Cobwebs Read online

  But she didn’t want to. “I want my feet on solid ground,” she said. She didn’t need the whole world. Her loom—her web—was large enough.

  Now, every spring, Rachel cried. “He thinks I don’t want to be with him,” she had sobbed to Nancy this March. “I can’t be with him up there on that roof.”

  And he couldn’t be with her, down on the ground. Now Nancy told her mama all about the new apartment, up high like the one in Mama’s favorite TV version of La Bohème, the Australian Opera one, where everyone was young and beautiful and there was a big neon sign saying L’amour outside their apartment on the roof. She knew how Mama would feel, and now she’d made her cry, telling her about it.

  “I wish I was different,” Mama said.

  “You’re yourself,” Nancy told her, grasping for soothing words. “My Greene Mamba.” It was a favorite nickname, usually guaranteed to bring a smile.

  “She thinks I don’t love her,” Ned had said. “She says if I loved her I wouldn’t live on some empty roof.”

  “She’s afraid of everything,” Nancy had said sadly.

  Nancy crawled under the loom, looked out at the nose-level grass and dreamed herself back at Dad’s apartment. Open those glass doors and breathe, listen to the city breathing. The whole world was up there. She loved it, or she wanted to love it, but her body seemed to rebel against it, breaking out in shivers and shakes every time she approached the edge.

  “I’m still afraid of heights,” Nancy confessed to Rachel. It needed facing, this fear of hers that was so natural for a human, so unnatural for the kind of spider she wished she were.

  “Needn’t be,” said Rachel. She laughed, and threw the shuttle that carried the weft thread through the shed of the loom. The shuttle sailed over Nancy’s head, letting out rose yarn behind it like exhaust smoke.

  “Well, I am,” Nancy said, her voice heavy. She watched the weaving from her favorite angle, lying on her back, nestled at her mother’s feet. She had her own yarn with her, and was knitting, the yarn unrolling from its ball inside her school backpack.

  “Your father likes to be above it all,” said Rachel. She stopped weaving and rolled her long brown hair into a knot, jabbed two pencils into it to hold it. It was a beautiful finish to what Shamiqua would call Mama’s “look” (if she had ever seen her)—long teal skirt with giant roses, a T-shirt with a Buddha on it, red socks. Kicked into a corner were her shiny green clogs; Mama wove in her stocking feet, the better to feel the treadles.

  “Very glamorous,” Nancy said. About her father she whined, “Why does he always have to be up so high?”

  Mama inhaled deeply. “Here’s what they used to tell me about being afraid of heights,” she said. Before she stopped trying to follow Ned to high places, she meant. Before she stopped leaving the house. “That what you’re afraid of is yourself. Not that you’ll fall, but that you’ll throw yourself off.”

  “That’s bizarre!” So bizarre it was almost true. When Nancy was someplace high, she had a sense of holding herself close, clenching her muscles to stay still. Why? Because the wind might blow her off? No. Because she could imagine herself jumping. Rising. Falling. Would I?

  “I’m going to the store,” she said, leaping up and making a fast exit. She careened down the courtyard steps, slammed through the apartment, and hit the sidewalk feeling all shaken up. She felt like Jell-O, not shaped yet. It was perfectly possible that she could slip off the top of something whether or not she intended to fall or jump. She wanted to solidify, to become, to choose her own shape or, at least, the bowl that shaped her.

  Nancy bought her mother’s springtime almond tea on Court Street at the Korean grocery, then on a whim ducked into the Everything store. Yes, they had the thing she needed. (They had Everything.) It was as if it were all planned; suddenly she was passionate about doing what she wanted right now. She took the tea back to Mama, dashed in and put it on the table, saying, “I’m going to Dad’s.”

  “Tonight?” It was not Dad’s night.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got to,” Nancy said in a forceful, no-explanation voice she’d never used before.

  “You haven’t got to,” Rachel retorted, fixing Nancy with her green Greene eyes.

  “Okay, I want to,” Nancy said in a lighter tone. “Okay?” This softening made it seem as if she were asking Rachel’s permission; it did the trick. Rachel nodded.

