The Thread (21 page)

His gaze shifted to the picture on the bookshelf. It was Amir’s smiling baby face, but he couldn’t help wishing that they had a photo of the grown-up Amir. “Like you didn’t give up on Amir,” he said.

But Mum shook her head. “No, Kirin. I mean like you didn’t give up on me. Remember all those years, when I was lost? When I could barely see you there, right in front of me?”

Kirin gave his head a single nod.

“Kirin, all those years, you never gave up on me. You kept on loving me. No matter how awful I was as a mother, no matter how deep I was in my pain.” She reached out and touched his knee. “So Kirin?”

He blinked back the tears that burned his eyes. “Yeah?”

“Don’t give up on Callie either.”

For a second, he wasn’t sure he had heard her right. But she nodded at the question she must have seen in his eyes. Her frown was gone now. “She’s been through so much, Kirin. If you really love her—be patient.”

Kirin looked into his mother’s calm eyes. This new peaceful Mum always surprised him. Sometimes she seemed like someone he had never met, but he liked her. He liked her a lot. And her words now made something inside him grow a little lighter. “Thanks, Mum,” he mumbled.

She turned then to Poppy. “Guess who I called while I was at work.”

“Who?” Poppy asked obligingly, even though he’d gone back to watching the end of the Star Trek movie.

“Safira Jackson.”

Poppy turned away from the TV. “How come?”

Mum sighed. “There’s something I need to tell her.” Her head dropped, and her hair swung down over the side of her face for a moment. She sucked in a breath, then lifted her head and tucked her hair behind her ear. “She wants all of us to come over to her house tomorrow night. For dinner.”

“Who’s all of us?” Poppy asked.

Mum held up her hand and counted on her fingers. “You. Me. Kirin. Maa. Mrs. Broadstreet. Callie. Callie’s aunt. And that homeless guy, Richard. So there will be ten of us, with Safira and her husband. Eleven counting the baby.” Mum looked both scared and happy.

Kirin felt his face burning. “Why’s she asking us to dinner?”

“She says there’s things we all need to tell each other. Pieces of the story.” Mum had a funny look on her face. “There’s something I need to tell. And maybe others have things they need to say as well. I’m glad we’ll all be together. All of us who went through what we did.”

Kirin tried to focus on the odd expression on his mother’s face. But all he could really think was one single thought.

Callie will be there. I’ll see Callie.

Maybe, he told himself, somehow, tomorrow at Safira’s, maybe he could find a way to make things right again.

While Mum and Poppy talked about what to have for dinner, he got to his feet, then went to the window and looked down. Callie wasn’t down there of course, though he had been hoping she would be. Had she come back, was she downstairs in her own apartment now? Or was she still out there, by herself, walking somewhere?

24

Callie

The Thread leads me to the bus stop, and there’s the Q101 bus waiting. I know where that bus goes, and I don’t want to go there, but the Thread is tugging at my hand. In the end, I give in and climb the steps. People glance at me, at the way I’m holding my hand up in the air, but they look away again as I sit down. This is the city, after all, and crazy people are everywhere. What’s one more?

I was hoping that the Thread would lead me to the Grandmother, but no, here I am, riding the bus, and then, no surprise, I’m getting off at the stop in front of a building that’s seven stories of white brick. It’s the prison—and Dad’s behind those walls.

I’ve been to the prison before, with Mom, just once since Dad took up residence here. Mom comes every week, but I refused to go after that first time. I don’t have anything to say to Dad. I don’t want to even look at him. But now the Thread is insisting that I go inside.

You have to be on a list,
I want to tell the Thread.
I can’t just walk in there and expect to see him.
But there’s no talking back to the silent but insistent tow on my hand. I follow the others inside the building and get in line.

There’s a guy ahead of me who keeps turning around to look at me, but I’m not paying attention to him—my heart’s pounding too hard, and I’m feeling like I might throw up—until he says my name. And then I look at him. I see his face.

It’s that Jesus guy.

He smiles his white wide smile and shoves his hoodie off his head. “Hey Callie.” Long dreads spill around his shoulders, falling nearly to his waist. They’re gold and brown and black, the same color as the lion’s mane at the zoo that day with Kirin.

“No way you grew those since last winter,” I hear myself say, as though that’s important right now.

He just keeps on smiling and murmurs, “All things are possible . . .”

“Yeah right.” I can’t keep looking into his dark eyes, so I pretend to be reading the sign on the wall:
All persons and their possessions are subject to search while in this building.
After several seconds of reading the words over and over to myself, I ask, “What are you doing here?”

“Thought you might need some company, boo.”

“Great. Thanks.” I go back to studying the sign.

He nudges me with his elbow, makes me catch his eye. In spite of myself, I find myself laughing with him, as though it’s all some silly joke, the whole entire thing.

But once I start laughing, I can’t stop. I’m gasping, shrieking, bent over at the waist with my hands on my knees, hiccupping and gulping, and now my laughter is mixed up with sobs. Just when I think I have myself under control, something sets me off again.

