“You sit here,” said Granny. “And take in what I have to say.”
“I—”
“Nancy,” said Granny. She rolled her fists together and trumpeted through them. “Now hear this!”
“Why?” Nancy gripped the arms of the chair. No, she didn’t want to hear any story about anything or anybody! Granny didn’t make it better by being funny.
“He was tall, so tall his legs poked out the gap between his socks and his trousers. Have you ever seen his legs?”
Nancy nodded. Well, of course she’d seen his legs. He was her grandfather, wasn’t he? Then again, had she? Granny threw back her head and laughed. Nancy tucked her foot under her to keep it from getting going of its own accord.
“They’re pale as ghosts, as if they’re scared of daylight. And the longest, finest black hair. And he was so pigeon-toed, even then. Oh, you should have seen him!”
Nancy would have liked to see him now, would have liked to hear him tell her she was wearing out her grandmother, instead of the other way around. And yet she thought she could see him, the way Granny described him. Or had she seen some old picture somewhere? He was as vivid and young before her eyes, in all his pigeon-toed glory, as bristly as Dion on his dome.
“The first time I ever saw him, oh my. He was chasing the bus. His glasses were so heavy they banged on the bridge of his nose, and he ran so comically, his big feet flapping. Fast, though, honey. He caught that bus.”
What if he hadn’t? Then the pattern would have been broken.
“After that I saw him in the OR,” Granny said.
“In surgery?” Nancy asked.
“We all had masks on then, of course. And his hands! Well, they were large and strong and graceful. His stitches were works of art. All his patients healed so quickly.”
“Why did they heal so quickly?”
“He was a good doctor!” Granny retorted immediately. She stared for a moment, then chuckled. “Oh, you know. Especially once I noticed him.” Her voice had gone woozy again.
Granny leaned back against the pillows and closed her eyes. “Thought you had some place to go.”
Nancy stood up. Granny didn’t stop her this time. It was fallen-Catholic Grandpa Joke who had told her what amen literally meant. She said it now as she fled: “So be it!” She banged the door behind her.
19
Shamiqua was at Annette’s, and as soon as Nancy heard her voice, she wished she hadn’t come. But, “Come in, lovey,” Annette’s mother was saying, pushing the door wide and calling for Annette, and in the next instant Annette and Shamiqua came barreling in, shoving each other against the doorway and welcoming Nancy way too enthusiastically.
Jealous! The evidence that Shamiqua was, in so many ways, what Annette had wanted Nancy to be lately, was all over Annette’s room: essentially, the room looked like they’d bought stock in Cosmetics Plus and were setting up shop right here. Nails, hair, eyes: all had been done.
The fact that Jimmy Velcro had really asked Annette to some dance, and of course Shamiqua was going with Buddy, had the two of them practically bouncing off the ceiling. Now they were looking at Nancy as though she were a blank canvas and they were inspired artists. Well, Nancy had wanted to get away from the house to someplace where she couldn’t put anyone at risk, couldn’t do anything to cause herself or family trouble. A makeover was innocent enough. Maybe.
“You’ve got such a pretty face,” Shamiqua said generously. “Why don’t you get your hair out of it?” Shamiqua’s hair was done in perfect tiny braids, all pulled into a ponytail as if it were straight hair like Annette’s.
“It’s my trademark,” said Nancy, who had read a few Seventeen magazines herself.
“Have you ever been in love?” Shamiqua asked Nancy, not expecting an answer, and she and Annette laughed hysterically at each other as though they’d been asking each other that question since school let out.
“No,” said Nancy automatically.
“I saw you with that bald-headed boy.”
“I can’t stay long,” Nancy said to Annette.
Shamiqua kept going. “I’m so glad to get a chance to talk to you without people around. I’ve been dying to ask you where—”
Where is your home planet?
Where you learned to knit?
“—you buy those gorgeous tights.”
Annette went into a pretend coughing fit, since Nancy’s tights were one of the big things they differed on.
