Cobwebs (10 page)

“You okay?” Nancy brought the wheelchair close to the bed.

Granny Tina made the big effort to stand up and get in the chair. “Another day,” she said.

Nancy’s heart ached. “Plenty more,” she said.

“I don’t know how many more there are going to be, Nancy love,” Granny said slowly.

Nancy felt hurried. “Granny? What would you do if you wanted to know all about someone?”

“You don’t need to know all about someone,” Granny Tina said. The words sounded slurred and angry.

“But I do,” Nancy protested.
There’s this boy with no eyebrows from Alta, Utah …
She pushed the wheelchair, but Granny already had it moving herself, and fought her. The door wasn’t open far enough to let the wheelchair through, so Nancy reached to open it, but Granny had already rolled up to it. Was there going to be a tug-of-war?

Then Granny backed up, Nancy opened the door, and Granny reached for her hands. Her brown-black eyes seemed flat, not sparkling like Coca-Cola the way they usually did. “If you want to know all about someone,
learn what he
does.”
Then she said to herself, “Not ‘do.’
Does.”
She fluttered her fingers toward her head a little.

Rachel came into the kitchen to start the coffee. Granny looked up at her and said, “I’m going a little crazy, Rachel.”

Rachel smiled nervously, but said, buttery-smooth, “That makes two of us, Mother. How about you, Nancy?”

“Yeah, me three.”

Grandpa Joke listened to Granny closely, and watched her face and Mama’s. Rachel’s eyes were tired, too. Sometimes after warping, she wove all night. The air felt zingy with tension. Nancy was grateful that no one asked where she’d been or what she’d been up to or whether there was anything new with her.

Later she holed up with Mama in the greenhouse, her Docs tossed in the corner with Mama’s green clogs, doing her homework under the loom, knowing Rachel was too busy (too obsessed) to talk, knowing that she liked Nancy being there. “Mama,” she asked, “what would you do if you wanted to know all about someone?”

Rachel ran her hand across her loom. “Find out what he loves,” she said.

“Enough to fight for,” said Grandpa’s voice from the greenhouse doorway. The afternoon had warmed up enough that Rachel had the doors open, so they hadn’t heard him coming on one of his rare trips out there. “Nancy, who are you trying to find out about?”

Oh, there’s a direct question from someone who won’t answer any.
Nancy shook her head, wouldn’t answer.

“Pop, is something wrong?” Rachel asked.

“Your mother,” he said in a voice grown old. “Rachel, do you think you could give her a back rub?”

In an instant the slow-moving Mamba was moving quickly out the door and up the stairs.

“It’s not an emergency, Nancy,” Grandpa said, seeing her face. “She just needs Rachel’s hands, that’s all.”

“Why, what’s she got that you haven’t got?”

Nancy might as well have slapped him, he looked so hurt. She could see that whatever was wrong with Granny, he felt responsible. Maybe a doctor always did, when someone hurt.

“She’s a daughter,” he said. “It’s that blood connection.”

“What about a granddaughter?”

“That’s good, too,” he said, and smiled.

“It might be.” Nancy pushed the words out, though her throat felt glued together. Grandpa looked away from her, ran a stubby finger over the weaving on the loom.

“Grandpa, what—”
Careful, now.
“What’s the matter with Granny?”

“You know, Nancy,” he said wearily. “Arthritis. And that stroke last summer didn’t do any good.” It had been the beginning of Rachel’s fight against the house calls.

“Why do the house visits take so much out of her?”
Careful.

He studied the pattern in the weaving. “Moving around. Seeing new patients.”

“What does
that
take out of her?”
Something I have? Something I could give her? Say yes!

He leaned against the doorjamb, eyes closed, sunning, silent. Was this saying no? “Energy,” he said. His eyes were still shut.

Nancy turned.
Energy I’ve got. I do! If it’s just a matter of that
—But she knew there was something missing. She sat down on Mama’s loom bench and studied
the pattern to figure out what came next. She took off her shoes and pressed her feet down on the treadles to make the right frames rise for the next thread. She picked up the submarine-shaped shuttle full of weft yarn and shot it through the shed.