  Ten minutes later Nancy walked along Court Street to the subway with a cocoon of white cotton fishing net wrapped around her shoulders. And saw the Promenade boy for the second time ever.

  Blue eyes, dusty shoes. He was up high again, perched atop the geodesic dome in the playground in Carroll Park. She had to walk right by to get to the subway. He watched her with steady eyes.

  Now she saw his shirt, with a message she’d juggle in her head and on her tongue for the next few days: Alta, Utah. What did it mean? Nothing. Try saying it three times fast. It was as tricky a tongue twister as “Unique New York.” Just then neither of them said anything.

  Now she noticed his hat, a Mets hat, thank God, for who but Grandpa Joke could bear the Yankees? Skin brown, though not half black like hers. Eyes blue. Yes, that’s been noted. So blue, those eyes following her.

  “Staying safe?” she asked.

  He said, “No.”

  The hairs rose up on the back of her neck. He studied her.

  Nancy walked on. She carried the mass of white netting into the subway, and succeeded in not looking back. She rushed, because a train came into the station right as she was going down the steps. She leaped onto it, but there weren’t any seats because it was rush hour, so she had to stand. The train zipped out of the tunnel and up onto the bridge above the Gowanus Canal. The city blossomed behind it, and Nancy found herself looking down into Brooklyn. She felt divided in two between being reasonable and hoping for crazy changes, between wanting to see him again and thinking he was weird and scary. She still didn’t know his name.

  At Seventh Avenue she climbed out of the station into her dad’s new neighborhood, clutching the net around her shoulders like a silk shawl. A bouncing wave of energy hit her, and she ran all the way to the apartment, up all the stairs, and tossed the whole pile into Ned’s arms with a yell.

  It was a hammock. When Ned saw she’d really gone and bought it the way he said, he jumped in the air and clacked his cowboy heels together.

  Metal girders held up the roof of the little penthouse. Ned started rigging up cable and hooks around them to hold Nancy’s hammock.

  “Hoo-rah!” he said, making a little salute toward the first hook on the first pole. “Soon you’ll have a place to hang your—” He studied the second pole, eyeballing the distance from the first.

  “My hammock?”

  “No, your—” He got distracted, unfocused. He hooked the ring at the head of the hammock to the first pole and walked over to the second, a length of steel cable in one hand, a cotton cord in the other. “What’s your mother doing tonight?” he asked.

  “Why don’t you call her up and ask her?” she asked. What was the purpose of the two of them being married, anyway? she might have asked, but already knew what the answer would be: “You,” they’d say, both of them. She thought it was a cockeyed reason.

  She went outside and sat down in a little café chair Ned had put there. It was a corner building, taller than the rest of the block, so she could see down onto rooftops and gardens, from a higher vantage point. Also, being in Park Slope, it was on a hill, which made it higher than lots of areas of the city. The line of skyscrapers stood out in the distance, a miracle made by people who apparently weren’t worried by the sucking space between themselves and the ground.

  She caught herself thinking that maybe that boy was a roof dweller, too, then did her best to erase the thought. What remained, though, were warm rubber crumbs that would not disappear: he had good balance, and she couldn’t help wondering—hoping, really—th
at he had a secret hidden.

  7

  Dion did have a secret, several, in fact. The one that pressed hardest on his mind was the one he could do the least about. He and Mina had come home from school that day and found their apartment empty. Dion went to the roof to bring in the laundry left drying up there. But he was the third one on the roof. Mom had tried to fall over the edge, and Dad had made a massive leap across the roof to stop her. He had the scratches on his face to prove how she’d tried to fight him off.

  Dion’s oldest secret was that his mother, a counselor, needed help herself. It had started long before the day of jumping. Far from helping herself, it was as though she hated herself, hated her skin, anyway, enough to scratch at herself, make herself bleed. Dion’s father had promised, before, to get his mother help. After, Dion had bawled at his father, raged at him: “You said you were getting that doctor in!”

