictured stitches sliding away from her wooden needles, the pretty ones Granny Tina had given her just last night, with strawberries painted on the knobs. She should have packed it more carefully. Now she’d have to fix it in homeroom, and the nosy girls would want to know what she was doing, or worse, they’d just stare. Nobody else knitted in high school. Worse, they’d want to know who that boy was who Shamiqua saw her with. Nobody. Nobody! She’d say.

  Dion took Nancy’s free hand and wound the yarn onto her pointer finger. This looks idiotic, Nancy thought, a string coming out of my backpack and ending in a spiral around my finger. Her school was around the corner. People walking by were mostly going there. It didn’t take Dion two seconds to put the string on her finger, but it felt like a space opened around them. She felt the eyes looking. “Who was that boy, Nancy?”

  When Dion saw her watching the faces, he made a little snorting sound. He said, “I don’t go.”

  I don’t go. Where? He turned the corner quickly and was gone, as she stood there calculating how long it was before school started and how many people had seen her.

  She ran after him. How could I act like my sweater was more important? He was gone.

  Dion didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him. He had a deep fear of feelings in these times. When a feeling got too close, too personal, he jumped. Off the dome? Off the rail? Off the deep end?

  No, just away. Of all the people in New York that his father could have trailed, why had he chosen Nancy’s grandfather? Dion knew why. What mattered to Niko was strength. It was what he had that his parents hadn’t had—beaten-down immigrants who couldn’t adjust to the need to blend in. Like many a social climber, he had married Rose Browning as much for her bloodlines as her beautiful Navajo eyes.

  Now Niko wanted help for his Rose, and he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. Help was help, and if Nancy’s family had a way of helping—or two ways, or three—then Niko wasn’t going to wait for them to reach a hand out. Time was much too pressing, and, like most reporters, Niko worked best under pressure.

  That didn’t mean it was best for Nancy.

  Ned had been unpacking again. He concerned Nancy sometimes, the way he kept things, such as all of the newspapers and The New Yorker cover from when the World Trade towers came down, the towers in blackest black over a black-gray sky. Nancy touched the papers to see if they were those old ones. No. This one was much more recent. DOES BROOKLYN HAVE AN ANGEL?

  She skimmed the article, the usual story about someone doing bad deeds who got clonked on the head by a something falling from above—in this case, a screwdriver. Right here on the bed Dad had plenty of articles about the Angel, a dozen of them, all covering events that happened last year, mainly in Brooklyn, but some also in Manhattan.

  The stories were all by different reporters, all with the initials N.P.: Nick Pappas, Nestor Paprika, even a byline that had to be a pen name, Nobody in Particular. That was the Post, so goofy.

  The hammock was still strung with yarn, the balls of wool motionless on the floor underneath. Nancy experimented with Ned’s rigging, hoisted the hammock up as high as she could get it, and discovered how it felt to climb up there and slip into the sling.

  Nancy settled into the lovely feeling of being alone when you know someone will be home soon. The rooftops were the colors that boy Dion was: a wash of pale blues and grays and Brooklyn brick, russet, rose, and brown. The sky looked blue and warm and made her sleepy and comfortable. From so high, she could see it all—Dad’s tiny tomato and marigold plants in the garden patch, the peonies he was trying to start, some roses that were nothing but thorn sticks. For a vague moment just before she fell asleep, she imagined Dion crossing the roofs, his shirts and jacket flapping like wings.

  Afterward she thought she should have known. On Tuesday Nancy called The New York Times from the pay phon
e in the front hall at school and asked for Nick Pappas. They gave her another phone number. She braced herself for a voice barking “Pappas,” like in movies about newsrooms, but instead heard a quiet “Hello.” This made three: the speaker phone, the dark doorway, and now the phone at her ear. It was him all right. Niko Papadopolis, and Nick Pappas, and probably the other N.P.s as well.

  “Oh,” she said, flustered, then said the words she’d rehearsed. “I’m doing a report on criminal investigation for school. I saw your byline on a crime article in the Times—”

  “Your name?”

  She said the first name of the first girl she spotted down the hall and the last name of the second. “Jessica. Hyde.”

