Cobwebs (24 page)

“I’ll show you what else I know,” she told Mina, and unwrapped the jump rope from around her wrist. She taught Mina cat’s cradle. The soldier’s bed sprang up. Candles lit beneath it, folded their light into a manger. The manger’s straw turned to diamonds, like a miracle out of “Rumpelstiltskin.” The diamonds blinked and glimmered, became cat’s eyes. And the cat’s eyes looked
for a kitten and wove the cat’s cradle again.

Then Nancy took the rope from Mina and twirled her hands through Jacob’s ladder, so fast and sure that Mina was dazzled.

“Show me that!” she begged.

“Inside,” Nancy said.

“They don’t want me inside,” Mina said.

“Who doesn’t?”

“My daddy. And that doctor. And the old spider lady.”

“What about your mother?” Nancy asked gently.

Mina wound the jump rope tightly around one hand in a way that didn’t form any figure, and twisted it even tighter.

“What about Dion?”

“Dion who?” the girl said angrily, with a look of her father about her.

“Your brother?”

“He should have been here before.”

“He’s here now?”

“That’s why
I’m
out here.” Mina mimicked an adult voice. “‘Too many kids in here!’”

“Dion sent you out?”

“I’m supposed to be getting—”

“Getting what?”

“Ice cream.” It was the snack of the evening. Mina stopped. “You want to go in, don’t you?” she asked.

“If you let me in, Mina, I’ll teach you Jacob’s ladder.”

“Pinkie swear?” They linked pinkies, and Mina took a ribbon from around her neck and used the key on it to open the door without a sound. “You have to be silent,” she whispered. She slipped off her shoes, crept barefoot down the hallway, and stopped just before a door that was ajar. Nancy followed. Inside, a pale dark woman wrapped in silk of silver-gray, in so many layers it was as though she’d never be warm. Granny, slim as a ghost in the chair beside the bed. And Grandpa Joke, hovering above them both and looking breakable as a bubble.

“You’re here, then, Nancy,” said Grandpa. Granny held out her hands impatiently, reaching palms-down for Nancy’s. Nancy lifted up her hands to Granny’s. Her hands were still smaller than Granny’s and maybe always would be. Granny’s knuckles shone, the bones pressed up beneath her skin, and the gold of her wedding ring gleamed in the light from the rose-shaded lamp.

“Nancy, this is Ms. Browning,” Grandpa said. Nancy
turned toward the bed, turned her body away from Granny, thought she’d reach for Dion’s mother’s hand, but Granny held on tight.

“Call me Rose, cherub.” Her eyes were the color of Dion’s, but the pupils were large and black, with darkness or love or kindness.

“Hi, Rose,” Nancy said over her shoulder, trying to pull her hands away. Granny would not let go. Nancy wanted to turn, to pull harder, but instead felt her palms rise up to meet Granny’s as though to squeeze out whatever gap remained between their hands. But she wanted to talk to Rose—

“Well, kiddo,” Rose said faintly. “You’re the one my two are both in love with, huh?” It was almost more than she could say, but still there was a strength in her voice that reminded Nancy of a gym teacher she used to have, back in middle school, who made her laugh so that she didn’t mind not being able to do one single intelligent thing in gym class.

“Mina says you’ve got magical hands. She says you made the Eiffel Tower? And my Dion—”

“Stop!” Granny said to Rose. Rose fell against the pillow as though the two sentences she’d spoken had
exhausted her. Granny, exhausted herself, sent a different energy into Nancy’s hands, an
asking
energy. She seemed to fade before Nancy’s eyes.

“Gran?”

Rose, from her pillow, said to Nancy, “Then you’re the next Healer.”

T
he next Healer? Nancy yanked back her hands.

“Wait!” Granny growled. She gripped Nancy’s hands so tightly it hurt. Again Nancy felt hot pressure in her own palms.

“Are you?” Hoping, Rose lifted herself onto one elbow and reached toward the bond of the locked hands. She was asking whether Nancy could help, whether Nancy could heal her. “Nancy?” She touched Nancy’s wrist with two shaky fingers. Though Granny lunged forward with her upper body, her hold on Nancy’s hands did not change with Rose’s touch.

“What’s happening?” Niko barreled into the room, pressing through the doorway with Mina, pushing Grandpa out of the way.

“Are you?” Rose asked Nancy in a voice that made it sound like Nancy shouldn’t worry if she wasn’t. Nancy was frantic not to disappoint her, but what was required?

