The Thread (11 page)

She laughs. “My Child does not sit around. He
acts
, just as I
am
. He speaks. He moves. He makes me visible.”

I suck in an impatient breath. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“No matter.” She waves her free hand through the air, as though shooing away my question, and then runs the same hand along the thread that spins into the air above her head. “This connects me to my Child. Always.” She stretches her arm higher and grasps a loop of the gleaming filament, then thrusts it into my hand. “You want to know if Jesus is real? Then follow the Thread, child. It will lead you to my Child.”

“To Jesus?”

But she doesn’t answer me. Her eyes are fixed on the thread, and after a moment, I realize she’s done talking.

“But what about Ayana?” I came here wanting answers, but I haven’t gotten any. “Who did that to her? Do you know?”

She flaps her hand at me, but she doesn’t turn her head. “Go on with you now. See where the Thread takes you. Find my Child.”

“Do you mean Ayana? Did something happen to her? Again?”

The old woman smiles. “That sweet baby is safe and sound with her mama. Stop fretting about her. It’s time for you to find my Child.”

I stare at her, trying to understand. “Do you mean—
Jesus
?”

She doesn’t answer me. I stand there a few seconds longer, the thread loose in my hand, not sure what she expects of me.

And then I feel the thread jerk in my hand. The
zing
between my fingers tells me that
urgency
is the thread’s name now. (
From the Latin
urgere, my long-ago self reminds me,
which means “to press hard, to drive, to push, to compel”
).

Okay then
, I tell the thread,
I’m coming
.

13

Kirin

Kirin had given up on sleeping. It was going to be one of those nights.

He had looked up the folktale Safira had mentioned,
La Llorona
, on the Internet. What he learned hadn’t comforted him any.
La Llorona
not only grieved for her lost children; she also stole other children. She was not only insane; she was evil. The descriptions of her—desperate, angry, never able to heal or let go of her pain—were all too like Mum.

But Mum would never steal a child.

Would she?

She was so upset after she saw Ayana; she wouldn’t have been upset like that—not like that—if she were the one who had put her there.

Would she?

Or was one part of Mum still sane, while the other part had turned into something desperate and evil?

If you can believe she might kill Poppy, why not believe she would steal a child?

He didn’t know which was worse: the thing dream-Amir had told him about Poppy, or these new terrible thoughts about Mum. They were both too horrible to be true, so he pushed them out of his head.

Instead, he tried to think how he could paint Indra’s net so that it made sense. It wasn’t the same thing Carl Jung had described, not exactly, and he knew it wasn’t the string theory that his father had been talking about—but there was something happening, some
synchronicity
. If he could make a picture from the ideas floating around inside his head, he might understand better what was happening to him and Callie.

Threads
. . . He let his mind wander while he painted an entire canvas a deep black that held just a hint of cobalt blue, a blue as dark as a night sky, as dark as dreams.

Dreams
. . . How did they connect: Callie’s thread, his dreams about Amir? He squeezed a dab of alizarin crimson on his pallet, mixed it with some aquamarine blue. His tiniest horsehair brush was still too thick for what he needed, so he used the edge of his pallet knife to make the slightest, sharpest lines of purple on the black sky, crossing and intersecting, like the spider web Callie had made in art class. It seemed so long ago now. Back then, she was just a face he liked to watch, not the person he was getting to know now.

While he thought about Callie, wondering about the sense he had that she was always hiding something from him, he painted pearls at each juncture of the purple web, smooth blobs of white that gleamed against the cobalt-black, pearl after pearl after pearl, each with a tiny face reflected in it . . .

He had painted Callie’s face, over and over and over. He stepped back, laughed.
Sorry, folks, that’s not much help, is it? Doesn’t get us any closer to the truth, doesn’t tell us who the bad guy is, doesn’t tell us anything at all. Just that poor old Kirin has it bad for Callie Broadstreet—and we already knew that.

Just as he threw down the pallet knife in frustration, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He knew even before he looked at it that it was a message from Callie.

It’s happening again. I’m outside. Meet me in front of the building?

He wiped his hands on a rag and pulled on his jacket.

• • •

When he pushed open the lobby door, the night rushed against his face like something living, something cold and fast and silent. He hesitated outside the door on the stoop, looking up and down the street.

Something was weird.

The streetlight in front of the building was dark, though he was sure it had been shining when he and his grandmother went by earlier, and the grate where Richard had sprawled was empty now. The night was silent. Too silent. He couldn’t hear anything, not a single sound except for the hiss of his own breath.