  “And what is it you want to know, Miss Hyde?”

  “How you get your stories.”

  He laughed, a huffing sort of sarcastic chuckle. She felt embarrassed, patronized. The way some people talked to kids …

  “I mean, where does the information come from? The police records?”

  “Yes,” he said in a way that could have meant yes or could have meant not exactly. “And from other sources.”

  “What other sources?”

  “Uh, Miss Hyde, I’m not sure this is—”

  “Like people on the street?”

  He paused. “At times.”

  Was that all he was going to say? “Well, how do the police find out a crime is happening?”

  “Miss—”

  “I mean, everyone can’t dial nine-one-one, can they?”

  His voice grew stern. “Surely you realize that a journalist reporting a crime is working after the fact.”

  “What I want to know is, who tells the police?”

  “Whoever happens to be in the vicinity to witness a crime in progress,” he said. “Now, if there’s anything else you need to know, may I suggest you call—”

  Before he could brush her off and never take a call from her again, she said, “Just one other thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “As a reporter, say you want to know all about someone, what do you do?”

  He cleared his throat. She guessed this was more the kind of question he expected from a student. “Start with the basics,” he said. “Who, what, where, when, and why. Who he is, what he’s done, where he works … Just keep asking questions. It’ll lead to the truth.”

  “Thank you,” Nancy said, hung up the phone, and went to math class. She already knew the where, she realized. She even partly knew the why. But who … Start with the basics.

  18

  That afternoon Nancy made three cups of tea. She made the first cup, the sky blue one with the big brown cat on it, in the basement kitchen, then took it to Rachel where she sat weaving in the greenhouse.

  “Hot tea,” she announced. “Here’s a sandwich, too. Mama—”

  Rachel was at the loom, still in her nightgown, clogs in the corner, morning tea cold and congealed in a cup on the floor. She had that look on her face that Nancy hated, that I’m Creating So Don’t Get in the Way look. “Angel,” she said softly to her daughter.

  It startled Nancy off-course. Instead of what she was going to say, she asked, “What does it mean, Mama, all your weaving?”

  Rachel ran her hand over Nancy’s curls, then the same hand coasted over the weaving held tight across the beater. “It’s how I make sense of the world,” Rachel said. “The pattern.”

  “It’s not only weaving that makes patterns,” Nancy said. “It’s webs! They’re everywhere at school. Longitude and latitude, trigonometry, music staffs. Even the notes look like spiders. The greenhouse,”—she pointed to the spines of metal that formed its frame, like the structure of Dad’s penthouse—“the playground dome by the subway. And this kid on top of it who uses it for his web.”

  “Uses the dome?”

  She dared to tell. “Yes. The one by the subway. The one made out of triangles.”

  “Is he trying to catch someone?” Rachel asked, trying to follow this curious line of thinking.

  It was clear that what Rachel said was so.

  Rachel thought Nancy’s silence meant she didn’t understand the question. “Trap you,” she explained. “‘Step into my parlor,’ said the spider to the fly.”

  “No! I’m the spider.” Dion was the fly, wasn’t he?

  Rachel curled up on the loom bench, rubbing her arms and looking up at Nancy. “It’s catch or be caught, baby girl. Chase or be chased. It’s what Granny would tell you to do.”

  “Granny!”

  “Let him think he’s caught you, but really—”

  “Catch him,” said Nancy.

  Her mama nodded, her eyes clear as the greenhouse glass.

  “Mama?”

  Rachel’s shoulders dropped a little. “What?” She may as well have said, What now?

  “Why’d Granny come to New York?”

  “She was drawn here,” Rachel said quickly. “Life in West Virginia wasn’t so much for an—” She hesitated. “A creative girl.”

  “Like New York was a magnet?” A magnet for weirdos of any kind. Spiders were just one kind.

  Rachel smiled. “You mean it was a test of her mettle.”

  Nancy groaned. “Her metal?”

  “Mettle. What’s inside her.”

  Nancy got the pun, but pondered the meaning.

  “Pay attention to what draws you, Nancy.”

