Cobwebs Read online

  The sides of the booths were so tall you couldn’t see people if you didn’t walk right up to their booth. Nancy had just walked past them all without looking into any of them. As she glanced back now, one little dark-haired girl with blue-gray eyes was peeking around the corner of a seat. It was Dion’s sister. The person across from her was a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man. Niko Papadopolis.

  Nancy took a step toward them, but Annie said, “You’re all set, Nancy. Now go home.” She took Nancy by the shoulder and turned her out the door.

  “It’s okay, Annie. You don’t have to push.”

  “Your Grandpa’s waiting for you. Now go.”

  Grandpa Joke was in the doorway of the OTB, watching for Nancy. “We’re all connected, Grandpa Joke,” she said fiercely. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yes. But what kind of connections are they, Nancy?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “There’s some you want to stay separate from,” he said.

  “Why, if I can help?”

  “How can you help?” He said it gently, but still it hurt.

  “Grandpa, you’re the one who said to show kindness.”

  “Stay away from that man,” he told her.

  “You don’t.” What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. He hadn’t said to stay away from the son or the mother or the daughter.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen good. I’m a good doctor, but I don’t have certain talents your grandmother has. The people that need her are very good at finding her.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Some of them are bad. And it’s not all they want, just a little medical help. They draw a different kind of strength from someone like your Granny.”

  “Is that what this Niko is doing?”

  Grandpa sighed. “What I have observed is that over the last year he has followed some of the patients. Events coincide, and you notice a pattern. He was in the background. Then he was—”

  “In the foreground?”

  He frowned. “Mostly patients get better and go away. But some of them … I make a judgment. Sometimes it’s best to pay them off. That’s all some of them want. If I can get them to go away and leave us alone for a time, it’s better. But sometimes—more often lately—they come back.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re easy money, see?”

  The light dawned: Nancy saw the pattern in the horse-racing situation. Grandpa’s winnings paid off the Healer seekers. “But that’s not why Niko Papadopolis keeps coming around, for the money.”

  Grandpa bowed his head. “They don’t leave you alone so easy, not if the one that’s sick isn’t getting better.”

  “That’s stupid!” Nancy burst out. “Why should it cost so much to go to the hospital?”

  Grandpa Joke looked at her as though she were knee-high to a centipede. “It’s not as simple as that,” he said gently. “Don’t you see, it’s spiders that respond best to your Granny’s kind of healing?”

  The focus burst open and clear. It was as though Grandpa Joke had stepped on a treadle of Mama’s loom and revealed to Nancy that a fabric she had thought to be striped was, quite suddenly, plaid. A network of random strings fell into place.

  “Grandpa,” she said, her voice deep and hoarse, “he’s a reporter. He’s not just looking for healing. He’s looking for stories.”

  “Your Granny hasn’t got very many stories left,” Grandpa Joke said.

  Nancy shook. She thought she knew the kind of stories Grandpa meant. “Why aren’t there more healers?” she whispered.

  “In these times? With malpractice and insurance and—Why do you think we keep it so quiet? Yes, there are others, and they’ve gone underground the way your Granny has. There are so few, they’d suck her dry otherwise.”

  “Then a newspaper story would be devastating.”

  He nodded. “Go on home, Nancy,” he said. “Go now, before anything else can happen.”

  Nancy let herself into the basement apartment without a word to Mama or Granny. She was right about the card she’d stolen from Grandpa Joke. It was in Dad’s handwriting:

  ATT. RAPE MOTT ST. AL

  WATCH FOR N.

  That most terrifying of words jumped right out at her. And just below it, WATCH FOR N. Nancy thought about Grandpa today—the words he’d been saying, the way his eyes had looked. N. might stand for her, for Nancy, or for Ned. Or Niko.

  She knew where Mott Street was: in Chinatown, on the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Last fall Rachel had sent her there to buy paper lanterns for Granny’s birthday. Talk about mazes! She tried to picture a Mott Street alley and could only come up with the narrowest, darkest place. There wasn’t room for anything more.

