Cobwebs Read online

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “Mama, too.”

  “How about Granny and Grandpa?”

  “Maybe if I tried from Mama’s house, I’d be able to figure out if they were there, too.”

  “How about now?”

  “Now it’s different, because I already know where they all are. You mean, could I tell from here?”

  He nodded solemnly, his eyes alert.

  “Maybe.” And thought about Dion, and how often she’d run into him lately, and how he hadn’t appeared that evening when she’d wished for him. “But the climbing is the big thing,” she added. “I can go farther than ever. I’ve been practicing on my own.”

  “I know, I know,” he said, hushing her. He looked up at the sky.

  “You all don’t need to think you have to teach me everything in the world. You could tell me things instead.”

  “What things?” Cautiously. Didn’t he know? Didn’t he know that she had followed him across the rooftops?

  “What’s up with Granny, for one thing. What you’re clipping those papers for, for another. And—” Her knees were shuddering in the damp, betraying the fear she’d ignored all evening. A delayed reaction to the heights she’d scaled? Her real self coming seeping up from under the false bravery she’d been feeling? “Tell me about the clippings,” she said.

  “Nancy,” Ned said. “You don’t need to know.”

  Her knees, the wall, the drop … she was trembling. “I need you not to keep secrets.”

  She was throwing herself off-balance. Ned reached his hand toward hers, didn’t touch.

  “Did you ever think maybe I need help?” she asked, her feet wide apart on the wall, the wall cold beneath her.

  “Help?” Ned’s eyes were fearful.

  “Information,” she told him. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be—what I’m trying to—do.” The strands came together inside her, and blanketed her once and for all in the knowledge that there was some sort of a task before her. A quest. A challenge. A struggle. “How hobbit-ish,” Annette would say. But Nancy hardly felt heroic.

  “I feel as doo-lally as Granny,” she said. “And now every time Granny tells me one of her stories, things happen.”

  “What things?”

  “I get—” Feelings. Janglings. “I find—”

  “Trouble?”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “Yeah!”

  He grasped her hand again then. “You’ll figure it out,” Ned said.

  “I have to figure it out myself?”

  He nodded, swallowed. “Like everybody else does.”

  “Not Annette. Not the kids in my school. Not—”

  “It’ll come,” said Ned. “Or it won’t. Maybe—”

  Nancy waited. The city wavered behind her.

  Ned shook his head.

  “Maybe what?”

  Another shake. “I’m afraid to go out on a limb here.”

  “Even for me?”

  He nodded. She took her hand away.

  “’Cause either you will find out, or you won’t. Does it help to know I have faith in you?”

  She sat down abruptly on the wall to quiet the rising fear. Ned turned and backed up to her. She put her arms around his neck and let him carry her inside.

  He let her in the bathroom first, then cozied her under her comforter in the hammock. She thought he was going off to take his turn in the bathroom, and she began to berate herself for not quizzing him harder. I am just too tired, she admitted to herself. What came to mind was Gone with the Wind, a book Annette’s mother used to quote to the girls during a sleepover when they were up too late messing around and wouldn’t knock it off, something about saving some trouble for tomorrow.

  How to end this day? She wished she had Gone with the Wind to page through now, to help her settle down for the night. Ned came back from the bathroom and began rummaging through one of his boxes. More clippings? He came walking toward her, bringing a book held up on his fingers like a tray: Charlotte’s Web.

  “Oh, brother,” she said. She knew it word for word and didn’t even bother to open it, but rolled on her side and tucked it against her chest, and fell asleep.

  22

  Next morning Dion was on the roof—the roof outside Ned’s nest, the way she’d pictured him that night—when Ned came loping along on his way to a job. What kind of job? Nancy wasn’t sure anymore.

  “Hey!” yodeled Dion.

  His voice woke Nancy in her hammock. She leaped out so fast she almost killed herself, having raised the hammock so high. She caught herself from falling through the window, palms slapping on the windowsill so hard it hurt.