  His father still hadn’t kept his promise—not that one or the promise to stop writing so many Angel stories—and Dion couldn’t live in the same house with him. That meant not sleeping there. It meant getting by on his own. It meant eating less. It meant sleeping and washing, hanging his laundry on whatever quiet roof he could find. It meant cutting school. And he had shaved his hair; he would keep it shaved until things seemed different, better. What difference that made, he wasn’t sure, only that he felt different without his hair, less recognizable, more invisible. He sneaked home when Dad wasn’t there, to see Mina and check on Mom.

  Dion’s saddest secret was that his mother was worse now, not better.

  At least his father had jumped. For jumping, Dad could be relied on. Dion’s father was the best jumper around, the fastest, strongest jumper. You should see him on a basketball court. That was what Dion had thought about his father, back when he was proud. His father had a jump shot you wouldn’t believe. It was just about the only way he used to be able to get around his mother, who was a formidable guard, though tiny and stocky.

  Rose hadn’t been on the basketball court in a while. Neither had Dion. He’d practically grown up hanging off the fence around the cages to watch Niko and Rose play one-on-one, or pickup games, when they weren’t teaching him. Well, basketball was done now.

  Another secret was that Niko and Rose didn’t worry much about Dion, and Dion knew it. He guessed his mother was just too wound up in her own problems. Niko thought—or let himself think—that his son was close to home, maybe staying with a friend, and what with the needs of his wife and daughter, he couldn’t do much more. “Let the little idiot take care of himself, if he wants to make so much trouble,” Dion had heard his father say through the fire escape window. “There’s a limit to what any human being can do. He’s sixteen. If he wants to drop out of school, it’s legal.”

  Niko’s lifeblood was stories. He wrote under pen names: Nestor Paprika (for the News), Nobody in Particular (for the Post), and his favorite, Nick Pappas (for the Times). He went over the police blotters for signs of the Angel’s involvement. He was good at filling the gaps to make the stories hang together. After all, there had always been stories about people on the roofs of New York, from the time when the roofs had first grown tall enough to look down from—from the spectators of the blimp races, to the people with tuberculosis who slept by the thousands under the stars, to the tar beaches on top of tenements. People flew, or rose, or fell. Girls and gorillas. Angelic and bad. Visible and invisible. The stories had kept on coming, growing taller and taller with the buildings. No one had come along so far to challenge what Niko said the Angel did. Why should they? New Yorkers liked a yarn, and Niko never made anything up. The interpretation alone was his; he said it was what made him an artist. Where real and fake divided, Niko was no longer sure.

  Now Niko was searching for something more scarce than the Angel, more elusive than his son, more urgent than anything he’d sought before: a cure for Rose. He had bent his ear to an urban legend, a groundless rumor, an old wives’ tale for his young wife. A family crisis, he told his bosses. They didn’t want to hear about it; they wanted Angel stories.

  But Niko put his considerable energy into tracing a surgeon who healed wounds faster than average. The surgeon had frequently switched from hospital to hospital around the city and was now practically retired from a very private practice—Green Medicine—which most people (correctly) assumed was holistic in nature. Niko hadn’t written any stories about this person, whom he called the Wound Healer. He didn’t want anyone making a connection between the Wound Healer and the Angel. While he looked for the Wound Healer, he kept on writing about the Angel.

  Though Dion was grateful to his father for catching his mother, he couldn’t go home. He couldn’t face seeing his mother; he knew he’d have to ask her why. He got up onto high things to ask himself instead. It was just as well to live on the rooftops, to master climbing up and down and getting around, because he knew he wouldn’t fall off anything he attempted to balance upon. He alone knew—until that girl on the Promenade held his foot and looked up at him with those clear green eyes.

  Now he searched for her, too. The geodesic dome dug into his behind, got him moving. He jumped off and walked in the direction his feet led him. He wanted to—he would—be where she was from now on. Which way had she gone? Toward Manhattan? Or toward Coney Island? Uncertain why, he headed toward the water of the Gowanus Canal, crossed it, and once on the other side, scoped out a roof where he could spend the night.