Wump.
It did not sail through smoothly, as it did when Mama wove, but hung up in a stray thread from a treadle not pushed down firmly enough.
Rats.
Nancy pulled the shuttle out and disentangled the thread.

“Learning to fix your mistakes?” Grandpa asked, peeking through one eye.

“Maybe,” Nancy said. It took effort not to throw the shuttle across the room, let it take the whole pattern with it. She laid the shuttle back on the beater bar. “Grandpa. What do you love enough to fight for?”

“This family,” he said abruptly. “What about you?”

“Granny,” Nancy said.

He opened his arms to her.

Rachel came down looking twice as worried as she had when she went up. Nancy was alone, on her back under the loom, thinking crabby, questioning thoughts, her feet resting backward on the treadles.

“Nancy Ariadne,” her mother said. “Green toenail polish?”

“It matches my eyes,” Nancy said. She fluttered her fingers at Mama; the polish on them shone silver. “What’s up with Granny?”

“She’s tired,” Rachel said. “It matches my eyes, too. You’d better get me some.”

“Tired from
what?”

“Tired from life! Would you mind moving your feet?”

“Not tired to death?”

“Nancy,” Rachel said in a warning voice.

Nancy lay there trying to whistle like Annette’s mother.

“Could you stop that?” Rachel was barely patient.

“I want to shave my legs,” said Nancy.

“Why?”

“The other girls at my school—”

“Followers,” Rachel said. “Be a leader, Nancy.”

“Right,” Nancy said. “I’ll lead a new fad of hairy legs.”

Her Greene Mamba had the good grace to smile. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “Just keep the hair on your legs.”

“Can’t you explain? It’s
not
politics, is it? It’s spiderness.”

“Yes.”

“Something else that’s either going to show up or not?”

Her mother was silent for a long moment. “If you’re eighteen and you don’t need it, you can shave it off.”

“Because I won’t be a minor anymore?”

“No. Because it’ll be too late by then.”

“Too late for what?”

“Ack!
It’s better if you find out yourself.”

“Find out what? Nobody’s telling me anything.” She pulled herself up from the floor. “Look, Mama, I’m no roof dweller, but I can climb. I’ve been learning. I’m getting better. And I’m not even as scared.”
So she was lying. Wasn’t courage more courageous when you were scared?
“I’m no ground dweller, but I’m getting better at knitting. My new sweater is beautiful.” She was shivering, wanting so badly to be clear, to be understood. “Here’s what I want to know: One, what good is my leg hair? Two, what does Grandpa Joke need so much money for? And three, why does Granny look near death just because she went along with him on a doctor’s house call?”

Rachel steadied herself, both hands on the strong wood of the beater. “Nancela,” she said. “You went up to the door last night, and you weren’t supposed to. What happened?”

Nancy swallowed. “There was a man—the man on the phone, I think. And a girl with wings.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard right.” She held her mother’s eyes with her own. “What else do you want to know?” Would Mama bargain? “Mama?”

“Don’t shave,” Rachel said. “That’s all the information I’m giving you. It’s better that way, and you’ve got to trust me.”

“Because what I don’t know can’t hurt me?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m going to Dad’s tonight.”

“Good,” Rachel said. “He said that he wanted you tonight. But he’s not going to tell you, either.”

For a moment Nancy stayed there, studying her mother’s green eyes. “Give, Mama,” she said.

Rachel seemed to grow even more still and quiet than usual. “It’s either there or it isn’t, my darling. I can’t just ‘give’ it, and you can’t just take it.”

“Give
what?
Take
what?”

Nancy felt abandoned. She bolted upstairs, stood breathing on the landing until she was calm enough to enter Granny’s kitchen. At the window upstairs she filled the birdfeeder and watched Rachel sitting at her loom, rubbing her forehead. Granny, in her wheelchair at the table, struggled to paint a pot, which was an interesting course of action, considering the sort of day she’d been having, or a testimony to Rachel’s daughterly powers. She watched Nancy watching. “The trouble with you is, you don’t know your own strengths.”

Nancy turned from the window. “What strengths?” She felt that everyone was disappointed in her. And they wouldn’t even tell her what was missing, so it wouldn’t hurt her! Well, it
was
hurting her.

“Strengths. But you’d better start finding out. Time is getting short.” Nancy banged the window shut, making the birds fly away.

