Cobwebs (16 page)

“How would I know? It’s not something you advertise.”

She said, “You know I said I knew when you were home? I can tell when you’re coming, too.” And Dion. She didn’t tell him it happened with Dion, too.

“On the roofs? In the subway?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t come in the subway that often.”

“Well, you know. When it’s not rush hour.” They
smiled at each other. “Squish hour.” It was such an oddly vague feeling that she wondered if she was exaggerating. And yet she wasn’t lying; she
could
tell.

“How?” He hadn’t asked, before.

“I’m not sure. I think it’s my feet or my ankles or knees.”

“You’re picking up vibrations from the trains,” said Dad.

“And yours,” she said.

“Even my tiny little spider vibrations?” He watched her eyes intently, wanting to know what she knew.

“Maybe,” she said. “I hope so.” She thought she understood why they hadn’t told her before: maybe suggesting it would have changed the way she felt it. She wasn’t sure whether she was just making an educated guess. But she wanted him to think she showed some promise.

“Well, that’s encouraging.” He said it so lightly.

“What use is it anyway?” she asked. “What good does it do? It’s not like I’m about to turn into a spider and run around being practically invisible. What good is knowing someone’s coming?”

Ned pulled her up by one hand. “Think about it,” he said.

They headed home in the regular way, walking on their own two feet, or four feet, or however many feet they had between them, Nancy and her spider Dad.

A
ngels have wings
, Nancy said to herself, thinking back on what Ned had told her. That didn’t mean he wasn’t the Angel. It didn’t mean Dion wasn’t, either.

Nancy lay in her bed at Mama’s, snuggled down like a bug in a rug, keeping her thoughts to herself. They were keeping her awake.

Why did the newspapers want more Angel stories? What did it mean to the newspaper people—the
Times,
the
Post,
all of them—that some winged spirit was in New York with nothing better to do than help people?

This much was clear: Dion’s father was hot on the
trail of the Angel of Brooklyn. And Dion was trying to make Nancy think that Ned was the Angel. How long would it be before he clued his father in?

It was like falling off solid ground into a dark hole and whirling downward, to think that all her life—and long before—her same old father might have been doing this amazing thing. Because, she thought, if anyone was the Angel,
he
was.

Nancy tossed the covers off and kicked them.

Dion didn’t need to know that in the last year she’d been with her father when he had replaced two “missing” screwdrivers and a hammer, tools that the Angel had been reported to drop from a rooftop heaven to break up the hell taking place below. Doubtless there were more.

Ned was a roofer, and that was all the excuse he needed to buy new tools, all the excuse he needed to be on the roof, and even to commute to and fro on the rooftops. But as far as Dion’s hypothesis about Ned being in the right place at the right time to stop crimes, well … Nancy was about to toss a variable into the experiment.

The variable was herself. She wondered how far she
could go with this new experiment, how much she could do, really, without Ned’s disappearing powers, without her mother’s weaving genius, without Granny Tina’s gift for making things strong.

Ned had taught her climbing, after all, and he was the best climber. Rachel had taught her weaving, and wasn’t she the best weaver? And Granny Tina had taught her—well, nothing about making any
thing
strong, but about making herself strong on the streets. She would keep her distance from Granny for now, and rely on the extra energy she’d already gotten from the stories. And on her vibrations.

The next morning Nancy got her experiment going. She began by being invisible. Visible people looked threatening, or vulnerable. You noticed them in your gut, because they worried you, one way or the other. Invisible people looked like they knew where they were, where they were going.
They
weren’t scared or worried. They had their “street face” on.

Each morning Nancy filled her backpack to the brim, not just with schoolbooks and her knitting, but also some laundry, shirts she needed to wash, or
sometimes already had washed. Sometimes they were even wet, which was more authentic, though heavier.