He took a careful step down, holding tight to the cold railing. “Callie?”

A dark shape moved out of the shadows. “Kirin.”

He ran down the steps to her. “Hi.” She bumped her shoulder against him, and he felt her warmth all the way through his quilted jacket.

“Hi.” Her teeth flashed white in the shadows.

“So what’s up?”

She gave a little snort of laughter that sounded half-scared, half-embarrassed. “Want to help me find Jesus?”

Kirin listened while she told him her story. The thread again, the old woman with the spinning wheel. He scowled at her. “Why didn’t you text me sooner? I want to see her.”

“You believe me?” She leaned toward him, as though she were trying to see his face in the darkness. He gave a quick nod—of course he believed her, after all that had happened—and he saw the tense line of her shoulders relax.

“Next time,” she said. “I’ll text you next time it happens. If it does. And then you can tell me if I’m the one who’s crazy—or if she is.”

Kirin looked down into her face, met her eyes. The night was cold and silent around them, but he felt as though a warm circle hung around them, a tiny glowing space. He thought about all that Callie had told him about the old woman, about the thread. Maybe there was something more she still wasn’t telling him, but she had told him a lot, more than he had told her about his dreams . . .

You will have to trust each other, you two,
Safira had said.
Two heads know more than one . . . and two hearts together dare more than one alone.

“I keep dreaming about my brother,” Kirin blurted. “Amir. He—he talks to me. Tells me things. He’s—he’s not a baby in the dreams, not anymore. He’s grown up. A man.”

Callie tipped her head to one side, the way she always did when she was paying close attention to what he was saying. She didn’t look like she was thinking he was silly. “Do you think he’s alive?” she asked. “That he’s . . . somehow getting messages to you?”

Kirin shook his head. “In the dreams . . . he says he’s dead.” He hesitated. “He says I have to find him. His body, he means.”

“But how can you?”

“I don’t know.” He swallowed, glanced away from her face, from her steady eyes. He couldn’t tell her the rest. Instead, he took a step closer to her, close enough he could feel her warm breath on his face. His head dipped toward her, and her lips were so close to his own . . .

She jerked away from him and held her fist up. She was still holding that invisible line, he realized. “We should follow this.” Her voice was high and fast.

Wait
, Kirin wanted to say to her.
I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.
But instead he followed her down the sidewalk. At the corner, he paused, feeling again the night’s strange hush, as though something soft and heavy had muffled the city’s normal sounds. Callie stood still as well, and then she looked up at him. “What is it? Why’s it so quiet?”

He searched for an answer, but all he came up with was: “Something’s strange.”

Beside him, Callie sucked in her breath and pointed. “Look! See that?”

He turned in the direction she pointed, toward the old factory across the street. The dark walls wavered, as though they were a reflection in water, and then—

They were gone. There was only the empty black sky where the building had stood for as long as Kirin could remember. He blinked.

And the building was there again, back where it belonged. But this time, it was different. The empty dark windows were gone, and instead lights shone behind them. The silence disappeared at the same time, replaced by the
whoosh-whoosh
of cars and trucks over on 61st Street.

At least that much was back to normal. At the corner, where the street met Freshwater Avenue, Kirin saw headlights arc through the darkness, and then a car turned the corner, coming toward them. He pulled Callie a step back on the sidewalk, deeper into the shadows, as a sports car rolled slowly past, its chrome gleaming in the darkness. “That’s a 1990 Corvette,” he whispered. “A ZR-1. It’s one of my dad’s favorite cars.” The car had a brand-new shininess, and he felt goose bumps crawl along his arms.

He looked up and down the street, at the other cars parked along the street. “That’s a 1987 Ford Escort, or maybe a 1986. Mid-eighties, anyway.” He pointed. “And a mid-eighties Pontiac. And that’s a 1989 Caprice.” After years of looking at his father’s car magazines, he recognized them all. A strange certainty, stranger than anything that had happened yet, blossomed inside him. His breath came fast, and he heard his own heart beating.

“So?” Callie shook her head and made a face up at him. “Who cares about cars right now?”

“Don’t you get it?” He grabbed her shoulder and turned her toward him. “There’s nothing on the street later than 1990, maybe 1992 or 1993. And there’s
that
.” He waved his hand at the factory building that ought to be dark and empty, and then he pivoted in a circle, looking up and down the street. “Nope. Nothing. No modern cars.” He heard his own breath hiss between his teeth, fast and shaky, but he couldn’t tell if he was excited or scared—or both. “This isn’t now.” His voice sounded higher than usual in his ears, the way it used to before it had changed, but he barely noticed. “This . . . this is something else, it’s earlier. It’s not now.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

He took a deep breath. “Callie,” he said. “I’m pretty sure we’ve gone back in time.”

