Cobwebs (11 page)

Soon enough she climbed the hill up from the canal and was among houses again. She found herself walking under trees with the lower ten feet of their trunks covered in ivy; they made her think of poodles’ legs (really large poodles) or satyrs, those half men-half goats from the Greek myths she’d read in freshman English. She laced her fingers in the ivy as she passed, skimming the papery, cool leaves with her fingertips and thinking she’d like to crawl inside them.

Nancy didn’t blame Ned for keeping to the roofs. He
beat her easily to Rachel’s. What did he need to go so fast for anyway?

She let herself quietly into the basement apartment. Mama was still sleeping and Dad wasn’t there. She had had a quiet hope that sleeping with Mama was his reason for leaving Nancy in the penthouse so early in the morning. She stepped back out again. She could smell Dad’s almondy smell in the old, gold-wallpapered hallway.

She climbed the stairs to Granny and Grandpa’s apartment but stopped short of knocking. Nancy knew where to find her grandfather, this early on a Sunday morning. Some people were already in the community garden working, laying out sticks and strings for seed rows, weeding out what was already growing. Sure enough, Grandpa Joke was in his little plot, putting metal rings around the tomato plants to support them as they grew.

“What’s going on, Grandpa?” she asked, hands on her hips.

“Child! What are you doing here so early in the morning?” He looked at his wristwatch, hung over a fence post.

Nancy snagged the watch on her finger. “You’re going to lose this,” she said. “Where’s Dad?”

“Who? Here, Nancy, steady this plant for me.” His large hands moved the dirt around like shovels. The tomato leaves were soft fronds of the warmest green color. They practically had bubbles of life coming off them, they were so healthy. Nancy squatted down in the dirt and lifted the leaves of a tomato plant, felt the gentle bristles of its thick stem.

“Another early riser!” Ned was at the fence, his dark eyes glinting at her in a mood she couldn’t identify, an old wooden ladder in one hand and a saw in the other. The ladder was one that had been stored in Rachel’s garden shed for years.

“What are you doing with that?” Nancy asked. “What is this, gardening day? Is Mama out gardening, too?”

Ned put up his hand like a shield, as though she were blowing wind on him.

“Mama’s still asleep,” he said. “What are you doing here at the crack of dawn tying tomatoes?”

“Getting a lesson, what else?” said Grandpa.

“In what, gardening?”

“Or how to get here safely at the crack of dawn?” Grandpa’s voice sounded accusing.

“Looks like she got that figured out,” Ned said.

“Not exactly,” Nancy said, glaring.

“I’m going to saw this in half, Joke. That’s what you want, isn’t it?” Ned asked. “Nancy, come lend a hand.” Nancy grabbed the ladder. Ned started to saw it in half. The ladder shook so that Nancy had to put all her weight on it to keep it from shuddering out from under Ned’s saw. He paused, bent close to her ear. “Don’t look now. There’s a boy on the corner acting like he’s got business being here staring at you. Here, don’t look! Hold the ladder!”

Grandpa leaned over the fence. “We’re going to stand this up at each end of the garden, Nancy,” he said. “Then we’re going to string from one ladder to the next, make a support for our peas and beans.”

Nancy kept her eyes on the ladder. The saw bit into the worn old wood, Ned’s dreadlocks hung down, sawdust drifted onto the sidewalk.

“Can you think what it’s going to look like, Nancy?”

“Nope.”
What do I care, Dad?

“Wait and see!” Why was he trying to distract her?
Half the ladder dropped out of her hand and clattered to the sidewalk. She shot a look at the corner. Dion!

Ned heard her intake of breath. “It’s not the first time, is it?” he asked, low.

She shook her head, glanced at Grandpa Joke, who was merrily planting his half of the ladder in the dirt, oblivious. With a spool of brown string, he connected the halves of the ladder. The string slumped between them. He tied another string to the fence, to the ladder top, let it drop with the other string, then brought it up to the other ladder and across to the other fence.

“Is it the bridge?” Nancy asked.

“What bridge?” Ned demanded.

“Our bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.”

“The spiderweb bridge,” said Ned.

