Cobwebs (22 page)

What came to her mind most readily was homeroom, and what they would say.

“Heard about that Nancy Greene-Kara? Heard how she’s half insect?”

“Well, she always bugged me!”

“Knitting with those knitting needles like antennas.”

“You know, she didn’t even shave her legs.”

“Ew. Nasty.”

It figures,
thought Nancy.
The first person I ever felt like I belonged with should drag me into this.
It occurred to her that she’d been in it before she ever met Dion. She’d have been in it one way or another, would have met him one way or another.

On his way to the next dusty rooftop, Dion caught the drift of Nancy’s heavy thoughts.
It figures,
he thought.
The first person I ever felt like I belonged with should turn out to be someone who wouldn’t take a chance on me. Scared. Well, who could blame her?

N
ancy passed Saturday night and most of Sunday on the roof, getting better at putting weight on her leg, feeling alone even when Ned was there, and worrying.

Someday soon the phone at Granny and Grandpa’s was going to ring, and they would get up and go to the house on the curved street. Nancy, as usual, would ride along in the backseat, to keep Granny company during the time when Grandpa went inside to check the condition of the patient. If Granny used that time to tell Nancy one of her action-inspiring stories, would there be enough left for Granny herself?

No one else would be admitted to see Rose. Niko
Papadopolis would want no spectators. He wouldn’t care if Granny sat in the car while the checking went on, and he wouldn’t care if Nancy was left alone once the treatment began.

Nancy devised a plan around the only person there she thought she could wrap around her finger. The plan depended on the jump rope Dion had fixed. She packed it into her backpack on Sunday afternoon when Grandpa came in his car to take her back to Carroll Gardens. Ned and Grandpa, each holding one elbow, got her up the stairs, though she told them they didn’t need to: already her thigh was pulling and hurting less than this morning, further testimony to Rachel’s healing ability.

“Hey,” she called, West Virginia-style.

Granny sat in the stuffed chair by the front window in the living room, as if she were waiting for something.

“I started knitting my first sleeve!” Nancy announced from the doorway.

No answer. She went and stood in front of Granny, holding up her hands with a jump rope cat’s cradle in between. Granny Tina didn’t think twice, reached in with both hands and turned it into the soldier’s bed.
Nancy took it back and made candles, the one where Granny had to twist her pinkies around the strings while she pulled it into the manger form. Manger was the first move Nancy didn’t know, and she watched closely to get it right.

But she wasn’t holding it right, because Granny went
tch,
like a little girl, and said in a cranky voice, “I can’t reach, Josie. Hold it closer.”

Nancy glanced at her face, but Granny’s eyes were on the strings as she twisted them into place. She held her hands up to Nancy again.

“I’m Nancy,” Nancy told her. Granny blinked.

Nancy’s turn to make the soldier’s bed. Granny’s for candles. Nancy’s to try the candles-to-manger transformation. She tucked her pinkies under, the way Granny had done it, plunged her fingers into the right spaces. But the strings slid through her fingers and, once again, it was just a big loop of jump rope. “Oh,” Nancy sighed, crestfallen.

Granny took the rope and Nancy thought she was going to show her, but instead Granny wrapped it around her own fingers. They spun and popped and plunged, and she let go with cat’s whiskers. Held them
up in front of her face and meowed with an expression worthy of entertaining Mina herself.

Then her fingers went dipping and diving again, and when they stopped there was a perfect bridge between them, looped and wound through every finger, exquisitely tense. She said words in Italian, words Nancy couldn’t understand, except that they included her grandfather’s name:
“La Scaletta di Giacomo.”

“Huh?”

“Oh, come on, honey, you’ve heard that old story. It’s right in the Bible. Jacob’s ladder, with the angels ascending and descending between heaven and earth.” Granny turned her hands so that the ladder hung vertically.

“Show me how,” Nancy said.

Granny showed her. It was just a few steps beyond cat’s whiskers, and when it was done, the stretching tension between Nancy’s fingers was perfect and divine, truly the most satisfying thing she’d yet made with her hands. She wanted more, and quickly wound her hands through it again. She wished there were more steps going onward from it, but where would they go? It was perfect as it was, a ladder, a connection, a bridge between heaven and earth.

It wasn’t exactly a story, but it gave Nancy something new all the same.

