The Thread (4 page)

He looks up at me again, and his hairy face splits open around his smile. His stained teeth are perfectly even and straight. As straight as mine are now that my braces are off. “You’re a good girl,” he says. “I pray for you every day.”

When his eyes meet mine, they seem—well, they seem sane. They’re sad and tired, but they don’t look crazy, not now. And then he says something more, and this time he surprises me so much that I think maybe I’m the crazy one, hearing things that aren’t real.

“Think about following that thread,” he says. “Look for that which is unseen rather than that which is seen.” He gives his head a nod. “Go all the way next time. ”

5

Kirin

Kirin wrapped a string back and forth, creating a pattern that came to life in his head as he made it. As his fingers worked, he was thinking about Callie Broadstreet, remembering how he’d finally gotten his nerve to talk to her.
Spider web is made of protein
. Could he have said anything more stupid? He felt his face get hot all over again.

Nani had given him all the bits of string she kept squirreled away in her kitchen drawers, and today he was stringing them between her sewing pins on pieces of cardboard, web after web. His fingers seemed to know by themselves how to wind apparently random intersecting lines between the pins, lines that turned into images. He made a sailboat, a dove, a star, a tree. He had just made a flower that grew into a mandala.

His grandmother gave a cry of delight when he gave it to her. “A yantra! Thank you, little Amir.” She pressed a kiss on the top of his head. “I will use this yantra when I pray.”

He reached for another piece of string. “I’m not Amir, Nani.”

“You are Amir come back to us,” she insisted. “If only your mummy could see. If only your father would realize.”

“No, Nani.” As always, he felt obliged to state what he knew to be true. “I’m not Amir. I’m me. Kirin.”

But she only shook her head and smiled at him. “You are Kirin, but you are Amir too. Amir drew little pictures, even though he was just tiny. When you started drawing, just the same way, I knew for certain. He is you, you are he.” She ran one of her tiny brown fingers along the string of the mandala he had given here. “A yantra is like a loom,
lal
, just like this. A loom that God weaves endlessly, and we are each the threads, repeating and repeating and repeating, each life like one of these pins.” She turned to him and this time her hand slid along his cheek. “What are you making now,
lal
?”

Kirin shrugged. “I don’t know. I won’t know until it’s done.” For a second, he let himself lean against the warmth of her hand.

• • •

At dinnertime, he left the peace and quiet of his grandmother’s apartment and climbed the stairs. His grandmother was a vegetarian, an excuse she used for seldom sharing a meal with him and his parents, but he thought she really just wanted to avoid the tension in their apartment.

As he passed the third-floor landing, he thought about Callie again. If he painted her hair, he would use burnt umber and burnt sienna mixed together, he thought, like the background canvas of a Baroque painting, maybe with a little venetian red . . .

He occupied his mind with thoughts of color all through dinner. His parents ate quietly, speaking briefly in the sad, weary voices they used when they were sorry for the ways they hurt each other. Kirin didn’t bother to say anything. On the days his parents weren’t fighting, he tried sometimes to make them act like normal parents. Today he didn’t feel like making the effort.

“I can’t stop thinking about that little girl, Tab,” his mother said as she cleared away the dishes. She hung her head, and then she whispered, “I feel so guilty.”

His father put his hand on her arm. “You have no reason to feel guilty, Shashi.”

She lifted her head, her eyes dark and very wide. “Do you think it’s . . . the same? As Amir?”

His father leaned back in his chair, flipping through one of his car magazines. “How could it be, Shashi? All these years later. It’s been more than twenty years since we lost him.” He slid his hand up her arm, one of those swift, tender caresses he gave her, as though if he were quick enough she might not notice. “You always forget, Shashi. For you, it’s yesterday.”

Mum ducked her head again, and the gray-threaded curtain of her hair fell around her face. “Yes,” she murmured. “It’s as though I can feel him always there, my baby, as clear as though I had just turned away from him.” She pressed three fingers against Poppy’s shoulder. “Oh Tab, will I never heal?”

Poppy sighed, turning the magazine’s glossy pages, staring at the images of racecars and engines, shiny new cars and the sleek cars of his youth that he loved the best. Kirin knew their names as well as his father did; he had once hoped that cars would be the way he persuaded Poppy to pay attention to him, just as he had once thought his mother would notice if he pretended to enjoy music the way she did. None of it had worked. His parents each had their distractions from their grief and anger, but there was no room in those distractions for Kirin.