  And then he was yelling her name. “Nancy! Nancy!”

  Where’s Dad, anyway? What’s Dion doing here?

  She staggered out onto the roof, and he landed on the wall before her. The Alta, Utah, shirt, purple in the early light, and his legs long and straight in those jeans. She pulled her cloud pajamas straight and wrapped her arms across her stomach. Had she drawn him to her?

  “How long have you been here?” she asked.

  “He’s gone,” said Dion. “He disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” she said.

  “Right,” said Dion.

  “He’s just fast,” she said, thinking about the morning she’d chased her father. “He’s used to the rooftops. It’s how he gets around. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “He’s just gone,” Dion said, snapping his fingers.

  “Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me?”

  He nodded. “One of the things. Haven’t you watched him? Haven’t you seen him come and go?”

  She was silent. Then, “You think he’s the Angel of Brooklyn. Or is it your father who does?”

  He nodded. He said, “No.”

  She gave him a funny look. “No? Or yes?”

  “I think there ain’t no angels in Brooklyn.” He didn’t respond to what she’d said about his father.

  She said nothing, stared at the place her father had been.

  “What do you think, Nancy?”

  “My father doesn’t know how to turn invisible, if that’s what you think.”

  “I’ve seen him disappear before. Haven’t you?”

  Nancy felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. No. Being somewhere else wasn’t the same as disappearing. Other times he hadn’t been where she expected him to be, had sort of twinkled away behind her, like that time she’d dropped Poochie in the subway. I look one way for him, the way I think he went, but he’s not there, so I look the other way, the way I don’t think he went, and there he is.

  She couldn’t let Dion know she was even considering this crazy disappearing theory. And yet…

  “What do you do, follow him?”

  “Yeah. Like I follow you.”

  “Why? I can’t disappear.”

  He smiled at her, his eyes crinkling up around the blue. He said, “You know why I follow you. The same reason you keep finding me.”

  She couldn’t help grinning, then sucked the grin back in. She hadn’t just realized that her Dad could disappear. She’d been pondering the phenomenon for some time now, more frequently since the morning she’d followed him to Mama’s, and, face it, more since she’d become braver herself on the rooftops. And faster.

  “You must be pretty fast on the roofs yourself,” she said. She rubbed one foot over the other, to get the roof grit off.

  “It runs in the family,” he said.

  “Oh? Greek? Navajo? Which part?”

  “No part that disappears,” he said. “And no part that heals.”

  “What are you saying, then? What part?”

  “We jump,” he said. “And I live on the roofs, like your kind of spider.” He straightened, taking the stance he’d taken when she’d asked him if he was homeless that day.

  She whispered, “Not my kind. I’m the African kind.” At least I hope I am. She didn’t mention Scottish. She didn’t mention Italian. She fi
gured everyone knew Anansi, and he was her most important ancestor anyway. By now, she knew there were a whole lot of different ways spiderness could show up in people. And there were ways it didn’t show up. “Spiders don’t disappear,” she added.

  “Your kind does,” he said. “Don’t you even know that?”

  “Get off our roof,” she told Dion in a quiet, dark voice. “Leave us some privacy.”

  He backed up fast against the wall, as if she’d pushed him.

  “I’m right,” he said.

  She stared at him, seeing stubble where his eyebrows should have been. Were. “Didn’t you hear me? Go!”

  “Nancy,” he said.

  “Stalking around. Sneaking up on me. Stealing juice. Acting like you’re—”

  His chin went up, blue eyes on hers. “Acting like what?”

  “Acting like the Angel of Brooklyn yourself, like I said before! Spying on everybody. I thought you ran away from your father, but it looks like you’re helping him.”

  “You don’t know one thing about it.”

  “What don’t I know?” Plenty, but she wasn’t going to show him that.

  “How much they want those stories in the papers. The more my father finds, the better.”

  “For whom?”

