Cobwebs Read online

  33

  With a needle, with thread so silver it was nearly clear, with gauze woven as carefully as any heirloom blanket, Rachel fixed Nancy up.

  “What kind of thread is that?” Nancy could see it coming off the spool, but it didn’t look so clear on it.

  Rachel looked Nancy in the eye and said hoarsely, “It’s silk.” She threaded it through her hand before she fed it through the needle. Nancy, staring, saw the thread thicken as it passed through her mother’s hand. Rachel, too, watched the thread closely and began to breathe more normally.

  “Is this what Granny’s doing for Dion’s mother?”

  “Is that his name? Your fly on the wall?”

  Nancy nodded, wondering where he was. “Mama, answer me.”

  “This is all she can do,” Rachel said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “I mean, if this doesn’t work for his mother, well, there isn’t anything more.”

  “There’s nothing stronger?”

  The question stilled Rachel’s hands, but then she went on adjusting the thread, her eyes on her work. “So now that you know about your father, what do you think?”

  Nancy wasn’t expecting the question, not with her mother here doing natural magic, or whatever this was. Doing healing. “Dangerous,” she whispered, mindful of Dion nearby. “It scares me. He’s so vulnerable. He could be squashed! Thing is, Ma—” She stopped, feeling the needle poking through her skin. Through her skin!

  Rachel paused. “Does this hurt, Nancy?”

  Nancy shook her head. “Don’t know why.”

  They said nothing for a moment, one feeling the strangeness of a needle penetrating, the other struggling to swallow the sensation of being the one to push it through.

  Rachel shakily asked, “Thing is what?”

  Nancy said, “He acts indestructible. Like he’s James Bond. Double-oh-Ned.”

  Her mother laughed fondly.

  “Ma, could I—”

  “What?”

  “Mama. Could I be transformed that way? The way Dad does?”

  Mama swallowed, unwinding gauze carefully, not stretching it too far. “It seems unlikely,” she said. The gauze came off a larger spool than the thread, clouding in a way that seemed more than a trick of light. Nancy took Rachel’s lead and didn’t mention it.

  “Why? Because it hasn’t happened yet?”

  “It’s not impossible, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Well, it has to be a very strong strain.”

  “You mean it’s hard for him?”

  “Yes. No, I mean a genetic strain,” Rachel said. “Dad’s a real throwback. It’s unusual, even among spiders.”

  “Even among spider-humans, you mean. It’s normal, among spiders.”

  “How can you joke?”

  Nancy rolled her eyes. “How can you not?”

  “Because the next one could be you.”

  “Couldn’t it be you?”

  “No,” Rachel said most definitely. “To make a match with someone like me—a healer, down both sides of my family—”

  “You are?”

  “Yes,” her mother said. “As much as Granny Tina is. I’m supposed to be. And you lose the use of it if you don’t practice. But how can I have a practice when I can’t go out?”

  “Mamba, are you worried the strain will be lost in me?” No wonder they watch me so closely.

  “It’s what your grandpa says. You keep us all connected. It’s an enormous responsibility.”

  Mama didn’t know what she’d been up to lately, the responsibility she’d been trying to share with Ned. “And what if nothing develops?”

  Rachel had finished wrapping Nancy’s leg, first in the silvery gauze, then in a normal, store-bought hospital-white gauze. Now she pulled Nancy’s skirt off over her head and took a pair of her own soft long johns from a drawer. Together, she and Nancy drew them up over Nancy’s feet and began to lift them higher.

  “Your legs!”

  “I know. A disaster.” Nancy pulled the long johns higher.

  Rachel tugged them back. “You shaved.”

  The lump in her throat was back. “I’m sorry!”

  “Sorry? Nancy, I thought you realized … Tell me again how you got hit by that bike.” Rachel called out, “Mother!”

  The door swung open and Granny Tina was there; she must have been just outside the door, in the living room, while Rachel had been working on Nancy. Dion was nowhere in sight.

