Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

  “Which question?”

  “That question about knowing someone.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Kindness, Nancy. Show him some kindness.” He glanced at Ned again.

  “Kindness!” she whispered. “To Dad?”

  He shrugged. “To anyone. Kindness brings a person out.”

  “Out of what?”

  He didn’t exactly answer. “Kindness,” he said, tasting the word. “To everybody. Show everybody some kindness.”

  It should have been a poster on the subway.

  “Do you want me to stay tonight?” Nancy asked Rachel, less because she wanted to than because she wanted an excuse not to do what she was about to do.

  But Rachel didn’t save her. She said, “Baby girl, I’m deep into work on my masterpiece.” Nancy thought she probably meant it, about the weaving being a masterpiece.

  “How’s it going, Rache?” Ned asked.

  “What do you care, dear?” She may as well have said, “Now go.”

  It was still full light out, a long lovely spring evening, when Ned and Nancy left the house. “Holy Saint Chris,” Ned said with a sigh.

  “Amen,” Nancy began, and then changed to “So be it.” She jammed her foot into the house door. “There’s something I want to show you,” she said.

  “Now?”

  She pulled him back in and slammed the door so that those inside would think they’d gone out. “It’s on the roof,” she told him. “This roof. You’ve been asking for it, so don’t blame me.”

  24

  Nancy closed the roof hatch carefully behind them. “That’s how I get here,” she said, fighting the quaver in her voice. “From the street, up the stairs. I want you to tell me how you get here, Dad.”

  Ned’s breath caught, then he let out a ragged sigh.

  “Dad?”

  It was as though his chest had gone hollow. Sharp-shouldered, he walked over to the parapet, the edge of the roof, and looked down. “Joke was right,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “The wine.” He closed his eyes. “You.”

  “Dad, listen. I followed you the last time you came here.”

  He nodded. He knew.

  “But I couldn’t follow you for real, Dad. You’re too fast.”

  Eyes still closed, Ned raised his eyebrows.

  “How can you be that fast, Dad?”

  “Practice.”

  “And—?”

  “And what?”

  “Dad. That boy, he said—And I didn’t believe him, but then I realized he was right. I couldn’t figure out where you went. I have really good eyes, Dad, but you were gone.”

  “Nancy—”

  “It’s not just practice,” she insisted.

  He opened his eyes, turned and held his hands out to her. “No, it’s not. You’re right. But that’s all I can—”

  She wasn’t having it. “Dad, I want to know about you. I think I already do. So you have to tell me now.”

  “Little egg!”

  Ned’s hands were on her shoulders, his face against her hair. She could feel him trembling. He stood back and gave her a long look, his eyes looking blacker than black with the sunset sky behind him. He let the breath go out of his chest, blowing gently. Then he dropped his hands and walked away to the edge of the wall, climbed over it. He was gone. He just suddenly was not there. No Ned.

  “Dad?”

  Nancy hung over the parapet. The street below reflected the evening light, so far away it looked like a river. The back of her neck and palms had gone hot and cold with fear, and now not just the hair on the back of her neck, but also the hair on her head, felt like it was standing on end. She felt electrified, scared rigid. Scared stiff. She whirled, looked every which way on the roof, but Ned was gone.

  “Nancy!” Ned’s musical way of saying her name floated on the air, came through low and level.

  She turned back to the street, searching, searching. There he was! She spied her dad on top of the building on the other side of the street, on the roof opposite this one. He leaned both hands on the parapet of that building, smiling nervously at her, his eyes still so serious, the sunset purple on his hair.

  She didn’t ask how or why. She said nothing. She didn’t dare speak or call out. There were people walking on the sidewalk below. Dion! Dion and a little girl, that sister of his, walking down the block along the community garden. Spying.

  Nancy backed away from the edge and waved Ned toward her with both hands, as if pulling water toward her in a bathtub. Come back.

  From this distance she watched him bend below the wall. She waited seconds, a minute, standing back from the edge out of view of Dion, should he chance to look up, waiting, wondering where Dion was, wondering what was happening to Ned—for something most assuredly was happening to Ned. She was caught fast and tight as a warp thread in a web of unbelievable strands: her father, invisible; her grandparents, healing people; and Dion, at the center of it all, somehow magically but completely expectedly and continually finding it all out through her, through Nancy herself. This is why Mama stays on the ground, in her web, Nancy thought, because of times like this.

  Ned climbed over the edge of her wall, walked over to her.

  “Did you see me?”

  “I saw you disappear,” she said.

  He grinned, ducked his head, looked up and laughed, hair in his eyes.

  Nancy pushed the dreadlocks out of the way. “That’s how you did it right? You disappeared. Did you go somewhere else, like the guys in Star Trek?” Beam me up. That’d be a good strategy for the Angel of Brooklyn.

  He shook his head. “Neither,” he said. He blew out his breath again, bent down lower, and in a kind of swooping motion, quickly wrapped his arms around his knees. He was like a woolly bear caterpillar, the fuzzy kind with the orange stripe that curls into a ball in the hand of a child who picks it up. As he curled, he shrank, quick as a gasp, there on the rooftop with Nancy. His hands hung down, his hair hung down, and everything about him—grew smaller and smaller. And smaller. She felt a sort of frozen panic: This will probably freak me out later. Right then she simply kept her eyes open.

