Cobwebs (20 page)

“How can you—” Her voice was shaken apart by his steps and by the fainting feeling that came over her every time she thought of her leg, the skin, the cut, the shaved hair.

Somehow he got her to her house. She didn’t ask how he knew where it was. “Mama!” she called as Dion banged on the door, and they practically fell into the basement apartment, collapsed into chairs in the kitchen.

“Oh, my Lord,” Mama said when she saw what had been done to Nancy. She was out the door in two seconds, up the stairs in three. But it took a few whole minutes to bring Granny Tina down to the ground floor.

Granny ought to have been in the wheelchair, Nancy could see that right away. Dion could have carried her down, maybe but Mama had helped her. And, judging by the expression on Granny’s face when she saw Dion, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere with him.

“Here?” she said to him in a dark and thunderous voice like nothing Nancy had ever heard. “Does your father know?”

Dion shook his head as though he were dizzy. He had only seen the Wound Healer once, and didn’t know she had glimpsed him in Rose’s hallway. He said, “It’s Nancy I’m here for.”

“Nancy!”

Some kind of steel came into Granny Tina. She leaned hard on the counter.

“I need you up here, Nancy.”

Dion helped her up, his hands on her waist, and for a moment she put her hands to his head. Granny elbowed him out of the way, and lifted Nancy’s skirt to find the cut. “Oh, honey,” she said. “What’s this you’ve done?” She stroked Nancy’s shaved calf.

“Dion brought me home,” Nancy told her, not answering. “He carried me all the way.”

“From where?”

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” said Dion stubbornly, though Nancy was sure he knew she didn’t want him to tell. “She got hit by a biker.”

“Carried you?” Granny straightened and regarded both Dion and Nancy with her darkest eyes. “Rachel, you take care of her.”

Rachel was already at the sink, readying cloths and
pads and liquids to clean the cut. Now she froze. “No!” she said ardently. She dropped the things onto the counter, leaned her hands on the edge, and glared at Granny. “No, Ma.”

Granny stood stony as a statue and said: “Rachel.”

It was as if the air stopped moving in the kitchen. Everyone held their breath, including Dion.

Grandpa appeared in the doorway. He caught his breath when he saw Dion, and Dion backed toward the garden door. “You?” Grandpa Joke said.

Nancy had had enough of this. “I’d never have made it here without Dion,” she told them all. “It’s not his fault some fool of a bike messenger mowed me down. Maybe he should have taken me to the emergency room?” Trickster Nancy, testing them all in front of an outsider.

“No,” Mama said steadily. “No, he did the right thing.” And she smiled at Dion and said, “I thank you.”

Granny and Grandpa watched Rachel and decided somehow together, without even exchanging a glance, to give way to her.

“Well, is somebody going to take care of my leg or what?”

“Your mother is,” said Grandpa. He handed Nancy
a clean sheet to drape over herself. Nancy tucked her shaved legs behind the ends of the sheet to hide them.

“It’s too much for me,” Rachel protested, seeming so concerned about what they were asking her to do that she didn’t wonder what Nancy was being so modest about.

“Exactly,” said Granny. She reached out and took Rachel’s hands. “I’m asking you to do it, though. We’re all asking.”

“Is that best?” asked Dion.
How dare he?

Grandpa touched Dion’s shoulder. “It will be,” he said. “It would take too much out of Tina to do it.”

Rachel pulled her hands harshly from her mother’s grasp and growled, “Everybody get out.” She stood over the sink, examining her hands—for dirt, Nancy guessed. She kept her back to them, and Nancy saw a tremble in her mother.

“Yes, Rachel,” said Granny in another voice Nancy had never heard, an accepting voice, a you’re-the-boss voice. Dion went out with the grandparents, and shut the door.

“All right, Mamba,” Nancy said. “What are you going to do that Granny couldn’t do? Cast a spell?”

Rachel said, “Hush, Nancy. There’s no magic involved here. It’s just nature.”

What kind of nature, Nancy was about to see.

W
ith a needle, with thread so silver it was nearly clear, with gauze woven as carefully as any heirloom blanket, Rachel fixed Nancy up.

“What kind of thread is that?” Nancy could see it coming off the spool, but it didn’t look so clear on it.

