Cobwebs (15 page)

Grandpa Joke was acting all ceremonial, with a white towel around his waist and a white cloth on the table. There was a beautiful smell of garlic coming from the kitchen, and he ran back in there as soon as he greeted Ned and Nancy at the door. He wouldn’t let them help with anything, just made them go sit down. Granny and Mama were in the kitchen as well.

“What’s up?” asked Nancy.

Ned just shrugged. All the way over on the subway, he had hardly said anything. Now he seemed to come to some decision. Waiting at the table, he said quietly to Nancy, “You know, I’ve seen him.”

“Dion?”

“Is that his name?”

Nancy nodded. Where before Dad had had a warning tone when he spoke of Dion, now he seemed suspiciously light and airy. “At first I didn’t recognize him, down on the ground.”

“Yeah, he’s always on the dome by Carroll Street.”

“That’s not where I meant.”

“Then where
have
you seen him?”

“I’m sure it’s him. He has a distinctive way of moving.”

“Where?”

“Across a few blocks of roofs.”

Up high. She leaned closer. “What do you think about him?”

“He’s light,” Ned said. “Everything about him. He’s quiet. He’s smooth. He knows how to blend in. He’s a good—”

“Wow, you
do
know him,” Nancy interrupted.

Ned glanced at the kitchen door, nodded. “As much as you can know about anyone by just watching him.”

Grandpa Joke entered bearing a bottle of wine and five glasses, all in his two big hands.

“Who’s coming?” Nancy asked, counting the glasses.

“You are,” Grandpa said. “Coming along. Ladies!” Rachel and Granny Tina came in from the kitchen. Everyone was looking at Nancy expectantly.

Grandpa Joke poured a little wine in each glass. “On your feet,” he said. He raised his glass to Nancy, to Ned.

Ned, with his arm around Nancy’s waist, clinked her glass with his. “Here’s to you, little egg,” he said.

“Salut!”
said Grandpa Joke in Italian.

“Salut!”
agreed Rachel and Tina, raising their glasses and kissing Nancy’s cheeks.

“Thanks,” Nancy said stiffly. She had never been toasted before, and she didn’t know why they were doing this now. The family ate beautiful eggplant parmigiana and drank the wine that tasted cool and hard when Nancy sipped it, but went down her throat warm and soft. The talk was nothing but chitchat. Nancy kept waiting for serious words, some explanation or question or challenge. They seemed to have gotten her here for a reason they all clearly agreed upon. But nobody said anything much. They discussed crops, of all things—stuff people were growing in the community garden.

Nancy couldn’t sit at the table anymore. She got up and carried the plates into the kitchen and washed them. Grandpa came in with the parmigiana dish and patted her shoulder. She turned and said, “Grandpa Joke, why’d you give me wine?”

“Didn’t I ever do it before?”

But he knew he hadn’t.

“Does there need to be a reason, Nancy? I enjoy you.”

Such a formal thing to say.

“You ought to drink wine with the people you love.”

What came to her mind was the winged girl who had
opened the door at the Papadopolis house during the first visit. “There’s something I want to know, Grandpa Joke.”

“Don’t find out too much!” he interrupted in a jolly voice, as if he knew exactly what she was going to ask.

“You’d be surprised what I know,” she told him. “You’re going to have to tell me more sometime, Grandpa.”

Grandpa Joke inhaled through his nose, as if he were getting extra oxygen that way. He looked over his shoulder at Ned as he passed behind him on his way to spray water into the sink, filling it with big white suds. “You were asking me a question the other day,” he said quietly. “I’ve been thinking about the answer.”

“Which question?”

“That question about
knowing
someone.”

“Yeah?”

“Kindness, Nancy. Show him some kindness.” He glanced at Ned again.

“Kindness!” she whispered. “To Dad?”

He shrugged. “To anyone. Kindness brings a person out.”

“Out of what?”

He didn’t exactly answer. “Kindness,” he said, tasting the
word. “To everybody. Show everybody some kindness.”

It should have been a poster on the subway.

“Do you want me to stay tonight?” Nancy asked Rachel, less because she wanted to than because she wanted an excuse not to do what she was about to do.