  8

  The Greenes and Karas did things with their hands. Ned roofed, Rachel wove, Grandpa Joke was a doctor. Granny Tina was a potter and a knitter. Nancy had done nothing but draw, until Granny Tina started making her knit over Christmas vacation this winter.

  Age was changing things for Granny. She had developed awful arthritis, a terrible condition for someone who lived through her hands. Granny used to have long, straight hair like Rachel’s, although hers was silver and white. She could have gotten Rachel to braid it, but instead she cut it short, and got Grandpa Joke to keep it in trim. Nancy thought she looked punk. Like Grandpa Joke, she had brown eyes, but his were slow and warm (and sometimes hot when his anger sparked up). Granny’s were bright and quick, making a liar of her slowing, hunching body.

  Granny used to dart around, up and down the stairs between the apartments, helping Rachel with the loom, throwing pots on her wheel in the garden shed, always simmering tasty recipes on the stove for dinner. Grandpa Joke took Nancy to the playground, but Granny taught her to climb the ladders of the big tall slides. Grandpa Joke walked Nancy back and forth to school, and Granny made sure he took her into stores and introduced her to people.

  Now it was Nancy who darted around the house, Nancy who helped Mama with her loom, Nancy who went to the grocery store with Grandpa Joke and lugged home all the stuff. It was not a pretty sight, Granny Tina stuck inside her body, inside her house, not knowing until she woke in the morning whether it would be a wheelchair day or a walking day. Unlike Rachel, she had not chosen her prison.

  As arthritis had taken the knitting out of her hands, Granny had done her best to put it into Nancy’s, pressing her to knit samples and mittens and boring long scarves until she could do it without thinking. Granny Tina didn’t always approve of the results. For example, the black sweater Nancy was wearing had made Granny almost frantic. She hated the color with every shred of her being, and had told Nancy so the moment she came home with the yarn.

  “We should never have sent you alone!”

  “I wanted to go alone.”

  “And look what it’s come to: black.”

  “What’s wrong with black, Tina?” Ned had asked, sticking up for Nancy.

  “It’ll hide the mistakes,” Nancy said.

  Rachel began shaking her head.

  “Mistakes!” sputtered Granny. “There aren’t going to be any mistakes. I’m not teaching you how to make mistakes.”

  “Well, you’ll have to teach her how to take them out, Mother.”

  “If that isn’t a
Rachelish thing to say! If you pay attention to what you’re doing, you won’t make mistakes.”

  “If that isn’t a Tinaish thing to say,” Rachel replied. “Nobody’s perfect.”

  “No, but their weaving should be,” barked Granny. It was unusually harsh for her.

  “You mean knitting,” corrected Grandpa Joke, making his first contribution to the conversation.

  “Of course, knitting!” said Granny. “What did you think I was talking about?”

  Nancy didn’t want to learn how to undo mistakes. She would have thrown the whole thing aside. And she knew what else would go on while the knitting lesson did: more tiresome stories about Granny’s childhood on that West Virginia farm. What was the point of hearing the same tired yarns over and over?

  “You haven’t got the point, if you don’t know yet,” said Granny, as if she’d heard Nancy’s thoughts.

  Nancy, turning her key to unlock Mama’s gate, noticed a stray thread on the cuff of her sweater. When she tugged at it, a hole appeared. Drat. She looked up at Granny’s windows, almost expecting to see Granny there.

  The phone rang. Rachel picked it up. “Mother!” she said. It was Granny, calling from her apartment upstairs. “No, nobody called here for Pop.” She looked at Nancy, and Nancy shook her head, confirming it. Dad had called, to give them the number for his new phone in the penthouse, but no one had called for Grandpa Giacomo—Grandpa Joke.

  “Who do you think it was?” Rachel said into the phone, sounding anxious. “If he’s gotten himself tangled up with some…”

  Knowing Grandpa Joke, Nancy thought, chances were good that he had. She pointed her knitting needles into her work, jammed it into her backpack, and crawled out from under her mother’s loom. Granny’s voice crackled on the other end of the phone.

  “All right.” Rachel glanced at Nancy, and hung up the phone.

  “What?” asked Nancy flatly. As if she didn’t know.