Cobwebs (21 page)

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ned, after a beat.

How could it not matter?

Ned looked out his beloved window, over his beloved rooftops and his beloved city. Nancy, beside him, looked, too. “We can’t let Granny go there again,” she said.

“She may insist.”

“Or Niko might.”

“He doesn’t know what we are made of,” said Ned stoutly.

What am I made of?

Ned asked, “Which side has that young roof dweller of yours settled down on?”

“Dion?”

He nodded. He glanced out the window.

“He’s not there,” Nancy said.

“Sure?”

“Pretty much.”

Ned cocked his head and looked at her. “Which side?”

“He loves his mother,” she said, “He doesn’t trust his father. I don’t, either.”

“Niko Papadopolis,” said Ned. “What’s his story?”

“He wants to be at the top of the food chain. If he could just tell everybody what to do … everybody in our family, that is.”

“He can’t tell us,” said her father.

The sun beamed through the penthouse windows, throwing a net of shadows across the floor. It lit the V8 juice and Ned’s Bloody Mary, and made the seeds of the raspberry jam shine. She asked, “How did you stop that rape?”

For a moment, Ned looked jolted, surprised. But then he began to tell her.

Ned had yelled—no, called, really. Yelling would have
been too loud. “Hey.” Period, not exclamation point, but not question mark, either. And then, again, “Hey.”

Two faces had looked up, faces scared in different ways, and saw nobody.

“So you leaped down, decked the man, put your arm around the girl and—”

“No,” said Ned. “That isn’t what happened. I scooped gravel from the roof and dashed it down into the attacker’s face. The man’s hands flew up to his eyes, and the girl—the smart, brave girl—snatched the gun. Stuck it in his ribs and cocked it and told him to march.”

“Didn’t he run when he got to Mott Street?” asked Nancy.

“He sure would have. But this girl got him in a hold with his arm behind his back, and when she cleared the alley she spoke to a woman selling ducks, and in an instant, ten guys grabbed the criminal and held on till the cops came.”

Nancy grinned, nodding. “She was lucky.”

“Lucky! She was brilliant. She kept her wits about her and took her opportunity, and she cleaned his clock! My part was throwing gravel.” Ned’s head
dropped into his hands. “Some angel.”

Nancy thought about how spiderwebs signified neglect. They made a place look unwatched, uncared for, invisible on the face of the earth, hidden inside the walls of the city. That was a spider’s deception. Made it look safe for flies, then foiled them.

“And there’s another thing, Dad.” She sounded, to herself, as breathless and silly-urgent as the girls in homeroom. “Say you’d caught that guy, taken him off to the cops. Where would that girl be?”

“She’d be saved.”

“Yeah, well, this way she saved herself. It’s better.”

“Better how?”

“Because now she knows she can! I mean, that’s what I don’t know. If I could grab the gun and hold it on him and make him march—”

“You?”

“Well, of course me. I could be that girl.”

“That girl, little egg, got that gun on the guy because he had gravel in his eyes—”

“Oh, really?”

“Or else, she was—”

“You mean,
your
gravel? Ned Kara’s?”

“She was maybe dead or worse back there.”

“If not for you?”

Stalemate. They both wanted to believe the girl would have found another way out. They both understood that her way out came because Ned threw gravel. That was the way it had happened. But things could have gone another way entirely, if, say, one string had been woven from another harness, if it shot over instead of under, if it were blue instead of green.

The pattern of what he did—what he’d been doing since he was fourteen, from his rooftops and below—would not change, unless Niko Papadopolis got hold of it.

N
ancy knitted on the chaise lounge on the roof outside the little penthouse, watching the sun move from one side of the sky to the other, waiting for Ned to go to Rachel’s and go to work and come home again. She knit about a zillion stripes along the sweater’s front; when she held the sweater up, midafternoon, it reached from her hips to her breastbone. Before long she’d be starting on the sleeves. She laid it down, unwrapped the jump rope from her wrist, made a cat’s cradle, looked through it at the city.