Rachel looked Nancy in the eye and said hoarsely, “It’s silk.” She threaded it through her hand before she fed it through the needle. Nancy, staring, saw the thread thicken as it passed through her mother’s hand. Rachel, too, watched the thread closely and began to breathe more normally.

“Is this what Granny’s doing for Dion’s mother?”

“Is that his name? Your fly on the wall?”

Nancy nodded, wondering where he was. “Mama, answer me.”

“This is all she
can
do,” Rachel said.

“Meaning what?”

“I mean, if this doesn’t work for his mother, well, there isn’t anything more.”

“There’s nothing stronger?”

The question stilled Rachel’s hands, but then she went on adjusting the thread, her eyes on her work. “So now that you know about your father, what do you think?”

Nancy wasn’t expecting the question, not with her mother here doing natural magic, or whatever this was. Doing healing. “Dangerous,” she whispered, mindful of Dion nearby. “It scares me. He’s so vulnerable. He could be squashed! Thing is, Ma—” She stopped, feeling the needle poking through her skin. Through her skin!

Rachel paused. “Does this hurt, Nancy?”

Nancy shook her head. “Don’t know why.”

They said nothing for a moment, one feeling the strangeness of a needle penetrating, the other struggling to swallow the sensation of being the one to push it through.

Rachel shakily asked, “Thing is what?”

Nancy said, “He acts indestructible. Like he’s James Bond. Double-oh-Ned.”

Her mother laughed fondly.

“Ma, could I—”

“What?”

“Mama. Could I be transformed that way? The way Dad does?”

Mama swallowed, unwinding gauze carefully, not stretching it too far. “It seems unlikely,” she said. The gauze came off a larger spool than the thread, clouding in a way that seemed more than a trick of light. Nancy took Rachel’s lead and didn’t mention it.

“Why? Because it hasn’t happened yet?”

“It’s not impossible, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, it has to be a very strong strain.”

“You mean it’s hard for him?”

“Yes.
No,
I mean a
genetic
strain,” Rachel said. “Dad’s a real throwback. It’s unusual, even among spiders.”

“Even among spider-humans, you mean. It’s normal, among spiders.”

“How can you joke?”

Nancy rolled her eyes. “How can you not?”

“Because the next one could be you.”

“Couldn’t it be
you?”

“No,” Rachel said most definitely. “To make a match with someone like me—a healer, down both sides of my family—”

“You are?”

“Yes,” her mother said. “As much as Granny Tina is. I’m supposed to be. And you lose the use of it if you don’t practice. But how can I have a practice when I can’t go out?”

“Mamba, are you worried the strain will be lost in me?”
No wonder they watch me so closely.

“It’s what your grandpa says. You keep us all connected. It’s an enormous responsibility.”

Mama didn’t know what she’d been up to lately, the responsibility she’d been trying to share with Ned. “And what if nothing develops?”

Rachel had finished wrapping Nancy’s leg, first in the silvery gauze, then in a normal, store-bought hospital-white gauze. Now she pulled Nancy’s skirt off over her head and took a pair of her own soft long johns from a drawer. Together, she and Nancy drew them up
over Nancy’s feet and began to lift them higher.

“Your legs!”

“I know. A disaster.” Nancy pulled the long johns higher.

Rachel tugged them back. “You shaved.”

The lump in her throat was back. “I’m sorry!”

“Sorry?
Nancy, I thought you realized … Tell me again how you got hit by that bike.” Rachel called out, “Mother!”

The door swung open and Granny Tina was there; she must have been just outside the door, in the living room, while Rachel had been working on Nancy. Dion was nowhere in sight.

“Mother, she shaved,” said Rachel.

“And nearly got herself killed,” said Granny Tina sarcastically. “See where it got you. Stupid sheep!”

And Nancy suddenly got what they were saying, what they’d
been
saying and she’d been resisting all along: that it was her hair that let her know when the subway was coming, when Dad or Dion was near, her hair that acted as a sort of extra sense or reflex. Rachel helped Nancy down from the counter, made her lean on the counter as she hopped toward the doorway to
the greenhouse. “You think if I hadn’t shaved, I wouldn’t have had this accident?” Her mother and grandmother exchanged glances, their eyes glowing.