  Nancy went through all the day’s papers, then yesterday’s. She found a little story on an inside page of yesterday’s News. “The criminal was apprehended by his would-be victim,” it said.

  How had the victim apprehended him? Some kind of martial arts? Or did she get his gun or knife off him? Nancy stopped reading and looked around, almost expecting to find someone watching her, though she didn’t know who. There was no reason for her to be reading this story, not as she’d been reading news stories lately—for the Angel. Only there was this note. She returned to the article and read it closely. There was no mention of anything falling from above—no hammer, no pebble, no clothespin. If there was no Angelness, was there, maybe, some spiderness? Suddenly she could feel her stomach inside her body, a round cold gray thing that seemed empty, but not in a hungry way.

  Calm down, she told herself. It’s not as though there were any draglines or silk in the story, nothing obvious like that.

  She went into the bedroom and studied her face in the mirror. Tight braids. Green eyes. Grim face. Spinnerets or not, there was spider in Nancy. Wings or not, there was Angel in Nancy. Climb or fly, she would rise in her own way. She would help her family, her city, the best way she knew how. First she had something, someone to check on in Chinatown. And she knew who she wanted to take with her.

  3. The Web

  Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;

  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;

  Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;

  Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried…

  —Walt Whitman, from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

  29

  The sky over the river was blue-gold with western light when she rang Annette’s buzzer. Nancy couldn’t get out onto Annette’s little balcony over Pierrepont Place fast enough. She had to approach this just right with Annette, who sat soaking up the sun. The trees over the Promenade were deep green now; the neighborhood rang with the sounds of kids playing in the playground and the Kustard King truck dingling its jingle on the corner and boats tooting on the river.

  Nancy sat beside Annette and poked her feet through the railings. “Let’s go get ice cream,” she said. It was too hot for tights, too hot for tights! What next? What would Annette say if she took them off? What would Annette say about the way she’d walked away with Dion, about anything she’d done lately?

  “You can’t stay long, Nancy,” Annette said. “And I don’t want to eat. I want to feel thin. I’m meeting Mom to shop for an outfit to wear to that dance. It’s tomorrow night, you know.”

  “What sort of outfit?” Nancy asked casually, but inside her mind reeled and Annette’s long response went in one ear and out the other. So much for Nancy’s plans to entice Annette to Chinatown: green tea ice cream on Bayard Street, five-dollar embroidered shoes, and those scrumptious coconut drinks that came in coconut shells from buckets on Canal Street.

  “You know,” Annette was saying, “long and floaty, with points that fly out when I dance.” That dance! Nancy tried to picture herself dancing somewhere beside Ned’s roof. She didn’t have any d
ancing clothes. Her mother did, flowing skirts and tank tops, and maybe—what with the magic of elastic and safety pins and needles and thread—Nancy could patch together an outfit. Nancy suddenly felt completely inhuman, too weird to live, and it made her frantic. She jumped up so fast she almost snapped her legs off at the knees, because she’d forgotten her feet were stuck through the balcony railings.

  “What’s with you?” Annette asked, startled.

  “What’s Shamiqua wearing?” Steady there, Nancy said to herself. What if Annette wouldn’t come with her? She would have to be brave enough alone.

  “Something slinky.”

  “You mean sleazy?”

  “She’s not, you know. She’s nice.”

  Nancy was silent, and sullen.

  “What do you know about it, Nancy? It’s not like you’ve been around!” Here it came now. Annette’s black eyes were pools of hurt. Quickly she snapped them shut, as if in concentration, as she twisted her hair up onto her head and jabbed at the knot to make it stay.

  Peace, thought Nancy. Peace first. “’Nette? Would you do an act of rebellion with me?”

  Nancy and Annette conducted a science experiment on Nancy’s legs. They coated one leg with shaving cream, and the other leg with Nair. Annette said, “Do you want to hear the poem I’ve been working on?”

