Cobwebs

by Karen Romano Young

  The spots cleared and she saw an edge, and space beyond. But not Brooklyn below. Not Granny. But somehow Granny was there, showing Nancy how not to be afraid, for the sake of saving her.

  A barn floor, hay, and a boy’s face looking up. He was holding a ladder by the rungs, tipping it away from the edge.

  “George Webb!” screeched Josie beside her. “You bring that ladder back here, boy!”

  “Ha!” George sneered over his shoulder. “Come and make me.”

  “That stinker,” said Josie. “That smelly old cow turd. That stinking skunk.”

  “Stinking skunk cabbage,” she said.

  Nancy had only vaguely heard that there was such a thing as skunk cabbage. What did it mean: a story without its teller?

  Josie crossed her eyes and laughed.

  Where am I? thought Nancy, knowing, the same way she knew Josie was Granny Tina’s sister, and George was Tina’s brother. Did that make her … Tina?

  “Now what do we do?” she asked Josie and the air. “How do we get out of here?”

  She and Josie stepped closer to the edge and looked down. There was only one way down. A long rope hung limp and straight from a pulley above the high loft window. Grab the knotted end, the air seemed to tell her. Shinny down the hanging end. Keep the two ends of the rope balanced and you won’t go plummeting to the ground.

  “Don’t you dare!” said Josie. “Dad will—”

  Nancy jumped to her feet. If she was in Granny Tina’s body, then where was Granny Tina herself? Why was it then, and not now? Faint and spotty-eyed again, Nancy bent at the waist, hung her head down to stop the spinning feeling.

  Nancy looked up to find herself on Niko’s rooftop. She felt a funny little thrill. It was hardly the place for that, but suddenly she was not afraid, just calm, her shudders stilled. She descended the ladder that led down the back of the house to the fire escape, and she felt light, soft, part of the wind, not a leaf or kite to be blown by it.

  Nancy jumped to the first landing of the fire escape. Unlike the wind, the iron resisted her. She landed in a heap of hurting thigh and knees, and kept herself from falling over the rail by throwing herself against the scratching, scraping brick wall of the house.

  She got up and dashed for the alley. At first she thought she’d forgotten its location. When she realized that the alley had been gated off, blocked and locked, she felt a chill ripple over the sweat she was already in. She was caught in a tangle of swingsets and clotheslines, trees and garden fences, and the brick walls of the backs of the houses.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  “Nancy! Don’t go!” Her mind spun. Where a second ago Josie’s voice had seemed to be, now she heard Dion. It wasn’t that she was confused, that she thought he was her sister. Something deep inside her turned and trusted and went toward him across the courtyard.

  Later Nancy would learn that Niko had spotted her through the window near Rose’s bed. Later she’d learn that Niko thought she was going to get away, sic the cops on him because he held Grandpa and Granny against their wills, because he hoped Granny would come to and rise to the occasion and do more for Rose. If he left to catch Nancy, the old man would escape—fair enough—with his own sick wife. Who could know Niko’s craziness in stopping Grandpa Joke from going? Torn, he bolted for the hallway, then back to the window, glimpsed his son’s bristly head inside the flapping gap that a towel on the clothesline made as it billowed.

  Grandpa Joke caught Niko’s eye away from Dion, reached long strong graceful hands, and pulled him back. Niko saw in Grandpa Joke’s face a waiting, a wishing, a wanting to say—

  “Rose?” He looked at his wife’s face (Grandpa would tell Nancy later) and saw no more struggle, but stillness, goneness.

  Later she would hear that Niko thought his wife was dead.

  “Rose?”

  He touched her thin face so tenderly, holding her like flowers between his hands.

  Grandpa Joke put a sympathetic hand on Niko’s shoulder. He would not tell the police about Niko and give him away. He only wanted to get away himself. But what about Nancy—his granddaughter? A connection broke in Grandpa Joke’s mind, he told Nancy later. He left her to her own devices. He thought only of Granny Tina.

  Niko flew roaring out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, out the back door to the courtyard awash in washing. “Don’t go!” he bellowed after Nancy.

