The Thread (17 page)

Callie seemed to think Shiva was still there, that he had spoken. “Do you mean that Kali is the same as Jesus?” she asked him. “For a Hindu?”

Kali’s eyes flashed and she drew herself up taller. “I am not Jesus. This is not like a matching test, where you can draw a line between two things and say they are the same. Do not believe my followers are merely watered-down
Christians
.”

Again, Callie seemed to have heard something different. She nodded, even smiled a little. She turned back to the blue mist in the corner. “So what was that about the particle and the wave?”

For a moment, in the midst of all the weirdness, all the blueness, Kirin heard Poppy’s voice in his head. His words were so calm and reasonable, his voice so familiar, that Kirin felt tears of longing spring into his eyes. He blinked them away. “It’s physics,” he told Callie. “Quantum physics. Light can be either a wave or a particle. When it’s a wave it moves through time-space. When it’s a particle, it’s just—there. In one spot. Not moving through time or space.”

Callie frowned. “So what’s that mean? And how can it be?” She came closer to him, stared up into his face. “Something’s made you cry. What’s wrong, Kirin? What else has happened? Besides—” She waved her hand at the room filled with pulsing blue light. “Besides all this.”

He didn’t want to tell her.

He had to tell her.

“Mum,” he said miserably. “I think she was the one who stole Ayana.”

He had expected Callie to recoil from him, but instead, she took his hand, her small fingers firm around his. He swallowed back the tears he wanted to shed. “Safira sent me after you,” he told her, “to find the Grandmother, to ask her—” He looked at Kali’s terrible beauty. “And instead,
she’s
here.”

Kali smiled, her teeth as white as milk against her red lips. “What would you have my Consort do for you, child?”

Kirin looked at the bright blue mist that hung behind her. For a moment, it congealed into the shape of the giant man, and then it dissipated again.
Forget all this other nonsense
, he told himself.
You’re here for a reason
. “I need to know if it was Mum who hurt Ayana.”

“And is that all you need to know?” Kali asked.

He shook his head. “No.” He could no longer hold back the tears in his eyes. “I need to know if Poppy killed Amir.”

Kali nodded, and for a moment, he thought she was answering his question:
Yes, your parents, the people you love so much, they are monsters.
But she said only, “So out of all the questions you could ask me, those are your questions. Very well. Tell me then, why do you need them answered? What good will it do you? What good will it do the world?” She fingered the hilt of her sword. “Think, boy. Why are these answers important to you?”

He thought for a moment, obeying her despite his impatience with all her eyes and arms and skulls, with her bizarre
blueness
. Could he go on not knowing? Wouldn’t that be better, really? Like rolling over in bed after a nightmare and going back to sleep?

He shook his head. “Because—because I need to know the truth. Mum needs to know the truth. Safira needs to know the truth.” He looked at Callie, he remembered the kid named Ricky, and he thought of Richard. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “I don’t have even a clue. And I don’t know what
good
it will do to know. It will probably be terrible to know. But we—all of us—we need to know the truth.”

Kali’s blue fingers curled tight around the sword hilt, as though she were about to draw it out, but at the same time, one of her other hands reached out and picked up something small and round from the floor. “A seed.” She held it out so Kirin could see it. “Within this seed is a tree. You cannot see it, for it is hidden there. But wait. By nature a seed becomes the tree.” Her fingers closed around the seed, then opened again. “Truth is like that. It is hidden—and it will be manifested. That is the nature of reality.”

Her three eyes blinked, though not in unison, and she stretched out a third hand toward the blue mist. Her fourth hand, the hand that dripped with blood, reached for Kirin. He took a step backward, and she laughed, her red tongue thrusting out from behind her teeth. “What is far, child, is at the same time near. What is within is without. That which moves moves not. Can you see
that
in this truth you crave?”

“Stop it!” Kirin flung up both his hands. “Go away, if you’re not going to help us!”

All four of Kali’s hands dropped into her lap. “Very well, child. I will go. But you will see me again.”

And suddenly the room was an empty, dusty room, lit only by pale winter sunlight.

“Well, that’s just great,” Callie said. “What are we going to do now?”

They looked at each other for a moment. There didn’t seem to be much of anything they
could
do except go downstairs and have dinner with their parents. How could he sit down and eat with Mum and Poppy, all the while suspecting that they were capable of such horrible things? Kirin shivered, aware of the suddenly icy air but even more aware that he had nothing to tell Safira.

As though she had read his mind, Callie reached out for his hand again. “I’ll call Safira,” she said.

• • •

They said good-bye on the landing of the fifth floor. He didn’t want to leave her. He wanted to bury his face in her bright hair and forget about everything else.