When she left for school she took a route that went across rooftops, acting as though she belonged there, playing the part of the guest of someone in the building, who didn’t know her way around. If she saw anybody she marched right up to them and asked to borrow some clothespins. She picked different fire escapes each day by which to ascend to the roof or descend to the street, and the two times she was surprised by some nosy tenant, she said the same thing she and Ned had said the time they’d gotten caught on their own fire escape: “Oh, sorry, I’m your new neighbor, and my parents insist I learn to use the fire escape.” The second time she’d really laid it on thick, saying, “They don’t
have
fire escapes back home in Connecticut,” rolling her eyes at the absurdity of New York.

Nancy also took care to blend in style-wise. She moussed her hair down so it didn’t stick out as though electrified the way it usually did. She wore her black sweater if it was cool, and if it was warm she kept her uniform blouse tucked carefully into her skirt. She
wore her Doc Martens; everybody wore those, so they didn’t stand out. The only painful thing was leaving her “fun” tights at home, and wearing plain black ones. What with the attention her tights had been getting, it was probably just as well.

The result: nobody thought anything of her. Polite girl, kind of cute. Must be a weird family. Nothing remarkable. She walked around acting the way Granny Tina had taught her to act, no matter what New York neighborhood she was in, never lingering on the edges, but walking straight up the middle. “Walk like you know where you’re going,” Granny had said when Nancy started going out on her own at age eleven. “Someone who wants to bother you will have to break up your flow.”

So Nancy flowed. She flowed across lonely roofs, leaped across alleys, went around the back ways of buildings. She got so she could do it without making much sound. She got so she could tell that someone she’d just walked by had already forgotten they’d seen her. She got so she knew that someone walking below in the alley did not know that she was above on the roof. And she got good at hitting marks on the ground
with stones or roof tiles or clothespins, even once a bent knitting needle—although she decided that, as weapons went, knitting needles were expensive and too likely to mark her as a suspect.

T
he next week there were three newspaper articles about the so-called Angel of Brooklyn. A dealer menacing a kid on Nelson Street in Red Hook had been nailed in the eye by a pebble from a peashooter and had to have emergency surgery before he could appear in court. There had been an attempted knifing on John Street in DUMBO, that had been foiled by an unidentified yell from above. And a mugging in a Brooklyn Heights alley had been interrupted by a flying clothespin.

Nancy considered the details in the two cases she hadn’t been involved in: Were they accidental interventions?
Intentional ones? Twice, in the night, she woke abruptly, thinking she still heard the rough, mean voice; the scared, protesting voice; the pushing and scuffling in that alley; the garbage bag bursting against the Dumpster, the clatter of scattering keys and credit cards.

She wondered if her father had seen the article. She clipped it herself, and saved it, just in case. She hid it in the back of her little red dresser at Mama’s house, knowing Rachel would never guess what it meant that she treasured such a clipping.

And then Ned came while she was doing homework in Mama’s kitchen and placed all three clippings before her on the table. “Thought you’d be interested,” he said. “I’ve noticed you reading these lately.”

Nancy stared down at her own personal clipping, the words of which she knew by heart—as well as the byline, Nobody in Particular (it was a
Post
article)—and beyond it her history notebook. In the margin was an insult from the hand of Annette: a picture of a little ghost drawn in green marker. The green ghost was what Annette had decided would be the child of a marriage between Nancy and Ghost Boy. Nancy
placed her hand over the ghost and touched the edge of the clipping with her fingertips.

She began carefully, “The thing about these stories—”

“Hmm?” Dad turned away and cut a piece of bread to put in the toaster, put the little copper kettle on to boil.

“He doesn’t seem to think there’s anything, you know,
special,
about the Angel of Brooklyn.”

“Special?”

“You know. Other than knowing where to go, there are no special talents or abilities. Shouldn’t it be more heroic?”

“You mean
superheroic.”

“Yeah, like a comic book. Flying or teleporting or seeing through walls or something.”

“Teleporting?” asked Ned.

“Like beaming up. Being gone from one place and appearing in another.”

“Isn’t that what you used to think I did?”

They grinned at each other, faces open. But their secrets weren’t. Ned said, “Isn’t conking criminals a superpower?”

“Why should it be?” asked Nancy. “Any fool can drop things off roofs.”