“Everyone around here talks in riddles,” she said.

“That’s
your
problem,” said Granny.

N
ancy woke in her hammock at Ned’s, and saw, on the window before her nose, a spider. She closed her eyes to shut it out, and opened them a few minutes later. It was gone.

What had awakened her was a door closing. Was Dad here? There was a note tucked into the webbing of the hammock beside her head:
GONE TO MAMA’S.

Mama’s? Without her? Had she seemed so sound asleep that he hadn’t wanted to wake her? In that instant she spotted her father, crossing the rooftops. He was already a few buildings away and heading off
at a steady trot, running the roofs as if they were an obstacle course, dodging chimneys and water tanks, antennas, and skylights.

She thought back on all the times Ned had come home over the rooftops. It had never occurred to her to go with him before. When he was with her, he traveled on the ground. Now she leaped out of the hammock, hitting the floor with a bang. She felt freaky, as Annette would say.
Breathe deep, Nancy,
she told herself.
Go after him!
Nancy knotted the laces of her shoes together and slung them around her neck as she crossed Ned’s rooftop.

And then she was doing it. There was only one way to get from Ned’s roof to the next:
Jump.
There was no gap to fall into, just the different roof levels to account for, and the walls to cross.
Jump.
So what if she’d never done such a thing before. So what if going
down
the walls scared the snot out of her. If only she had silk.

She didn’t. She tried to put thoughts out of her head and just blast along.

I can do this. (Maybe.)

Climb the wall. (Just like the other time.)

Don’t think twice. (Yeah, right.)

Leap for it. (Only as far as absolutely necessary.)

Land on all fours on the next roof. (Ow. No, actually it didn’t hurt. Why doesn’t it hurt?)

Jump up and run.

She kept Ned in sight, his tails of hair bobbing and springing. It wasn’t that light out yet, but a gold edge to the sky showed her the way. How had it gotten to be morning so fast? She hated to lose him, but couldn’t thud too heavily with her feet, tried to sound like nothing more than a squirrel or a pigeon on the roof. This would have been harder with her Docs on. Her feet were already sore and scraped.

Over the rim of a roof came the sun, shining on brave Nancy, leaping roof to roof.
It’s easy, really, not the biggest jump I’ll ever have to make, just across, not down. If it’s so easy, why can’t I catch him?

Yes, Ned was faster, so much faster, inhumanly fast and as practiced at it as Anansi the shape-shifting spider himself. Through a network of rooftops, he led her, and the gap continually grew between them until he was nothing but a black dot with legs, scampering in and out of view. She leaped up onto a wall to glimpse him again and reeled backward, sick and spinning. There was no other roof to leap to, only the street far
below and, across it, a tall white church, then the high train trestle that took the trains across Fourth Avenue and the bridge over the Gowanus Canal.

No time to sit gagging, her head whirling.
Stand up and find him.
But he was gone, her Arach-Ned. And she was there alone on the top of some strange yellow-colored building, with a lady coming out the door with her washing and looking aghast to see her there.

The lady probably believed she was about to be attacked. Behind her, Nancy saw Ned reappear atop the train trestle, across the gap, a small dark model of himself. How? How how how
how?

“You get the hell off this roof!” the lady yelled.

Nancy skimmed over the wall to the fire escape.
Oh, horror!

“Stupid kids! I’m going to call the cops if I catch you up here again!”

Don’t think about it. Keep moving.
She was going down down down now, and she couldn’t help the way her feet felt stuck in tar, not fast enough, like in a dream.

Inch by inch, sweating, stuck, she forced herself. At last she dangled from her fingertips and dropped,
landing hard, not light and airy like her dad. Nancy cleaned her palms on her hips and examined them closely. Nothing there but dirt. She still wasn’t a drop-and-dragger and perhaps never would be. If Ned had taken her with him, she would only have dragged him down.

It was even slower going, down in the street. Nancy didn’t much like the area around the canal. It wasn’t so nice, although people said it was “up and coming.” It was grayer, with not as many trees as other parts of Brooklyn, and it smelled of garbage and dirty water. Nancy was scared. She tried not to run, tried not to call attention to herself, to blend in. So much for the garish, bright spider.