He looked down at their hands, still linked, as though neither of them wanted to let go. Callie followed his gaze. “I’ve been wanting to hold your hand, but I was too scared,” she said. “I got brave.”

He gave her a shaky grin. “Thanks.”

“It will be okay,” she said. “All that stuff up on the thirteenth floor—why would it be happening to us if it wasn’t going to be okay in the end?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it means that.” Her Grandmother and whoever else she was seeing might be loving and comforting—but he thought Kali’s terrible face made no promises.

“Why
is
it happening?” she asked.

But he had no answer for her. Their hands slipped away from each other, and they went to their separate apartments.

He found two police officers sitting in his living room, talking to his parents. Poppy got up and put his hand on Kirin’s shoulder, pushed him gently into the kitchen.

“What’s going on?”
Have they come for Mum? Have they found out it was her?

Poppy shrugged. “They just had some more questions for your mother. She matches the description of the woman who may have taken that little girl—and she was there the night you found the little girl. And they know about our history, of course, about Amir. Lots of connections. So they want to talk to her. It’s nothing.” He opened the refrigerator door. “I’ll start dinner, I guess. They should be gone soon.”

“They’re not going to arrest her?”

“Arrest her?” His father swung around and stared at him. “Of course not. You didn’t think your mother would really do something like that, did you?”

Kirin could not meet his father’s gaze. “She gets so angry, Poppy. Like she’s crazy sometimes.”

His father shook his head. “Your mother would never hurt a child, Kirin. Never.” He turned back to the refrigerator. “I’m making omelets. It’s a good night to have breakfast for dinner.”

Kirin tried to hear what the police and Mum were saying in the living room, but the whisk’s clatter against the bowl was too loud. As his father spilled the eggs into a pan, Mum came into the kitchen.

“They’re gone.” She dropped into a chair, folded her hands in her lap, and stared down at them. Kirin wanted to ask her what the police had said to her, but as he opened his mouth, his father caught his eye and shook his head.

Mum said nothing while Poppy finished making the eggs. Kirin set the table, and his father slid an omelet onto Mum’s plate. She murmured her thanks and picked up her fork. Poppy dropped a quick kiss on her head, handed Kirin his food, and then sat down with his own plate.

Mum had eaten only three bites when she put down her fork. “I can’t eat.” She put her head in her hands for a moment, and then she straightened. “I’m going to bed. I don’t feel well.”

When she had left the room, Kirin looked at his father, but this time it was Poppy who wouldn’t meet his eyes. They continued eating, both of them silent.

“I’ll clean up,” Kirin offered when they had finished.

Poppy shook his head. “I’ll do it. You go do your homework. Watch some television.” He smiled, but Kirin thought it wasn’t a real smile. “Stop worrying, son. It’s all right.”

It’s not all right, folks. You can see things aren’t right here, no sirree.

The chipper voice annoyed him. “Just shut up,” he muttered when he reached his room. “A lot of help you’ve ever been.” He got out his paints, hoping to paint away the day’s confusion, to make sense of it all.

But he couldn’t find any shapes that would contain what he had seen on the thirteenth floor. What he couldn’t have
really
seen. And he couldn’t let his fears about Mum and Poppy out onto the canvas. He didn’t want to see
those
shapes.

After a half hour of moving his brush back and forth, he stepped back and looked at what he had painted. A peculiar, electric blue covered the entire canvas: no shapes, no patterns, no lines—just blue. He sank back in his chair and stared at the blue rectangle. “Well, that’s just great,” he said finally, echoing Callie’s words.

As he sat there, a wave of sleepiness poured over him, as though the entire day was suddenly drowning him. He cleaned his brush, put away his paints, and fell into bed.

• • •

“There you are,” Amir said in his dream. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

They were in the hallway outside Kirin’s bedroom. The lights were out, the apartment very still except for the sound of Amir’s voice. Kirin could see the dark outline of his brother’s silhouette, lit only by the streetlight outside the window at the end of the hall.

“Now pay attention,” his brother said. “I’m going to show you something—and you have to remember it. Don’t go telling yourself it was ‘just a dream’!”

He went to the little stand that stood at the end of the hall. “See, kid, this is where he hid the key.”

“What key?” Kirin asked, though he thought he knew.

Amir was taking the stuff off the stand—books, CDs, Poppy’s cell phone, a box of tissues—and setting them on the floor. He glanced up at Kirin. “The key to the storage room on the thirteenth floor. Like I told you.”

“Poppy says he doesn’t have a storage room up there. I asked him.”