Someplace over there Annette was getting ready for the dance. Nancy wondered what her dress was like. She
ran her hand up her leg—still smooth, though not as silky—and fooled with the edge of the bandage on her thigh. Already she felt steadier and stronger, but not much like dancing. She thought about dancing on the Brooklyn Bridge for Dion and felt her face get hot, and the hair on the back of her neck stand on end. She closed her eyes in embarrassment, though there was nobody there to see except some pigeons, and daydreamed instead that Dion was dancing
with
her on the bridge.

A shadow passed across her face. Nancy opened her eyes. Dion had his old jeans on, his scuffed boots, and a gray T-shirt.
Camouflage,
Nancy thought, and patted the chaise next to her good leg. He sat. He took the jump rope off her hand, and stretched it out, examining the knots he had made to connect the ends into a loop. The jump rope was a strong elastic woven strand of gold, green, and purple threads, not as bright and sharp as they were when it was new, before Nancy and Dion had found it and made it theirs. She grabbed it back, she pulled him toward her, and he came with the rope as it contracted.

She reached her arms around his back and leaned her head on his shoulder. He put his face into her hair.

They both sighed, and she felt—and she knew he felt—the opposite of how she felt when her hair stood on end. Her hair all stayed in its place. She felt that
she
was back in place, as if this place—Dion’s arms—was a place she had known for a long time. It was as though she had been struggling to get back to this place and now she had finally gotten here.

“Can I kiss you?” Dion asked, in the deep chord of a voice he had used on the bridge.

He kissed her.

She kissed him back. She held him, her arms around his neck, and brought her legs carefully up into his lap. He picked her up very gently. He leaned on the parapet and slid to the rooftop with her in his arms.

For the longest time they stayed there, and Ned did not come home, or if he did, in his spider form, he went away again and left them on their own.

Nancy wasn’t sure if she’d slept. When she opened her eyes, Dion’s were closed. With her fingertip she touched him where his eyebrows were a line of tiny feather tips. He startled, then smiled. He said, “I know you.”

She said, “I know you, too.”

A cloud crossed his eyes, then, or so it seemed, because the deep blueness that had come into them on the bridge the day before suddenly gave way again to the familiar nervous paleness. “My mother’s really bad,” he said. “She’s going to die unless I get her help. That’s why—I wanted you to know that, whatever happens, it’s nothing against you. Nothing against your family.”

She pushed herself off his lap so that she was sitting on the roof beside him. “The whole thing is hurting my family. It’s hurting my grandmother.”

“Is it? Is she—”

“What is your father trying to do?” Now her hair stood up, as though it were trying to make up for the lost hair on her legs.

“Same thing
your
father is trying to do,” he said. “What’s best.”

“What’s best for who?” His father would say
whom.
His father would say a lot of things!

He closed his eyes. “Us, I guess.”

“Not
me.
Not my family.”

“I meant my family,” Dion said.

“I know you did!”

“I’m sorry.”

There was silence between them for a long moment.

“My father’s trying to live a good life,” she said. “He’s trying to help people.”

Dion got up and sat on the edge of the chaise, clasped his hands between his knees, as if to warm them, looking down.

Nancy struggled to form the question she wanted to ask. “What were you like,
before?”

“Before my mother—”

“Before you started living on the roofs.”

“You mean, before I ran away?”

“Well,” she said, looking into his eyes. “You didn’t run very far.”

He could have argued that living on the roofs was symbolic of distance. He just said, “I was pretty normal before.”

“That’s
hard to believe. You mean you, for instance, had hair?”

That was more symbolism he wouldn’t address. “It’s funny,” he said. “Fewer people seem to notice me the way I am now.”

“Who noticed you before?”

“Teachers. People in the neighborhood. People
seemed to—you know—have an eye on me.”

“That’s because they knew who you were,” Nancy said. “They’d seen you around, or seen you with your parents or your sister—”

He cut her right off. “Now they look away,” he said.

Yes. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

“Or they look right through me.”

“What do you mean by that, Ghost Boy? They don’t recognize you? Or you’re invisible?”

He only grinned. She backed off the subject, but had to ask, “What’s it like? Living on the roofs, I mean.” She had an idea what he might say, had imagined him enough to think she knew how it was: puddles, asphalt, cooking smells, mist and lights, and him in the shadows.