“Listen to this!” Grandpa Joke put a finger in the air, made a little speech with the ball of string in his other hand, in a position like the Statue of Liberty. Nancy prayed Dion was too far away to hear. “A quote. From a scientist. ‘It is a rare person—’”

“What is, a spider?” Ned asked.

Nancy thought:
I have no spiderness. I am not a rare person.
She glanced toward the corner. In this golden
light, Dion’s clothes looked gray, almost pale brown. He was wearing his old Mets cap, sloppy on his head, and paced on the corner as though he were waiting for a bus. He moved like a marionette, his joints too loose, bouncing up off the balls of his feet as if gravity affected him only minimally.

“No. A person. Listen: ‘It is a rare person who does not feel at least a bit uncomfortable in the presence of a large, dark, hairy spider darting across the floor.’” Nancy bent over, giggling, a bundle of jangling nerves. She felt as though she were connected by invisible wires to each of the people around her—her dad, her grandfather, Mama and Granny in the house, and Dion on the corner—and as though each of those wires were vibrating with some different and separate anticipation or warning. A change was coming, advancing toward her.

When Nancy looked up again at last, Dion wasn’t there.

“No more fly on the wall,” Ned said.

Grandpa Joke asked, “What fly?”

Ned answered, “Never mind.”

Grandpa said, “Ask your granny about flies on the wall.”

“Huh?”

“Ask.”

“Dad,” Nancy said, “what would you do if you wanted to know all about someone?”

The question flustered Ned. “Well, what would
you
do, Nancy?”

“Follow him,” she said fiercely, yanking a knot.

“Follow whom?” asked Grandpa Joke.

“Me,” said Ned, his hand on Grandpa Joke’s shoulder. Nancy didn’t bother correcting him.
Let them think what they want.
Besides, it was true that morning.

But this answer made Grandpa Joke afraid. “Oh, Nancy,” he said, leaning heavily on the bridge, which, surprisingly, took his weight. “Go slow.”

D
ion, it seemed, was everywhere now. Not just on top of the geodesic dome, but drawn down off it. By her? Not just outside the subway station, but inside on the platform. Far away at first, then nearer, then in the same subway car, then getting off at the same place Nancy did for school. Not just on the street corner, but following her down the street, loping along as if he were stepping on springs.

It felt a little scary. It felt a little pleasant.

Nancy would have walked the whole way to school if it hadn’t been raining that Monday morning, and he might not have found her at all.

She noticed him as she stopped to put up her umbrella, then he disappeared among all of the umbrellas bobbing along the sidewalk of Atlantic Avenue. Nancy glanced back once, and saw his face getting wet under the too-narrow brim of his hat. Of course he didn’t have an umbrella.

Last night, over a dessert of Ned’s coconut pie, Grandpa Joke had said, “Tina? Tell Nancy about the fly on the wall.”

“Fly on the wall? What fly?”

“You know.” He smiled at her, encouraging.

“Ask me again later,” Granny said, “When I’m not feeling so doo-lally.”

“The poor little fly on the wall?” Rachel suggested, wanting to help her old mother.

Then Granny Tina said in her slow-motion way,

Nancy thought it was cute, but now, walking along with Dion getting wet behind her, she felt differently.
Poor Dion, in his blue-gray clothes, making me nervous back there. What does he want?
Calmly she folded her umbrella and dived ahead, ducking under and around people.

She skidded around the corner of Hicks Street to Joralemon, darted into the little grocery, stood there breathing deeply, looking into the drink case, and chose V8 juice, lured by its warm redness on this gray day. She stopped under the awning outside to poke a straw into the bottle, and Dion appeared beside her, pulling a big bottle of Welch’s out of the crook of his arm. No bag. Had he stolen the juice, straw and all? Horrible thought:
Does he have any money? What’s he living on? Rainwater?

“Going to school?” he asked, blue eyes staring.

She sipped her V8, narrowed her eyes at him. Other kids were walking along toward the old brick building around the corner. She turned a shoulder to shut out her view of Shamiqua passing. She didn’t answer Dion.
See what he does,
she told her chilly-calm self.
And stop thinking his name!

He walked along beside her.
It’s my hair,
she thought,
in its usual rat’s-nest condition, that’s got his attention.
But then Dion plucked the end of a strand of wool from the flap of Nancy’s backpack and pulled it, so it looked like she was working a spinneret.