  “That’s just the point, girl. They don’t care if it’s for real, if he’s for real.” He pointed a finger in the direction Ned had gone.

  “Why?” she asked. She was genuinely curious.

  He leaned on the precipice and studied the view. “Because it’s cool,” he said. “It’s unreal, except it seems real. And the more real my dad makes it, the more it’s a piece of journalism, the more they like it.”

  “What if it’s not real?” asked Nancy. “What if he’s lying?”

  “What if he’s not lying?” Was he warning her about his father or informing her about her father, or informing her about his father and warning her about her own?

  “People can’t disappear,” she said.

  “Some kinds of people can.”

  Nancy covered her face in a confusion that seemed like a whirlpool in the East River, silent and sucking. It could bring them all down. And then here was this beautiful-ugly boy at the heart of it all, and in spite of all her anger and whirlpooling conflict she wanted to chase him back to his rooftop lair—wherever that was—grab him by the ears and, well, who knew, after that.

  “You have to go now,” she said to him. She turned, went inside and locked the door. If only there were curtains—but there weren’t. The daylight made it shadowy inside, though. She grabbed her clothes, locked herself into the bathroom, and when she was dressed for school she snatched up her backpack full of knitting and headed for the door. She did not look back, she did not scan the windows, she closed her ears and her eyes and the hair on the back of her neck to the possibility of Dion’s presence. She closed the door and went down.

  On the stairs, the tears released and streamed down her face. No! In the little lobby she dropped her backpack on the floor, dug out Kleenex, and blew.

  She hoped she would never see him again. If his mother died, she hoped he’d go home and look after Mina. She didn’t know anything about his father. What she could see, all she could see, was that the only reason Dion had been following her around was in hope of getting closer to the family he thought could help his mother. It wasn’t her, after all, that had drawn him.

  “Pay attention to what draws you,” Rachel had said.

  Nothing draws me, thought Nancy. Watch me pull away.

  23

  “Pretty good,” said Ned that evening. He was examining the sketch she’d left beside her hammock on the floor, her notebook open to the page. It was a sketch she’d drawn of Dion, from memory. Catch him, her mother had said. “Nancy, could you get ready to go out, please?”

  “Listen, Dad. That guy who writes about the Angel of Brooklyn—”

  “Who?” said Ned.

  “I think he’s got lots of names. Nestor Paprika, Nick Pappas…”

  “What about him?” Quietly, almost to himself, he said, “That’s all the same guy?”

  “All the same. And Niko Papadopolis.”

  “Who’s he?” Louder.

  It made her tired and teary to think of telling him. She pointed her finger at the drawing of Dion. “His father.”

  “What?” Quieter.

  “He thinks you’re the Angel of Brooklyn.”

  Ned laughed, a big explosion. “It doesn’t matter what anybody thinks.” He rolled his eyes, chuckling, broke eye contact, turned away, big hands in the air, fingers splayed. “Come on, Nancy,” he said breathlessly.

  “Come on what?”

  “Angels have wings,” he said.

  “So?”

  He threw her black sweater at her. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” She didn’t want to go anywhere. He was already at the door. He hadn’t denied what she’d said. Did he realize the boy in the picture was the one who’d spied on her from the garden, who’d been on the dome that night?

  “Granny is expecting us for dinner.”

  “I don’t want any dinner,” she said, all snarly. “I’m the complete opposite of hungry.”

  “You’re coming, Nancy,” said Ned, sounding tired and angry himself. It was an unusual attitude. What was this all about? Why did it matter so much to Ned to go over there? What if they went and Granny told her another story—and she got another crazy inspiration? What would happen this time?

  She jumped out of the hammock so suddenly he almost fell over in surprise. “How are we getting there?” she asked. She would find out what her family wanted, and get what she wanted, too.

  Ned cocked his head at her and swung the door. “I thought we’d take the subway,” he said.

  “Now? At rush hour?”

  “Unless you have a better idea,” he said, challenging her.