Finally, Poppy slapped the magazine shut. “You don’t want to heal, Shashi,” he said. “You don’t want to let him go. Twenty-one years. My god. And you still can’t accept he’s dead.”

Mum flipped back her hair and turned to face him. “And why are you different from me, Tab? What makes you so certain that he’s truly gone? How can you know that I’m not right? That you’re not wrong?”

Kirin got to his feet. “I’m going to do my homework. And then I thought I’d paint for a while.” His mother nodded without glancing at him. He picked up his dishes and carried them to the sink, then hovered in the kitchen doorway, waiting to see if they would say anything to him.

But they just continued their same old conversation. “I just know,” Poppy said. “Amir will never come back to us.”

“Then why can’t you move on either, Tab? Because you haven’t. Not really.”

“I would move on if you could, Shashi.” His hand touched hers. “But how could I leave you where you are, all alone? If I had known—” He didn’t finish his sentence, and Kirin found himself, for just a second, remembering his dream.

Just a dream, folks, not real, not true. Nothing to worry about.

Mum’s eyes were on the window, as though even now she were looking for something out there, some clue that would tell her where her son had gone. After a moment, she sighed and turned began to load the dishwasher. “We are together still, Tab. For whatever that’s worth.”

In the doorway, Kirin made a silly face, just to see if his parents would notice. Then he held up his middle finger.

He was invisible.

“This little girl that’s disappeared, she—” His mother’s words broke, but then she pulled them back together and continued. “She was so close by, so much the same. What if it’s the same man? What if he’s been away somewhere, and now he’s back? If they could catch him, if we could just know . . .” Her voice trailed away.

“There is more than one evil man in the world, Shashi,” Poppy said. “One crossed our path twenty-one years ago. And another one has now crossed the path of this unfortunate family that lives a few blocks away. Coincidence. Nothing more.”

Mum shook her head. “Karma,” she whispered. “That’s what Maa calls it. She always says life has a pattern, that it’s like beads sliding along a string, one after another, each strand connected to the others in a pattern. Like Indra’s net.” She sighed. “But I can’t see it. I can’t see that life makes any sense at all. I only know I feel guilty. As though—as though this child’s disappearance is
my
fault.”

“Inshallah,” his father said. “It is the will of Allah.”

“So,” Kirin said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

• • •

He painted until long after his parents had gone to bed. The paint swirled from his brush across the canvas, and the scent of oil and turpentine filled his head, forming the image of Kali, just as she looked in the framed picture his mother kept beside her bed: blue skin, teardrop bindi on her forehead, strands of gold wrapped around her ankles and her four arms. He painted her garlands of red flowers and skulls, he painted the battlefield behind her, and he was nothing but hands and eyes now, all his thoughts swallowed by shapes and colors. When he was too tired to keep going, he stepped back and looked at the painting, then turned it toward the wall. He let his brushes drop into a glass of turpentine, wiped his hands on a rag, and fell
into bed.

He had hoped for one of the good nights when sleep swallowed him whole and spit him out the next morning just in time for him to jump in his clothes and catch the bus to school. But instead he fell almost immediately into another nightmare.

He dreamed his mother’s long hair flowed loose around her shoulders, and her cadmium-red tongue hung down wet and long from her lips. A necklace of severed heads bobbed up and down on her breast, and in one of her four hands was a curved knife, its blade dripping with blood. Demon shadows danced all around her, and she swung her knife, back and forth, as though she were harvesting. Another bloody head hung by its hair from another of her hands. Kirin didn’t want to see the head’s features, didn’t want to know that it was Poppy’s . . .

The sound of someone crying woke him from the dream. At first, he thought it was his own voice he had heard, but then he heard again the sound of a child’s cries. They sounded too close to be possible.

He pulled the covers over his head.
Stop it.

His brain was playing tricks on him, making him hear that heartbreaking strand of sound when there was only the wind and the sound of a car horn in the street below.
There’s nothing,
he told himself,
it’s nothing. Go to sleep.

• • •

This time, he dreamed again of Amir. He and Kirin were walking down the street together. “Sorry, man,” Amir said as they reached the corner. His hand gripped Kirin’s shoulder for a moment. “You’re the one who has to deal with this now. I know it’s not fair.”

Kirin shrugged. He found himself wanting to impress this grown-up older brother, but instead, in the dream, he felt his eyes fill with childish tears. “I just wish I could help Mum,” he said. “But she doesn’t even see me. There’s nothing I can do.”

