Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

  She wondered if her father had seen the article. She clipped it herself, and saved it, just in case. She hid it in the back of her little red dresser at Mama’s house, knowing Rachel would never guess what it meant that she treasured such a clipping.

  And then Ned came while she was doing homework in Mama’s kitchen and placed all three clippings before her on the table. “Thought you’d be interested,” he said. “I’ve noticed you reading these lately.”

  Nancy stared down at her own personal clipping, the words of which she knew by heart—as well as the byline, Nobody in Particular (it was a Post article)—and beyond it her history notebook. In the margin was an insult from the hand of Annette: a picture of a little ghost drawn in green marker. The green ghost was what Annette had decided would be the child of a marriage between Nancy and Ghost Boy. Nancy placed her hand over the ghost and touched the edge of the clipping with her fingertips.

  She began carefully, “The thing about these stories—”

  “Hmm?” Dad turned away and cut a piece of bread to put in the toaster, put the little copper kettle on to boil.

  “He doesn’t seem to think there’s anything, you know, special, about the Angel of Brooklyn.”

  “Special?”

  “You know. Other than knowing where to go, there are no special talents or abilities. Shouldn’t it be more heroic?”

  “You mean superheroic.”

  “Yeah, like a comic book. Flying or teleporting or seeing through walls or something.”

  “Teleporting?” asked Ned.

  “Like beaming up. Being gone from one place and appearing in another.”

  “Isn’t that what you used to think I did?”

  They grinned at each other, faces open. But their secrets weren’t. Ned said, “Isn’t conking criminals a superpower?”

  “Why should it be?” asked Nancy. “Any fool can drop things off roofs.”

  “True.” Ned tore the cover off a tea bag. “But how does the Angel know where he’s needed?” He paused, then added, “Or she?”

  “Pure chance?”

  “You’re playing the ‘pure chance’ card again?” asked Ned, shaking his head as if he were throwing off water. “Strange if there wasn’t something else involved.”

  “Something else?” Nancy slid the clipping out of the way before she closed the book over the green ghost. The nervous feeling leaped up again. Despite all her experimentation, the desired result hadn’t materialized: there had come no silk, no tiny transformation. Okay. She’d stalk the rooftops if that was what she had to do. But how different it would be if—if only—

  Well. It hadn’t. And that was that. If she tried anything further in that direction, it would be with the knowledge that her own Angel activities came from just her as she was, nothing more.

  27

  On Thursday when Nancy got out of school, Dion appeared, slipping out of a Joralemon Street doorway to walk beside her.

  “Ghost Boy!” said Annette from the other side of Nancy.

  “Learn much at school?” Dion asked. “I mean the one of you that’s not an idiot, of course.” He was holding his nose, shooing away bad energy waves from Annette. He looked even taller and gawkier than before, his long coat fluttering along, all raggedy behind him.

  No one was going to show up out of nowhere and make Nancy feel small. “She’s my friend,” she said. My best friend who’s crossing the street and turning the corner to get away from you, and I’m going with her. But she didn’t go with Annette. She stepped off the curb, glanced back at Dion to see if he saw that she was walking away from him and wished him not to follow. But he wasn’t looking. He was scooping a left-behind Chinese jump rope off the sidewalk.

  Against her better judgment, Nancy paused. The jump rope was busted, popped, pulled so hard that the bind between the ends had broken, no more elastic loop.

  “I hate when that happens,” she said before she could stop herself, and took a step toward Dion, unable to resist reaching for the springy jump rope.

  Dion took the ends of the jump rope in his fingers and knotted the ends together deftly, making a knot so tiny and smooth and faultless it was hard to see it was there.

  Nancy’s hands were aching for the jump rope, to have it between them, bridging them, wrapping around and under and crisscrossing them in its boingy rubber band way.

  Dion held out the rope in a neat striped bundle. “Remember my name?” he asked.

  It scared her how often she had said it to herself. She could have embroidered it on her pillow in her sleep, but to let him know that she remembered it… Not yet.