  Ned was a spider. A spider! A black spider, a little bit hairy, with nice long legs. His dark clothes had shrunk so small they faded into his skin, and his dark spider color was all of a tone. A perfectly regular spider like the one in the corner of a doorway.

  It was appalling. Could everyone in the family do it? Am I going to do it? Nancy felt her knees go weak with shock, collapsed, and flopped to the roof on her bottom.

  Ned skedaddled, eight legs moving fast up the wall, then over the parapet and gone. She bounded up again to see where. He’d disappeared again, and the evening grew darker. The last light of day picked out the sheen of window glass and light posts, street signs and the crisscross webbing of the fence around the community garden. Yes, Ned was gone.

  But no. This time she spied the faint silken thread dropping him down ever so gently, past windows and doors and stoops, to the bushes beside the sidewalk.

  She lost sight of him. The roof she stood on was too high. He was too small.

  A car made its way down the street, and people clomped along the sidewalk in shoes that seemed suddenly heavier and more potentially lethal than Nancy’s Doc Martens ever could. He was the most vulnerable thing in the city, a practically invisible spider. Had he dropped onto the sidewalk or let the breeze take him across—

  On the other side of the street there was nothing to see, but Nancy focused on the rooftop and waited.

  And then her father’s dear old head popped up from behind the parapet and his eyes—his laughing Dad eyes—were looking at her out of his human face again.

  He thinks this is funny!

  Another minute and he was back at her side, crouched against the wall, Ned again, Arach-Ned no more. For the moment.

  He grabbed her hand, sticky with silk, and pulled her down with him, side by side below the parapet.

&nb
sp; They sat hidden on the roof on the sticky tar paper, their backs against the wall. Nancy knew she should have needed a thousand explanations, but she only really wanted one.

  “Does it hurt?”

  She realized her face was covered in streams of tears, and she pressed her palms to her cheeks, making her hands even hotter and sweatier and stickier than they already were.

  “Oh, Nance,” Ned said, holding her tighter. “Oh, egg. It’s just—it’s just me.”

  You’d think I’d have known that.

  You’d think I’d have realized.

  You’d think I’d have noticed just once that my father wasn’t just spiderlike, he was a spider.

  “Only you?”

  “In my generation. My father was, too.”

  “None of your cousins?” Her father had lots of cousins.

  He shook his head.

  “Only you?” she asked again.

  “In my family.” He studied her. “So far,” he said.

  Surprised wasn’t the word …

  “It is the other part of what I am.”

  Of course, she thought, Anansi, who changes himself into a man, and into other things, too. “But a spider is Anansi’s main thing,” she said. “Isn’t your main thing—”

  “A man,” said Ned.

  She swallowed. “And Grandpa Lester?” He had died before she was born, before Ned had married or even met Rachel.

  Her father said, “Lester was more of a spider. Less of a man.”

  “And you’re less of a spider?”

  “And you?” Ned asked.

  It was a long time before Nancy managed to say anything else at all. “And I’m afraid of heights,” she finally said.

  He said, “I’m afraid of being squished.”

  She didn’t know why she laughed, then thought of all the times he had avoided the subway, especially at rush hour, or how he never ever rode the bus. “Yeah,” she said.

  “Yeah? Your old dad just turned into a spider, Nancy. Is that all you’re thinking?”

  “No.”

  He studied her and waited. “I couldn’t always do it,” he said. “Only since I was fourteen.”

  “Fourteen!” I am less than I could be, Nancy thought. She thought about the way her father had talked about Dion earlier, as if he were special, wonderful, light, a good—

  A good what?

  “What about the other spider people?”

  He shrugged.

  She shrugged back. “Don’t you know?”

  “How would I know? It’s not something you advertise.”

  She said, “You know I said I knew when you were home? I can tell when you’re coming, too.” And Dion. She didn’t tell him it happened with Dion, too.

  “On the roofs? In the subway?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t come in the subway that often.”

  “Well, you know. When it’s not rush hour.” They smiled at each other. “Squish hour.” It was such an oddly vague feeling that she wondered if she was exaggerating. And yet she wasn’t lying; she could tell.

  “How?” He hadn’t asked, before.

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s my feet or my ankles or knees.”

  “You’re picking up vibrations from the trains,” said Dad.

  “And yours,” she said.

  “Even my tiny little spider vibrations?” He watched her eyes intently, wanting to know what she knew.

  “Maybe,” she said. “I hope so.” She thought she understood why they hadn’t told her before: maybe suggesting it would have changed the way she felt it. She wasn’t sure whether she was just making an educated guess. But she wanted him to think she showed some promise.

  “Well, that’s encouraging.” He said it so lightly.

  “What use is it anyway?” she asked. “What good does it do? It’s not like I’m about to turn into a spider and run around being practically invisible. What good is knowing someone’s coming?”

  Ned pulled her up by one hand. “Think about it,” he said.