Amir shook his head. “There’s something you can do, Kirin. You have to find me. It’s the only way she’ll ever let me go.”

Kirin stared at his brother. “What do you mean? You’re dead.”

Amir nodded. “That’s what I mean. You gotta find me, man.” He cuffed Amir’s cheek lightly and then swung away. “That’s your job, little brother,” he said over his shoulder. “Someone else is going to die if you don’t stop this thing now.”

His words made Kirin’s blood run cold. “Wait!” he shouted, but his brother was gone, and Kirin was no longer asleep.

His heart thudding inside his ribs, he lay looking up at the ceiling. The darkness was already the gray of a winter morning, and when he rolled over and looked at the clock, he groaned: time to get up for school.

But as he showered and dressed, he couldn’t stop thinking of the dream.
Someone is going to die.

6

Callie

The hopeful feeling inside me has faded. All week, it was just more of the same old boring stuff, day after day, night after night. Dad’s still sick, but being in bed all day makes him wide awake at night. It seems worse somehow now that I caught a glimpse of something different.

I brought my purple spider web home from school and hung it on my bedroom wall to remind me of webs that are stronger than steel, but the whole thing seems more and more stupid to me. An imaginary thread in the darkness—how pathetic is that?

During art class, Kirin Ahmed kept his eyes on his work—we were making clay pots now—and he didn’t look up at me. We’ve passed each other on the stairs a few times or shared the elevator, and every time he gave a little grunt, like maybe he meant to say hello. I ducked my head and made myself invisible.

When the week finally ended, things didn’t get any better, because now it’s the winter break, with no school for two weeks, no reason to escape the apartment. I helped Mom decorate and put up the Christmas tree, but I hate it. I hate it all, all the familiar decorations we’ve had my whole life, all the Christmas music, all the cookies and the smell of evergreen and spices. I hate it because I used to love it so much, and now it’s all ruined. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just one more lie.

And now it’s Christmas morning, Mom has to call me twice before I can pull myself out of bed. “What’s wrong with you?” she asks. “Are you sick? It’s
Christmas!
You used to be dragging Dad and me out of bed at six a.m.—and now I can’t get you up?”

“She’s growing up.” Dad doesn’t meet my eyes. He knows why I’m tired this morning.

I remember when Christmas morning was happy and magical. Now it’s just boring, like everything else. Mom buys me the same sweaters every year, the same pajamas and blue jeans, stuff she’d buy me anyway because the old ones are worn out or outgrown. Dad always gives me a teddy bear, a different one every Christmas. I remember when I loved his teddy bears, when I couldn’t wait to tear off the paper and see what this year’s looked like.

“What do you think?” Dad’s prodding me to say something about the bear I’ve just opened.

I look down at the teddy bear’s face. “He looks sad.”

I look up in time to see a funny expression on Dad’s face. For an instant, he looks so much like the Dad I used to know, the Daddy I loved when I was a little girl, the man who was funnier and wiser and kinder than anyone I knew. My eyes fill up with tears, and I pull the bear up against my face so Dad won’t see. I pretend to give the stupid stuffed thing a kiss so that I can wipe my face on its fur.

I wish I could get up and walk out of the apartment. I wish I could walk down the street and never come back. But where would I go?

Mom stands up and gives me a hug. “Merry Christmas, Callie.” She smiles down at me, all perky and happy in her red-checked nightgown. “And happy birthday, Jesus!”

“A-
men
,” Dad says.

Mom starts picking up the wrapping paper, and after a minute I help her. She gives me a smile. “I feel almost guilty having such a happy Christmas,” she says. “What with those poor people just a few blocks away, the ones who lost their baby. I can’t stop thinking about them.”

I give an all-purpose
mm-hm
, the sort of bored, barely polite little noise I hope will tell her I’m not really paying attention. She’s gone on and on about the missing baby and her poor parents. Meanwhile, I keep wondering—if Dad hit me (instead of doing what he does), and he left a big black bruise on my face, would she even notice? Or would she pretend like she didn’t, and just keep worrying about some strange baby she’s never met?

Mom gives me another hug, drops a kiss on my head. I want to slap her, I really do. “I’m going to go get dressed,” I mutter and pull away.