  “Mother, she shaved,” said Rachel.

  “And nearly got herself killed,” said Granny Tina sarcastically. “See where it got you. Stupid sheep!”

  And Nancy suddenly got what they were saying, what they’d been saying and she’d been resisting all along: that it was her hair that let her know when the subway was coming, when Dad or Dion was near, her hair that acted as a sort of extra sense or reflex. Rachel helped Nancy down from the counter, made her lean on the counter as she hopped toward the doorway to the greenhouse. “You think if I hadn’t shaved, I wouldn’t have had this accident?” Her mother and grandmother exchanged glances, their eyes glowing.

  In the greenhouse Rachel sat Nancy on the loom bench to rest a moment. “Is that what you think?” Rachel asked her. She pulled the bands off Nancy’s braids and began to fluff out her hair.

  Nancy felt jolted, jangled, and nauseated again. “I want to lie down,” she said. “Where’s Dad? Where’s Dion?”

  “Not here,” said Mama. “I called Ned. Grandpa’s going to bring you over there later. But first, take a nap. Rest a while. You’ve had a shock.” She laid one of her soft blankets beneath the loom.

  Nancy wriggled onto the blanket and lay gingerly on her back. She thought, The hair on my legs is already growing again.

  “This hair thing,” she said. “Is it unusual?”

  “Not among spiders,” Rachel said, smiling.

  What would happen if Dion grew back his hair?

  Above her the threads snapped in place, grayish-white like a map being printed in a newspaper, the street lines crisscrossing, crosscrissing. What if they added on to each side of Manhattan, filled in the river with more and more streets all the way across to Brooklyn? Think of the added humming, different without the river in between, think of the change in the rhythm of the city. Nancy heard it now: swoosh went the shuttle through the shed. Boom went the beater, pressing the new street into the newsprint. Bam went the beater, thrown back out of the way. Clunkety went the foot on the treadle. Clash went the heddle frames switching position. Swoosh. Boom. Bam. Clunkety. Clash. Swoosh boom bam clunkety clash.

  Rachel was back into her rhythm. Nancy dozed off. Tina made her slow, creaking way out to the greenhouse.

  Words flew unheeded far over Nancy’s head.

  “You know, she might—”

  “She could—”

  “Oh, Ma, do you think so?”

  “She’s got to learn to ignore the world—”

  “To focus on a feeling—”

  “She can’t do that if she doesn’t feel—”

  “She can’t feel if she’s just following—”

  “I don’t think she will anymore, Rachel.”

  “That boy’s been following her—”

  “She’s been following that boy—”

  “His mother’s the one—”

  “And his father—”

  “What are we going to do about them?”

  “How did she ever find that boy?”

  That boy.

  Nancy woke to the sound of weaving, her ears full of it. Started to hear the difference in the heddle positions. Started to hear the difference in the treadles.

  Her eyes opened, waited to see, as well as hear, what would come next. Started to see how the street-threads were going to fall into place, in advance. The ground was solid and still and safe beneath her. She tested the pull on the wound on her thigh, slowly bending her leg at the hip, at the knee. She reached a hand toward her mother and felt Rachel’
s strong arms pull her up from the floor.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Okay,” Nancy said. She put weight on her foot gingerly, moving toward the door. “I want to go to Dad’s,” she said.

  Rachel nodded. That was odd: though Mama didn’t believe she’d ever go out again, she must have believed in her healing.

  Grandpa was waiting in the car. Nancy walked carefully up the stairs, the way a spider makes its way toward a new hole in its web. Will it hold? She had figured out a new idea while she half slept under the loom. Maybe a fly in a web was stuck, but it changed the way the day went for the spider. Without it, the pattern would be different: the web untorn, the spider still hungry. She herself, Nancy walking slowly up the stairs, was a difference. The pattern will change, she thought bravely, because I am here. “Amen,” she said to that.