By Monday Nancy’s legs had a light stubble. “Is this what’s supposed to happen?” she whispered to Annette in homeroom.

“Yeah. I shave mine every other day.”

“I hadn’t realized it would be a regular thing.”

Annette rolled her eyes. “Where have you been hiding? Everybody knows the hair comes back thicker once you’ve shaved.”

It was the first piece of good news Nancy had heard in a while.
“Really?”

Annette scrutinized her face. “You
like
that idea?”

“How was the dance?” Nancy asked quickly. She pulled up her kneesocks and patted her skirt where the bandage was. She hadn’t told Annette about her accident and didn’t show her the bandage. Nancy didn’t know a lot about medicine, especially spider medicine, but she knew that stitches shouldn’t heal—and disappear—within forty-eight hours of a big gash in the skin.

Annette had had a good time with Jimmy Velcro. It made a lump come in Nancy’s throat, hearing about
how they’d danced. Nancy pulled her knitting out of her backpack and sat working her way past the elbow of her sleeve.
Let them talk if they want to.
She hadn’t seen Dion. Not on the roof, not on the train, not in the grocery store.

“Hey, Nancy, whatcha knitting/crocheting/doing?”

“My Grandma/Nana/Nona does that. She made me the best socks/scarf/sweater.”

“Nancy, can you knit socks?”

“I never tried,” she said.

“You could, I bet, if you could make a sweater with stripes/colors/ribs like that. You could go into business.”

“We
all
oughta knit socks. Then we could quit worrying about our hairy legs.”

Everybody cracked up, Nancy included, all of them laughing together. Who’d have thought it? Annette came and leaned on her shoulder and asked, teasing, “Is that knitting or purling?”

“I’ll make you a baby bonnet, Annette,” Nancy threatened.

“Listen,” Annette whispered. “When I went to the dance? My mommy had a
date.”

“Really?”

“Wouldn’t that be great if she got married again? Then I could go out all I want.”

Nancy was astonished.

“Is that what you want?” she asked.

“I do
now,”
said Annette. She kissed Nancy’s cheek and whispered. “That Jimmy Velcro …”

“Ooh la la?” asked Nancy. It was what they used to say about watching smooching in movies.

“Oh, very ooh la la!” said Annette. She turned back to the other girls, giggling. That was all right, Nancy thought, and considered the idea of Annette kissing Jimmy Velcro. She would have liked to tell Annette about Dion. But she wondered if Annette would understand any more than she’d understand if Nancy told her she was never ever shaving her legs again.

“H
ow do you heal her?” Nancy asked Granny. She was forking up spaghetti out of the pot and serving Granny for once, instead of the other way around. Granny was feeble, but at the moment her eyes (and head) seemed clear.

“It’s like giving her energy.” Granny pulled the pitcher across the table, poured beautiful red sauce over the noodles.

“Granny, you haven’t got any energy to spare.”

“Why haven’t I?”

“You’re old,” she said flatly. “You’re sick. I was trying to show you my sleeves this afternoon and it was like you weren’t here.”

“Maybe I wasn’t!” Granny said carelessly. “Are you worried I’ll die?”

Nancy stuck a knot of noodles into her mouth to fill it, and didn’t say a word.

“What do you think happens when you die?” Granny asked.

“How do I know?” Nancy said with her mouth full.

“Listen, girl, there’s only so much energy in the world.”

“Right! So you’d better
conserve
it while you can.”

“While I can! Honey, you know there’s always the
same
energy in the world. When something dies, its energy goes into something else to make it live, or make it stronger.”

“Or to transform into something else,” Nancy said.

Granny pointed her fork in a way Grandpa Joke would have disapproved of. “What do you mean,
transform?”

“Change into something else, the way heat changes water.” She remembered this from science classes, but had never seen how it applied to anyone she knew.

“Answer me this: does the heat
want
to change the water?”

“No.”

“Well, what if it did?”

“That’s like saying a ray of sun can direct its energy into a specific drop of water. It doesn’t work that way.”

“How do you know it doesn’t?”

Nancy put spaghetti in her mouth and studied Granny’s dark eyes, the thinness of her hair over her scalp, the shakiness in her hands. She hoped her own hands would never shake like that. Her hands that had made Jacob’s ladder and cat’s cradle just yesterday … “Can
you?
” she asked Granny.