Shamiqua looked intently at Nancy. “Well, a girl with thin legs …,” she began, then changed her tack. “You know, Annette, my grandma says we’ve all got something, and it’s all about what you do with it.”
Annette laughed a big “HA!” of a laugh and covered her mouth with her hand.
Nancy did have a few gorgeous pairs of tights—paisleys and florals and a rainbow pair—but these were just purple-and-black stripes, nothing miraculous. “Ricky’s,” she said.
“Oh, where’s that?”
“There are a bunch of them. Mostly in Manhattan.”
“Oh, Manhattan!” Shamiqua’s face fell as though she never got across the East River.
“It’s not that far,” Nancy said.
“Yeah, but … Well, maybe … Do you think? Oh, this is so embarrassing!”
“What?” Annette seemed fascinated by how Nancy would respond.
Shamiqua put her hands on her slender hips and stuck out a leg. “You know how they don’t let you try them in the stores? What if I spent the money and then they didn’t fit?”
Nancy shrugged.
Shamiqua tried flattery. “You have such cute legs,” she said. “Mine are … longer.” That was true. Longer and perfect, and, Nancy saw, perfectly smooth. If she could tell that on Shamiqua’s dark skin, how much more evident would the black hair be on her own medium-brown legs?
“Well, do you think I could try them on?”
Nancy saw no gracious way out of it. She took off her shoes—“My feet probably smell,” she said—and shimmied out of her tights. Then she bounded into one of Annette’s bedroom chairs feet first, curling her hairy legs beneath her. Did she look as alarmed as she felt?
“You know, cornstarch helps with foot odor,” Annette said.
Nancy stuck her tongue out at Annette behind Shamiqua’s back, and said, “It’s all about what you do with it.” Annette looked shocked and glanced at Shamiqua, who showed no sign that she’d heard, and was taking the tights from Nancy with a smug smile.
Nancy had an idea that Annette had possibly mentioned her unwillingness to shave to Shamiqua. It’s not that I’m unwilling, she caught herself thinking. But Mama would have my head. She just knew Shamiqua would have a clever answer for that, too, but she kept it to herself. She could almost feel the hair on her legs sticking out. That’s ridiculous, she scolded herself. But it was still true.
She watched Shamiqua to see if she was looking at her legs, but Shamiqua was trying on the tights, which of course stretched to fit.
“These are adorable. Do you think I could carry them off?”
Nancy wished she could just tell Shamiqua to keep the tights, to leave them on, to go home now, to get out! But Shamiqua had been invited to stay for dinner. Mrs. Li said Nancy could stay, too, but all Nancy wanted was to yank her tights back onto her own furry-feeling legs and get on out of there.
In the street again in her tights and shoes, hot and embarrassed and fed up beyond her limits with her family and their weirdness, she conjured up Dion in her mind, imagining him around every corner. But he did not appear.
20
Grandpa wouldn’t let Nancy help Granny Tina to the door. He didn’t get the wheelchair out of the trunk. He had Granny walk with her canes across the street, over the sidewalk, up the steps to the door, slow and steady.
The door opened, letting out a beam of light as someone let Nancy’s grandparents in. The door closed, then opened again a few inches. A boy came out, slipping a slouchy baseball cap over his head, and descended
the steps. He skimmed the sidewalk, quick and quiet. Nancy would have sat upright if she’d dared. The pale blueness of the light on his shoulders reminded her of Dion. If it were any brighter she could have seen his face. If it were any brighter, he could have seen hers. He seemed to try, peering out toward the parked cars shaded by the trees, and bouncing as he walked.
She leaned forward to watch the dim figure of the boy walk along the street, look back once, then head for the corner. He walked directly under the streetlight, which shadowed his face even more under the brim of the hat. If it were Dion, and why should it have been, other than that it looked like him, what was he doing here?
Nancy kept her eyes and ears open. She got the car door open, too, stepped out, closed it enough to douse the car’s dome light, but not enough to make a noise. The boy was at the corner now, and he didn’t notice when Nancy got out of the car.