  34

  It wasn’t that Nancy was slow. She just hadn’t realized, before she shaved her legs and let her human side overpower her spider side for a few days. Now she saw what a human, even another spider person, would see in her father. If you could trap the Angel of Brooklyn, you might bend him to your use. Him or her.

  “Can’t you see?” Nancy asked Ned, tapping her finger on The New York Times. They were finishing a breakfast of eggs and brioche from the Uprising Bakery, a special treat to soothe Nancy’s hurt leg—and psyche, said Ned.

  “See what? Want another brioche?”

  “Yes.” She couldn’t get enough to eat this morning. “You think you’re following Niko Papadopolis’s work. But he’s following yours.”

  Dad didn’t deny it. He ran his fingers through his hair, leaned his head against her arm, and sighed. “What’s that you say, Nancy … ‘small, but wiry’? That’s me, too, you know.”

  “You’re not exactly small, Dad.”

  “Well, I can be. That big oaf can’t keep up with me.”

  “Dion says he plays basketball, Dad. Got a jump shot like you wouldn’t believe.”

  Ned nodded. “So he’s a jumping spider?”

  “Yes.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Ned, after a beat.

  How could it not matter?

  Ned looked out his beloved window, over his beloved rooftops and his beloved city. Nancy, beside him, looked, too. “We can’t let Granny go there again,” she said.

  “She may insist.”

  “Or Niko might.”

  “He doesn’t know what we are made of,” said Ned stoutly.

  What am I made of?

  Ned asked, “Which side has that young roof dweller of yours settled down on?”

  “Dion?”

  He nodded. He glanced out the window.

  “He’s not there,” Nancy said.

  “Sure?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Ned cocked his head and looked at her. “Which side?”

  “He loves his mother,” she said, “He doesn’t trust his father. I don’t, either.”

  “Niko Papadopolis,” said Ned. “What’s his story?”

  “He wants to be at the top of the food chain. If he could just tell everybody what to do … everybody in our family, that is.”

  “He can’t tell us,” said her father.

  The sun beamed through the penthouse windows, throwing a net of shadows across the floor. It lit the V8 juice and Ned’s Bloody Mary, and made the seeds of the raspberry jam shine. She asked, “How did you stop that rape?”

  For a moment, Ned looked jolted, surprised. But then he began to tell her.

  Ned had yelled—no, called, really. Yelling would have been too loud. “Hey.” Period, not exclamation point, but not question mark, either. And then, again, “Hey.”

  Two faces had looked up, faces scared in different ways, and saw nobody.

  “So you leaped down, decked the man, put your arm around the girl and—”

  “No,” said Ned. “That isn’t what happened. I scooped gravel from the roof and dashed it down into the attacker’s face. The man’s hands flew up to his eyes, and the girl—the smart, brave girl—snatched the gun. Stuck it in his ribs and cocked it and told him to march.”

  “Didn’t he run when he got to Mott Street?” asked Nancy.

  “He sure would have. But this girl got him in a hold with his arm behind his back, and when she cleared the alley she spoke to a woman selling ducks, and in an instant, ten guys grabbed the criminal and held on till the cops came.”

  Nancy grinned, nodding. “She was lucky.”

  “Lucky! She was brilliant. She kept her wits about her and took her opportunity, and she cleaned his clock! My part was throwing gravel.” Ned’s head dropped into his hands. “Some angel.”

  Nancy thought about how spiderwebs signified neglect. They made a place look unwatched, uncared for, invisible on the face of the earth, hidden inside the walls of the city. That was a spider’s deception. Made it look safe for flies, then foiled them.

  “And there’s another thing, Dad.” She sounded, to herself, as breathless and silly-urgent as the girls in homeroom. “Say you’d caught that guy, taken him off to the cops. Where would that girl be?”

  “She’d be saved.”

  “Yeah, well, this way she saved herself. It’s better.”

  “Better how?”

  “Because now she knows she can! I mean, that’s what I don’t know. If I could grab the gun and hold it on him and make him march—”

  “You?”

  “Well, of course me. I could be that girl.”