• • •

Grandma’s building is close enough we can walk there, only two blocks away. Mom calls it the “Christmas Walk”—a Christmas tradition, my parents and I walking together through the cold, quiet streets, something we’ve done as long as I can remember. It feels strange to me now, though, to be leaving the building at the same time as my parents, their shoulders brushing against mine as we go out the door and down the steps to the sidewalk. We so seldom go anywhere at the same time, except for church on Sundays, and then we take the car.

The homeless guy is sitting in his usual place, and Mom stops to give him a bag of oranges. “Merry Christmas, Richard.” She’s bending down to peer under his umbrella, close enough to him that she must be breathing in his weird sweet stench.

The bag of oranges tips over and one rolls across the sidewalk. Mom picks it up and hands it to the guy, and for an instant, I see her as though she were some long-ago queen in a medieval painting, white skin and even whiter winter jacket glowing against the gray day, the orange in her hand like some magic orb she’s handing to a beggar. I blink, and the picture disappears.

I wish she were the magic queen I’d imagined. But she’s just my clueless, hopeless,
useless
mother.

The homeless guy tips his umbrella to one side so he can look up at her, and then he glances at my father and gives him a grin, as though the two of them are old friends. “How you doing, bud?”

Dad shifts back and forth on his feet and nudges Mom’s arm, and I know he’s eager to be on our way. He’s still not feeling well, and his face is flushed as though he has a fever. Meanwhile, the homeless guy just smiles some more, and then his glance shifts to me. His eyes are bright above his tangled beard. “Santa good to you this year?”

His voice holds a hint of something metallic and sour. The word that comes to my mind is
irony
. I suddenly remember (back from the days when I was obsessed with this sort of thing), that the Greek word behind the English
irony
has to do with someone pretending to be ignorant, someone who evades the truth.

I don’t answer the homeless guy, but he gives me a little nod as though I had, and then the three of us turn away.
Irony
might be a good word for Mom, I’m thinking as we continue our Christmas Walk—except, I remember now, the word also comes from the same old, old root as
worm
,
warn
,
wrestle
,
warp
,
wring
. It has to do with something that’s been wound around and around (
like a thread
, whispers my mind). I can’t help but think that truth is woven through irony’s twisty strands like a warning. At least, that’s what I thought I saw in the homeless guy’s gaze. A little wriggly worm of truth, something unappealing and yet real. And something inside me was relieved to see it there. Even if the truth is ugly, at least it’s
real
.

“Why do you have to act so chummy with him?” Dad is asking Mom.

Mom gives Dad a look, one of her fond but slightly impatient expressions. “Fred, Richard has been around since we were kids. Didn’t he even live in your building, back when we were kids? He’s never left the neighborhood.” She takes Dad’s arm and smiles up at him. “Just like us.”

Dad’s expression turns dark. “Well, I never liked him. He was always crazy, even when we were kids.”

Mom gives him a squinty look. “Fred, he’s ill. He has a mental illness. And no wonder, with that terrible father
of his.”

Dad shakes his head. “You shouldn’t talk to him, Pam. You don’t know if he’s safe.”

Mom just laughs. “He’s harmless, Fred. The poor man. What kind of life can it be, huddled out here on the sidewalk, day after day? The least we can do is show him some kindness.”

Dad takes her hand and then gives me a smile over her head, the sort of honest, open look that says,
Your mom is hopeless, but I sure do like her.
The sort of look that also says,
See, I’m a nice guy. I’m the dad you’ve known all your life.

I’d like to think that expression is a lie, the way the glimpse of Mom looking like a queen had to be a lie. Or even that it was irony.

But the funny thing is, sometimes I don’t think it is. Sometimes I can’t help but believe him.

So if Dad’s a nice guy, where does that leave me?

All these thoughts are still inside my head, feeling like a bunch of razor blades, while we take the elevator up to the seventh floor of my grandmother’s building. When the elevator doors open, I can smell Grandma’s cooking, even out in the hall. My mouth waters—and at the same time, I feel a little sick to my stomach.

Maybe
, I’m thinking,
there’s nothing at all wrong with Mom and Dad. Maybe they really are good people.

Maybe I’m the one full of lies.

Maybe I’m evil.

But then the door opens into my grandmother’s apartment, and I’m surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins. For a little while, I feel almost like a normal person in a normal family.