Beside him, Callie jerked, as though something had suddenly tugged her forward. “Gotta go,” she said over her shoulder. “This way.”

They broke into a trot, running together again, the way they had the night they found Ayana. At the same time, even while he felt gripped by something huge, something he didn’t understand, he looked from side to side, tallying the number of old cars, shiny old cars, old cars that didn’t look old . . .

Back in time. Like some fantasy, sci-fi movie. Back before either of them had been born?

Maybe there just happened to be a lot of old cars parked on the street tonight. The thoughts tumbled through his brain, as though he had another person inside him capable of carrying on separately while his outside self was busy running beside Callie.

She halted. “There.” She pointed down into a stairwell.

Kirin forgot everything else. A boy crouched in the shadows. He was younger than they were by a few years, maybe twelve or thirteen, and his face was very white.

Callie took a slow step closer to him. “Hello?”

The boy wiped his sleeve across his nose; the streetlight shone on the smear of snot across his face. “You’ve gotta help me,” he said. “Something—something bad is going to happen. Something terrible.”

Callie turned her head and looked back at Kirin. Their eyes met for a moment, but Kirin wasn’t sure what they were saying to each other. Something, though, something that neither of them could have spoken out loud. He moved closer to her and put his hand on her arm.

“The thread leads to him,” she whispered. “What does that mean?”

“That he’s Jesus?” Kirin looked at the skinny kid in the shadows. The boy’s face was turned up toward them, a pale slice of misery. Kirin shrugged. “Doesn’t look much like the son of God to me.”

But he found he recognized something else in the boy’s face. He knew the terror and misery the kid was feeling; it was what he felt when he dreamed his mother killed his father, the same horror and grief, the terrible feeling that reality had turned so hideous he’d never be able to bear being alive again.

The air smelled like urine—people must have used the stairwell to take a piss—and someone had spray-painted FUCK on the brick wall above where the kid was huddled. The night seemed too strange, too ugly, both too hazy and too sharply cut to be real. Something dark eddied around them, a thick foul-smelling stream that made Kirin shiver as it touched his face and neck. The boy’s pale face looked as though it had been cut out of paper and pasted on the darkness—and Kirin was suddenly certain he must be dreaming. He had to be back in his bed, asleep, his mind telling one of its little stories.

“I want to go home.” Callie’s voice was a mere breath. “I don’t want to be here.”

But her invisible thread had led them here.
Dream or not, folks, it’s not like we can just turn around and find our way back now.
He let out of breath of laughter.
Not that that makes any sense either!
He let his hand slide down her arm and gripped her hand, pulled her closer to him. “Maybe,” he said in her ear, “maybe he needs us. Like Ayana did.”

Callie glanced back at the kid, but he could feel her reluctance through her cold fingers as though it were something tangible, a slow, cold current running through her blood. “So what are you thinking?” she hissed. “That we’re some kind of superheroes sent out on missions to save kids? Time-traveling superheroes?” Her eyes were very wide and dark; her face was as pale as the boy’s.

Kirin tightened his fingers around hers and smiled into her eyes. “I’m not thinking anything, Callie. Nothing that makes any sense. Who knows what’s going on? All I know is this kid sounds like he needs some help.”

Callie’s hand grew warmer and her fingers curled tighter around his. “Okay. Okay.” She turned back to the boy who was still waiting there in the stairwell, looking up at them. “What’s wrong?” she asked him.

The boy sniffed, sucked in a deep breath, as though he were trying to pull himself together. “My dad—” He shuddered and looked as though he might be about to be sick. “My dad has—”

Kirin went down the steps and sat next to the kid. The boy wasn’t wearing a coat, only a thin plaid shirt, and when Kirin put his hand on the boy’s narrow shoulders, he felt him shivering. “It’s okay,” Kirin said. “Whatever it is. Take a breath.”

The boy breathed: in . . . out . . . in again, long, shuddering gasps. Finally, Kirin felt the bony little shoulders relax beneath his hand. Kirin found he felt better now too, and the night seemed less weird.

The boy looked up into Kirin’s face. He gulped, sucked in one more deep breath, and then he said, “My dad— He made me do it. He made me steal a little kid. He—” His voice broke. “I think he’s going to do something bad. Something
really
bad.”