Amir shrugged. “He lied. He doesn’t want Mum to know. I’ve tried to persuade him to tell her, but he won’t. So you have to.” He tipped the stand over. “There it is. Taped to the bottom where you and Mum will never find it. The key to storage room 27.”

Kirin’s insides did the floppy, twisty thing they seemed to keep doing lately. “But why? Why would he—?” He couldn’t finish the question.

Amir put his hand on Kirin’s shoulder. “You’ll find out. Don’t worry.”

And then he was gone, and Kirin was lying in bed, wide awake. He wanted to roll over and pull the covers up over his shoulders. He wanted to go back to sleep and let the dream slip away into the dark depths of his brain, where it could lie hidden and forgotten when he woke up again in the morning.

He threw back the covers and sat up. The flip-flopping thing in his belly had crawled into his chest, and he could hardly breathe. Gasping for air, he reached for his flashlight.

Out in the hallway, he took the things one by one off the little table—books, CDs, Poppy’s phone, the box of tissues, just like in the dream—and set them quietly on the floor. He sucked a breath into his chest and tried to get up his nerve to take the next step.

“It was just a dream,” he whispered.

Then look. If there’s no key, you can go back to bed.

He picked up the stand and set it on its side, but it was too dark to see anything on its underside—and he was trembling too much to run his fingers along it.

You have to know.

He drew in another breath and snapped on the flashlight, pointed it. The light made a round circle on the wood.

In the center of the circle was a key.

18

Callie

I’m lying here in bed, like I am so often, not sleeping. It seems like most of my life goes on in the dark, a lot of it right here in this room. Maybe everything that’s happened has all been a dream, all of it, the Grandmother, Ayana, Kirin. It’s all just something I made up in my sleep, bits and pieces of real life I pulled together to make a story. Maybe I have schizophrenia like Richard, and I can’t tell the difference between the stories in my head and the real world.

I’d give up even Kirin—I think—if all of it could actually be a dream. Or if I could at least go back before the part of the story that happened tonight, while I was down in the laundry room.

• • •

After I left Kirin, at first everything seemed okay, or at least as okay as it ever is. I smelled pizza as soon as I opened our door, and I realized I was starving.

“Oh, there you are,” Mom said when I walked in the kitchen. “Neither of us felt like cooking tonight, so we ordered a pizza. We were just going to start eating.”

Dad pulled a slice out of the box and put it on a plate for me. “Have a seat.”

I slid into my place at the table and automatically closed my eyes and bowed my head while Dad asked the blessing.

“Dear Lord,” he prayed, “we thank you for this food and we ask your blessing on it. We thank you for all your many blessings to us. We ask that you help us to serve you. In the name of your son Jesus, amen.”

“Amen,” Mom echoed.

And what’s that about? This thing we do every time we eat, as though closing our eyes and bowing our heads is the way we can connect to God’s wavelength? For a moment, I just sat there, trying to fit everything together in my head. An image of the Grandmother and the Jesus guy sitting together up on the thirteenth floor popped into my head, and I could imagine them nudging each other, saying, “Look, he’s got his eyes closed and his head bowed—we’d better pay attention to what he’s saying.” And then they would cock their heads while they listened, and the Grandmother would say, “Hey, Sonny, did you catch that? I couldn’t quite hear what he said, that bit about serving me.”

I stuffed a bite of pizza in my mouth to hide my giggle. When I looked up, I saw Dad watching me.

“Where have you been, Callie?”

I chewed my pizza for a moment.
How do you eat pizza of all things after you’ve been chatting with God and Jesus?
“Talking to Kirin Ahmed,” I told Dad finally and took another three bites, one right after another. I hadn’t eaten any lunch, and really, what else could I eat—communion wafers? Manna from heaven?

“Aren’t you seeing an awful lot of that boy?”

I wished I could just eat in peace. “We’re friends, Dad.”

Mom put her slice of pizza down on her plate. “Callie, we’re a little worried about you getting too close to this boy. You know what it says in the Bible—do not yoke yourself with unbelievers.”

“I’m not yoking myself with anyone.” I reached for another slice of pizza. “Believe me. Kirin and I are friends. Just friends.”

“Well, be careful,” Mom said.

Dad was frowning, but before he could say anything, a cough burst out of his mouth, followed by a long chain of more coughs. Mom got up to get him a glass of water, then reached for the bottle of medicine the doctor gave him.

“You should take this, Fred,” she said. “As soon as you finish eating—and then go to bed early. The medicine will make you sleep. If you could get a good night’s rest for once, maybe you could shake this cold.”