  Behind him, Mina was back. “Look, Daddy! Look!”

  Nancy looked back in time to see two things, all she could see in her glimpse through the courtyard door: legs in bright green clogs.

  Niko didn’t look, though if he had it might have changed things for Nancy and Dion. He shouldn’t have frightened Mina like that about the spider. But there was no going back now, no going back to his little girl to tell her about her mother. Instead he went after the big girl he thought had taken away his attention at the crucial moment.

  He was too angry to go back and see what—or who—Mina had brought in with her. Angry about healers. Angry about angels. You shouldn’t have to go after them, Niko thought, shouldn’t have to bring them to you, tie them down, pen them up to get them to help you. Weren’t angels supposed to seek out the presence of evil? Wasn’t that what the Angel of Brooklyn was always doing? So why hadn’t it sensed the evilness of Rose’s wounds, her approaching death?

  Poor Niko. He didn’t know the difference, Nancy saw later, between having a gift given and grabbing it. He didn’t recognize the Angel when it came to his house in its many forms. He didn’t see the green shoes. He didn’t glance back through the window. He didn’t know the true, new Healer came, because he was climbing to the roof to chase after Nancy.

  Later on he’d get a chance to ask Mina what happened when the Healer came. “Nothing spectacular,” Mina would say. “She just said, ‘Hi, I’m Rachel.’”

  43

  Nancy chased Dion across the wet blanket of grass, scampered away from Niko, in and out the squares of yellow light that fell from apartment windows into the courtyard, Dion blending in with the fluttering shadows that fell from sheets and shirts that hung above them in the night air, the hair on Nancy’s legs raising the alarm as she raced through the tangled damp maze.

  “There’s a way out,” said Dion, and led her to another gate, the kind of garbage-can alley that only nosy kids knew about, not their busy, worried parents—even those who had taken the trouble to gate up their own alleys.

  They had a block’s head start on Niko. Nancy ran pell-mell down the street. She was in time to see Grandpa slam the back door of the car, leap into the driver’s seat, and peel out.

  “Grandpa!” she yelled. She and Dion were abandoned and pursued, all at once.

  “If he’s leaving, my mom must be—” Dion stood still on the sidewalk, stunned, ruined, empty. His mother, dead.

  Nancy reached out for him. If only Mama … If only I…

  Dion went red-hot furious, threw her hand and her sympathy right off him. If this was how he felt, what was his dad going to do? He turned back to Nancy. “He’ll kill me for not being there. Run!”

  Nancy didn’t have the energy to run, but she didn’t dare stop and face Niko. If she could get to where Grandpa was going, she might be able to help, to somehow send the energy and memories and knitting and weaving back into her Granny Tina. There has to be enough for both of us!

  She raced behind Dion down an alley to the courtyard behind another block of apartments. The buildings rose around them. The bottoms of these fire escapes were the overhead kind that extended to the ground if you were coming down, and sprang up too high for anyone to get up. “I’ll give you a boost,” said Dion.

  “But my leg—”

  “Can you jump?”

  “Hardly!” she said.

  “All right,” he said, and stood, hands on his hips, looking up at the clotheslines. Laundry, just hung and heavy with dampness, weighed the line low. Dion leaped up in an unearthly basketball leap and pulled the tail of a shirt towa
rd the ground. “Grab the clothesline,” he told Nancy.

  “What?”

  “Grab it. Hold on.”

  “And do what?” Heaving and terrified, they stood snarling at each other among the clotheslines.

  “Follow me.”

  “You think I’m an idiot.” Niko was coming.

  “I think you could do it.”

  “Based on what? Your desire to kill me?”

  “My desire to— Nancy, you’re a spider, aren’t you?”

  She felt her eyes flare open the way she had that time on the roof when the mugger was below. It was a gut reaction of fear. It was a gut call to act.

  “What would you know about that?” Niko was coming. Could Dion jump like that?

  He reached toward her, and she recoiled. “I just want to—” He reached again, and cupped his hand around her cheek. “Trust me,” he said.