“Watch it, Dennis!” She stopped walking. “You’ll unravel my work.”

“It’s not Dennis,” he said. “It’s Dion.” He stared at the wool as if trying to identify the animal it came from.

“Oh yeah, right,” she said carelessly, pretending.

“Dionysus,” he said. “I’m Greek. And Navajo.”

She thought,
I
could love him.
She felt raw around the edges, unfinished and uneven. She liked the feeling. “Are you homeless?” she heard herself ask him.

“What if I was?” He straightened. His voice held warning, and patience.

“Then—”

Then, a shelter? Or city services? At school, the guidance office? Or, if he was hungry, should she bring him food? Maybe he
was
safer not going home. Who knew what his home was like? Who was she to say, home good, dome bad?

“It’s just a word,” she said.

Shamiqua tore past, going into the store with a homeroom buddy, making big eyes at Nancy. Nancy turned aside, blocking out the view of Shamiqua, who raised her pointed nose and went on.

Nancy blew out her breath at Dion. “Why are you always hanging around me so weird anyway?” She grabbed for the yarn, trying to get it away from him without pulling it. She pictured stitches sliding away from her wooden needles, the pretty ones Granny Tina had given her just last night, with strawberries painted on the knobs. She should have packed it more carefully. Now she’d have to fix it in homeroom, and the nosy girls would want to know what she was doing, or worse, they’d just stare. Nobody else knitted in high school. Worse, they’d want to know who that boy was who Shamiqua saw her with. Nobody.
Nobody!
She’d say.

Dion took Nancy’s free hand and wound the yarn onto her pointer finger.
This looks idiotic,
Nancy thought,
a string coming out of my backpack and ending in a spiral around my finger.
Her school was around the corner. People walking by were mostly going there. It didn’t take Dion two seconds to put the string on her
finger, but it felt like a space opened around them. She felt the eyes looking.
“Who was that boy, Nancy?”

When Dion saw her watching the faces, he made a little snorting sound. He said, “I don’t go.”

I don’t go. Where?
He turned the corner quickly and was gone, as she stood there calculating how long it was before school started and how many people had seen her.

She ran after him.
How could I act like my sweater was more important?
He was gone.

Dion didn’t want anybody feeling sorry for him. He had a deep fear of feelings in these times. When a feeling got too close, too personal, he jumped. Off the dome? Off the rail? Off the deep end?

No, just away. Of all the people in New York that his father could have trailed, why had he chosen Nancy’s grandfather? Dion knew why. What mattered to Niko was strength. It was what he had that his parents hadn’t had—beaten-down immigrants who couldn’t adjust to the need to blend in. Like many a social climber, he had married Rose Browning as much for her bloodlines as her beautiful Navajo eyes.

Now Niko wanted help for his Rose, and he didn’t care what he had to do to get it. Help was help, and if Nancy’s family had a way of helping—or two ways, or three—then Niko wasn’t going to wait for them to reach a hand out. Time was much too pressing, and, like most reporters, Niko worked best under pressure.

That didn’t mean it was best for Nancy.

Ned had been unpacking again. He concerned Nancy sometimes, the way he kept things, such as all of the newspapers and
The New Yorker
cover from when the World Trade towers came down, the towers in blackest black over a black-gray sky. Nancy touched the papers to see if they were those old ones. No. This one was much more recent. DOES BROOKLYN HAVE AN ANGEL?

She skimmed the article, the usual story about someone doing bad deeds who got clonked on the head by a something falling from above—in this case, a screwdriver. Right here on the bed Dad had plenty of articles about the Angel, a dozen of them, all covering events that happened last year, mainly in Brooklyn, but some also in Manhattan.

The stories were all by different reporters, all with the initials N.P.: Nick Pappas, Nestor Paprika, even a byline that had to be a pen name, Nobody in Particular. That was the
Post,
so goofy.

The hammock was still strung with yarn, the balls of wool motionless on the floor underneath. Nancy experimented with Ned’s rigging, hoisted the hammock up as high as she could get it, and discovered how it felt to climb up there and slip into the sling.