“I can choose where to direct my energy.”

Nancy didn’t say anything, not yet.

“Most parents direct it to their children.”

“But not you?”

“Who says I’m not? There’s some left for my grandchild, too.”

“Haven’t I got enough energy?” Nancy asked cautiously.

“Haven’t you been feeling different lately?”

In more ways than one. “Yes. But I thought that was because of me.”

“Of course. You’ve got plenty of your own energy, Nancy.”

“Then—”

“Nothing else?” Granny’s eyes held her steady, but a wisp of cloud had begun to come into them. She was tired.

“Those stories you’ve been telling me,” Nancy said. “They seem so moving. Real. Like I’m
in
them.”

“You’ve heard them before.”

“Afterward I try things I wouldn’t try before.”

“Or is it just that you understand better?”

“Or am I changing?”

“Nancy. Don’t you want to grow up?”

What a stupefying question. Nancy put down her fork, sat there with her hands to her cheeks, then nodded slowly.

“Don’t you want to grow stronger?” Again, Granny pointed the fork at Nancy, her eyes intense, though cloudier, her hand trembling.

“Maybe.” Nancy was afraid to say more.

“So?”

“What will I have to do, if I get stronger?”

“What will you
have
to do?” Granny hit the table so hard that she lost hold of her fork, which flew across the table and landed in Nancy’s lap. “Ask what you’ll be
able
to do!”

“But, Granny—”

Granny was still speaking, saying over and over, under her breath, “Just like your mother. Just like your mother.”

“I am
not!”

Granny looked up at her, muttering, “Don’t you
dare
be.”

Nancy banged the door of the greenhouse open. Rachel was on the floor, inside the loom, warping up yet again, as though there were some great rush on gray silk shawls. “Mama!”

Rachel practically clobbered herself, jumping. “What?”

“Pay attention.” Nancy climbed into the loom beside her mother, crouched holding her skirt around her feet, knees to her chin. “There’s a woman—”

“What woman!”

“She lives in Cobble Hill.”

Rachel’s face closed up. “Yes …”

“She’s got a little girl, just ten, did you know that? And she’s sick, Mama. She’s so sick, she can’t heal. And Granny’s helping her. She’s trying to heal her.”

Rachel nodded. “It’s not going well,” she said.

“It’s taking her
away.”

“The woman?” asked Rachel.

“She’s taking Granny with her.”

Rachel’s eyes reflected the color of the grass outside.

“Her name is Rose Browning. Mama, you can help her, and she can help you. You’ve got to.”

Rachel ran her strong, graceful, hardworking hand across her silver-gray warp strings. “What help do I need?”

“She’s a counselor, Mama. A therapist. She could help you get out of here.”

“Can’t you see I don’t want to get out?” Mama’s voice was as languid as the green afternoon.

“Mama, I love you. Dad loves you. What are you going to do, stay inside forever?”

“It’s not in me, Nancy,” Rachel said.

“Oh,
nonsense,
” said Nancy. The word was stronger than the worst swear, and said exactly what she meant.
Nonsense,
like not listening to the universe, fate or destiny or whatever Grandpa said. “It’s what people choose that matters!” she hollered.

“Or what chooses them?” her mother yelled back.

“Like my sweater stripes?” asked Nancy. “I don’t
know which is true, Mama. Only this—what you always tell me to look at—the pattern. But
you’re
not looking.” She strode out of the greenhouse and down the steps to Rachel’s apartment, and there she spun around and stood nose-level with the grass, like Thumbelina, stuck in the hole with the mole.

“You ought to, for Dad and me,” she said to her mother, loud in the shady courtyard.

Rachel rose and came to the door of the greenhouse, the fingertips of one hand fussing with the fingers of the other. “How can I?” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“Not even for Granny?” Nancy said.

In a daze the Greene Mamba went back to her loom, picked up her shuttle, sat, and trod on the treadle, resumed sliding the shuttle back and forth.

Nancy dashed back to the greenhouse. She sank to the floor beside her mother, leaned her head on Rachel’s knee. Rachel couldn’t press the treadles that way. “Oh, Ma,” Nancy moaned. “My granny. She’s losing power, Grandpa says.”