Cobwebs (25 page)

“You’re a brave girl, Wilhemina Rose,” her father said.

“Don’t let him out too near the house,” Nancy told Mina. “He’ll just come back in. Take him down to that tree by the curb. Let him out in the ivy. Spiders like that.”

“When you’re done,” Niko said, “go up to the corner and pick out some ice cream the way I told you before.”

Nancy began, “But the store’s—”

“Enough from you!” Niko said to her, and Grandpa’s eyes behind him stopped her further. Granny lay staring on the couch.

There went Mina. If Nancy had done her job right,
Mina wouldn’t get freaked out and squish the spider under her foot.

In the doorway Nancy closed her eyes and sent a strand of wishes across the space.
Be there,
she asked.
Be here.

She should have wished for herself, too. When she turned back to the hall the spider fear was gone from Niko’s face. “We need to get you out of the way, too,” he said to her, as if he were planning to squish her in place of the spider.

“So I’ll go,” Nancy said obstinately.

“She’ll stay with me, if I have to be here,” said Grandpa.

Suddenly Nancy knew what she wanted. She headed for the bedroom, for the figure in the lacy cover of silk. Just a glance through the door, that was all she got, and it was all she needed to get Niko away from Grandpa and Granny.

He grabbed her arm and pulled her back. Nancy realized what she hadn’t understood a short time before: he was out of power. Niko’s power was his writing, his research, his digging. He was like a burrowing spider who needed a surprise place from which to jump out at you. Now he’d lost the surprise advantage; he would have to rely on his jumping. She could guess
how wildly he might jump, if he feared everything was slipping. If she could just get away, get Mama …

In the meantime dealing with him was a matter of making him think he was in charge. She could pull what she wanted out of Niko. She tugged her arm away, to make him grip tighter. He nudged her ahead of him out of the bedroom, into the hall, toward the living room again. Each time he took her in a new direction she let out a whine, an angry hiss, a yowl.

“Let her be, Niko,” said Grandpa. “She can’t—”

“You’re holding out on me,” Niko said, shaking a finger at Grandpa Joke. He didn’t know about Rachel, Nancy saw.

“You ought to go to jail,” Nancy said. The redness in Niko’s face deepened.

“Be what you are, Niko,” Grandpa said wearily. “And leave the rest of us be.”

“I’m not what you say!” Niko moved toward Grandpa.

“Stop!” Nancy covered her face with her hands. “I won’t bother your wife,” she said. “Put me anywhere. Out the door. I’ll sit in the bathroom on the toilet if you want me to.”

Niko actually listened, his face exhausted, exasperated.
A sudden mind picture of Dion on the geodesic dome sailed into Nancy’s thoughts, the pale blue Brooklyn sky behind his head.
Where are you now, Spider?
“But, please,” Nancy said. “Not high up. Nowhere high.”

“Good idea,” Niko said. God knew what he thought of her. The point was to make him worry about what she might do if he didn’t keep her under his thumb. Sure enough, he took her elbow again, pulled her into the hall, placed his hand on the small of her back and guided her up the stairs.

She protested, “Down, not up!”

He humphed and kept climbing.

“Down!” Nancy resisted, made him push her along. He didn’t stop when he reached the roof door, just threw it open. They struggled in the doorway. “I told you! I’m afraid of heights. No place high!”

“So don’t look down,” he retorted. “Stay away from the edge. See if
he
shows up.” She fought him, pretending with every dramatic bone in her body. “And if he does, tell him—”

But just as it occurred to Nancy that Grandpa might be getting away right now with Granny, the same thought must have occurred to Niko. He sped her
through the doorway so fast that she tripped over the threshold and fell on her knees.

He scooped her up and set her on her feet. “You okay?” As if he cared! Without waiting for an answer, he went. The door slammed and clicked locked. Nancy was by herself on the roof of Dion’s house with nothing over her head but the night, never sure, then or after, which angel Niko thought would come for her.

N
ancy spun around the rooftop. The healed-over place where she’d cut her thigh ached. Her knees were scraped raw but not bleeding. She brushed the grit off them and rushed along the edges of the roof.

