Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

“I know you did!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There was silence between them for a long moment.

  “My father’s trying to live a good life,” she said. “He’s trying to help people.”

  Dion got up and sat on the edge of the chaise, clasped his hands between his knees, as if to warm them, looking down.

  Nancy struggled to form the question she wanted to ask. “What were you like, before?”

  “Before my mother—”

  “Before you started living on the roofs.”

  “You mean, before I ran away?”

  “Well,” she said, looking into his eyes. “You didn’t run very far.”

  He could have argued that living on the roofs was symbolic of distance. He just said, “I was pretty normal before.”

  “That’s hard to believe. You mean you, for instance, had hair?”

  That was more symbolism he wouldn’t address. “It’s funny,” he said. “Fewer people seem to notice me the way I am now.”

  “Who noticed you before?”

  “Teachers. People in the neighborhood. People seemed to—you know—have an eye on me.”

  “That’s because they knew who you were,” Nancy said. “They’d seen you around, or seen you with your parents or your sister—”

  He cut her right off. “Now they look away,” he said.

  Yes. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  “Or they look right through me.”

  “What do you mean by that, Ghost Boy? They don’t recognize you? Or you’re invisible?”

  He only grinned. She backed off the subject, but had to ask, “What’s it like? Living on the roofs, I mean.” She had an idea what he might say, had imagined him enough to think she knew how it was: puddles, asphalt, cooking smells, mist and lights, and him in the shadows.

  But he said, “There are a lot of pigeons. More than you’d believe. Even babies.”

  Nancy smiled. “People talk about how you never see baby pigeons,” she said. “Really you never see any baby birds.”

  “Unless they fall out of the nest,” Dion said.

  Nancy nodded. She had once seen a scene she didn’t want to remember precisely: a gawky pink bird form without enough feathers to fly. Dead. “Or get pushed,” she said, shoving the image out of the front of her mind.

  Dion shook his head. He said, “It’s been good, the parts where it’s just been me. Good enough. I’m warm enough, and it’s quiet. I can think.”

  “What do you miss?”

  “Nothing!” His voice filled up. “Lots of things.”

  “What about food?”

  “Oreos,” he said, almost sobbing the word. “Mina supplies me when she can.”

  She picked the most unemotional aspect of life. “What about school?”

  “I seem to go right on learning things,” he said after a moment. “What I miss is gym: games, and playing things. I liked it when you danced on the bridge. I thought I could go back to my school and go to a dance. School would be better if you went to my school. Or I could come to your school.”

  Nancy thought of her school and said, “Maybe we should start our own school.” She wanted to plan something with Dion, to know he would be there, and yet there was this whole other mess between them, and only she could do anything about it. It wasn’t so easy to find words that wouldn’t send him flying off the handle, but she gripped his hand and made herself speak.

  “Your father should back off,” she said. “What does he have to keep covering all these stories for? Doesn’t he want you to go to school?”

  Dion, making excuses for his father, said, “He’s got enough to think about. He can’t save the whole world.”

  Nancy wondered, if it were between her and Mama, which one would Ned look out for? “What is he trying to do, catch my father?”

  “Catch him?” Dion pulled his hands away and tucked them between his knees. “Your father is the Angel of Brooklyn.”

  “Your father made up the whole thing! There is no Angel. It’s just a nice story to make people feel better.” They were pushing each other away with words, but their eyes were locked together.

  “But it’s good news,” Dion said. “Don’t you see?”

  “Stop him,” she said. And again she said, “There is no Angel. No one Angel.”

  “Then what does your father do?”

  “Same thing you do. And me.”

  “You?”

  “Who else would throw a clothespin?”

  He whistled. “Pretty good.”

  “Dad’s just the same,” she said. “He wants to beat up the bad stuff. So he throws rocks at it and jumps on it or gets its attention. It’s bigger than he is. He’s just higher.”

  “And smaller,” said Dion.

  She looked at him warily. “Wouldn’t you like to be the Angel?” Her hands were gooey from sweating and tears.

  “What?”

  “It’s stupid, I know. There’s no such thing. I just wish it were true. I want to be the Angel.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can’t be seen. So I can’t be hurt.” He knelt in front of her. Oh, his eyes. “So they won’t know who’s helping.”

  “I’ll know,” he said.

  She kissed him; he was strong, sweet. If they could get his mother fixed, maybe his father would look out for him.

  “Help my mother,” he said, staring into her with his ghost eyes. “Or there’s no telling what my dad’ll do.”

  “Are you threatening me?” she asked.

  He might as well have been leaving, the way he seemed to recede from her. “Warning you,” he said.

  “Get away from me,” she howled at him. She tore her eyes away, turned her back.

  He was up and gone, over the wall and onto the next roof. She made it to the wall. They stared at each other across the space.

  “Go now,” she said. “And don’t come back. I’ve forgotten your name again.”

  His fingers on the wall were the last thing she saw as he rounded a corner in a blur of gray. Nancy put all her energy into getting to that corner. When she did, he was already gone.

  She collapsed back onto the chaise and imagined she felt him putting distance between them, felt it stretch out as he went away.

