The Thread (2 page)

The door swung open, and Nani looked out at him. “Bad night upstairs,
lal
?”

Kirin shrugged and went inside. “No more than usual.”

“Are you hungry?”

He was now. He was starving.

• • •

Life looked better once his stomach was full. His head still ached, though, the way it always did when his parents fought.
Which, face it, folks, is most of the time.
He sprawled on his grandmother’s sofa, watching television, waiting until he thought it was safe to go upstairs again.

Nani finished the washing up and sat down next to him. He put out a finger and traced the pattern that twined through her sari’s silk—turquoise, deep blue, a streak of rosy red—and imagined the colors he would choose if he were painting:
cobolt teal, ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson.
She ran her little fingers through his hair, and he let his eyes close, comforted for a moment.

“I’m sorry, little Amir,” his grandmother whispered. “I am sorry that life is sometimes so hard for you.”

Kirin sat up. “I’m not Amir, Nani.” He’d said the same words so many times that he had long ago given up any hope he could convince her.

She smiled at him and bobbed her head. “When your mummy became pregnant again after so many empty years,
lal
, I felt your brother’s spirit enter her.” She had told him the story so often that Kirin barely listened anymore.

He knew his grandmother loved him, knew she worried about him. But in her eyes he was always his brother reincarnated.
Another form of invisibility, folks. Basically, Kirin Ahmed just doesn’t exist. Not to his family.

It was different at school. There he was the smart, shy kid. He wasn’t popular, but teachers liked him. His friends Justin and Anthony thought he was funny. People noticed when he spoke. They saw him when he came in the room.

Except for Callie Broadstreet. Can’t have everything in life, folks.

“What makes you sigh,
lal
?” His grandmother leaned closer to peer at him, her dark eyes searching his face.

He shrugged. “Do you know the Broadstreets, Nani? They live on the third floor?”

“Ah. The ones with the pretty daughter.” She gave him a knowing glance. “I say hello to them as we go in and out, but I could not say I know them.” After a moment, she frowned, “The girl seems not happy,
lal
. Does she have some trouble?”

“Not that I know of.” Callie was quiet at school, even quieter than he was, but he thought she must be happy at home. Most every Sunday morning, he saw her with her parents as they left the building on their way to church. Her parents’ hands were always touching her, their heads bent toward her as though they couldn’t look at her enough.

He sighed again. “I should go upstairs and do my homework.” But he didn’t move.

Nani’s small hand smoothed his hair away from his face, and he let himself slump back on the sofa, his face turned against her shoulder.

“Nani?” he asked after a moment, his voice muffled by the silky folds of her sari.

“
Lal
?”

“Why is Mum the way she is? It’s been so long since Amir died. Why doesn’t she . . . get
better
?”

He’d taken his mother’s constant grief and rage for granted when he was younger. He’d never known anything else. But the older he got, the weirder he realized his family was. When he saw the way his friends’ parents acted, even the ones who argued and threatened to get a divorce, he knew his own parents were broken in some strange way. Lately, he’d taken to reading anything he could find at the library that might explain his parents: fat, dull-covered books on psychology and philosophy, science and theology, with page after page packed dense with words. The books interested him but in an abstract kind of way. They made his picture of the world wider and deeper. But none of it really helped.

His grandmother’s fingers slid through his hair again and again, until he felt the tension in his head easing. After a moment, she said, “I will tell you a story,
lal
. It is partly true and partly make-believe, but it is my daughter’s story, I think. Come here, little Amir.” She tugged at Kirin until he shifted his legs onto the sofa, and his head dropped into her lap. He closed his eyes and listened to her voice, felt her warmth against his cheek, and wished she would call him by his own name just once.

“On a day long, long ago,” she said in the sing-song voice she used for storytelling, “Mother Durga, the self-sufficient one, she who is patient and invincible, whose compassion is fierce and unfailing, was in battle with the demon Raktabija, he whose name means ‘Blood Seed.’ Raktabija had claimed Mother Durga’s firstborn son as his own, but Durga was determined that the demon would not have the boy. She had resolved in her heart to fight Raktabija until he gave back her son.”