But I’m not hungry, so after a while, I slip away from the long, noisy table and sit in the living room beside the tree. Grandma has a wooden crèche she always puts under the branches, and I sit on the floor, staring at the baby lying on his hay. He looks so safe and happy, with Mary and Joseph smiling down at him, and the angels and animals and shepherds clustered around. I find myself thinking, though, that I would have hated to have all those eyes staring at me. If I were him, I would have wanted to crawl on my little hands and knees under the manger, where no one could see me.

My Aunt Mickey comes into the room and drops down next to me on the floor. “How’s it going, Callie?”

I give that all-purpose adolescent shrug that usually gets adults off your back, but Aunt Mickey puts out her hand and pulls back my hair so she can see my face. “You all right?”

“Sure.” I give her a smile, but I still can’t meet her eyes. I’m scared that if I do, I might cry. She’s looking at me as intently as Mary and Joseph and all the rest are looking at the baby. No one ever really looks at me like that, no one except Dad.

Aunt Mickey reaches out and picks up the baby, holds him cupped in her fingers and rocks him back and forth. “Grandma had this back when your dad and I were kids,” she says. “I remember I used to pretend he was a tiny, real baby. I’d sneak him into bed with me the night before Christmas and whisper to him before I went to sleep. I’d tell him everything that had happened since last Christmas.” Her eyes on the little figure lying on her palm, she smiles. “Your father used to make fun of me. He was good at that, being my big brother and all. But I never quite got out of the habit. Every Christmas I want to tell this Baby Jesus everything that’s happened. All my secrets.” She looks up at me, but then her smile fades away, and I see her search my face again.

“It’s hard being a kid sometimes, isn’t it, Callie?” she says softly. “Grandma and Grandpa weren’t such great parents, you know. Your dad had a specially hard time, I think.”

“What do you mean?” I don’t want to say the words, but I hear them come out anyway, and I feel just the thinnest, smallest tendril of curiosity. I begrudge its existence, though, because it’s connected to Dad.

Aunt Mickey looks back at the baby in her hand. “You never knew your grandpa, of course. He was . . . a strange, angry man. I’m not sure that any of us understood him. Grandma would never admit it, but she’s been happier since he’s been gone. I don’t think Grandpa really loved anyone except your father. He adored Fred. But he was also hard on him. Always watching your dad, praising him one minute, scolding him the next.”

We both hear Grandma’s voice calling Aunt Mickey to come help her with the pies. “Gotta go,” Aunt Mickey says. “Here, sweetie.” She hands me the baby. “Tell him about your year.”

I down at my hand, but all I see is a chunk of carved and painted wood.

• • •

That night, once we’re back home, Dad pays me another special Christmas visit. After he leaves, I lie in the darkness, curled as tight as I can around myself, as though my body were one big fist. And I find myself thinking: What’s the point of being alive?

I get these thoughts sometimes. Most of the time, I have a stubborn streak inside me that insists if I can hold on long enough, I’ll outlast Dad. I’ll grow up and move away, and he and Mom will get old and die. Then I’ll be free. All I have to do is keep living, and time will be like a river that carries me to a different place in my life, a better place. Time is my friend, I tell myself. Just hold on. Let yourself float. You’ll end up someplace safe if you just drift down the river.

But other times, like now, I start to wonder if there really is a better place anywhere down that river. Times like these, I’m convinced I’ll
never
be free. Even when Dad is dead and gone, and I’m a little old lady, I’ll still lie awake in the dark and hear Dad whisper, “You’re my special little girl.” I’ll feel his fingers touch me, feel the way he makes me feel, and that will be all I’ve ever had, the only love I’ve ever known.

I can’t stand these thoughts. I can’t bear the thought of myself. I just want to wipe myself out, so I don’t exist anymore.

But even thinking like this makes me feel impatient, so I push all my thoughts out of my head and try to sleep. “Merry Christmas, Callie,” I tell the darkness, “and happy birthday, Jesus.” I hear myself give a little hitch of laughter that sounds more like a sob.

I think about Aunt Mickey talking to the Baby Jesus, but only once a year at Christmas. I wonder what good she thought it did to tell him everything that had happened. Maybe she thought he would make the next year better.

I remember when I used to believe in Jesus, when Jesus seemed like some friendly relative I’d never met but talked to often, the way we telephone my other grandmother, the one who lives in Florida now. Back then, I didn’t picture Jesus as a baby, but as this young guy with kind dark eyes. I’d lie in bed every night and say my prayers, a whole list of things I’d ask Jesus to give me because I knew he loved me. I imagined him listening to my voice somewhere in the dark, paying close attention.

But I never got the things I asked for.