She dashed after him, but when she got to the corner he had disappeared. A little grocery store glowed like a jewelry box, the colors of the fruit and flowers gleaming out. I’ll make it look like I’m on some errand. She stopped at the window, peered inside. She’d step in just long enough to buy a V8 juice—
There was an odd squeaking sound overhead. Nancy backed up quickly. It sounded as if maybe the store’s security gate was dropping down in front of the entrance. But it wasn’t. An alley ran between the grocery and the row of buildings where Grandpa and Granny were. Nancy peered in from the sidewalk, giving the dark alley a wide berth the way Granny Tina had taught her. It was nothing but a regular Brooklyn alley, the back gate to the courtyard, the garbage cans and clotheslines, clotheslines that stretched right up to the roof, and a fire escape that, because it went down the back of the building, not the front, reached near enough to the ground for her to jump up and grab it.
Nancy was drawn up the fire escape as though pulled by a magnet, the test of her mettle, or metal, with no time to think about fear. Fear! If that had really been Dion coming out of the house …
She made herself imagine she was just on the fire escape outside Dad’s nest. At the top, she reminded herself, was the sky. She crept up slowly, moving precisely, until she was high enough to see over the curtains into the room. Inside she saw her grandmother’s hands, smoothing a coverlet of soft gray silk around a small, dark woman. She saw pink roses near the bed, and a hand that held—what was it? Something orange. A child-sized basketball? How odd.
The lights were dim, the woman’s mouth was closed, Granny Tina was talking softly. Nancy could tell by the way her mouth was moving. Her heart went out to her grandmother, so old and sick, yet so tender and intense.
From above, there was the screech of metal on metal, and Nancy practically fell off the fire escape. It was hard to believe Granny didn’t look up, that everyone inside the apartment didn’t come running to the windows. And then Nancy wanted to kick herself for being so jumpy. The racket was only a clothesline pulley squeaking as someone brought in the washing. Just in time, too, because it was starting to rain.
“What do you see up there?”
Dion stood below her in the garden, staring up at the fire escape. There was no way to hide what she was doing. She didn’t dare call down an answer.
“Come down here!” His voice was quiet as wind, and as light.
She pointed a finger toward the window, which lit her for Dion to see, and raised the other hand, as if to ask, “Who’s that?”
He waved her down. She crept down the iron steps. He gave her his hand at the bottom. “Is that your grandmother?” he whispered.
She nodded. “Is that your mother?”
He looked away. It was.
Did he know what her grandmother was doing? Did he know—what Grandpa had said—that his mother might die? Into her mind came Granny’s words: Did you know how I knew I was in love with him?
“What’s the matter?” she asked, to find out what he knew.
No answer supplied. A drop of water hit her cheek. Another hit Dion’s forehead. His eyes were shadowed, but the water glimmered just above where his eyebrow should have been.
“Were you in there?”
He shook his head. “On the roof.”
“Why?”
Suddenly his face lit with alarm. “Don’t let him see you!”
She flattened herself against the wall in the dark, and watched from the corner of her eye as a dark curly-haired man came to the window and lowered the blinds.
“Is that your father?” she whispered.
In answer he climbed, springing rapidly step over step to the roof, and she was cursed if she was going to let him see her fear. It’s easier going up, she reminded herself, and followed.
The fire escape passed more windows, but the one that caught Nancy’s imagination was a room with a loft bed surrounded by posters; in the darkness up there she could see faces, but could not tell whose they were. Beneath it, a child’s bed stood, lit by a Lava lamp on the bedside table. In the glow of the Lava lamp, she saw a pair of red wings hung over the bedpost. Mina’s room—and Dion’s?
Rain was falling for real now, and thunder came on the wind. The metal steps felt wet and grimy. Her shoes slipped and slid. One flight up Nancy heard the heaviness of a street door closing. The visit must be finished. The hair on the back of her neck prickled and the insides of her knees broke out in a sweat. She tried tiptoeing and ended up skidding, skinning her knees and the outsides of her wrists, falling backward as fast as she could down the fire escape to the ground. She made a break for the street.