“Is she?” asked Niko in his hard voice.

“Is she what?” asked Mina in her soft one.

“The Healer,” said Grandpa.

The room seemed to ring with the echo of his words.

Nancy wanted her hands out of Granny’s hands.

Granny wouldn’t let go. She held on as though she were desperate not to release Nancy. She shook Nancy’s hands in hers, pressed against them and drew Nancy’s eyes to hers. There were no two possibilities in Granny’s eyes, only one.

“Nancy!” Granny called out in a voice that stilled the murmuring echoes. “Nancy, are you?”

Nancy wanted to be.

She held tight to her grandmother’s hands and in a dazzled instant she saw a view of Rose, up on her feet,
her cheeks pink and healthy, up and about in her house, doing things. She thought of herself, Healer Nancy, making it happen, thought how it would feel, how Dion and Mina and even Niko would love her then. She gripped Granny’s hands and felt the energy flow between them and out of them and into them.

Once again Granny demanded, “Are you?”

Wanting it wasn’t enough. Nancy suddenly felt the city around her, gray and plain and dusty, and in this view of it everyone, including her, was the same size, paying the same subway fare, with the same troubles, the same fights, the same lousy chance of getting by, getting through, getting along, getting over it. Everyone had the same overwhelming sadness, and for this moment Nancy felt how Rose must have felt—powerless. And knew that it was true.

She felt a huge, drowning wave of disappointment. When she looked around the room, released from Granny’s eyes, she sensed that this same disappointment had washed through all of them, that they all knew the instant she did.

“No, I’m not,” she said in the tiniest possible voice.

There was a rumble and a slam from the hallway as
the only person who hadn’t squeezed into the little bedroom got himself out of the tight spot his heart was in.
Oh, Dion, come back.
He was gone.

“Good God, girl!” roared Niko, crazy with fear. “Have you been wasting our time here?”

Granny’s grip lightened. She didn’t exactly drop Nancy’s hands, but she took her hands away, pulled her eyes away, away from them all. Nancy didn’t want to see her grandmother’s face, or Rose’s, or Niko’s, or any of them. She wanted to see Dion, but he was gone.

She had never felt so hurt.

She never afterward wanted anything so much.

She wanted to be—

And she wasn’t.

She never wanted so much to fade away, disappear, and hide.

She never understood her mother so well as at that moment, or wanted her so much.

But no! Mama had what Nancy didn’t, what Granny hadn’t been able to suck out of Nancy’s palms with her powerful ones. Mama Rachel had what Rose needed. Nancy didn’t.

Yet Nancy was here and Rachel wasn’t.

Well, Nancy would do something about that.

She would get Mama here somehow.

But first to get out, to get free, to go. But first—

Grandpa left the room in despair. There was no ground under her feet and Nancy felt gigantic, and ungainly. She reached out for the support of the doorknob.

Niko leaned over Rose in a gesture that forever shifted Nancy’s ugly image of him, cradling her somehow without putting his weight on the bed or on her.

It was Nancy who caught her pale, spent Granny as she fell. For a moment Granny seemed gone. She opened her eyes six inches from Nancy’s. “I’m perfectly fine, Josie,” she said. Nothing moved but her mouth and the slowly turning light in her dark, dark eyes. “I’ve been happy every minute. Never a bit of pain until now.”

Pain?

“Don’t be sad, Granny,” Nancy said, not thinking of what she was saying or where or how loud, only hurrying to say it.

Pain!

Grandpa and Nancy lifted Granny onto a narrow
couch in the hallway. Grandpa felt expertly for Granny’s pulse.

Niko Papadopolis burst out the bedroom door. “What’s going on?” His face was pale, his eyes colorless like Dion’s, his lids puffy and red. Was his Rose, then, dead? Dying? Where, oh where, had Dion gone?

“Now you’re here you’ll stay here,” Niko said to Nancy abruptly. “I’m not having you going off to the police. You can watch Mina while we look after my wife.”

The expression on Grandpa’s face showed Nancy all she needed to know about Granny’s condition. His hands in fists at his sides, he said, “My granddaughter is not part of our agreement.”

Was it threat or sadness in Niko’s face? “Inside,” he barked at Mina and Nancy. Nancy wanted to run for the front door, take Mina with her.

Where was Dion? Had his father thrown him out, too? Or had he just left again?
He
wouldn’t go for the police, would he, not for his own father?