  “How about the roofs?”

  “You want to go all the way to Mama’s on the roofs?”

  “I never have before,” she said.

  “You’re not going to now, either,” he said. He held the door for her, and they went down the stairs the normal way, to the street.

  Dion wasn’t on the dome. Maybe he was home.

  Grandpa Joke was acting all ceremonial, with a white towel around his waist and a white cloth on the table. There was a beautiful smell of garlic coming from the kitchen, and he ran back in there as soon as he greeted Ned and Nancy at the door. He wouldn’t let them help with anything, just made them go sit down. Granny and Mama were in the kitchen as well.

  “What’s up?” asked Nancy.

  Ned just shrugged. All the way over on the subway, he had hardly said anything. Now he seemed to come to some decision. Waiting at the table, he said quietly to Nancy, “You know, I’ve seen him.”

  “Dion?”

  “Is that his name?”

  Nancy nodded. Where before Dad had had a warning tone when he spoke of Dion, now he seemed suspiciously light and airy. “At first I didn’t recognize him, down on the ground.”

  “Yeah, he’s always on the dome by Carroll Street.”

  “That’s not where I meant.”

  “Then where have you seen him?”

  “I’m sure it’s him. He has a distinctive way of moving.”

  “Where?”

  “Across a few blocks of roofs.”

  Up high. She leaned closer. “What do you think about him?”

  “He’s light,” Ned said. “Everything about him. He’s quiet. He’s smooth. He knows how to blend in. He’s a good—”

  “Wow, you do know him,” Nancy interrupted.

  Ned glanced at the kitchen door, nodded. “As much as you can know about anyone by just watching him.”

  Grandpa Joke entered bearing a bottle of wine and five glasses, all in his two big hands.

  “Who’s coming?” Nancy asked, counting the glasses.

  “You are,” Grandpa said. “Coming along. Ladies!” Rachel and Granny Ti
na came in from the kitchen. Everyone was looking at Nancy expectantly.

  Grandpa Joke poured a little wine in each glass. “On your feet,” he said. He raised his glass to Nancy, to Ned.

  Ned, with his arm around Nancy’s waist, clinked her glass with his. “Here’s to you, little egg,” he said.

  “Salut!” said Grandpa Joke in Italian.

  “Salut!” agreed Rachel and Tina, raising their glasses and kissing Nancy’s cheeks.

  “Thanks,” Nancy said stiffly. She had never been toasted before, and she didn’t know why they were doing this now. The family ate beautiful eggplant parmigiana and drank the wine that tasted cool and hard when Nancy sipped it, but went down her throat warm and soft. The talk was nothing but chitchat. Nancy kept waiting for serious words, some explanation or question or challenge. They seemed to have gotten her here for a reason they all clearly agreed upon. But nobody said anything much. They discussed crops, of all things—stuff people were growing in the community garden.

  Nancy couldn’t sit at the table anymore. She got up and carried the plates into the kitchen and washed them. Grandpa came in with the parmigiana dish and patted her shoulder. She turned and said, “Grandpa Joke, why’d you give me wine?”

  “Didn’t I ever do it before?”

  But he knew he hadn’t.

  “Does there need to be a reason, Nancy? I enjoy you.”

  Such a formal thing to say.

  “You ought to drink wine with the people you love.”

  What came to her mind was the winged girl who had opened the door at the Papadopolis house during the first visit. “There’s something I want to know, Grandpa Joke.”

  “Don’t find out too much!” he interrupted in a jolly voice, as if he knew exactly what she was going to ask.

  “You’d be surprised what I know,” she told him. “You’re going to have to tell me more sometime, Grandpa.”

  Grandpa Joke inhaled through his nose, as if he were getting extra oxygen that way. He looked over his shoulder at Ned as he passed behind him on his way to spray water into the sink, filling it with big white suds. “You were asking me a question the other day,” he said quietly. “I’ve been thinking about the answer.”