  “Mama,” Nancy asked after a long moment, “if I were in danger, would you be able to go out to help me?”

  “Are you in danger?” Rachel asked sharply.

  Nancy hunched one shoulder up to her ear and shook her head against it. “What if Dad was?” She didn’t meet Rachel’s eyes.

  Rachel caught her breath. “Is he?” she asked.

  Nancy didn’t reassure her, only stood up and climbed the steps to the other apartment.

  Nancy made the second cup of tea in the upstairs kitchen. She used the black cup and saucer, and put a little shot of amaretto in it, the way Grandpa Joke liked it. He hunched over the steaming, almond-fragrant cup, studying the tea and a swirl of cream the color of the grape vines at the edge of his garden.

  “You okay, Grandpa?”

  “Nancy.” Grandpa Joke took her hand and pulled her to him, hugged her with his arm around her waist, his brown eyes on hers. “We’ve got another house call tonight.”

  “Same place?” she asked. Her stomach felt like little holes had been punched out of it.

  He nodded. “I’ll need you,” he said.

  There was almost a pattern to the way her family was letting her in on or leaving her out of information, each in his or her own way deciding whether or not it was time. Nancy thought it was. Maybe Grandpa Joke—the other not-very-spidery one among them—thought so, too.

  “Honey, show Granny Tina your knitting. Take her mind off.”

  “Take her mind off what? Your patient? Or is it hers?”

  He rubbed his face with his hands and waved her away.

  Granny Tina had made the mug that Nancy brought her. She had thrown it round on her wheel, baked the clay, glazed it dark red, and fired the glaze to make it shine. It was beautiful, and, like all of her pottery, phenomenally strong.

  Nancy flipped the tea bag into the sink, added honey. With one foot she pushed her backpack full of knitting along the polished floor ahead of her, into Granny’s room.

  As soon as Granny Tina saw Nancy, she snapped her reading light off, her deep dark eyes bright with expectation.

  “Show me what you’re doing, then,” she said. “Still the pattern that isn’t?” She took a sip of tea and leaned back against her pillows to watch Nancy knit. Two more inches of the front piece, and in came Grandpa Joke.

  “Tina?” he said softly, his hand on her shoulder. Nancy looked up to see Granny asleep, her tea mug empty. She must have stayed awake long enough to drink it.

  “Grandpa?” Nancy asked. “Granny is—” She leaned forward and caught Grandpa Joke’s eye, made a shaky-hand gesture to show him sh
e thought her granny was not quite all right. “How’s the patient?” Nancy went on, hoping to catch Grandpa unaware.

  He searched her eyes. He didn’t say it was his patient, not Granny’s. Well, that was something she knew that Dion didn’t. “She’s going to die,” he said.

  Nancy asked, “Of what?” She was shocked to have gotten a real answer.

  “Failure to heal.”

  And another! She hadn’t heard of this before. She thought back to that first phone call. “But I thought she was a heart patient.”

  “Heart? Your granny doesn’t treat heart patients.”

  “Because she is one herself?”

  “No, because—”

  “Anyway, why can’t you make the patient better?” Nancy pressed on daringly. “What are you doing at that house?”

  “The self-inflicted wounds are the most difficult to heal,” said Grandpa Joke. “It’s impossible if the patient herself doesn’t want to get better.”

  He took the blood-red mug and went out. Nancy stuffed her yarn and needles into her bag. As she stood to leave, Granny opened one eye. “It’s not impossible,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Well, don’t expect him to tell you everything.”

  “Grandpa?”

  Granny nodded slowly, then said, “Do you know how I knew I was in love with him?”

  Nancy shrugged one shoulder. She wanted to go out, and no, this was not the story she wanted to hear right now. Look what had happened after the last story—how she’d lost her mind and gone up to that door, met the reporter’s little girl, and met the man himself. Well, she’d met his voice at least, and now they were going again tonight. She hadn’t changed anything last time. Granny had still come home older, weaker, sapped.

  “I’ve got homework,” Nancy said firmly. “Hard homework.”

  “Do you think this is going to be easy?” Granny asked.

  “I don’t have time for a story,” Nancy said. “I have to—”