But Rachel didn’t save her. She said, “Baby girl, I’m deep into work on my masterpiece.” Nancy thought she probably meant it, about the weaving being a masterpiece.

“How’s it going, Rache?” Ned asked.

“What do you care, dear?” She may as well have said, “Now
go.”

It was still full light out, a long lovely spring evening, when Ned and Nancy left the house. “Holy Saint Chris,” Ned said with a sigh.

“Amen,” Nancy began, and then changed to “So be it.” She jammed her foot into the house door. “There’s something I want to show you,” she said.

“Now?”

She pulled him back in and slammed the door so that those inside would think they’d gone out. “It’s on the roof,” she told him. “This roof. You’ve been asking for it, so don’t blame me.”

N
ancy closed the roof hatch carefully behind them. “That’s how
I
get here,” she said, fighting the quaver in her voice. “From the street, up the stairs. I want you to tell me how you get here, Dad.”

Ned’s breath caught, then he let out a ragged sigh.

“Dad?”

It was as though his chest had gone hollow. Sharp-shouldered, he walked over to the parapet, the edge of the roof, and looked down. “Joke was right,” he said.

“About what?”

“The wine.” He closed his eyes. “You.”

“Dad, listen. I followed you the last time you came here.”

He nodded. He knew.

“But I couldn’t follow you for real, Dad. You’re too fast.”

Eyes still closed, Ned raised his eyebrows.

“How can you be that fast, Dad?”

“Practice.”

“And—?”

“And what?”

“Dad. That boy, he said—And I didn’t believe him, but then I realized he was right. I couldn’t figure out where you went. I have really good eyes, Dad, but you were
gone.”

“Nancy—”

“It’s not just practice,” she insisted.

He opened his eyes, turned and held his hands out to her. “No, it’s not. You’re right. But that’s all I can—”

She wasn’t having it. “Dad, I want to know about you. I think I already do. So you have to tell me now.”

“Little egg!”

Ned’s hands were on her shoulders, his face against her hair. She could feel him trembling. He stood back and gave her a long look, his eyes looking blacker than black with the sunset sky behind him. He let the breath go out of his chest, blowing gently. Then he dropped his hands and walked away to the edge of the wall, climbed over it.
He was gone. He just suddenly was not there. No Ned.

“Dad?”

Nancy hung over the parapet. The street below reflected the evening light, so far away it looked like a river. The back of her neck and palms had gone hot and cold with fear, and now not just the hair on the back of her neck, but also the hair on her head, felt like it was standing on end. She felt electrified, scared rigid. Scared stiff. She whirled, looked every which way on the roof, but Ned was gone.

“Nancy!” Ned’s musical way of saying her name floated on the air, came through low and level.

She turned back to the street, searching, searching. There he was! She spied her dad on top of the building on the other side of the street, on the roof opposite this one. He leaned both hands on the parapet of that building, smiling nervously at her, his eyes still so serious, the sunset purple on his hair.

She didn’t ask how or why. She said nothing. She didn’t dare speak or call out. There were people walking on the sidewalk below. Dion! Dion and a little girl, that sister of his, walking down the block along the community garden. Spying.

Nancy backed away from the edge and waved Ned toward her with both hands, as if pulling water toward her in a bathtub.
Come back.

From this distance she watched him bend below the wall. She waited seconds, a minute, standing back from the edge out of view of Dion, should he chance to look up, waiting, wondering where Dion was, wondering what was happening to Ned—for something most assuredly was happening to Ned. She was caught fast and tight as a warp thread in a web of unbelievable strands: her father, invisible; her grandparents, healing people; and Dion, at the center of it all, somehow magically but completely expectedly and continually finding it all out through her, through Nancy herself.
This is why Mama stays on the ground, in her web,
Nancy thought,
because of times like this.

Ned climbed over the edge of her wall, walked over to her.

“Did you see me?”

“I saw you disappear,” she said.

He grinned, ducked his head, looked up and laughed, hair in his eyes.

Nancy pushed the dreadlocks out of the way. “That’s
how you did it right? You disappeared. Did you go somewhere else, like the guys in
Star Trek?” Beam me up. That’d be a good strategy for the Angel of Brooklyn.