Nani’s voice grew slow and sad. “But some battles cannot be won. No matter how hard Durga fought, she could not destroy the demon, for each time a drop of his blood fell on the ground, it sprang up as his identical image, hundreds, thousands of demons, all fighting side by side, until the battlefield was crowded with demons—and they all looked exactly the same. Durga was confused, she was exhausted. She could not know which was the true demon. She did not know where she should fight. Her arms grew weak, and her heart turned faint. Life ebbed from her.

“And then,
lal
, just as Durga was ready to lie down and die, the Goddess Kali sprang forth from her. Kali was clad in a tiger’s skin, and her four glorious arms waved above her head. With her skull-topped staff held high, she opened her mouth and roared. The string of skulls around her neck clattered and bounced on her breasts, and her red eyes blazed.

“The battlefield was still dark with the demon’s countless images. Durga’s son was still gone. But she knew now she would not die, for Kali has endless divine energy. She snatched up first one demon and then the next, and she thrust them one after another into her mouth. Their bodies hung between her long, sharp teeth, and her lips dripped with their blood.

“But she was not appeased. Lost in rage, she grew wilder and wilder, her feet stamping the earth until the world itself began to sway and tremble. Her husband, Lord Shiva, took her by the arms and asked her to stop before she destroyed the world—but she was too consumed with grief and anger to hear him. She was blind and deaf to everything but the demon that had stolen her son from her. Her energy had no limit because it came from the One God—but the demon’s images were endless too. And so Kali fought on for all eternity.”

Nani fell silent. Finally, Kirin turned his head and looked up at her. “Is that the end of the story, Nani?”

She sighed. “No. There is more to the story. Lord Shiva will lay himself down beneath her feet, and then she will come to herself rather than hurt him. But my daughter has not yet lived that part. She is caught there on the battlefield.”

Kirin imagined his mother with demons hanging from her teeth.
And there you have it, folks. Apparently, the
Mum-and-Poppy Show
won’t ever be canceled. It will be playing for all eternity.
“It’s not a very comforting story, Nani.”

His grandmother looked down at him and smiled. “But God is there in it.”

Kirin made a face. “Where, Nani? With Mum chewing on demons forever? What kind of life is that? And where’s Poppy in the story? Is he Lord Shiva? Does he have to lie down and let Mum stomp on him?”
And would that even stop Mum? Maybe she’d just keep on stomping until Lord Shiva was a bloody pulp . . .

His grandmother leaned down and planted a kiss on his forehead. “Lord Shiva takes many forms,
lal
. I have hope.”

Kirin looked up at her little wrinkled face hanging above him. “Mum keeps Kali’s picture by her bed, right next to Amir’s.”

Nani nodded. “I think sometimes that your mother sees only her baby and Kali, no one else. Not you, not your father, not me. Kali is her mother now, more than I am.” Nani walked her fingers up Kirin’s chin and nose, then did a little finger dance on his forehead. “But I have hope,” she repeated.

“Hope?” He shook his head, dislodging her tickling fingers. After a moment, he added, “I think I’d rather be a Catholic than a Hindu, Nani. If I had to choose.”

“And why is that,
lal
?”

He thought about his friend Anthony’s house, with its images of Mary hung everywhere, a calm, sweet-faced woman dressed in blue. “Because their goddess seems so much . . . calmer. She just sits around smiling and glowing. None of this stamping around with skulls. No blood dripping off her teeth.” He turned his head against his grandmother and said into her soft belly, “Mothers should be like Mary, Nani. Not like Kali.”

“Mary too sorrows for a lost child,” Nani said softly. “But she is the mother of God, not a goddess herself. She is the one who said to God, ‘Let it be as you will.’”

Kirin lifted his head. “Poppy said tonight that Mum should submit to the will of Allah. She didn’t like it.”

Nani smiled. “No, she wouldn’t. She wants only the God that roars and fights, the God that defends the innocent one. But death and life are braided so tight that no one can part the strands.”