“True.” Ned tore the cover off a tea bag. “But how does the Angel know where he’s needed?” He paused, then added, “Or she?”

“Pure chance?”

“You’re playing the ‘pure chance’ card
again?”
asked Ned, shaking his head as if he were throwing off water. “Strange if there wasn’t something else involved.”

“Something else?” Nancy slid the clipping out of the way before she closed the book over the green ghost. The nervous feeling leaped up again. Despite all her experimentation, the desired result hadn’t materialized: there had come no silk, no tiny transformation. Okay. She’d stalk the rooftops if that was what she had to do. But how different it would be if—if only—

Well. It hadn’t. And that was that. If she tried anything further in that direction, it would be with the knowledge that her own Angel activities came from just her as she was, nothing more.

O
n Thursday when Nancy got out of school, Dion appeared, slipping out of a Joralemon Street doorway to walk beside her.

“Ghost Boy!” said Annette from the other side of Nancy.

“Learn much at school?” Dion asked. “I mean the one of you that’s not an idiot, of course.” He was holding his nose, shooing away bad energy waves from Annette. He looked even taller and gawkier than before, his long coat fluttering along, all raggedy behind him.

No one was going to show up out of nowhere and
make Nancy feel small. “She’s my friend,” she said.
My best friend who’s crossing the street and turning the corner to get away from you, and I’m going with her.
But she didn’t go with Annette. She stepped off the curb, glanced back at Dion to see if he saw that she was walking away from him and wished him not to follow. But he wasn’t looking. He was scooping a left-behind Chinese jump rope off the sidewalk.

Against her better judgment, Nancy paused. The jump rope was busted, popped, pulled so hard that the bind between the ends had broken, no more elastic loop.

“I hate when that happens,” she said before she could stop herself, and took a step toward Dion, unable to resist reaching for the springy jump rope.

Dion took the ends of the jump rope in his fingers and knotted the ends together deftly, making a knot so tiny and smooth and faultless it was hard to see it was there.

Nancy’s hands were aching for the jump rope, to have it between them, bridging them, wrapping around and under and crisscrossing them in its boingy rubber band way.

Dion held out the rope in a neat striped bundle.
“Remember my name?” he asked.

It scared her how often she had said it to herself. She could have embroidered it on her pillow in her sleep, but to let him know that she remembered it… Not yet.

“I’m leaving, Nancy,” yelled Annette from across Joralemon.

“I’ll call you later!” To Dion, she said, “Danny?”

“It’s an unusual name,” he hinted. “It’s Dion.”

She folded the bundled jump rope into her palm. Now that it was there, her hands could just stop itching to move it around and make things out of it. She wondered if she could remember the Eiffel Tower, the cup and saucer, the cat’s cradle…. No, cat’s cradle took two people. You couldn’t do it alone. “Dion?” Oh, he was gone.

He didn’t stop when she came pelting up behind him, just continued his way to the Carroll Street park. “Mother’s waiting for you, isn’t she?”

She didn’t answer, stunned at first—he had never mentioned her
mother
before—and then defiant. When they reached the dome he climbed up on it. “What about
your
mother?” Nancy asked.

He straightened his coat around him in sharp, angry
movements, his eyebrows—a five-o’clock-shadow of eyebrows, she saw—furled together. Good, she could make
him
mad, too. But then he turned his shoulders toward her and said, “Mina says Mom could die.”

“You love her,” she said.

“She’s a pain in the ass,” he lied gruffly.

“So are you. Do you get it from her or from your father?”

“What do you know about my father?” he retorted.

“What else do you get from your father?”

“What do you
think?”

She wasn’t about to tell him what she thought.

“Your mother wouldn’t hurt herself,” he said. He didn’t say anything about his father.

“Could you hurt yourself?” she asked him, noting his shaved eyebrows, his head that needed hair.

He jumped down from the dome like a gymnast, hardly bending his knees to land perfectly.
Where’d he learn that?
she wanted to know. Wished he’d waver a little so she could steady him, wished he’d stay. He moved away quickly, stretching out his legs.