Dad gave a groan and coughed some more. His coughs are really ugly sounds—
hack, hackity-hack, hack,
like some old guy about to spit—but at the time, it was music to my ears. I really like it when Dad goes to bed early and sleeps like a log all night.

Mom poured the medicine into a spoon and held it out to Dad like he was a little kid. He opened his mouth, swallowed, and then leaned his head against her. “Thanks, Pam,” he said into her stomach. “You’re too good to me.”

You can say that again
, I thought.

Dad managed to finish his pizza, and then he staggered off to bed, still coughing.

“Your poor father,” Mom said. “He’s been sick for weeks.”

I reached for a third slice of pizza. Talking to God must make a person extra hungry.

Mom cleaned up the kitchen, chattering to me about her day at work. I chewed and said, “Mmm,” now and then. Down the hall, Dad’s coughs eventually subsided.

When I was finally full, a thought occurred to me. “Mom, you said you and Dad have known Richard all your lives?”

“Richard? The man out in front of the building?”

“Yeah. Was he always like that? Even when he was a kid?”

Mom stared off at nothing, squinting, as though she could make out Richard—
Ricky?
—as a kid standing off somewhere in the distance. “No,” she said, “not like he is now. But he was odd. And he had an odd family. They lived in the neighborhood where your father and I grew up, the same neighborhood where Grandma Broadstreet still lives. Richard’s about my age, so I saw him at school. I heard people talk about him and his family, the way people do.”

“What was their name? And what was so odd about his family?”
Did his father murder little kids?

Mom was busily wiping every surface in the kitchen, the way she does every night, as though having a clean kitchen will prove what a nice family we are, but now she paused and leaned against the kitchen counter. “Oh I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember their last name. Something common, like Smith or Jones. They kept to themselves, didn’t really talk to anyone on the street. His mother never seemed to speak at all, and when his father said anything, he had a voice like Billy Goat Gruff.” Mom laughed. “I used to be scared of him, even when I was a teenager. Such a big man, always dressed in black, with his tiny little wife and poor scrawny little Richard.” She must have seen a spot of grease on the oven handle, because she leaned over and scrubbed it with her sponge. “But then the man just dropped dead. Right on the street. Which we—my group of friends—thought was the creepiest thing he’d done yet. We got off the school bus one day, and there he was lying on the sidewalk with his eyes rolled back and his mouth hanging open. He must have been waiting for Richard the way he often did—and then, just like that, he had a heart attack. The bus driver did CPR on him, but he was gone.” She sighed. “Poor man. I don’t suppose he knew the Lord.”

I don’t suppose he did,
I thought.
But that explains why he stopped killing little girls.

It all seemed to be making sense, every bit of it—or at least as much sense as the parts about time travel and magic threads could possibly make, which granted, wasn’t a lot. And given that there was so much that
didn’t
make sense, I wasn’t sure how we were going to tell the police what we knew. I was trying to think how we could stop Richard from taking another little girl and then another, like his father had done, without telling the police.

“Richard’s mother died soon after,” Mom was saying. “And then we graduated from high school, and your father and I got married, and I guess I forgot all about Richard for a while. I heard he went to seminary. He wanted to become a priest, I think, or one of those Catholic monks. I don’t know whether he ever did. One day, he just showed up out in the street, homeless. The police move him along sometimes. A couple of times, they’ve picked him up, got him committed to a psychiatric hospital for a while. But they can’t hold him forever, and then there he is, back again, sitting on the sidewalk somewhere in the neighborhood. With that black umbrella of his. He’s had that forever.” She gave one of her sad, helpless little sighs. “I feel so bad for him. I really do. I guess all we can do is pray for him.”

Close our eyes, bow our heads. Maybe,
I was thinking,
it’s not so much like pushing the numbers on a phone and waiting to hear a voice, but more like rubbing a genie’s bottle. Of course the genie never shows up—at least not for most people—but you just keep believing he’s there inside the bottle, working on your wishes. Even though he never ever comes out in a puff of smoke.

It’s all just make-believe,
I wanted to tell Mom.
It’s a little kid’s fairy tale.
But who am I to talk? I’m the one chatting with God and Jesus up on the thirteenth floor.

Mom shook her head and smiled; she can’t stay sad for long, not when life’s just so
pretty
, at least the way she sees it. “I think this floor needs mopping.” She gave the shiny floor a tiny frown. “While I do that, would you mind doing a load of laundry for me? If you put it in, I’ll move it along to the dryer when it’s done.”

“Sure,” I muttered, because I’m always such a good girl. I grabbed my pile of dirty clothes off the floor of my bedroom, and then I went to the bathroom to get Mom and Dad’s clothes from the hamper there. I made a face as I tumbled Dad’s dirty t-shirts and tighty-whities into the basket.