Kirin made a face and let his head drop back into Nani’s lap. Sometimes his grandmother’s wisdom comforted him; other times it just annoyed him.

“What if Mary and Kali had
other
children, Nani?” he whispered.

The folds of her sari swallowed his words, and his grandmother gave him no answer. Instead, she turned the television channel to one of the old reruns she loved. Kirin rolled over and watched episode after episode with her. He couldn’t help but laugh too when the silly stories made her shake with giggles.

At last, he got up and kissed her good night, but out in the hallway, his smile faded. He decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator, and he climbed slowly, putting off the moment when he had to open the door of his own apartment. He hoped his parents would be in bed by now, but he never knew what he’d find.

A few flights above him, he saw a shadow move, and he thought he heard a child whimper. He looked up, but there was nothing there, only the echo of the child’s cry lingering inside the stairwell’s cage.
Good luck, kid. I hope when you get home, your mother is more like Mary than Kali.

On the third floor landing, Kirin’s feet slowed as he thought again about Callie Broadstreet. He pictured her in her apartment, living her happy, normal life with her happy, normal parents. They probably tucked her in and kissed her good night.

2

Callie

I should have known this would be one of
those
nights. All day long, the world looked darker than usual. I had that nasty, nagging anxiety that’s tied to nothing in particular.

I fell asleep easily, though, for a change. It was the creak in the hallway outside my room that woke me, that familiar, little sound. No matter how many times it happens—and by now, I suppose it’s happened two hundred times, maybe three hundred—I still get this sick feeling in my stomach, a feeling like fear and anger, sorrow and terror, all clenched together in a knuckly fist inside me.

I breathe in, breathe out, hoping this time the footsteps will continue on past my room. Sometimes they do. So I hold my breath, listening, waiting . . .

The door cracks open, and a triangle of light widens across the ceiling. I screw my eyes shut, and I pull myself deep inside myself. Like some dark, furry, little thing, I scurry into the smallest, darkest, deepest place I can find.

The bed shifts as his weight settles on the edge. Then his hand pulls back the covers. I must have made a noise, though I didn’t mean to. “Shush!” he hisses.

He’s breathing hard, trembling, almost crying, which is different from the way this usually goes, but I don’t care. I close my eyes so I can’t see his face. As his weight settles on me, I squeeze all that’s me somewhere he can’t reach, and then I open my eyes so I can stare up at the dark ceiling. I always hope I’ll find something there in the darkness, something to anchor me.

“Look for a brownie,” Mom used to say when I was little, lying on my back on the kitchen counter, my head hanging into the sink so she could wash my hair. “Hold real still and look sharp. You wait. One of these days you’ll see his little brown face poking out from that crack up there in the ceiling. That’s where he lives, you know.” The water would be pouring over my head now, her hands in my hair, and I’d be looking and looking. “Do you see the brownie, Callie?” she’d be saying. “See if this time you can see him.”

I never saw the brownie. And tonight, as usual, there’s nothing but darkness above my head. Nothing at all. But I hold still anyway.

I’m just waiting for Dad to be done.

Afterward, I am nothing, only a body lying there on the bed, waiting for my soul to crawl out of its hiding place. In the morning, I’ll try to convince myself that nothing happened, that it was all bad dreams. But it never works.

• • •

“You look tired,” Mom says when I come in the kitchen the next morning. “I hope you’re not catching whatever Dad has. He was running a fever yesterday, and he’s too sick to go to work this morning.”

But not too sick to pay me a visit.

She’s getting ready to go to work, glancing at the little television playing on the kitchen counter while she packs her briefcase, but she pauses and looks at me a moment. “Or did you stay up late reading again?”

For just a second, I stare back at her. I don’t read in bed at night. I never do, not for years now. Does she really not know what happens in the night? Can she really, honestly,
not know
?

Her attention has shifted back to the television, though, and she doesn’t see the way I’m glaring at her. A news story is playing about a baby that’s disappeared, and Mom’s eyes fill up with tears. “Those poor parents,” she murmurs.

