The Thread (15 page)

He quirks his lips and gives his head a quick shake, as though he’s impatient—but not with me, I sense. He flaps his hand at the dirt on my fingers as though it’s something so trivial and unimportant that he has no time for it. “That’s nothin’,” he says.

The Grandmother chuckles. “Literally.” She nudges me with the toe of her old felt slipper. “Child, my Son here, he has a thing with hands. When he holds a person’s hand in his, he doesn’t feel what
you
see. He feels the real thing, the person’s
true
hand.” She nods toward that large hand that’s still stretched toward me, waiting. “Shut your eyes, child. You’ll see what he feels. Give it a try.”

The young man gives his head a little nod, encouraging me to follow the Grandmother’s directions. I swallow the hard lump in my throat, shut my eyes, and put my left hand in his. His fingers close around mine, warm and strong.

And behind my closed lids, I’m seeing a hand as small and smooth as Ayana’s. It isn’t mine. This hand is pink and dimpled and perfect. The tiny fingers lie in the young man’s palm, and he holds them so gently, so carefully. And then I see there’s blood pooling in the hollows between the two hands, but I can’t tell if it’s the man’s or the child’s.

“That’s
not
my hand.” My voice comes out rough with disappointed scorn, but the young man just laughs. His fingers tighten around mine.

“Look again, little boo.”

As I watch, the pudgy little hand changes, the fingers grow longer, stronger. It
is
my hand, but it’s no longer grubby and soiled the way I saw it just before I closed my eyes. Instead, my skin is the shade and texture of the coral-colored geraniums Mom grows on the kitchen windowsill. My nails are pearly and translucent, like seashells.

My hand glows.

It’s beautiful.

“That’s not my hand,” I say again, automatically, but I know it is. I open my eyes and look into the young man’s dark eyes. “How can it be?”

“Because that is your true hand, sweet boo.” His eyes are sad and filled with joy, both at the same time. “That is your
real
hand. There are so many amazing things you will do with that hand. So many ways you will change the world.”

“What do you mean?”

He tips his head sideways at the Grandmother. “You tell her, Granny.”

She gives him a little kick with her toe. “Have some respect, Sonny,” she says, and they both collapse into laughter, the kind of silly, helpless giggles I used to share with my friends at sleepovers late at night, back when I was younger.

Watching them laugh, I keep my own face straight, though I feel as though there’s a goofy little girl inside me who’s longing to join in. After a minute, the Grandmother dashes the back of her hand across her eyes and sits up straighter, but the young man’s shoulders are still shaking. “All right then,” the old woman says. “All right. Straighten up, you.” She gives him another little kick, then turns to me. “What was I supposed to tell you now?”

I sigh. “Start by telling me what’s going on.” I wave my hand at the spinning wheel, the thread, the spiraling seeds. “All this.
Jesus
here. Everything. What’s it mean? What’s happening?”

The Grandmother’s shiny dark eyes meet the young man’s, and I’m afraid they’re going to start giggling again. “Oh my,” she says, “is that all the child wants? The meaning of
everything
?”

“I liked that revelation you gave Julian of Norwich, Mawmaw. Try that.”

The old woman snorts. “And it only took
her
twenty-odd years to figure out what it all meant. And she didn’t have all the distractions this poor child has.”

“Well,” the boy says thoughtfully, “there
was
the Black Death.”

“Oh that.
Death
.” The Grandmother waves her hand in the air, dismissing death as though it were something trifling. “That’s always a part of the picture. I was referring to
distractions
—all the lights and buzzers, all the shiny things with wires, the silvery screens of all sizes with their words and their pictures and their interruptions. It’s
hard
to be a mystic these days, Son, you know it is.”

The boy—
Jesus?
—smiles at me. “And yet here she is, Mawmaw. Our little mystic.”

The old woman nods, and her puckery mouth is soft and fond. “She’s doing well, isn’t she?”

I look back and forth between their smiling faces.
They’re talking about me?
I feel a tiny little glow inside, the way I used to feel back in the old days, back when I was little, when Mom and Dad would make a fuss over something I said or did. They’d hang whatever it was—some silly drawing or a sheet of homework with a good grade—on the refrigerator, and I’d feel that same warm shiny feeling inside me every time I walked by. But that’s silly. It didn’t mean anything real back then, I know that now, so I shake my head. “Just explain
something
to me.
One
thing.”