“Don’t forget to check Dad’s pockets for money,” Mom said as I went out the door. “He always forgets to empty them.”

I nodded and lugged the basket out into the hall and down the elevator to the basement.

The laundry room was empty, which was good, because I didn’t feel like talking to one of the old ladies who live in the building. Not that they’re not nice old ladies—just that I didn’t feel up to making conversation. I opened the lids of two washing machines and started separating our clothes into darks and lights.

As I was stuffing Dad’s old blue jeans into a machine, I hesitated, remembering Mom’s instructions. I don’t like touching Dad’s clothes, but I sighed and checked his pockets, the way Mom had asked. Sure enough, there was something hard, buried deep in one of the front pockets. It didn’t feel like money, though.

I pulled it out—and then everything I thought I had figured out just fell apart.

• • •

And now here I am, lying in bed, staring into the dark. I don’t know what to do next. I don’t know what I’m
supposed
to do next. I feel like it should be obvious to me, but it’s not.

I stick a hand up in the air, wave it around. I’d be glad right now to feel the thread hanging there. If I followed it up to the Grandmother, maybe she could make sense out of this. Maybe she would tell me what to do.

More likely she would tell me some story about Jesus and seeds and third things. She doesn’t really seem that interested in the real things going on, I’ve noticed. All the big horrible things happening, and she acts as though they’re incidental to the main storyline.

Maybe from God’s perspective, that’s how things look. Maybe He—
She?
—really doesn’t care all that much about the grubby little details of human lives.

Anyway, there’s no thread hanging in the darkness. It’s just me tonight.

And that’s something, at least. Imagine if it were Dad and me tonight. I don’t think I could take it. Not after what I found in his pocket. But what would I do?

What
am
I going to do?

And then my cell phone buzzes. I know it’s Kirin—no one else calls me—and I can’t help but smile a little, even as bad as things are.

I pick up my phone, surprised that he’s calling instead of texting. “Will you come with me to the thirteenth floor?” he says in my ear. Or at least I think that’s what he says. He’s whispering, and his voice is shaking, so I can barely understand him.

I don’t wait to ask him to repeat himself, though, and I don’t ask what has happened. I just say, “I’ll be right there,” and I pull on my jeans.

Out in the hallway, while I’m putting on my coat, something makes me turn around and go into the dark kitchen. I grab a knife out of the block on the counter, and then I slide it under my coat, inside the waistband of my pants.

• • •

Kirin’s waiting for me on the fifth-floor landing, and he looks the worst I’ve ever seen him.

“What happened?”

He holds out a key. “I dreamed about Amir again. He told me where to find this. And I did. It was right where he showed me in the dream.”

Once, that would have seemed weird, unbelievable, but so much has happened now that I just nod. “So what’s it a key to?”

“To a storage room on the thirteenth floor. Room 27.” He sounds stunned, as though his thoughts are frozen somewhere inside him, as though it’s hard for him to get them out into words where I can hear them.

“And what’s in the storage room?” I ask patiently, forgetting about everything except Kirin.

He shudders, and I don’t think he’s going to be able to answer me. “Amir,” he says at last. “I think Amir is in the storage room.” I see the muscles in his throat move as he swallows. “His skeleton. My father put him there. That’s what Amir told me in a dream. It’s what he showed me. I saw my father holding it—the skeleton—hiding it.”

This isn’t fair
, I want to tell someone.
Okay, I’ll deal with the way life sucks. Whatever. But not Kirin. Why should he have to handle this?

I take his hand—it gets easier every time I do it—and I say, “Come on. We have to go see. And then we’ll decide what to do next.”

We climb the stairs slowly, like we’re a tired old couple. When we go inside the thirteenth floor, it’s scarier without the thread in my hand. I’ve been hoping that the Grandmother will be up here, but everything is dark, no golden wheel glowing in the darkness. Kirin turns on his flashlight and shines it at the doors.

Little brass numbers are above each door; the one we’re looking at now is number 3. We walk further down the hall, the flashlight following the numbers up to 15, and then we turn a corner. This time we make it to 23 before we reach a corner, but when we go around it, the next number is 39. I tug on Kirin’s hand. “We have to turn the other way. Back there. Come on.”

He’s walking slower and slower, until I feel like I’m dragging him along. The light dips to the floor, then crawls up the wall and shines on another little brass plate: number 27, right here, right in front of us.

“Give me the key,” I tell Kirin. “I’ll open it.” I turn the key in the lock, and the door swings open into a darker blackness. I can’t be scared right now. I have to help Kirin. “Give me the flashlight.”