The sycamore trees led her to the front of the building. Mina must be down there, walking under the trees, going for ice cream. Did she know she’d have to go all the way to Atlantic Avenue to find it? Surely the store lady was long gone by now. The leaves hid Mina, and the car, if it was still there. Were Granny and Grandpa down there, heading for the hospital? Or were they still trapped in Niko’s hallway?

The two sides of the roof led onto the other rooftops, and they stopped at the end of the block. The only way out was to go down the fire escape at the back of the buildings. But first, there was the climb to the parapet and the drop four stories to the courtyard below.

Come on,
she told herself. It was only what she’d been practicing, those nights outside the penthouse, for real. Fear of heights was nothing more than fear of throwing yourself off.

Nancy stood looking at where she had to go, and spots bloomed before her eyes. Her thigh hurt. She felt steaming hot with emotion and with the need to do something fast, and frantic with her inability to make herself move.

The spots cleared and she saw an edge, and space beyond. But not Brooklyn below. Not Granny. But somehow Granny was there, showing Nancy how not to be afraid, for the sake of saving her.

A barn floor, hay, and a boy’s face looking up. He was holding a ladder by the rungs, tipping it away from the edge.

“George Webb!” screeched Josie beside her. “You bring that ladder back here, boy!”

“Ha!” George sneered over his shoulder. “Come and make me.”

“That stinker,” said Josie. “That smelly old cow turd. That stinking skunk.”

“Stinking skunk cabbage,” she said.

Nancy had only vaguely heard that there was such a thing as skunk cabbage. What did it mean: a story without its teller?

Josie crossed her eyes and laughed.

Where am I?
thought Nancy, knowing, the same way she knew Josie was Granny Tina’s sister, and George was Tina’s brother. Did that make her … Tina?

“Now what do we do?” she asked Josie and the air. “How do we get out of here?”

She and Josie stepped closer to the edge and looked down. There was only one way down. A long rope hung limp and straight from a pulley above the high loft window. Grab the knotted end, the air seemed to tell her. Shinny down the hanging end. Keep the two ends of the rope balanced and you won’t go plummeting to the ground.

“Don’t you dare!” said Josie. “Dad will
—”

Nancy jumped to her feet. If she was in Granny
Tina’s body, then where was Granny Tina herself? Why was it then, and not now? Faint and spotty-eyed again, Nancy bent at the waist, hung her head down to stop the spinning feeling.

Nancy looked up to find herself on Niko’s rooftop. She felt a funny little thrill. It was hardly the place for that, but suddenly she was not afraid, just calm, her shudders stilled. She descended the ladder that led down the back of the house to the fire escape, and she felt light, soft, part of the wind, not a leaf or kite to be blown by it.

Nancy jumped to the first landing of the fire escape. Unlike the wind, the iron resisted her. She landed in a heap of hurting thigh and knees, and kept herself from falling over the rail by throwing herself against the scratching, scraping brick wall of the house.

She got up and dashed for the alley. At first she thought she’d forgotten its location. When she realized that the alley had been gated off, blocked and locked, she felt a chill ripple over the sweat she was already in. She was caught in a tangle of swingsets and clotheslines, trees and garden fences, and the brick walls of the backs of the houses.

Stupid, stupid, stupid!

“Nancy! Don’t go!” Her mind spun. Where a second ago Josie’s voice had seemed to be, now she heard Dion. It wasn’t that she was confused, that she thought he was her sister. Something deep inside her turned and trusted and went toward him across the courtyard.

Later Nancy would learn that Niko had spotted her through the window near Rose’s bed. Later she’d learn that Niko thought she was going to get away, sic the cops on him because he held Grandpa and Granny against their wills, because he hoped Granny would come to and rise to the occasion and do more for Rose. If he left to catch Nancy, the old man would escape—fair enough—with his own sick wife. Who could know Niko’s craziness in stopping Grandpa Joke from going? Torn, he bolted for the hallway, then back to the window, glimpsed his son’s bristly head inside the flapping gap that a towel on the clothesline made as it billowed.

Grandpa Joke caught Niko’s eye away from Dion, reached long strong graceful hands, and pulled him
back. Niko saw in Grandpa Joke’s face a waiting, a wishing, a wanting to say—

“Rose?” He looked at his wife’s face (Grandpa would tell Nancy later) and saw no more struggle, but stillness, goneness.