The Grandmother nods her frowsy white head. “All right, child. One thing. What shall it be?”

I know I ought to ask about Richard and Ricky and Ricky’s father, about Amir and Ayana. That’s why I came here. But I’m just like the silly people in fairy tales who waste their three wishes, and I hear myself blurt, “What
is
that?” I point at the swirling lines of thread that hang like clouds around the Grandmother. “And
that
?” This time I point at the golden line that runs through the countless seeds. I know that if I could manage to follow the line with my eye it would lead to that constantly whirring wheel. And I know that the same line is still clutched between the thumb and finger of my right hand. I can feel its faint
bzzz
against my skin, as though I have the tiniest bee in the world cupped in my fingers. I look back and forth between the Grandmother and the Jesus guy. “What is it?”

“It is the Giver of Life,” the old lady says softly. “The Helper. The Comforter that proceeds from me, and from my Firstborn. It is that which goes out from us into the world. It is Mercy and Grace. It is the third thing.”

My eyes continue to shift back and forth between the Grandmother and this man she’s calling Jesus. I remember Richard saying something like this:
I believe in the third thing that makes the One. You know. The Trinity.
“You mean,” I say slowly, “it’s the—the Holy Spirit?” I feel stupid saying the words out loud. They’re words that belong in Sunday school and sermons, not here in this shadowy room on the thirteenth floor.

But I guess it’s no more stupid than everything else.

“Oh,” says the Grandmother, “spirit. Tell me, child, what
that
means. Go ahead. You with that dictionary inside your head.”

“Wind,” I say automatically. “From the same root word as ‘respiration.’ Breath.”

“Exactly.”

“But what’s that have to do with—” I wave my hand at the spinning wheel, at the loops of thread.

“The breath of life. Dreams. Thread. Light.” The Grandmother shrugs. “Even Nothingness. All metaphors, each one different from all the others, each particular. But it’s all metaphor, you know. I’m a metaphor.
He’s
a metaphor.” She points a gnarled finger at the young man. “Or you could say we’re a story—and the world is full of different stories.”

“You mean you’re not—real?”
And does that mean I’m crazy?

“Pfft! ‘Real.’ What’s that when it’s at home?” She shakes her head. “Of course we’re real. Touch us, if you want. Poke your finger in those marks he wears on his wrists.” She tips her head toward the young man, and they smile at each other.

Then she turns back to me. “Child, this is just a tiny piece of who we are, an image you can grasp. Your complicated brain with all its neurons and jumpity-jump electricity is still too simple too grasp
all
that we are. It’s a lovely thing, that brain of yours, but it’s a machine that only functions in up and down and across, then and now. You’re pretty much trapped inside it. So we give you pictures. They’re a little like snapshots of the ‘real’ thing, taken from one perspective and then another. We give you
this
, and we say, ‘It’s a lot like
that
.’ But not quite, mind you. When you start thinking
this
is exactly
that
, then we’re gone, moved on.”

The young man is still holding my left hand, and he gives it a little swing, back and forth. “I in you, Mawmaw,” he says softly, his eyes on the Grandmother’s face, “and you in me, that all might be one.”

She nods. “Exactly. You always did have a way with words.”

He snorts and his shoulders shake. For a moment, I think I’m going to lose them again to another of their silly private jokes, but they pull it together and turn back to me. “So,” the Grandmother says, “you wanted to know about this.” She holds up the thread as it slides between her fingers. “The third thing.”

“Yes . . . but I meant to ask you something else.”

“Later. First this. And then we’ll see, my Firstborn and I, what else we can do for you.” She falls silent, her eyes on the shining strand that spins through her hand, and then she nods at the pot on the floor beside the young man’s knee. “Take those seeds. There’s a good metaphor.”

She’s silent again for so long that I think she’s done, that’s it. A bunch of seeds in a pot is all the explanation I’m ever going to get. And what they have to do with anything is totally beyond me.