  “Errrr,” said Nancy, pretending uncertainty. She wasn’t pretending when it came to her legs; they sure felt rebellious. She had to concentrate hard to keep them still.

  Annette recited,

  “My Mom’s in love with General Tso,

  My father flew the coop,

  And I’m the little wonton

  That floats in chicken soup.”

  “Woe is me,” said Nancy, like always, and thought it was strange—a Chinese food poem, today.

  Annette made a little bow.

  The shaving cream leg felt cold, and the Nair leg felt hot. It felt hotter still as Annette slowly and carefully (and expertly, Nancy noted) shaved the shaving cream off Nancy’s leg. Only of course she shaved the hair, too, no stopping that, though Nancy was dying to stop her.

  “Please,” she said through her teeth, tears beginning to slip out of the corners of her eyes and down her cheeks.

  “What? Does it sting?”

  Nancy shook her head.

  “Try to act normal,” suggested Annette.

  “This is normal for me.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Annette said. Nancy knew it was ridiculously weird to cry over shaved legs.

  “Come on,” Annette said, looking at her in sympathy, rinsing the razor. “It really doesn’t hurt, does it?”

  Nancy shook her head again. “It just feels numb,” she said.

  Annette said, “Your brain is numb.”

  Nancy felt like the fingertips had been sanded off her hands, and she could no longer touch what she was holding. “Maybe I’m allergic to the shaving cream,” she said. Now she knew how truly weirdly unhuman she really was. She could hardly say that to Annette. “The hair on my right leg is disintegrating, right?”

  “It might take a couple shots. You have really hairy legs.”

  “It’s hereditary.”

  “How come you’re doing this all of a sudden?” Annette asked. “Must be that Ghost Boy.” She was smiling slyly.

  Nancy’s whole body felt hot and cold, split down the middle. “It’s Jimmy Velcro, didn’t I tell you?”

  “Ooh,” said Annette. “Now I wish we were doing that sugar-water thing. Then I could just rip you.” Instead she turned on the water in the tub and started rinsing Nancy’s leg with the shower massage attachment. And maybe it was the hair on Nancy’s legs (the hair that had been on her legs) or maybe it was her Ghost Boy, but she was crying again.

  “Does it hurt?” asked Annette again kindly.

  “No,” sobbed Nancy. “That’s the trouble.” Annette just stared. Well, how could Nancy explain how cutting off the hair on her legs made her feel cut off from the air around her?

  “Anyway,” Annette said. “I have these cute socks. I haven’t even worn them, Nance, so they don’t have cooties or anything. They’ll be so cute with your Docs.”

  Nancy slipped the ankle socks on: green and white stripes.

  “You have to admit they are fetching,” Annette said, grinning over Nancy’s shoulder into the mirror. Polka-dot Docs, green-striped socks, and her long brown, smooth legs.

  Nancy felt breezy. Pretty. “Whatever turns you on,” Nancy said, not wanting to admit how she felt.

  But Annette could tell she liked the look. “Yipe!” she yelled, glancing at the clock. “The time!” She’s as relieved to be leaving as I am, thought Nancy.

  “Use your phone?” Nancy asked. She called Rachel. “I’m not coming home tonight,” she told her. “I’m going to Dad’s.”

  “Why?” Mama’s voice on the phone sounded odd, bleak.

  “Because I want to,” she said, hanging up the phone.

  “Yeah, well, what are you going to do, Nancy?” said Annette, her face anxious. She threw a jacket over her shoulder, headed for the door. “I’m meeting Mommy for dinner, remember?”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  Annette’s eyes widened. “But Nance, we’re going shopping for the dance. At Bloomingdale’s.”

  Thank you, thought Nancy. Thank you, universe! She wouldn’t have to go to Manhattan alone. Annette would be with her. “Don’t worry, ’Nette. I’m not going to cramp your style.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I know, Annette honey. I’ll ride the train with you, that’s all. I’ll get off somewhere”—quickly she decided where, and resolved not to change her mind—“different.”