The newscaster is interviewing a man and a woman, the parents, I guess, but I’m still too angry to pay much attention. They’re holding up a picture of a brown-skinned little girl. She has a mop of curls held back with yellow barrettes shaped like ducks, and she’s smiling the way little kids do before they know there’s anything bad in the world. The words “Ayana Jackson, stolen from a playground outside her apartment building on 56th Street” spool across the screen beneath her face, followed by a phone number to call if anyone knows anything about her.

Mom gives a little gasp. “Oh my. They live right in this neighborhood. Such a terrible thing, so close to us.” She reaches a hand toward me. “We’re so lucky, Callie. So blessed.”

I dodge back from her hand and turn away.
Yeah, that’s us,
I’m thinking.
Nothing bad happens in our apartment. We sure are blessed.
I grab a Pop-Tart from the cupboard and shrug my backpack on my shoulders. I don’t bother to answer. All I want to do is get away before I say something mean and angry.

I gulp down mouthfuls of sugar and flour as I make my escape into the hallway, and then I run down the stairs. Kirin Ahmed, the guy in my class who lives two floors above us, is ahead of me, and I follow him out the door into the December air.

No longer in a hurry to get anywhere, I hang back as I go down the steps to the sidewalk, so I won’t catch up with Kirin. I step around the homeless guy who always sleeps under a giant black umbrella outside our building, and then Kirin and I join the group of kids waiting for the bus. All of us huddle in a sleepy, sullen silence, ignoring each other. Most of the kids have iPods playing music in their ears, shutting them off from the rest of the world, but mine is broken, so I have to listen to the traffic sounds while I wait. The bus finally pulls up in front of us with a sigh, like some huge, tired animal, and I climb on board with a sigh of my own.

The good thing about being at school is that I become invisible. To the teachers, I’m just one more adolescent shuffling into their classes, hunched over my desk, never meeting their eyes. I do enough homework to get by; I aim for solid 70s and 80s on my tests. As for the other kids, I’m not pretty enough, not ugly enough, not stupid enough, not smart enough, not even weird enough to attract their attention. If I’m careful, I can float for entire periods, lost in stories I tell myself, daydreams that are far more pleasant than anything real life has to offer. In each story, I manage to escape my life by finding a magic world where Dad and Mom don’t exist.

The primary rules at school are the same as at home: Be careful. Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself. Of course at home, the rules are pretty much useless a lot of the time. Being careful doesn’t do me any good. I don’t have a clue what triggers those nighttime visits of Dad’s, so I don’t know what I could do to avoid them. And I constantly have Mom and Dad’s attention.

Except Mom doesn’t pay any attention to the real me, not really. Instead her eyes are fixed on this Callie-shaped make-believe person, a person she’s imagined. So that’s weird, because it’s like I’m walking around inside her fantasy with her. I can talk to her, but she only hears what I would say in her pretty make-believe world.

And then there’s Dad. His attention is something else altogether. When Dad looks at me, I wish I could crawl out of my skin and leave it lying wrinkled and empty on the floor. He could do whatever he wants to with it, and I’d fly far, far away into my magic world where no one would ever see me again.

But I can’t. I’m stuck to my skin.

• • •

When I go to bed that night, I expect to be able to sleep, since Dad paid me one of his visits last night. Besides, he’s still sick.

But you never know. Sometimes that’s the worst thing, not knowing, not being able to predict. If there were a pattern, a kind of routine, then I could prepare myself on the bad nights and relax on the good nights. I’d feel like I had some control within the framework. But I don’t have any control at all.

So I lie in bed feeling scared and lonely, wishing there were somewhere safe I could hide, somewhere real,
someone
real I could trust. I hear Mom and Dad talking in the living room, and then I hear Mom come past my door and go into her room, but I don’t hear Dad’s footsteps. The sound of the television comes through my wall—
Law and Order
reruns, I think—and I know that’s not a good sign, because it means Dad’s going to watch television until Mom falls asleep. When I hear the eleven o’clock news come on, my stomach starts to feel sick, the way it always does, and when the
Tonight Show
begins, I know for sure what’s coming.