  Then it was true. There was no real connection between her family and his, other than the one Niko had formed by blackmailing her grandfather and demanding the very lifesilk of her Granny. How could there be anything good about that, no matter how good her heart told her Dion was. What stories would Niko feel free to tell if his wife died? How easy it would be for him to let the whole entire city know who the Greene-Karas were and what they were! And what would happen to them then?

  What came to her mind most readily was homeroom, and what they would say.

  “Heard about that Nancy Greene-Kara? Heard how she’s half insect?”

  “Well, she always bugged me!”

  “Knitting with those knitting needles like antennas.”

  “You know, she didn’t even shave her legs.”

  “Ew. Nasty.”

  It figures, thought Nancy. The first person I ever felt like I belonged with should drag me into this. It occurred to her that she’d been in it before she ever met Dion. She’d have been in it one way or another, would have met him one way or another.

  On his way to the next dusty rooftop, Dion caught the drift of Nancy’s heavy thoughts. It figures, he thought. The first person I ever felt like I belonged with should turn out to be someone who wouldn’t take a chance on me. Scared. Well, who could blame her?

  36

  Nancy passed Saturday night and most of Sunday on the roof, getting better at putting weight on her leg, feeling alone even when Ned was there, and worrying.

  Someday soon the phone at Granny and Grandpa’s was going to ring, and they would get up and go to the house on the curved street. Nancy, as usual, would ride along in the backseat, to keep Granny company during the time when Grandpa went inside to check the con
dition of the patient. If Granny used that time to tell Nancy one of her action-inspiring stories, would there be enough left for Granny herself?

  No one else would be admitted to see Rose. Niko Papadopolis would want no spectators. He wouldn’t care if Granny sat in the car while the checking went on, and he wouldn’t care if Nancy was left alone once the treatment began.

  Nancy devised a plan around the only person there she thought she could wrap around her finger. The plan depended on the jump rope Dion had fixed. She packed it into her backpack on Sunday afternoon when Grandpa came in his car to take her back to Carroll Gardens. Ned and Grandpa, each holding one elbow, got her up the stairs, though she told them they didn’t need to: already her thigh was pulling and hurting less than this morning, further testimony to Rachel’s healing ability.

  “Hey,” she called, West Virginia-style.

  Granny sat in the stuffed chair by the front window in the living room, as if she were waiting for something.

  “I started knitting my first sleeve!” Nancy announced from the doorway.

  No answer. She went and stood in front of Granny, holding up her hands with a jump rope cat’s cradle in between. Granny Tina didn’t think twice, reached in with both hands and turned it into the soldier’s bed. Nancy took it back and made candles, the one where Granny had to twist her pinkies around the strings while she pulled it into the manger form. Manger was the first move Nancy didn’t know, and she watched closely to get it right.

  But she wasn’t holding it right, because Granny went tch, like a little girl, and said in a cranky voice, “I can’t reach, Josie. Hold it closer.”

  Nancy glanced at her face, but Granny’s eyes were on the strings as she twisted them into place. She held her hands up to Nancy again.

  “I’m Nancy,” Nancy told her. Granny blinked.

  Nancy’s turn to make the soldier’s bed. Granny’s for candles. Nancy’s to try the candles-to-manger transformation. She tucked her pinkies under, the way Granny had done it, plunged her fingers into the right spaces. But the strings slid through her fingers and, once again, it was just a big loop of jump rope. “Oh,” Nancy sighed, crestfallen.

  Granny took the rope and Nancy thought she was going to show her, but instead Granny wrapped it around her own fingers. They spun and popped and plunged, and she let go with cat’s whiskers. Held them up in front of her face and meowed with an expression worthy of entertaining Mina herself.

  Then her fingers went dipping and diving again, and when they stopped there was a perfect bridge between them, looped and wound through every finger, exquisitely tense. She said words in Italian, words Nancy couldn’t understand, except that they included her grandfather’s name: “La Scaletta di Giacomo.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, come on, honey, you’ve heard that old story. It’s right in the Bible. Jacob’s ladder, with the angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth.” Granny turned her hands so that the ladder hung vertically.

  “Show me how,” Nancy said.

  Granny showed her. It was just a few steps beyond cat’s whiskers, and when it was done, the stretching tension between Nancy’s fingers was perfect and divine, truly the most satisfying thing she’d yet made with her hands. She wanted more, and quickly wound her hands through it again. She wished there were more steps going onward from it, but where would they go? It was perfect as it was, a ladder, a connection, a bridge between heaven and earth.

  It wasn’t exactly a story, but it gave Nancy something new all the same.

  By Monday Nancy’s legs had a light stubble. “Is this what’s supposed to happen?” she whispered to Annette in homeroom.

  “Yeah. I shave mine every other day.”

  “I hadn’t realized it would be a regular thing.”

  Annette rolled her eyes. “Where have you been hiding? Everybody knows the hair comes back thicker once you’ve shaved.”

  It was the first piece of good news Nancy had heard in a while. “Really?”

  Annette scrutinized her face. “You like that idea?”