  They ran for the train. Annette used the Clark Street station with the elevator, so naturally, Nancy couldn’t guess whether a train was coming or not.

  When they were under the river, the long stop-free stretch on the train, Annette finally asked, “Where are you going?”

  “Chinatown,” Nancy said. She got off at Canal.

  30

  There was no reason to visit Mott Street except to see what was there—and to maybe be seen, seeing it. That’s why Nancy was in Chinatown on a crowded Friday evening, dodging the buckets of turtles and frogs, the mechanical windup toys, baskets of crabs and tables of fish on beds of ice, the Chinese ladies hauling shopping baskets. That was why she was peering into shop windows and buying a bright green fish kite on a long stick—to blend in, to be seen, to have an excuse to look up, to check out the alleys and rooftops at the same time.

  At last she found the combination she was looking for: a narrow alley between two buildings, one of which had the orange-red untarnished copper flashing of a brand-new roof.

  Nancy sat on the doorstep that probably led to an apartment over the stores. She jammed the kite stick into the yarn inside her backpack. She pulled out Dion’s jump rope. Some things you just never forgot, like tying your shoes or knitting or cat’s cradle. Though it had been years since Rachel had first taught her, she made only two false starts before she succeeded in winding the rope into the cat’s cradle.

  The point was to have something to do with her hands while she pretended to be sitting there waiting for someone, while she gazed nonchalantly at the street near the alley, watching for Niko Papadopolis. Somehow she thought that he might be looking for the same thing she was.

  There was no reason that he should have been there then, on a crowded Friday evening, at the precise moment she was there, looking for the precise clues she’d already searched out. But he was, and afterward, long afterward, she wondered if she or the kite or the jump rope acted as a lure. If it had been her, he didn’t know it: though he’d heard her voice on the phone and in his own doorway, he’d never seen her face.

  There in front of her, stood the girl, Mina.

  “What happened to the angel tights?” she asked Nancy.

  Behind her stood her father, his hair like dark clouds against the sky.
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  “Too warm for them today,” said Nancy, as a normal girl would. “Like my socks?”

  “Let’s go, Meen,” said her father.

  “I know her!” Mina said, to clear that up.

  Niko must have thought Mina was old enough to know people he didn’t. He backed away a little, gazing up, listening.

  “Where are your angel wings?” Nancy asked.

  Mina said, “I was never an angel. Those are cardinal wings. It’s my totem bird.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Mina said, “It’s the thing I like best,” and patted her chest, over her heart. Niko, glancing at the two girls in a puzzled but accepting way (was Nancy a teacher’s aide?), moved a pace or two away to talk to a lady selling ducks and crabs.

  “What is it about cardinals? Because they’re red?”

  “People have animals in their spirit, my mother says. Cardinals are in mine.”

  Nancy wondered what was in hers. She glanced at Niko, who was talking to the duck woman. “How is your mother?” she asked in a low voice.

  Mina shook her head pessimistically in a way she must have seen someone else do. “Not so good, but the Healer says—”

  “Let’s go, Mina.” Niko was back, his eyes intent on Nancy in a way she didn’t like. He certainly didn’t like Mina mentioning the Healer. He reached for her hand.

  “Wait!” the girl said. “What’s that?” She touched the elastic jump rope Nancy was winding through her fingers.

  “It’s a Chinese jump rope,” Nancy answered. He wouldn’t—say anything, do anything, accuse anybody—in front of his little daughter, would he? “Do you like to jump rope?”

  “I’m the best jumper in my class,” said Mina.

  “I’ll bet you are,” said Nancy sincerely.

  But Niko Papadopolis said, as if she’d been sarcastic, “She is an incredible jumper.” Is he proud of Dion like that? It made her wonder what this man would do if he thought his son was the Angel of Brooklyn. Was Dion trying to make him think that?