Cobwebs (2 page)

“Look at it, Nancy,” he said. “House!” He threw one hand toward the little poky rooftop penthouse, its dirty
glass panes that let in only faint checkers of light. “And garden!” He threw his other hand toward the broken, crumbling cement border of a hard, cracked rectangle of dirt. Then he leaped onto the wall at the edge of the roof on his skinny legs in the black jeans, and threw both arms wide to New York City and the sky. “I’m in love!”

“Dad, don’t!”

He jumped down, bouncing a little in his springy way. “Sweetheart,” he said. “Little egg. It’s going to be beautiful.” He stroked his strong fingers over the zillion black ringlets that floated around Nancy’s head—the way his would if he didn’t wind it up in dreadlocks. He walked her toward the odd little penthouse, to the open door. The house was one big metal frame, white bricks from the floor to hip level, then glass to the ceiling. “We’ll scrub every window,” he said, making it sound like that would be good entertainment.

When Nancy squinted at him, rainbows appeared around his head. She made herself lighten up and tease him. “We?” she said.

Her dad grinned in relief.

“There’s plenty of sun up here,” Nancy said.

“Yes! A garden!” He whirled from the edge of the
roof to the house. “We can fix it all,” he said. “We’ll need some furniture, but it’s springtime, roof time. There’ll be work from now to November. I’ll make you a loft bed, Nance.” His voice changed, rose. He wanted her there. “Or a hammock. What about a hammock? You can swing in the summer breezes and never even know you’re not in Jamaica.”

A hammock? So temporary. “I love it at Mama’s,” Nancy said, sticking up for her mama, Rachel, for Rachel and her basement apartment, with its three sets of stairs, one leading down from the street, one from Granny’s apartment upstairs, and one from the courtyard with the greenhouse studio. Rachel had a cozy trundle that pulled out from under her bed for Nancy. Of course, a trundle bed was temporary, too, a just-in-case-Nancy’s-here bed.

Nancy’s parents loved each other but lived apart. She was strung between them like clothes on a pulley clothesline, going back and forth. Only Mama’s end of the clothesline never moved, and Dad’s always did. That had always seemed like a bad thing until now, when Dad’s end seemed like it might be settling down, too.

“Nance,” Ned said. She kept her eyes down.
He’s not
coming back this time,
she thought.
He’s moving to this rooftop, which he’s in love with. He said so himself.
He lifted her chin and saw the tears. “Nancy Greene-Kara,” he said. “You are a Greene and a Kara. This is your home, not just mine.”

“This rotten roof?” she said. “This dusty, cobwebby old wreck full of—”

“Our
rotten roof,” Ned said. He grabbed her hands and danced her across the roof again, kicking out his feet in the pointy cowboy boots he wore when he wasn’t roofing. Water tanks, chimneys, and TV antennas spun around them. Nancy couldn’t help laughing along, and stomped her feet.

When they stopped, puffing, Ned raised one finger and said, “The first thing we have to do is learn how to get down.”

She should have known. To most people that would mean the stairs or the elevator. But her father was very big on emergency procedures, precautions, just-in-cases. He led her to the edge of the roof. She took one look. “Oh, Dad, no.”

“Oh yes, little egg. You’re more than a ground dweller.”

“Listen, you old Arach-Ned,” she said. “You can’t turn me into a drop-and-dragger just because you make me dwell on the roof.”

“It’s in your genes, Nancy.”

She held up her palms so close to his face that he lost focus. “It’s not in my hands!”

He pulled his head back to see her clearly. “Better late than never,” he said. He turned her toward the edge of the roof. “Go on, Nance.”

I
t wasn’t enough to stand atop the wall. Next Nancy had to cross her ankles and turn around on her toes, turn her back to the air and climb down backward over the precipice. She turned, and froze.

Ned’s father’s father had built the Empire State Building, riveting steel bolts to steel beams high in the atmosphere.
His
father’s father strung the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge, straddling the brown brick tower, with nothing but the East River to catch him. And Ned’s daughter? A little bug afraid of heights.