  They headed home in the regular way, walking on their own two feet, or four feet, or however many feet they had between them, Nancy and her spider Dad.

  25

  Angels have wings, Nancy said to herself, thinking back on what Ned had told her. That didn’t mean he wasn’t the Angel. It didn’t mean Dion wasn’t, either.

  Nancy lay in her bed at Mama’s, snuggled down like a bug in a rug, keeping her thoughts to herself. They were keeping her awake.

  Why did the newspapers want more Angel stories? What did it mean to the newspaper people—the Times, the Post, all of them—that some winged spirit was in New York with nothing better to do than help people?

  This much was clear: Dion’s father was hot on the trail of the Angel of Brooklyn. And Dion was trying to make Nancy think that Ned was the Angel. How long would it be before he clued his father in?

  It was like falling off solid ground into a dark hole and whirling downward, to think that all her life—and long before—her same old father might have been doing this amazing thing. Because, she thought, if anyone was the Angel, he was.

  Nancy tossed the covers off and kicked them.

  Dion didn’t need to know that in the last year she’d been with her father when he had replaced two “missing” screwdrivers and a hammer, tools that the Angel had been reported to drop from a rooftop heaven to break up the hell taking place below. Doubtless there were more.

  Ned was a roofer, and that was all the excuse he needed to buy new tools, all the excuse he needed to be on the roof, and even to commute to and fro on the rooftops. But as far as Dion’s hypothesis about Ned being in the right place at the right time to stop crimes, well … Nancy was about to toss a variable into the experiment.

  The variable was herself. She wondered how far she could go with this new experiment, how much she could do, really, without Ned’s disappearing powers, without her mother’s weaving genius, without Granny Tina’s gift for making things strong.

  Ned had taught her climbing, after all, and he was the best climber. Rachel had taught her weaving, and wasn’t she the best weaver? And Granny Tina had taught her—well, nothing about making any thing strong, but about making herself strong on the streets. She would keep her distance from Granny for now, and rely on the extra energy she’d already gotten from the stories. And on her vibrations.

  The next morning Nancy got her experiment going. She began by being invisible. Visible people looked threatening, or vulnerable. You noticed them in your gut, because they worried you, one way or the other. Invisible people looked like they knew where they were, where they were going. They weren’t scared or worried. They had their “street face” on.

  Each morning Nancy filled her backpack to the brim, not just with schoolbooks and her knitting, but also some laundry, shirts she needed to wash, or sometimes already had washed. Sometimes they were even wet, which was more authentic, though heavier.

  When she left for school she took a route that went across rooftops, acting as though she belonged there, playing the part of the guest of someone in the building, who didn’t know her way around. If she saw anybody she marched right up to them and asked to borrow some clothespins. She picked different fire escapes each day by which to ascend to the roof or descend to the street, and the two times she was surprised by some nosy tenant, she said the same thing she and Ned had said the time they’d gotten caught on their own fire escape: “Oh, sorry, I’m your new neighbor, and my parents insist I learn to use the fire escape.” The second time she’d really laid it on thick, saying, “They don’t have fire escapes back home in Connecticut,” rolling her eyes at the absurdity of New York.

  Nancy also took care to blend in style-wise. She moussed her hair down so it didn’t stick out as though electrified the way it usually did. She wore her black sweater if it was cool, and if it was warm she kept her uniform blouse tucked carefully into her skirt. She wore her Doc Martens; everybody wore those, so they didn’t stand o
ut. The only painful thing was leaving her “fun” tights at home, and wearing plain black ones. What with the attention her tights had been getting, it was probably just as well.

  The result: nobody thought anything of her. Polite girl, kind of cute. Must be a weird family. Nothing remarkable. She walked around acting the way Granny Tina had taught her to act, no matter what New York neighborhood she was in, never lingering on the edges, but walking straight up the middle. “Walk like you know where you’re going,” Granny had said when Nancy started going out on her own at age eleven. “Someone who wants to bother you will have to break up your flow.”

  So Nancy flowed. She flowed across lonely roofs, leaped across alleys, went around the back ways of buildings. She got so she could do it without making much sound. She got so she could tell that someone she’d just walked by had already forgotten they’d seen her. She got so she knew that someone walking below in the alley did not know that she was above on the roof. And she got good at hitting marks on the ground with stones or roof tiles or clothespins, even once a bent knitting needle—although she decided that, as weapons went, knitting needles were expensive and too likely to mark her as a suspect.

  26

  The next week there were three newspaper articles about the so-called Angel of Brooklyn. A dealer menacing a kid on Nelson Street in Red Hook had been nailed in the eye by a pebble from a peashooter and had to have emergency surgery before he could appear in court. There had been an attempted knifing on John Street in DUMBO, that had been foiled by an unidentified yell from above. And a mugging in a Brooklyn Heights alley had been interrupted by a flying clothespin.

  Nancy considered the details in the two cases she hadn’t been involved in: Were they accidental interventions? Intentional ones? Twice, in the night, she woke abruptly, thinking she still heard the rough, mean voice; the scared, protesting voice; the pushing and scuffling in that alley; the garbage bag bursting against the Dumpster, the clatter of scattering keys and credit cards.