He shook his head. “Neither,” he said. He blew out his breath again, bent down lower, and in a kind of swooping motion, quickly wrapped his arms around his knees. He was like a woolly bear caterpillar, the fuzzy kind with the orange stripe that curls into a ball in the hand of a child who picks it up. As he curled, he shrank, quick as a gasp, there on the rooftop with Nancy. His hands hung down, his hair hung down, and everything about him—grew smaller and smaller. And smaller. She felt a sort of frozen panic:
This will probably freak me out later.
Right then she simply kept her eyes open.

Ned was a spider. A spider! A black spider, a little bit hairy, with nice long legs. His dark clothes had shrunk so small they faded into his skin, and his dark spider color was all of a tone. A perfectly regular spider like the one in the corner of a doorway.

It was appalling. Could everyone in the family do it?
Am I going to do it?
Nancy felt her knees go weak with shock, collapsed, and flopped to the roof on her bottom.

Ned skedaddled, eight legs moving fast up the wall,
then over the parapet and gone. She bounded up again to see where. He’d disappeared again, and the evening grew darker. The last light of day picked out the sheen of window glass and light posts, street signs and the crisscross webbing of the fence around the community garden. Yes, Ned was gone.

But no. This time she spied the faint silken thread dropping him down ever so gently, past windows and doors and stoops, to the bushes beside the sidewalk.

She lost sight of him. The roof she stood on was too high. He was too small.

A car made its way down the street, and people clomped along the sidewalk in shoes that seemed suddenly heavier and more potentially lethal than Nancy’s Doc Martens ever could. He was the most vulnerable thing in the city, a practically invisible spider. Had he dropped onto the sidewalk or let the breeze take him across—

On the other side of the street there was nothing to see, but Nancy focused on the rooftop and waited.

And then her father’s dear old head popped up from behind the parapet and his eyes—his laughing Dad eyes—were looking at her out of his human face again.

He thinks this is funny!

Another minute and he was back at her side, crouched against the wall, Ned again, Arach-Ned no more. For the moment.

He grabbed her hand, sticky with silk, and pulled her down with him, side by side below the parapet.

They sat hidden on the roof on the sticky tar paper, their backs against the wall. Nancy knew she should have needed a thousand explanations, but she only really wanted one.

“Does it hurt?”

She realized her face was covered in streams of tears, and she pressed her palms to her cheeks, making her hands even hotter and sweatier and stickier than they already were.

“Oh, Nance,” Ned said, holding her tighter. “Oh, egg. It’s just—it’s just
me.”

You’d think I’d have known that.

You’d think I’d have realized.

You’d think I’d have noticed just once that my father wasn’t just spiderlike, he was a spider.

“Only you?”

“In my generation. My father was, too.”

“None of your cousins?” Her father had lots of cousins.

He shook his head.

“Only you?” she asked again.

“In my family.” He studied her. “So far,” he said.

Surprised wasn’t the word …

“It is the other part of what I am.”

Of course,
she thought, Anansi, who changes himself into a man, and into other things, too. “But a spider is Anansi’s main thing,” she said. “Isn’t your main thing—”

“A man,” said Ned.

She swallowed. “And Grandpa Lester?” He had died before she was born, before Ned had married or even met Rachel.

Her father said, “Lester was more of a spider. Less of a man.”

“And you’re less of a spider?”

“And you?” Ned asked.

It was a long time before Nancy managed to say anything else at all. “And
I’m
afraid of heights,” she finally said.

He said, “I’m afraid of being squished.”

She didn’t know why she laughed, then thought of all the times he had avoided the subway, especially at rush
hour, or how he never ever rode the bus. “Yeah,” she said.

“Yeah? Your old dad just turned into a spider, Nancy. Is that all you’re thinking?”

“No.”

He studied her and waited. “I couldn’t always do it,” he said. “Only since I was fourteen.”

“Fourteen!”
I am less than I could be,
Nancy thought. She thought about the way her father had talked about Dion earlier, as if he were special, wonderful, light, a good—

A good what?

“What about the other spider people?”

He shrugged.

She shrugged back. “Don’t you know?”