Ned laid his large hands on top of Nancy’s. They were always slightly sticky, and now he turned her hands over
and rubbed his palms against them, to give her traction.

She tried to stand firm the way the boy on the rail had, though her hair threatened to act like a sail and pull her off the wall, though her stomach quavered and quaked.

“Don’t look down,” said Ned. But
he
looked down casually, as if he were reading a subway map, so Nancy did, too. Her instinct kicked in, the bad instinct that said,
Go no farther. Hold on tight. Don’t step out. Do it and you’ll be nothing but a squashed blob on the sidewalk.
“Let go, Nancy,” he said.

“Why?” she asked.

“It’s safest this way,” he said. “If your body’s going to learn to take care of you, you have to put it in these situations. Now go.”

Nancy wondered how strongly the fire escape was struck on the brown wall of the house. She felt her way down the ladder to the first landing, the one that stretched above the windows of the apartment under Dad’s new penthouse.

“What are you afraid might happen?” asked Ned.

“I’m afraid of splattering!”

He nodded. “I thought you were small but wiry.”

Nancy grinned. It was what she always said. But now: “If only I had spinnerets…”

Spinnerets made lines like bungee cords. They saved you from falling. But Nancy didn’t have them. Yet. Would she ever? She had grown lately, it was true. Her hair was longer and her legs were longer and Granny said her face was bony now, not soft. Her chest wasn’t bony anymore. Still, there were no spinnerets inside her, no silk.

“What you folks doing out there on that fire escape?” a white-faced blond woman scolded from the nearest window.

Ned leaned out from the roof to see. He would have tipped his hat if he were wearing one. “We’re your new neighbors on the fifth floor,” he said.

The woman leaned out and stared up, her mouth like a fish’s. “This building got no fifth floor.”

“The roof, I mean. Or should I say roofhouse? Penthouse?”

Nancy didn’t dare laugh. Here was her dad, already making the neighbors think they had a freak on their roof. If only they knew…

“This how you going downstairs every time?”

“This? Oh no. Emergency measures, that’s all,” said Ned. The window slammed shut, and Nancy saw the woman walk away inside it, shaking her head. “Emergency measures,” Ned said again. “Go on, Nance.”

Emergency measures were what Dion felt were needed just then. He felt it from the other side of Brooklyn, the very boundary of it, on the railing of the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge where he sat staring toward the Promenade a mile away and thinking about the girl he’d seen there. Not the crabby Asian one. The other girl, the one with the hair and the eyes and the thin legs in Doc Martens with painted-on polka dots, nutty shoes that his little sister, Mina, would like.

Dion whipped off his Mets cap and wiped the palm of his hand across his bald head. A hollow feeling grew in the pit of his stomach, a feeling of being scared, not hungry. His palms turned sticky and sweaty. He wondered if this was an anxiety attack, something he’d heard of from his mother. His mother … Was he going to be like this from now on, because of what his
father had caught his mother doing? Anyone who would jump off a roof, on purpose to fall…How could he go home and have dinner with such a person? Or with the person who would let her get into such a risky position?

“Stop chasing that Angel of Brooklyn,” his mother, Rose, had said. “Leave well enough alone.” She thought Dad was selling out, and selling the Angel out, and maybe selling the city out in the bargain. Dad said she was a bleeding heart, so worried about desperate people’s problems that she didn’t worry enough about her own family.

Rose had gotten angry enough with Niko that she threatened to hurt herself, then tried to. Did she think by hurting herself she’d hurt him?

Dion made himself think about the girl on the Promenade instead. Maybe he’d find her in that neighborhood or somewhere close by, if he hung around a lot. He pulled himself into a more comfortable position on the railing and suddenly felt a whoosh of nausea that came out of nowhere. He slammed his feet down onto the walkway and leaned there, gripping the rail, steadying himself.