  “I’m leaving, Nancy,” yelled Annette from across Joralemon.

  “I’ll call you later!” To Dion, she said, “Danny?”

  “It’s an unusual name,” he hinted. “It’s Dion.”

  She folded the bundled jump rope into her palm. Now that it was there, her hands could just stop itching to move it around and make things out of it. She wondered if she could remember the Eiffel Tower, the cup and saucer, the cat’s cradle…. No, cat’s cradle took two people. You couldn’t do it alone. “Dion?” Oh, he was gone.

  He didn’t stop when she came pelting up behind him, just continued his way to the Carroll Street park. “Mother’s waiting for you, isn’t she?”

  She didn’t answer, stunned at first—he had never mentioned her mother before—and then defiant. When they reached the dome he climbed up on it. “What about your mother?” Nancy asked.

  He straightened his coat around him in sharp, angry movements, his eyebrows—a five-o’clock-shadow of eyebrows, she saw—furled together. Good, she could make him mad, too. But then he turned his shoulders toward her and said, “Mina says Mom could die.”

  “You love her,” she said.

  “She’s a pain in the ass,” he lied gruffly.

  “So are you. Do you get it from her or from your father?”

  “What do you know about my father?” he retorted.

  “What else do you get from your father?”

  “What do you think?”

  She wasn’t about to tell him what she thought.

  “Your mother wouldn’t hurt herself,” he said. He didn’t say anything about his father.

  “Could you hurt yourself?” she asked him, noting his shaved eyebrows, his head that needed hair.

  He jumped down from the dome like a gymnast, hardly bending his knees to land perfectly. Where’d he learn that? she wanted to know. Wished he’d waver a little so she could steady him, wished he’d stay. He moved away quickly, stretching out his legs.

  “DION!” It was the biggest yell that had ever come out of her mouth, and it stopped him half a block away.

  “What?” She could see his mouth move to let out the word, though she couldn’t hear his voice.

  She said my name, thought Dion.

  Her heart danced along inside her as she made herself walk to him at a normal pace. “Get back up there,” she said, grabbing his arm, so thin and hard inside his clothes. He let her lead him back to the dome. Even below the level of the rooftops of the brownstones and the tall trees, she knew they were the highest things in the world. The sun beamed down and warmed their heads.

  “My mother is afraid of the city,” she told Dion. “She doesn’t go out.”

  Even Annette didn’t know this. Teachers at school didn’t know. People who had known Nancy since kindergarten didn’t know. Dion hadn’t. He said, “I’ve never seen her even once.”

  “Yeah well, you’d scare her to death, Ghost Boy, that bald head, sitting up here like—”

  He sat up, held himself proudly.

  “Quasimodo,” she finished.

  He hunched his back a little, to make her laugh.

  “But I wouldn’t want to lose her,” she said.

  “My mother’s not afraid of the city,” said Dion, his eyes full. “She thinks she can save the whole world.”

  “How?” Like my father?

  “She’s a counselor. Rose
Browning, M.S.W., that’s her professional name. She helped people with their problems.” He dropped his face into his palms.

  Nancy trembled. She didn’t want to crowd him, and she wanted to stay. She gave him her V8 juice out of her pack and waited while he cried. He stopped at last, and rubbed his nose on his coat sleeve, and sipped the V8. “Eight vegetables,” he said.

  “It’s good for you,” said Nancy.

  “You know what I like?” Dion asked.

  “Grape juice?”

  He shook his head. “Cream soda.”

  They both laughed.

  “You know,” Nancy began. She curled the toes of her shoes under one of the bars of the dome. “I’m afraid of heights.”

  “That’s just natural,” he said.

  “Well, you’re not, if you walk on that rail by the BQE.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “You’re like a spider,” she said. Shivers ran up and down her spine at her own daring.

  “A spider,” Dion said, nodding.

  “My mother says—” She stopped herself.

  “Your mother likes heights?”

  She shook her head. “She says that fear of heights is fear that you’ll throw yourself off.”