But he said, “There are a lot of pigeons. More than you’d believe. Even babies.”

Nancy smiled. “People talk about how you never see baby pigeons,” she said. “Really you never see any baby birds.”

“Unless they fall out of the nest,” Dion said.

Nancy nodded. She had once seen a scene she didn’t want to remember precisely: a gawky pink bird form without enough feathers to fly. Dead. “Or get pushed,”
she said, shoving the image out of the front of her mind.

Dion shook his head. He said, “It’s been good, the parts where it’s just been me. Good enough. I’m warm enough, and it’s quiet. I can think.”

“What do you miss?”

“Nothing!” His voice filled up. “Lots of things.”

“What about food?”

“Oreos,” he said, almost sobbing the word. “Mina supplies me when she can.”

She picked the most unemotional aspect of life. “What about school?”

“I seem to go right on learning things,” he said after a moment. “What I miss is gym: games, and playing things. I liked it when you danced on the bridge. I thought I could go back to my school and go to a dance. School would be better if you went to my school. Or I could come to your school.”

Nancy thought of her school and said, “Maybe we should start our own school.” She wanted to plan something with Dion, to know he would be there, and yet there was this whole other mess between them, and only she could do anything about it. It wasn’t so easy to find words that wouldn’t send him flying off the
handle, but she gripped his hand and made herself speak.

“Your father should back off,” she said. “What does he have to keep covering all these stories for? Doesn’t he want you to go to school?”

Dion, making excuses for his father, said, “He’s got enough to think about.
He
can’t save the whole world.”

Nancy wondered, if it were between her and Mama, which one would Ned look out for? “What is he trying to do, catch my father?”

“Catch him?” Dion pulled his hands away and tucked them between his knees. “Your father is the Angel of Brooklyn.”

“Your father made up the whole thing! There is no Angel. It’s just a nice story to make people feel better.” They were pushing each other away with words, but their eyes were locked together.

“But it’s good news,” Dion said. “Don’t you see?”

“Stop him,” she said. And again she said, “There is no Angel. No
one
Angel.”

“Then what does your father do?”

“Same thing you do. And me.”

“You?”

“Who else would throw a clothespin?”

He whistled. “Pretty good.”

“Dad’s just the same,” she said. “He wants to beat up the bad stuff. So he throws rocks at it and jumps on it or gets its attention. It’s bigger than he is. He’s just higher.”

“And smaller,” said Dion.

She looked at him warily. “Wouldn’t you like to be the Angel?” Her hands were gooey from sweating and tears.

“What?”

“It’s stupid, I know. There’s no such thing. I just wish it were true.
I
want to be the Angel.”

“What for?”

“So I can’t be seen. So I can’t be hurt.” He knelt in front of her.
Oh, his eyes.
“So they won’t know who’s helping.”

“I’ll know,” he said.

She kissed him; he was strong, sweet. If they could get his mother fixed, maybe his father would look out for him.

“Help my mother,” he said, staring into her with his ghost eyes. “Or there’s no telling what my dad’ll do.”

“Are you threatening me?” she asked.

He might as well have been leaving, the way he seemed to recede from her. “Warning you,” he said.

“Get away from me,” she howled at him. She tore her eyes away, turned her back.

He was up and gone, over the wall and onto the next roof. She made it to the wall. They stared at each other across the space.

“Go now,” she said. “And don’t come back. I’ve forgotten your name again.”

His fingers on the wall were the last thing she saw as he rounded a corner in a blur of gray. Nancy put all her energy into getting to that corner. When she did, he was already gone.

She collapsed back onto the chaise and imagined she felt him putting distance between them, felt it stretch out as he went away.

Then it was true. There was no real connection between her family and his, other than the one Niko had formed by blackmailing her grandfather and demanding the very lifesilk of her Granny. How could there be anything good about that, no matter how good her heart told her Dion was. What stories would Niko feel free to tell if his wife died? How easy it would be for him to let the whole entire city know who the
Greene-Karas were and what they were! And what would happen to them then?