The voices from the living room are suddenly quiet; Dad’s turned off the television. I hear his footsteps come down the hallway, and then the creak in the floor outside my room.

The door cracks open, and a triangle of light widens across the ceiling.

• • •

Afterward, I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling. “God,” I whisper, but I know if there is a God, I must look to Him like a wadded tissue someone just used to blow his nose. Or maybe wipe his ass. Anyway, I’m about as gross and dirty as a person can get. I hate myself.

I wish I could hate Dad instead. But the weird thing is—I don’t. Instead, I hate Mom for being so clueless, for not protecting me. That’s what mothers are supposed to do, at least that’s what I always thought when I was little, back when I felt loved and safe. But Dad can still almost convince me he loves me.

Tears are trickling from the corners of my eyes, running into my ears. I dig my nails into my thighs until I feel blood beneath my fingertips. “God,” I whisper again, but I don’t know why. I’m not praying, I don’t expect anyone to hear me. If there is a God, I would want to be invisible to Him more than anyone else. I wouldn’t want to call attention to myself by calling His name, any more than I would blurt out one of my teacher’s names at school.

If there is a God, I think, He’s so far away He doesn’t bother with humans.

Mom and Dad and I, we go to church every Sunday. We ask the blessing before we eat a meal together. Mom reads her Bible and prays every morning, and Dad teaches the adult Sunday school class. Maybe they feel all that does them some good. For Mom, though, I think it’s just more make-believe, one more piece of that dream world where she lives. And for Dad—who knows? Maybe it all makes perfect sense to Dad. Maybe he tells God all about me. Maybe he says to God, “A man has his urges,” the way he says to me sometimes in the darkness. “They’re only sinful if they’re acted on without love.” And God nods His head and gives Dad a wink, one man to another. After all, He must have made Dad that way. And He certainly never stops him.

But I don’t think there really is a God. And yet I whisper one more time, “God.”

And then something weird happens. It has nothing to do with God, but it’s totally outside anything that’s ever happened to me. I wonder if I’ve fallen asleep and I’m dreaming.

Something brushes against my face. I imagine a spider dropping down through the darkness from my ceiling, and I reach up to bat it away. My fingers touch something: a thread, a wisp as fine as a spiderweb, like something that’s almost not there at all.

I imagined it, I must have. There’s nothing there.

But there it is. My fingers slide along it, an invisible line that stretches through the darkness, like the slenderest wire possible, like the finest hair. And the weirdest thing? It isn’t hanging straight down, dangling, the way you’d expect a thread to behave if it were caught on something. Instead, it seems to be strung sideways, at an angle above my bed. It thrums between my fingers, dipping downward, then tightening again, as though someone were tugging on the other end. I sit up in bed, the thread between my fingers, and stretch my arm out as far as it goes.

Maybe the thread fell off Dad’s shirt. Maybe it’s a thread from my blanket. But it seems to be strung tight between the window and a spot somewhere above my head. I stand up and cross the floor, my fingertips skimming along this weird line. Sure enough, it’s caught beneath my window.

When I lift the window, a blast of chilly air hits me in the face, and my fingers lose the line. Feeling like an idiot, I grope through the darkness, certain now that I must have been dreaming before, that I must have just woken up.

But then my hand brushes against something in the darkness. It’s that same whisper of a touch I felt before, so faint it can’t be real, and yet somehow substantial. The thread is stretched straight up and down outside the window, tight enough that I’m scared it will snap when I run my fingers up and down it. For a second, I close my fist around it and I feel the tiniest vibration against my palm. My entire arm tingles, as though I’ve touched something living. I gasp and jump back from the window, staring out into the darkness, trying to see something, trying to make sense out of what’s happening.

There’s just the darkness, the cold air, the sound of traffic two streets over, and the arc of headlights turning at the corner. Slowly, I put my hand out into the darkness . . .

The thread is still there.

I can hear my heart pounding inside my ribs, but I take a deep breath and grab my jeans and a sweatshirt from the chair. I pull them on, and then I climb out my window onto the fire escape.

The thread waits for me, invisible in the darkness, a line leading upward.