  Dion’s body jolted. “How do you know these things, Nancy?”

  “My father,” she said, practically stammering.

  “Your father! What does he know about—”

  “About heights? He’s a roofer. I told you.”

  Dion studied her face a minute. “About my mother,” he said.

  She waited. He’d opened the door. Now she’d hear the story. Instead, he asked a question. “What do you mean, a ‘roofer’?”

  Duh is what Annette would say. “A guy who does roofs.”

  He nodded several times. “My mother was on the roof. And I don’t think she was afraid she’d throw herself off. I think she was afraid it wasn’t high enough to kill her.” He said it casually, in a tone of voice that reminded her of those cute baggy-pants boys Annette and Shamiqua and the other homeroom girls liked, the ones Nancy hated, who could say any cold thing as if it didn’t matter. “She’d hit the ground,” Dion went on, “but it wouldn’t kill her.” His voice cracked at the end.

  Nancy’s fingers wrapped around the bars, gripping so hard her bones showed.

  “No. Dad came up and found her and got her back from the edge.” Dion stood up, right on top of the dome, and wavered there, more like Dracula than Quasimodo. Nancy grabbed his big, cold hand and said, “Sit down.”

  He sat, and didn’t let go of her hand, looking at her with his beautiful sad eyes. “He told her she couldn’t go back to work till she was rested. But Ma can’t rest. Now she—” He drew a finger sharply across the inside of his arm, like a knife.

  “Self-destructive,” Nancy said, like some psychologist herself.

  Dion’s finger crossed one thigh, then the other.

  Nancy nodded. “Then she’s no better?”

  “Not until your grandparents—”

  “Then she’ll be all right—”

  “No worse,” he said. “No more cuts. But they can’t heal.”

  “What kind of cuts don’t heal?”

  “Come on, you’re not that stupid,” he said awfully.

  Nancy pulled her hand away, pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. She remembered what Grandpa had said about his mother’s problems. A Rose that pricked herself?

  Dion threw off his cap, rubbed his head with both hands. “I’m sorry! Sorry!” he said. “She won’t let them heal.”

  “And you had to cut yourself, too.”

  “My hair. It’s not the same. I don’t want to go home, not until I find an answer for my ma.”

  She lifted her hand to the back of his head, and let her fingers run lightly from the crown to the nape of his neck. Velvet. She’d been right. She didn’t have to ask what kind of answer he wanted for his mother. He wanted to find the Angel of Brooklyn. And if it wasn’t him, himself, then … “Last weekend the Angel of Brooklyn was in the paper three times,” she said.

  He didn’t comment.

  “Did you see the papers? Well, my father was on a job all week in Corona.” Corona was in Queens.

  “What were the weapons?”

  “You mean what were the crimes?”

  “No, I mean, what did the Angel of Brooklyn throw down?”

  “A pebble, and a clothespin.”

  “A clothespin!” Dion grinned. “You said three.”

  “The other time he just yelled.”

  Dion, smiling, looked at her sidelong. “I shot the pebble,” he said. “And my father went and reported it as the Angel.”

  She thought he’d laugh himself right off the dome. She couldn’t let him see how incensed she was.

  He laughed as hard as he’d cried. “I had this idea that maybe I’d attract the Angel. You know, draw him to me. He’d want to know who was stealing his thunder.”

  Nancy bet the Angel did want to know that, all right. She wondered if the Angel knew there were two thunder-stealers.

  “He didn’t show up, though,” Dion said. “Maybe he was somewhere else, huh, not Brooklyn? He wouldn’t be the Angel of Brooklyn then, would he? She thought it, but didn’t say it. She asked, “What would you have done if he had shown up?” She thought she knew. He’d take him to his father, that’s what, hold him for ransom until they got all the stories out of him. It would be the story of the century for New York—except that it would be all wrong, about angels, for pete’s sake, not spiders!—and Niko Papadopolis, Nick Pappas, Nestor Paprika, and Nobody in Particular would win the Pulitzer Prize all together.