There was nothing under Nancy. The fire escape ended a story above the street. Nothing but strips of rusty fire escape held her up. “Crawl over the edge,” Ned advised. “Hang on by your fingertips.”

With her hands above her head, she was six and a half feet high. (Ned had measured, so that she’d know.) It wasn’t so far to the ground. Far enough, though. Her knees crackled when she landed. Relief for Nancy.

Down came Ned.

“Chicken,” she said. Because there was no crackle landing for him. He landed softly on those slick cowboy boots that clacked when he touched the pavement. A strand of soft gray silk slowed his fall, glimmering just enough to be visible.

“Hey,” he said, as they set off for the grocery store. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“
I
did,” said Nancy. He let her get away with it, because, while she was still sweating, he was perfectly cool.

N
ed was a son of Anansi. His mother Aso’s side of the family were the African-Jamaican magical tricksters, able to leap and fall and disappear into shadows. Rachel’s were the Scottish orb weavers (Granny’s forebears, descendants of the unstoppable spider that had inspired Robert the Bruce) that hid among the thistles and the heather. Then there was Grandpa Joke’s side—just plain old Italians. Nancy had her father’s black hair—only a little softer, more Italian. She had her father’s brown skin—only a little lighter. Her mother was pale white. Nancy’s eyes were all Rachel, though. And inside?

“Anything new?” Mama Rachel and Granny Tina had been asking Nancy too often lately (for the last three years or so). Rachel said she had begun to become what she was at around thirteen. Ned began a little later, as boys do. Nancy was older than both.

“Same old beautiful me,” she told them, though it made a sharp hurt inside her to say it.

Her mother and grandmother turned away to hide their faces. It was Grandpa Joke who stroked the hair back from her forehead and said, “That’s fine.” But lately she thought he was the one who looked most worried of them all. There was no special spiderness coming from anywhere inside her, no matter how hard Nancy listened for it, watched for it, waited for it. It seemed that so far Rachel and Ned’s genes had canceled each other out in Nancy.

Canceled out meant no heights and no depths. When Nancy grew dizzy on one of Dad’s rooftops, she’d leave. Down to Mama’s basement, her pied-à-terre. Foot on the ground. Where, if you stood in the kitchen looking out toward the greenhouse, your nose was on a level with the grass. The truth was, Nancy wasn’t really comfortable anywhere.

But she tried. It was the old nature/nurture question, which Nancy had studied in freshman biology. The question was what made you who you were: The nature you got from your parents’ genes? Or your experiences? Her parents couldn’t change her nature, but they were determined not to skimp on experiences, whether or not they drove Nancy nuts in the process. Rachel taught her weaving, that was her way, and asked for nothing more. But Ned was always pushing her, leading her, guiding her to the edges of things. And then telling her not to look down!

Clorox and Ajax and Windex. Sponges and mops and ammonia. A ball-peen hammer and brass nails.
The New York Times
and the
New York Post
and the
Daily News.
General Tso’s chicken and moo shu pancakes and plum sauce. Red wine, and tomato juice and vodka so Ned could make his Bloody Mary in the morning. A box of Rice Krispies for Nancy.

Outside the cleaned-up windows, hours later, the lights of the city twinkled on and the moon rose up. Furniture would come later. For tonight, Nancy and Ned would sleep in sleeping bags, cocooned in their
own warmth. Reflected light dappled the ceiling.

“Thirty thousand nights,” Ned said.

“What?” Nancy was trying to go directly to sleep without thinking of the drop outside.

“That’s what we’re given on this planet.”

“Thirty thousand?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a long time.”

“Long enough to get sick of them, take them for granted.”

“So?” she asked slowly.

“So, we don’t even look up to see if the stars are there or the moon is out.”

“I do.”

Ned rolled onto his stomach, leaned on his elbows. “What if you only got one night, Nancy egg? It’d be magic! You couldn’t stop looking. You’d never go to sleep, all night long.” He sat up so that he could see out the windows. He sat there so long that at last Nancy sat up, too, and put a hand on his shoulder.