  “How was the dance?” Nancy asked quickly. She pulled up her kneesocks and patted her skirt where the bandage was. She hadn’t told Annette about her accident and didn’t show her the bandage. Nancy didn’t know a lot about medicine, especially spider medicine, but she knew that stitches shouldn’t heal—and disappear—within forty-eight hours of a big gash in the skin.

  Annette had had a good time with Jimmy Velcro. It made a lump come in Nancy’s throat, hearing about how they’d danced. Nancy pulled her knitting out of her backpack and sat working her way past the elbow of her sleeve. Let them talk if they want to. She hadn’t seen Dion. Not on the roof, not on the train, not in the grocery store.

  “Hey, Nancy, whatcha knitting/crocheting/doing?”

  “My Grandma/Nana/Nona does that. She made me the best socks/scarf/sweater.”

  “Nancy, can you knit socks?”

  “I never tried,” she said.

  “You could, I bet, if you could make a sweater with stripes/colors/ribs like that. You could go into business.”

  “We all oughta knit socks. Then we could quit worrying about our hairy legs.”

  Everybody cracked up, Nancy included, all of them laughing together. Who’d have thought it? Annette came and leaned on her shoulder and asked, teasing, “Is that knitting or purling?”

  “I’ll make you a baby bonnet, Annette,” Nancy threatened.

  “Listen,” Annette whispered. “When I went to the dance? My mommy had a date.”

  “Really?”

  “Wouldn’t that be great if she got married again? Then I could go out all I want.”

  Nancy was astonished.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked.

  “I do now,” said Annette. She kissed Nancy’s cheek and whispered. “That Jimmy Velcro …”

  “Ooh la la?” asked Nancy. It was what they used to say about watching smooching in movies.

  “Oh, very ooh la la!” said Annette. She turned back to the other girls, giggling. That was all right, Nancy thought, and considered the idea of Annette kissing Jimmy Velcro. She would have liked to tell Annette about Dion. But she wondered if Annette would understand any more than she’d understand if Nancy told her she was never ever shaving her legs again.

  37

  “How do you heal her?” Nancy asked Granny. She was forking up spaghetti out of the pot and serving Granny for once, instead of the other way around. Granny was feeble, but at the moment her eyes (and head) seemed clear.

  “It’s like giving her energy.” Granny pulled the pitcher across the table, poured beautiful red sauce over the noodles.

  “Granny, you haven’t got any energy to spare.”

  “Why haven’t I?”

  “You’re old,” she said flatly. “You’re sick. I was trying to show you my sleeves this afternoon and it was like you weren’t here.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t!” Granny said carelessly. “Are you worried I’ll die?”

  Nancy stuck a knot of noodles into her mouth to fill it, and didn’t say a word.

  “What do you think happens when you die?” Granny asked.

  “How do I know?” Nancy said with her mouth full.

  “Listen, girl, there’s only so much energy in the world.”

  “Right! So you’d better conserve it while you can.”

  “While I can! Honey, you know there’s always the same energy in the world. When something dies, its energy goes into something else to make it live, or make it stronger.”

  “Or to transform into something else,” Nancy said.

  Granny pointed her fork in a way Grandpa Joke would have disapproved of. “What do you mean, transform?”

  “Change into something else, the way heat changes water.” She remembered this from science classes, but had never seen how it applied to anyone she knew.

  “Answer me this: does the heat want to change the water?”

  “No.”

  “W
ell, what if it did?”

  “That’s like saying a ray of sun can direct its energy into a specific drop of water. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How do you know it doesn’t?”

  Nancy put spaghetti in her mouth and studied Granny’s dark eyes, the thinness of her hair over her scalp, the shakiness in her hands. She hoped her own hands would never shake like that. Her hands that had made Jacob’s ladder and cat’s cradle just yesterday … “Can you?” she asked Granny.

  “I can choose where to direct my energy.”

  Nancy didn’t say anything, not yet.

  “Most parents direct it to their children.”

  “But not you?”

  “Who says I’m not? There’s some left for my grandchild, too.”

  “Haven’t I got enough energy?” Nancy asked cautiously.

  “Haven’t you been feeling different lately?”

  In more ways than one. “Yes. But I thought that was because of me.”

  “Of course. You’ve got plenty of your own energy, Nancy.”

  “Then—”

  “Nothing else?” Granny’s eyes held her steady, but a wisp of cloud had begun to come into them. She was tired.

  “Those stories you’ve been telling me,” Nancy said. “They seem so moving. Real. Like I’m in them.”

  “You’ve heard them before.”

  “Afterward I try things I wouldn’t try before.”

  “Or is it just that you understand better?”

  “Or am I changing?”

  “Nancy. Don’t you want to grow up?”

  What a stupefying question. Nancy put down her fork, sat there with her hands to her cheeks, then nodded slowly.

  “Don’t you want to grow stronger?” Again, Granny pointed the fork at Nancy, her eyes intense, though cloudier, her hand trembling.

  “Maybe.” Nancy was afraid to say more.

  “So?”

  “What will I have to do, if I get stronger?”

  “What will you have to do?” Granny hit the table so hard that she lost hold of her fork, which flew across the table and landed in Nancy’s lap. “Ask what you’ll be able to do!”