  She knew she wasn’t the first girl in the history of the world to be persuaded by such a request. But again rose up the something deep that told her to go with him. “What do you know about being a spider?” she asked.

  “I know,” he said. Niko was coming. “Nothing bad,” Dion said. “Hold the rope and jump.”

  She grasped the rope in her two hands. “Your father—”

  “Hold on tight!”

  He gripped the other rope in his hand, and was pulling hard toward his chest with muscles he must have gotten from his father. Thanking the universe for making her small and wiry, Nancy sailed up toward the fire escape as if she were a shirt clothespinned on. When she reached the iron railing of the fire escape, she held the line steady. Along came Dion hand over hand, quick as a spider monkey on hands that were callused now.

  “Go!” he whispered up to her, the sound welling up against the brownstone walls.

  He landed on the fire escape beside her. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up the flights, as fast as Ned had ever climbed, her thigh complaining. She crawled over the parapet, reached down to help Dion up.

  Niko came leaping, like a basketball player, like a wolf spider, every jump an enormous pounce. He was behind them now, but they were younger, lighter. Across the rooftops they went. Nancy’s legs began to wobble beneath her as she ran and climbed and leaped the gaps, her knees like rubber, bending with no answering spring, her thigh screaming now.

  And then the walls stopped, the roof fell away.

  Below there was nothing but fire escapes and clotheslines,

  fire escapes and clotheslines,

  fire escapes and clotheslines.

  Their straight lines and angles spun out of a center so deep it disappeared. With it Nancy’s gut spun, and she felt herself turning inside out, or wanting to, wanting to throw up and cry and fall or throw herself off. Too many instincts fought against one another, her mother’s urge to be on the ground, her father’s yearning for the air.

  “Down the fire escape!” she said.

  No time for terror, just drop, descend. The second descent in one night, but there was no time to think of that. It had been bad enough to be in a hurry, but to be chased!

  This was that rusty, awful kind of fire escape that needed a paint job, needed replacing, and the grit of corrosion flaked away under her hands, scraping them. She was taking too long. Her hands were so sticky with sweat and fear that the rust stayed with them and rubbed harder as she picked up more rust on the skin of her palms.

  “Only as far as the clothesline,” said Dion. He grabbed the pulley rope at the top windows of this brownstone. It sloped away and up again to a window on the other side, but in the dip it nearly reached the line hung between the next set of floors down.

  “Do this,” Dion said. He grasped the rope and stepped off the fire escape, dangling five stories up. Then gravity took over and his weight dragged the pulley rope into the dip, where he let go and caught the next line, then slid back to the other wall. Then down to the next and the next, as easily as if he were dangling from cell to cell of his geodesic dome. Far below her, Nancy felt, as well as heard, his soft-soled boots land lightly on the wet pavement.

  “Nancy, come on!”

  Niko was only two rooftops away, headed straight for them.

  “Nancy!” Dion’s voice sounded hoarse, desperate.

  And she trusted him. She wrapped her fists around the rope, made her shaking legs pull her over the fire escape railing, stuck her heels through it backward to perch there quavering.

  “Do it,” said Dion.

  “Don’t!” yelled his father from above.

  Nancy stepped into thin air.

  Should she have trusted him?

  Her body dropped sheer. She held onto the rope so hard it burned. Oh, it hurt, that jolt of her weight on her hands, her hands on the rope.

  She rocketed down the rope slope to its center. Her right hand found the target. Her left hand fell shy, short and shy.

  Her body slammed sideways. The clothesline snapped, broke like a thread. Nancy closed her eyes, an instinct against the murderous ground beneath her. Oh, wrong, wrong! Nancy expected the concrete, the asphalt, the ground-in glass, the hard-packed dirt, the blades of grass.

  It didn’t come. Instead there came a fragrance of flowers, of soap, of wind. The touch of fabric against her face: T-shirts, towels, baby diapers, all slowly rising. Nancy was as light as wind. The city was enormous around her. She opened her eyes to see someone’s boxer shorts, should-be-small polka dots like gigantic spots before her eyes. Gigantic? Or was she small? For the moment she was all darkness, part of the darkness, dark in the dark, wind in the wind.