Then came that sound again, from above: the clothesline squeaking. What was Dion doing up there, bringing his laundry in from the rain? Why was he hiding from his own father? She pulled open the car door she had left unlatched and climbed inside, sat panting, watching her grandparents advance toward her.
21
Granny returned home exhausted practically to the point of falling into a faint. Rachel came dashing to the door to help get her upstairs, then stayed to rub her back and make her tea and fuss over her.
Nancy had to get out. When she pulled Grandpa aside to tell him where she was going, he was too distracted to protest much. “At this hour?”
“It’s only nine, Grandpa. I’ll be fine,” she said firmly. Oh, how his eyes were tired and sad.
“Nine? It seems like midnight.”
She went, poking the saint and saying “So be it,” wondering what that meant tonight.
She walked along quickly toward the Carroll Street station, knowing Dion would not be on the dome. Little by little the swift events on the fire escape came back to her, just as the scrapes on her elbows and shins began to lightly sting. She licked her palms and rubbed them on her arms, letting the wetness draw the cool air to these hot spots. She rubbed at her knees, too, although she couldn’t wet them through her tights and almost tripped, trying, just before speeding up to run for the train she knew was coming into the station.
Dion was not on the dome.
Ned sat at his table in a worn black T-shirt, the desk lamp lighting up the shots of silver in his long hair. Nancy let herself quietly into her father’s nest and scooped a clipping off the stack on the table before Ned even noticed she was there. The top one was by Nick Pappas; it was about a burglary that had happened in Canarsie two weeks ago. She knew this because Ned had neatly written in the date. He slid the clipping swiftly out of her hands and slipped it into a gray envelope.
“Why aren’t you at Mama’s?” he asked. “Isn’t it her night?”
She studied his face. She thought he didn’t like her reading that clipping. “I didn’t feel like it,” she answered starkly.
“Didn’t feel like what?” He was his usual sweet self, not getting annoyed by anything. She knew she was acting annoying.
She shrugged, refusing to answer, or not knowing where to begin.
“How about a cup of tea?” he asked, stood up, and bustled over to the little stove.
She followed him, rubbing her hands, but when he had
set the kettle on the burner and lit the gas, she finally said, “No, thank you, I don’t want any.”
“Oh! Okay! What, then?” He peered down at her, rattling his fingertips on the counter. It sounded the way she felt, as though her nerve endings were bumping into one another and fighting for space on the surface of her skin.
“Who do you think is the Angel of Brooklyn, Dad?” she asked, rubbing goosebumps from her arm.
He shrugged.
“You must have a theory, with all the stories you read.”
He said nothing about the stories. “Let’s go outside, little egg. It’s such a beautiful night.”
It was. No stars (there weren’t ever many in New York anyway) but a soft mist was left over from the rain. Dewy droplets outlined the wall and penthouse and fire escape like those on the Brooklyn Bridge in the photograph over Dad’s bed.
“Hey, Dad. Watch this!” She kicked off her shoes, peeled off her tights, climbed to the top of the wall and stood there, not holding on, her fingertips resting on the rim of the ladder. Her hair billowed up moist and bushy behind her, the only thing about her that moved.
This wall had nearly lost its power to terrify her. Nearly. With her feet bare and damp, she didn’t feel worried about slipping. She could focus not on the distance to the ground behind her, but on the wall under her feet. She felt it all through her legs, so solid, reaching all the way down to the ground and into the earth. I will not throw myself off, and I refuse to accidentally fall off, either.
She stood there until Ned walked over steady and smooth and gave her his warm sticky hand to guide her down.
“What changed?” he asked. Nancy felt him check the palms of her hands with his fingertips; she knew he would find they were dry. She stayed on the wall.
“Well, you know how I sort of feel where the subway is? It’s like that.”
“How so?”
She thought about it. “Well, when I’m coming into the house I think I can tell whether you’re here or not.”
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