Where was
her
dad? On some rooftop, safe and calm? Well, wasn’t this a crime?
Be drawn to this one, Dad!
And Mama, who could help if Nancy could only
get to her and make her come …

Niko and Grandpa growled unintelligible words at each other.
Get out,
Nancy begged Grandpa silently. She walked along the hallway that led to the back of the house. There was a dresser there, painted a soft pink, and on it was a photograph of a family. Younger, sweeter, rosier, and the mother a female version of Dion, except for her bright eyes (and she had hair). Seeing it, Nancy understood Dion’s ghostly gray look, his father’s drained face. A formal, posed, studio portrait, an item the Greene Mamba wouldn’t let in the house, but to Nancy it was an advertisement for family bliss. A mother and father, together under one roof. A boy and a girl. Normal. Perfect. And now Rose was dying. Was Granny?

Nancy bolted for the front door, unthinking. But Niko got her by the arm, held on hard.

“Niko!” Grandpa thundered. “There are other things! Other people! My wife!”

Niko let go of Nancy and grabbed Grandpa by the shoulders. “There is nobody else!”

“There’s nothing more to be done for your Rose!”

“Never say that,” Niko pleaded, wilting.

Grandpa’s hands came up to take Niko’s shoulders, but he was not shaking him back or pushing him; he was just holding him, making him be still.

And then a sound came that sent them all running back into the living room, forgetting the front door. It was Mina, screaming as though she were strangling.

“R
ose?” Sad, bewildered Niko leaned a hand on each side of the doorjamb. “Rose?” he asked more quietly.

But the scream came again from the living room.

Nancy got there first. Mina crouched in the corner of a chair, tears flowing, pointing.

Niko went to her, took her forearms gently, looked into her eyes. Then he saw what she was screaming at: a spider, furry and black, dangling from a dragline beside Mina. “Little Miss Muffet,” he said gruffly, and swung his arm toward the dragline.

“DON’T!” Nancy yelled. “It’s bad luck to kill a spider.”

“Spiders are vermin,” he said. He rolled a magazine into a pipe.

“Bad luck,” Nancy warned boldly.

He whacked at the spider with the magazine. He missed and hit the silk, and the spider fell near the baseboard.

On the couch in the hallway, Granny mumbled, “Ned?” Her hands shuddered where they lay on her stomach.

Grandpa laughed a phony, desperate-sounding laugh. “Why don’t you leave it alone, Niko?”

“I’ll leave nothing!”

“Papa,” said Mina. “You’re scaring me.”

“I’m getting the spider for you, Rosebud.”

Mina said, “No. You’ll hurt it.”

“Don’t you want me to? You were screaming two seconds ago.”

“It’s bad luck,” she said. Niko threw Nancy a disgusted look.

“Let me get rid of it for you.” Nancy picked up a water glass from the table, drained it into a dried-out plant. “I’ll show you how to make a bug ambulance,” she told Mina.

An ambulance.
Nancy put the glass down over the
spider, slipped an envelope from the coffee table under the glass, and lifted the spider in its glass dome toward Mina. Mina stepped forward, fascinated, wary.

“See all his legs?” Nancy asked. She was relying on Mina. How could she rely on this kid?

“Eight,” Mina said. She looked at Niko for praise, but he just looked appalled.
“You’re
not afraid, are you?” she asked Nancy. “Not afraid of spiders?”

Nancy gave the spider a closer look. He was blackish-brown, with awfully long legs and a familiar look in his eye. “Heights. Falling. Razors.” She listed her fears. “But never spiders.”

She carried the spider-under-glass toward the front door, opened it, wondered if it was going to be an easy escape.

There was a firm hand on her back, a strong grip that pulled her hair. “Let the kid do it,” Niko said.

Yes, she would have to rely on Mina.

“Let Dion come with me,” Mina said.

“Him?” said Niko with a short laugh.
“He
didn’t stay long.”

“He’s gone?” Nancy asked, to get information. Had he ever really been here?

“What do you know about my son?” Niko whirled toward her.

“Nothing,” Nancy said. She felt all of their eyes.

“Nothing is what he’s good for,” Niko said.

Nancy turned away from him and handed the spider ambulance to Mina, and turned back and said to Niko, “That is
so
untrue,” so softly that only he could hear. The way he stared at her! The venom! Maybe he
was
the type to hurt his own. “You know I’m right,” she whispered, and thought she saw pain to the depths of his eyes.

Mina said, “I’ll be careful.”