Cobwebs (26 page)

She felt her eyes flare open the way she had that time on the roof when the mugger was below. It was a
gut reaction of fear. It was a gut call to act.

“What would you know about that?” Niko was
coming.
Could Dion jump like that?

He reached toward her, and she recoiled. “I just want to—” He reached again, and cupped his hand around her cheek. “Trust me,” he said.

She knew she wasn’t the first girl in the history of the world to be persuaded by such a request. But again rose up the something deep that told her to go with him. “What do you know about being a spider?” she asked.

“I know,” he said. Niko was coming. “Nothing bad,” Dion said. “Hold the rope and jump.”

She grasped the rope in her two hands. “Your father—”

“Hold on tight!”

He gripped the other rope in his hand, and was pulling hard toward his chest with muscles he must have gotten from his father. Thanking the universe for making her small and wiry, Nancy sailed up toward the fire escape as if she were a shirt clothespinned on. When she reached the iron railing of the fire escape, she held the line steady. Along came Dion hand over hand, quick as a spider monkey on hands that were callused now.

“Go!” he whispered up to her, the sound welling up against the brownstone walls.

He landed on the fire escape beside her. She grabbed his hand and pulled him up the flights, as fast as Ned had ever climbed, her thigh complaining. She crawled over the parapet, reached down to help Dion up.

Niko came leaping, like a basketball player, like a wolf spider, every jump an enormous pounce. He was behind them now, but they were younger, lighter. Across the rooftops they went. Nancy’s legs began to wobble beneath her as she ran and climbed and leaped the gaps, her knees like rubber, bending with no answering spring, her thigh screaming now.

And then the walls stopped, the roof fell away.

Below there was nothing but fire escapes and clotheslines,

fire escapes and clotheslines,

fire escapes and clotheslines.

Their straight lines and angles spun out of a center so deep it disappeared. With it Nancy’s gut spun, and she felt herself turning inside out, or wanting to, wanting to throw up and cry and fall or throw herself off. Too many instincts fought against one another, her mother’s urge
to be on the ground, her father’s yearning for the air.

“Down the fire escape!” she said.

No time for terror, just drop, descend. The second descent in one night, but there was no time to think of that. It had been bad enough to be in a hurry, but to be chased!

This was that rusty, awful kind of fire escape that needed a paint job, needed replacing, and the grit of corrosion flaked away under her hands, scraping them. She was taking too long. Her hands were so sticky with sweat and fear that the rust stayed with them and rubbed harder as she picked up more rust on the skin of her palms.

“Only as far as the clothesline,” said Dion. He grabbed the pulley rope at the top windows of this brownstone. It sloped away and up again to a window on the other side, but in the dip it nearly reached the line hung between the next set of floors down.

“Do this,” Dion said. He grasped the rope and stepped off the fire escape, dangling five stories up. Then gravity took over and his weight dragged the pulley rope into the dip, where he let go and caught the next line, then slid back to the other wall. Then down to the next and the next, as easily as if he were dangling from cell to
cell of his geodesic dome. Far below her, Nancy felt, as well as heard, his soft-soled boots land lightly on the wet pavement.

“Nancy, come on!”

Niko was only two rooftops away, headed straight for them.

“Nancy!” Dion’s voice sounded hoarse, desperate.

And she trusted him. She wrapped her fists around the rope, made her shaking legs pull her over the fire escape railing, stuck her heels through it backward to perch there quavering.

“Do it,” said Dion.

“Don’t!” yelled his father from above.

Nancy stepped into thin air.

Should she have trusted him?

Her body dropped sheer. She held onto the rope so hard it burned. Oh, it hurt, that jolt of her weight on her hands, her hands on the rope.

She rocketed down the rope slope to its center. Her right hand found the target. Her left hand fell shy, short and shy.

Her body slammed sideways. The clothesline snapped, broke like a thread. Nancy closed her eyes, an
instinct against the murderous ground beneath her. Oh, wrong, wrong! Nancy expected the concrete, the asphalt, the ground-in glass, the hard-packed dirt, the blades of grass.

It didn’t come. Instead there came a fragrance of flowers, of soap, of wind. The touch of fabric against her face: T-shirts, towels, baby diapers, all slowly rising. Nancy was as light as wind. The city was enormous around her. She opened her eyes to see someone’s boxer shorts, should-be-small polka dots like gigantic spots before her eyes. Gigantic? Or was she small? For the moment she was all darkness, part of the darkness, dark in the dark, wind in the wind.