Later she would hear that Niko thought his wife was dead.

“Rose?”

He touched her thin face so tenderly, holding her like flowers between his hands.

Grandpa Joke put a sympathetic hand on Niko’s shoulder. He would not tell the police about Niko and give him away. He only wanted to get away himself. But what about Nancy—his granddaughter? A connection broke in Grandpa Joke’s mind, he told Nancy later. He left her to her own devices. He thought only of Granny Tina.

Niko flew roaring out of the bedroom, through the kitchen, out the back door to the courtyard awash in washing. “Don’t go!” he bellowed after Nancy.

Behind him, Mina was back. “Look, Daddy! Look!”

Nancy looked back in time to see two things, all
she could see in her glimpse through the courtyard door: legs in bright green clogs.

Niko didn’t look, though if he had it might have changed things for Nancy and Dion. He shouldn’t have frightened Mina like that about the spider. But there was no going back now, no going back to his little girl to tell her about her mother. Instead he went after the big girl he thought had taken away his attention at the crucial moment.

He was too angry to go back and see what—or who—Mina had brought in with her. Angry about healers. Angry about angels. You shouldn’t have to go after them, Niko thought, shouldn’t have to bring them to you, tie them down, pen them up to get them to help you. Weren’t angels supposed to seek out the presence of evil? Wasn’t that what the Angel of Brooklyn was always doing? So why hadn’t it sensed the evilness of Rose’s wounds, her approaching death?

Poor Niko. He didn’t know the difference, Nancy saw later, between having a gift given and grabbing it. He didn’t recognize the Angel when it came to his house in its many forms. He didn’t see the green shoes. He didn’t glance back through the window. He didn’t
know the true, new Healer came, because he was climbing to the roof to chase after Nancy.

Later on he’d get a chance to ask Mina what happened when the Healer came. “Nothing spectacular,” Mina would say. “She just said, ‘Hi, I’m Rachel.’”

N
ancy chased Dion across the wet blanket of grass, scampered away from Niko, in and out the squares of yellow light that fell from apartment windows into the courtyard, Dion blending in with the fluttering shadows that fell from sheets and shirts that hung above them in the night air, the hair on Nancy’s legs raising the alarm as she raced through the tangled damp maze.

“There’s a way out,” said Dion, and led her to another gate, the kind of garbage-can alley that only nosy kids knew about, not their busy, worried parents—even those who had taken the trouble to gate up their own alleys.

They had a block’s head start on Niko. Nancy ran
pell-mell down the street. She was in time to see Grandpa slam the back door of the car, leap into the driver’s seat, and peel out.

“Grandpa!” she yelled. She and Dion were abandoned and pursued, all at once.

“If he’s leaving, my mom must be—” Dion stood still on the sidewalk, stunned, ruined, empty. His mother, dead.

Nancy reached out for him.
If only Mama … If only I…

Dion went red-hot furious, threw her hand and her sympathy right off him. If this was how he felt, what was his dad going to do? He turned back to Nancy. “He’ll kill me for not being there. Run!”

Nancy didn’t have the energy to run, but she didn’t dare stop and face Niko. If she could get to where Grandpa was going, she might be able to help, to somehow send the energy and memories and knitting and weaving back into her Granny Tina. There has to be enough for both of us!

She raced behind Dion down an alley to the courtyard behind another block of apartments. The buildings rose around them. The bottoms of these fire escapes
were the overhead kind that extended to the ground if you were coming down, and sprang up too high for anyone to get up. “I’ll give you a boost,” said Dion.

“But my leg—”

“Can you jump?”

“Hardly!” she said.

“All right,” he said, and stood, hands on his hips, looking up at the clotheslines. Laundry, just hung and heavy with dampness, weighed the line low. Dion leaped up in an unearthly basketball leap and pulled the tail of a shirt toward the ground. “Grab the clothesline,” he told Nancy.

“What?”

“Grab it. Hold on.”

“And do what?” Heaving and terrified, they stood snarling at each other among the clotheslines.

“Follow me.”

“You think I’m an idiot.” Niko was coming.

“I think you could do it.”

“Based on what? Your desire to kill me?”

“My desire to— Nancy, you’re a spider, aren’t you?”