  Her left hand flailed, her right hand up above her head still held the rope. No, not a rope, no harsh burning clothesline this, but a soft thick cord that fit her hand and didn’t slide through it.

  Look, Dad!

  Look, Dion! And, thinking of him, came back to the form he knew. The toes of her Doc Martens touched the ground and Dion’s arms wrapped around her.

  “Nancy. How did you do that?” A whisper like her heart.

  “How?” It was too dark to do anything but feel that soft rope. She shook it off, shook Dion off.

  “You stupid kids!” roared Niko from the roof. He stood staring down in horrified amazement.

  “God,” said Dion. “God! I thought you were dead. You.”

  Niko came leaping down the steps of the fire escape, all those stories up and getting nearer. “Girl!” he yelled. “Now I know what you’re all about.”

  Some old bat stuck her head out a window and squealed when she saw him. “I’ll have the law after you all!”

  “Nancy! Come on!” Dion said.

  “I have to get to the hospital,” she told him, knowing it in her knees. She left him there on the ground, left his father on the steps, left his mother God-knew-where. She went after Grandpa, after Granny.

  She knew, in the moment of turning the corner, that Dion had taken her by the hand and brought her the way he knew she wanted to go, the way Grandpa Joke had once led Granny Tina to the church.

  EMERGENCY ENTRANCE, said the nearest lit-up sign.

  44

  It was his hands she fell for: large, with Italian olive skin, fine black hair feathering the backs.

  And it was his eyes behind his glasses, large, intelligent, cinnamon brown as the back of one of her father’s horses, with now and then a little sparkle around the edges that made her wonder what he’d be like if he laughed. He didn’t laugh, not in that OR, with a mask over his mouth, not in this emergency room, in this curtained cubicle.

  Push back the cobwebs, Nancy. Those weren’t her memories, they weren’t real for her. But what she felt was real. Niko on the roof, telling her he knew what she was about: did he mean he knew another spider when he met one? Dion on the ground, telling her to come down. Herself, dropping, while her heart rose up to the sky.

  Had it been real, spinning silk, falling into the shape of a spider, coming down on eight legs instead of just two, up to the very last moment? Now that the chase was over, an
d Nancy’s body could move gently, her mind swung into motion. She pushed the memory across the space between her and her grandmother, reaching from deep within her.

  Now was real, now in the emergency room waiting room, waiting forever, and finally, after four in the morning, looking up into Grandpa’s big brown eyes. They weren’t laughing. Nancy slid her arm through Grandpa’s elbow, noted the gray among the black hairs of his hand and arm. “Grandpa?” she began.

  “Come see her, Nancy,” Grandpa Joke said. It was a long walk through a maze with no magic string to lead the way back out again. She passed little scary curtained cubicles and night-light doorways, wishing only to stop and plant herself on the floor and refuse to move forward with time. But her body kept going, and her mind did.

  The only way Rachel could have come to Niko’s apartment was for Ned to have called her, which meant he had somehow heard Nancy’s calls, that he really had been the spider Nancy had saved.

  And then the thought she had held off, the way she—or was it Granny Tina?—savored the idea of ice-cream after dinner, the fact that she had survived the fall from the high clothesline. At the time her thoughts had been end-of-life thoughts. She had accepted the thud of her body against the ground and merely waited for it to happen. Now, free of that ending, she relived the fall. A strand of silk from her own spinneret had cushioned her fall. The giant boxers on the line didn’t just mean big butts in the house (as Annette would have said, though there wasn’t much funny here and now), but a small Nancy falling—a small human Nancy, or a small spider Nancy. Take it, Granny. It’s good news! It has to be!

  What had made it happen? Needing it to happen? Wanting it to happen? Finally growing? Or Granny dying?

  There was no stopping this walk down the hall. There was no stopping that fall from the roof. No stopping the spiderness. She wanted to tell her dad, but maybe he already knew. She wanted to tell Dion, and maybe he knew, too. He’d been there.