  Dion said, “I want to talk to him, that’s all. I want to know what it’s like.”

  It was only what Nancy wanted herself, but she’d have been an idiot to believe him. Too much was at stake for her and her family. If word got out, everyone would want to know too much about them. Look how they were already being threatened, Grandpa Joke first of all. Wasn’t Nancy in danger of exposing them to more trouble? And now she’d gone and told Dion about Mama.

  A spider had to choose its shelter or get backed into a corner. Nancy pulled away from Dion, jumped from the dome. A train was rattling into the station, and she ran to get on it.

  28

  Grandpa Joke, wearing his nice jacket and his outdoor shoes, must have been waiting for Nancy to come through the front door. “Got an errand,” he said, rushing past her on the stairs. “Granny’s sleeping. Your mama’s—” He waved his hand toward downstairs and shrugged.

  “Still weaving like a nut?”

  “It’s all this light,” Grandpa said. The longer the days grew, the longer Rachel worked. She was using every minute, working intently. Nancy thought it might be the money that Rachel was thinking of. Ned was working long hours, too. And there had to be a reason Grandpa went back to OTB.

  In the doorway Grandpa paused, stood with his hand on the foot of the traveling saint, and called up the stairs: “Nancy!”

  “What?” she said.

  “Say ‘yes,’ not ‘what,’” he said.

  She said nothing.

  He pressed the palm of his hand against the statue as though in exasperation. He said, “Don’t pick up the phone.”

  “How—”

  “Saints preserve us,” he said, and closed the door between them.

  When the phone rang, she picked it up.

  “Dr. Greene, please,” said the familiar, quiet, formal voice.

  “Whom should I say is calling?” Her grandfather had taught her how to behave on the phone.

  “Niko,” the man said.

  “Niko Papadopolis? The same as Nick Pappas? And Nestor Paprika?”

  “So you think you know everything, girl?”

  “Pretty much,” she said.

  He said nothing for a moment, then, “Tell him I called.”

  She went downstairs and told Mama to listen for Granny. Without waiting for an answer, with just a pat o
n the feet of the saint, she hit the sidewalk.

  Nancy found Grandpa Joke in Curley’s diner next to the OTB parlor, in the second to last booth. His eyes were closed, as though he were asleep or trying to calm himself. She slid across the blue vinyl seat. “Grandpa?”

  “Shh, Nancy!” He sounded dark and tired.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here. It’s beautiful out. We could go walk across the bridge.”

  “Shush, buggy. I can’t go out today.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re out.”

  He said nothing.

  She leaned closer. “Grandpa Joke, Dad’s been clipping all these newspaper articles, and they’re all by the same person. Nick Papadopolis. And I happen to know that your patient the other night was his wife, Rose Papadopolis.”

  “How?” He opened his eyes and looked over her head at the door. “Oh, Nancy baby, don’t you know we’re all connected?”

  The waitress said, “What’ll you have, Nancy?”

  “Just a V8, please, Annie.” Annie went away again.

  “Nancy, my love. This is information you don’t need. It can’t help you to know it.”

  Tears filled her eyes at how afraid her grandfather was. “I know you, Grandpa Joke. Don’t you lie to me, no matter what your big secret is.”

  His eyes filled up, too. He rummaged in his pocket for his handkerchief. There was a shower of OTB stubs and lottery tickets, his cigarette lighter, and a folded index card that unfolded itself so that Nancy spotted Dad’s handwriting. No handkerchief. As Nancy handed Grandpa her paper napkin, she palmed the card and pulled it toward her, hidden under her hand.

  Grandpa Joke waved the napkin away. “You just excuse me, Nancy. I’ll get a tissue from the front.”

  She thought she heard him coming back, but instead it was Annie with the V8. She smiled at Annie, made herself take a sip. And Grandpa Joke didn’t come. When she turned, he was gone.

  “Where’d he go?” Nancy asked, leaning over the register.

  “Hush, Nancy. Go on home,” said Annie. “Go home quick now.”