In the greenhouse Rachel sat Nancy on the loom bench to rest a moment. “Is that what
you
think?” Rachel asked her. She pulled the bands off Nancy’s braids and began to fluff out her hair.

Nancy felt jolted, jangled, and nauseated again. “I want to lie down,” she said. “Where’s Dad? Where’s Dion?”

“Not here,” said Mama. “I called Ned. Grandpa’s going to bring you over there later. But first, take a nap. Rest a while. You’ve had a shock.” She laid one of her soft blankets beneath the loom.

Nancy wriggled onto the blanket and lay gingerly on her back. She thought,
The hair on my legs is already growing again.

“This hair thing,” she said. “Is it unusual?”

“Not among spiders,” Rachel said, smiling.

What would happen if Dion grew back his hair?

Above her the threads snapped in place, grayish-white like a map being printed in a newspaper, the street lines crisscrossing, crosscrissing. What if they
added on to each side of Manhattan, filled in the river with more and more streets all the way across to Brooklyn?
Think of the added humming, different without the river in between, think of the change in the rhythm of the city.
Nancy heard it now:
swoosh
went the shuttle through the shed.
Boom
went the beater, pressing the new street into the newsprint.
Bam
went the beater, thrown back out of the way.
Clunkety
went the foot on the treadle.
Clash
went the heddle frames switching position.
Swoosh. Boom. Bam. Clunkety. Clash. Swoosh boom bam clunkety clash.

Rachel was back into her rhythm. Nancy dozed off. Tina made her slow, creaking way out to the greenhouse.

Words flew unheeded far over Nancy’s head.

“You know, she might—”

“She could—”

“Oh, Ma, do you think so?”

“She’s got to learn to ignore the world—”

“To focus on a feeling—”

“She can’t do that if she doesn’t feel—”

“She can’t feel if she’s just following—”

“I don’t think she will anymore, Rachel.”

“That boy’s been following her—”

“She’s been following that boy—”

“His mother’s the one—”

“And his father—”

“What are we going to do about them?”

“How did she ever find that boy?”

That boy.

Nancy woke to the sound of weaving, her ears full of it. Started to hear the difference in the heddle positions. Started to hear the difference in the treadles.

Her eyes opened, waited to see, as well as hear, what would come next. Started to see how the street-threads were going to fall into place, in advance. The ground was solid and still and safe beneath her. She tested the pull on the wound on her thigh, slowly bending her leg at the hip, at the knee. She reached a hand toward her mother and felt Rachel’s strong arms pull her up from the floor.

“How’s it feel?”

“Okay,” Nancy said. She put weight on her foot gingerly, moving toward the door. “I want to go to Dad’s,” she said.

Rachel nodded. That was odd: though Mama didn’t believe she’d ever go out again, she must have believed in her healing.

Grandpa was waiting in the car. Nancy walked carefully up the stairs, the way a spider makes its way toward a new hole in its web.
Will it hold?
She had figured out a new idea while she half slept under the loom. Maybe a fly in a web
was
stuck, but it changed the way the day went for the spider. Without it, the pattern would be different: the web untorn, the spider still hungry. She herself, Nancy walking slowly up the stairs, was a difference.
The pattern will change,
she thought bravely,
because I am here.
“Amen,” she said to that.

I
t wasn’t that Nancy was slow. She just hadn’t realized, before she shaved her legs and let her human side overpower her spider side for a few days. Now she saw what a human, even another spider person, would see in her father. If you could trap the Angel of Brooklyn, you might bend him to your use. Him or
her.

“Can’t you see?” Nancy asked Ned, tapping her finger on
The New York Times.
They were finishing a breakfast of eggs and brioche from the Uprising Bakery, a special treat to soothe Nancy’s hurt leg—and psyche, said Ned.

“See what? Want another brioche?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t get enough to eat this morning. “You think you’re following Niko Papadopolis’s work. But he’s following yours.”

Dad didn’t deny it. He ran his fingers through his hair, leaned his head against her arm, and sighed. “What’s that you say, Nancy … ‘small, but wiry’? That’s me, too, you know.”

“You’re not exactly small, Dad.”

“Well, I
can
be. That big oaf can’t keep up with me.”

“Dion says he plays basketball, Dad. Got a jump shot like you wouldn’t believe.”

Ned nodded. “So he’s a
jumping
spider?”

“Yes.”