I’m starting to feel restless and worried. I’m remembering that Kirin and Safira are counting on me to find out something more important than talk about metaphors and third things, and I’m feeling peeved and helpless and frustrated. But that warm hand that’s holding mine—as though we’re boyfriend and girlfriend—gives my fingers a little squeeze, and the tension inside me slips away again.

The Grandmother clears her throat, like she’s just figured out what she wanted to say. “Give her one of those seeds,” she says to the Jesus guy.

He drops my hand and obediently fishes inside the pot, then hands me a round shiny brown thing. “There you go. A hazelnut.” He gives the old woman a look that’s full of mischief.

She just smiles serenely, as though she’s refusing this time to be sucked in by his silliness, whatever it’s about. “Very good. The seed of the hazel tree. One of my very most favorites.”

“Oh they’re
all
your favorites, you know it,” he teases, but she ignores him and turns back to me.

“So this particular seed could grow into a tree. But will it, child?”

I shrug. “Not unless you put it in dirt, I guess. Water it. Give it sunshine. All that.”

She nods. “All that.
That
is what breaks open the seed.”

I look down at the tiny sphere in my hand, and for a moment, I’m reminded of that other round thing I held in this room, the thing that split open to reveal me and Dad. I give a little shudder, but the nut in my palm stays solid and shiny, unbroken.

“So with this particular little metaphor, this little story I’m telling—” The Grandmother holds up a hand, interrupting herself. “Remember, child, no metaphor is perfect. They all need to be smashed in the end. Anyhow.” She turns her attention back to the thread for a moment, her thumb and finger sliding along its length as the wheel turns. “So. You could say that I am the seed. But if you tried to look at me alone and separate, the image you’d be seeing would be just that—an image, something shiny and hard. Something you could set up on a shelf somewhere. It would never do a single thing but sit there and gather dust. That’s what would happen to that seed you have there if you took it home with you. You’d put it away somewhere safe and dry—and ten years from now or fifty, if a mouse didn’t steal it, you’d come back and there it would be. Still all shiny and hard like it is right now. It would be a nice little memento for you. Nothing living. Just a
thing
.”

I curl my fingers around the nut, and I try to follow what she’s saying, because somehow, it seems important. As though if I could grasp
this
, everything else—Ricky and Kirin and Amir, even Dad and me and Mom—would all somehow fall into place.

“But,” the Grandmother is saying, “if instead you see me
and
my Firstborn—the Word, the Verb, whatever you want to call that which has been from the very beginning. Well, then it’s like putting that seed into the earth. My Firstborn is the rain and soil and the sunlight, all those unpredictable forces that
move
, that
act
. They break open the world so I can emerge. Do you follow me?”

“I guess,” I say slowly, though I don’t, not really. “But what is the Holy Spirit then? What is the—the Thread?” I put a capital on the word now, the way the Grandmother does when she speaks it.

“It’s a third thing.” She looks over my head at the young man. He raises his brows and shrugs, as though he’s staying out of it, and the old woman looks down again into my face. “There’s a mystery inside every seed, child. If you cracked open that nut and looked inside, you would never see it. But the Dream I’m dreaming, the Breath I’m breathing, the Thread I’m spinning—it runs through every seed in the world. It’s a secret, a hidden power. It’s potential, in it’s truest sense. It’s an intrinsic something-or-other that makes things not just grow but
change
into something new. It’s in that seed there,” she nods toward my hand, “and it’s in you, child. It weaves through this building and through the city out there. It connects everything. It’s in every human being. In every bird and beast, in each tree and stone. The tiniest cells slide along my Thread. Go deeper, and my Thread is fine enough to string molecules . . . atoms . . . electrons and neutrons . . . leptons and bosons and quarks. Strong enough to make a necklace of planets, stars, quasars, galaxies.”

The young man shakes his head. “You always make it so complicated, old lady.” He gives me a grin. “Just call it love and be done with it.”

She purses her lips and makes that disgusted little noise of hers. “Pfft. Love is such an over-used word. Once you bring
that
up, we have to start explaining the difference between ice cream and boyfriends and parents who let you down. The difference between wanting and giving. Don’t even go there, boy. Stick to
this
metaphor, this story.”