Her left hand flailed, her right hand up above her head still held the rope. No, not a rope, no harsh burning clothesline this, but a soft thick cord that fit her hand and didn’t slide through it.

Look, Dad!

Look, Dion! And, thinking of him, came back to the form he knew. The toes of her Doc Martens touched the ground and Dion’s arms wrapped around her.

“Nancy. How did you do that?” A whisper like her heart.

“How?” It was too dark to do anything but feel that soft rope. She shook it off, shook Dion off.

“You stupid kids!” roared Niko from the roof. He stood staring down in horrified amazement.

“God,” said Dion. “God! I thought you were dead.
You
.”

Niko came leaping down the steps of the fire escape, all those stories up and getting nearer. “Girl!” he yelled. “Now I know what you’re all about.”

Some old bat stuck her head out a window and squealed when she saw him. “I’ll have the law after you all!”

“Nancy! Come on!” Dion said.

“I have to get to the hospital,” she told him, knowing it in her knees. She left him there on the ground, left his father on the steps, left his mother God-knew-where. She went after Grandpa, after Granny.

She knew, in the moment of turning the corner, that Dion had taken her by the hand and brought her the way he knew she wanted to go, the way Grandpa Joke had once led Granny Tina to the church.

E
MERGENCY
E
NTRANCE,
said the nearest lit-up sign.

I
t was his hands she fell for: large, with Italian olive skin, fine black hair feathering the backs.

And it was his eyes behind his glasses, large, intelligent, cinnamon brown as the back of one of her father’s horses, with now and then a little sparkle around the edges that made her wonder what he’d be like if he laughed. He didn’t laugh, not in that OR, with a mask over his mouth, not in this emergency room, in this curtained cubicle.

Push back the cobwebs, Nancy.
Those weren’t
her
memories, they weren’t real for her. But what she felt was real. Niko on the roof, telling her he knew what she was
about: did he mean he knew another spider when he met one? Dion on the ground, telling her to come down. Herself, dropping, while her heart rose up to the sky.

Had it been real, spinning silk, falling into the shape of a spider, coming down on eight legs instead of just two, up to the very last moment? Now that the chase was over, and Nancy’s body could move gently, her mind swung into motion. She pushed the memory across the space between her and her grandmother, reaching from deep within her.

Now was real, now in the emergency room waiting room, waiting forever, and finally, after four in the morning, looking up into Grandpa’s big brown eyes. They weren’t laughing. Nancy slid her arm through Grandpa’s elbow, noted the gray among the black hairs of his hand and arm. “Grandpa?” she began.

“Come see her, Nancy,” Grandpa Joke said. It was a long walk through a maze with no magic string to lead the way back out again. She passed little scary curtained cubicles and night-light doorways, wishing only to stop and plant herself on the floor and refuse to move forward with time. But her body kept going, and her mind did.

The only way Rachel could have come to Niko’s apartment was for Ned to have called her, which meant he had somehow heard Nancy’s calls, that he really had been the spider Nancy had saved.

And then the thought she had held off, the way she—or was it Granny Tina?—savored the idea of ice-cream after dinner, the fact that she had survived the fall from the high clothesline. At the time her thoughts had been end-of-life thoughts. She had accepted the thud of her body against the ground and merely waited for it to happen. Now, free of that ending, she relived the fall. A strand of silk from her own spinneret had cushioned her fall. The giant boxers on the line didn’t just mean big butts in the house (as Annette would have said, though there wasn’t much funny here and now), but a small Nancy falling—a small human Nancy, or a small spider Nancy.
Take it, Granny. It’s good news! It has to be!

What had made it happen? Needing it to happen? Wanting it to happen? Finally growing? Or Granny dying?

There was no stopping this walk down the hall. There was no stopping that fall from the roof. No stopping
the spiderness. She wanted to tell her dad, but maybe he already knew. She wanted to tell Dion, and maybe he knew, too. He’d been there.

She didn’t want to tell Grandpa Joke, who pressed his elbow against his side, caressing her arm. “Honey,” he said, “this night is going to just get longer.”

“Oh, Grandpa,” Nancy said. “If only Niko hadn’t kept us.”