  “That girl, little egg, got that gun on the guy because he had gravel in his eyes—”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Or else, she was—”

  “You mean, your gravel? Ned Kara’s?”

  “She was maybe dead or worse back there.”

  “If not for you?”

  Stalemate. They both wanted to believe the girl would have found another way out. They both understood that her way out came because Ned threw gravel. That was the way it had happened. But things could have gone another way entirely, if, say, one string had been woven from another harness, if it shot over instead of under, if it were blue instead of green.

  The pattern of what he did—what he’d been doing since he was fourteen, from his rooftops and below—would not change, unless Niko Papadopolis got hold of it.

  35

  Nancy knitted on the chaise lounge on the roof outside the little penthouse, watching the sun move from one side of the sky to the other, waiting for Ned to go to Rachel’s and go to work and come home again. She knit about a zillion stripes along the sweater’s front; when she held the sweater up, midafternoon, it reached from her hips to her breastbone. Before long she’d be starting on the sleeves. She laid it down, unwrapped the jump rope from her wrist, made a cat’s cradle, looked through it at the city.

  Someplace over there Annette was getting ready for the dance. Nancy wondered what her dress was like. She ran her hand up her leg—still smooth, though not as silky—and fooled with the edge of the bandage on her thigh. Already she felt steadier and stronger, but not much like dancing. She thought about dancing on the Brooklyn Bridge for Dion and felt her face get hot, and the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She closed her eyes in embarrassment, though there was nobody there to see except some pigeons, and daydreamed instead that Dion was dancing with her on the bridge.

  A shadow passed across her face. Nancy opened her eyes. Dion had his old jeans on, his scuffed boots, and a gray T-shirt. Camouflage, Nancy thought, and patted the chaise next to her good leg. He sat. He took the jump rope off her hand, and stretched it out, examining the knots he had made to connect the ends into a loop. The jump rope was a strong elastic woven strand of gold, green, and purple threads, not as bright and sharp as they were when it was new, before Nancy and Dion had found it and made it theirs. She grabbed it back, she pulled him toward her, and he came with the rope as it contracted.

  She reached her arms around his back and leaned her head on his shoulder. He put his face in
to her hair.

  They both sighed, and she felt—and she knew he felt—the opposite of how she felt when her hair stood on end. Her hair all stayed in its place. She felt that she was back in place, as if this place—Dion’s arms—was a place she had known for a long time. It was as though she had been struggling to get back to this place and now she had finally gotten here.

  “Can I kiss you?” Dion asked, in the deep chord of a voice he had used on the bridge.

  He kissed her.

  She kissed him back. She held him, her arms around his neck, and brought her legs carefully up into his lap. He picked her up very gently. He leaned on the parapet and slid to the rooftop with her in his arms.

  For the longest time they stayed there, and Ned did not come home, or if he did, in his spider form, he went away again and left them on their own.

  Nancy wasn’t sure if she’d slept. When she opened her eyes, Dion’s were closed. With her fingertip she touched him where his eyebrows were a line of tiny feather tips. He startled, then smiled. He said, “I know you.”

  She said, “I know you, too.”

  A cloud crossed his eyes, then, or so it seemed, because the deep blueness that had come into them on the bridge the day before suddenly gave way again to the familiar nervous paleness. “My mother’s really bad,” he said. “She’s going to die unless I get her help. That’s why—I wanted you to know that, whatever happens, it’s nothing against you. Nothing against your family.”

  She pushed herself off his lap so that she was sitting on the roof beside him. “The whole thing is hurting my family. It’s hurting my grandmother.”

  “Is it? Is she—”

  “What is your father trying to do?” Now her hair stood up, as though it were trying to make up for the lost hair on her legs.

  “Same thing your father is trying to do,” he said. “What’s best.”

  “What’s best for who?” His father would say whom. His father would say a lot of things!

  He closed his eyes. “Us, I guess.”

  “Not me. Not my family.”

  “I meant my family,” Dion said.