Grandpa shook his head. “Niko didn’t realize you can’t change what’s going to happen. We can’t any of us change what’s going to happen.”

“Niko—” Her voice rose angrily, tears falling at last.

Grandpa touched his finger to her lips. “Niko wanted miracles,” he said.

An image of Grandpa’s hands came to her. An image of a church. Dion’s hands. The Emergency Entrance sign. A bridge, a web, a connection. The strand connecting Granny and her was stronger than most. “He wanted to trade Granny’s life for hers!”

“Granny did what she desired,” Grandpa Joke said.

“Maybe Granny could have been saved—”

“You can’t put up that wall, Nancy. Niko—he’s one of the family. He and Rose and those kids.”

“What family?” She stopped again, leaned on the cold concrete wall. “We don’t have any Greek cousins!”

Grandpa said, “They’re from a distant branch of the family.” He picked up her hand, saw the bright scrapes on her knees from Niko’s roof. He ran fingernails across her palm, and laid the silken tendrils he raked up gently over her scrapes.

“The boy knew we were the same kind,” he said. “He’s a connector, like you. You knew, too, in your way.”

“Knew what?” She rubbed her knees. There was a smooth substance there, drying up.

“About being a spider,” said Grandpa.

“All of us? Even you?”

“Who do you think got us all into this mess?”

“You’re the original connector,” she said.

Smiles in the midst of tears.

“What will happen to Dion and Mina now?”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“We’ll help them. Their father’s kind of crazy, Grandpa.”

“Not really, Nancy. We’ll forgive him. And they’ll help us, too.” He turned his head away, tried to hide his tears.

“How can they help us?”

“Nancy,” he said, looking at her closely. “When we left, Rose wasn’t dead. Maybe she’ll live. She’s young, strong—”

“Mama was there,” she told him, clasping his hand.

“Rachel?”
Oh, the hope and gladness in his eyes.

“Yes!” She didn’t have to tell him how Rachel had known they needed her, or why she’d come: because it finally became evident that Nancy wasn’t going to be able to take her mother’s place in the healing world. Grandpa clutched her hand five times harder, hauled her full-speed down the hallway.

“Tina!” he called. “I’m right here!” He pushed through a curtain into a tiny cubicle. “Can you hear me?” he said, louder.

Nancy stood back. Granny was like a shadow in the dimness of the nighttime hospital, a shadow becoming part of the darkness itself. “Joke?” her weak voice said.

“I’m here!” Grandpa Joke was holding her hand, and crying.

Like the day Rachel was born and every day since. He’s always been here for me.

What did it mean that she had Granny’s memories? Her life was passing before her eyes. Before Nancy’s
eyes.
Don’t forget a single thing, she told herself.
Or so Granny told her. It would all seem different tomorrow, in the light. All the cobwebs would be covered in morning dew, every drop reflecting the ground and sky. Nancy pushed through the curtain and went all the way in. The cubicle was barely wider than the bed. Grandpa backed out to give them room.

“Listen, Granny! Mama went to help Rose. She was there! I saw her shoes. All the way to Cobble Hill, Granny. Isn’t that impressive? Granny,
listen.”
Green shoes,
she thought at Granny.
Green eyes. Mama’s hands on the loom, on the silk, on a hurt place.

Granny said, “Your Grandpa Joke was adorable when he was younger. Absolutely adorable like that boy Dion.” It was hard to imagine pigeon-toed old knock-kneed baldy-headed Grandpa Joke being adorable. Like Dion.

Nancy thought,
It’s more than trusting him or feeling sorry for him.
She realized:
I love him.

“I love him,” said Granny. “Josie, will you tell them for me?”

Nancy took Granny’s hand, held on hard. “Josie’s not
here right now, Gran. But
soon.
I’m Nancy.”
Know me. Know me!

Granny Tina’s voice grew soft and tired. “I know, Nancy.” And then, “Do you know, sweet lamb, my whole life has been one great long beautiful time?”

Nancy laid her head down near Granny’s knee. Granny’s hand moved gently to her head. “Such curls, like Ned’s head. My beautiful girl. Such curls.” Her hand rested on Nancy’s head and Nancy stayed there, unmoving, not daring to cry, thinking: the stores in their neighborhood, the birds in the backyard, the slides in the playground, Granny teaching her to climb them.