I’m falling into pieces. Everything that happened during the past year, during the past three and half years, during the past twenty-one years—it’s all caught up with me. It’s fallen right on top of me, tearing at me, tearing out all those rusty hooks inside of me, one after another. Maybe there’s a hook for each time Dad visited me, because there seem to hundreds of them, hook after hook, breaking off inside my heart, inside my memories. Each time I let out another burst of laughter, another sob, I let go of another one.

“Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left,” I gasp. “All I am is hooks, just a bunch of hooks, and nothing else.” But even that strikes me as funny.

The Jesus guy wraps his arms around me. Maybe his arms can contain the slender, raw thing inside me, all that’s left now with all those old hooks torn out; maybe he won’t let it slip away.

The spasms of laughter finally ebb. I lean on him, and my breath quiets. His hoodie smells like fabric softener. I heave a sigh and make myself take a step back from him.

His smile is gentle. “Better?”

I nod. “Yeah.” All the hooks that were stabbed into my heart, they’ve all fallen away. There’s nothing left now, only this thing inside me that feels like a thread of something pink and new, something that’s still there, still holding on. Still me.

“You ready for this now?” he asks me.

It doesn’t look like I have a choice. We’re at the head of the line, and the Jesus guy is talking to the woman behind the glass. Apparently, my name is on the list; everything is already in place for this visit. I should have known.

I suck in another deep breath and square my shoulders. My mind feels completely blank. After so long, after all these years that I’ve kept all the bad memories inside me, now that I’ve let them go, there’s nothing left around the thin, new piece of me that’s left. Nothing but space. My mind feels bare and empty.

And clean. Like there’s nothing to get in the way of the light that’s suddenly streaming around me. I blink, trying to see where the light is coming from.

It’s the young man. Light falls off from him like water. He laughs, as though life’s just too good to not be laughing. I smile back at him, and then I wipe away my tears. I take a breath and follow him to the room where my father waits.

• • •

Dad is thin and pale. He doesn’t meet my eyes. Looking at him, I feel embarrassed somehow, ashamed that he’s come to this. All our secrets are out in the open. Mom’s still doing her make-believe thing, but Dad and I can’t. Before last winter—back when life went on and on, always the same, without the Grandmother, without Kirin, without the Thread—back then, he and I used to pretend every day that we didn’t know what had happened the night before. We can’t do that anymore, not now. If we look at each other, we’ll both have to face everything that’s been between us. Everything. It’s this awful, horrible intimacy, something that I share with him and no other person.

So neither of us looks at the other. We sit across from each other, and we keep our eyes on the scarred table between us.

“Hello, Callie,” he says finally.

“Hello, Dad.”

My voice catches on the familiar words. Dad makes a noise, a thick wet sound, and I realize he’s crying. But I still can’t make myself look at him.

The last time I was here, sitting with Mom, I wanted to scream at them both. I wasn’t thinking about me, about what Dad had done to me. I was just thinking about Ayana. I wanted to hit him, hurt him, pay him back for the terrible things he did to her. My anger was like something hard and shiny, a shield protecting me from him.

I didn’t plan to ever let go of it. But when I laughed and cried just now, when I let go of all those rusty hooks, my shield dropped away with them. So here I sit, empty and naked.

“I know you can’t forgive me,” Dad says.

“No.” My voice is small and flat, but there’s no anger behind it.

“I’ll never ask you to.”

“Thank you,” I say politely. I do, in fact, feel a faint but real gratitude that he won’t ask this of me.

We sit there. There’s nothing to say to each other. Absolutely nothing.

What am I doing here?
I lift my head and turn to the young man beside me. He brought me here after all, he and his Thread.

He gives me his smile, and then he reaches for my hand. At the same time, he places his other hand on the table, palm up. After a moment, Dad put his hand into the man’s. I can’t bear to see Dad’s fingers, the shape of them almost as familiar as my own, so I close my eyes.

And suddenly, as soon as my eyes are shut, I know I’m seeing the hand the young man sees—not Dad’s big, pale fingers, but something else. His true hand? It’s small and grimy, poking out from the frayed cuff of a plaid shirt.

I recognize that shirt. I’ve seen this hand before

That can’t be Dad’s hand. Because that’s—

I suck in a breath. “No.”

It’s Ricky’s hand.
But that makes no sense.

“I’m so sorry,” says Ricky’s young-boy voice. “I didn’t want to turn into Pop. Oh Callie, I’m so sorry.”

I open my eyes and stare at Dad’s tear-streaked face. He looks back at me, but I don’t see any version of the father I’ve known all my life—not the kind, good-natured Dad from my childhood, not the terrible Dad I’ve hated these past few years. All I see is Ricky’s eyes, the eyes of a frightened little kid, looking back at me from my father’s adult face.

“I don’t understand.” I turn back to the Jesus guy beside me. “I don’t get it.
He’s
Ricky? Not Richard? But what . . .
how
—?”

“You and Kirin were not time travelers,” the young man says. “You were
dream
travelers. You were inside your father’s dreams. You spoke with his dream-self, and you walked with him through his dreams about the past. And then it was his dream-self who came to you at the end.”

“Then—” I feel as though a jigsaw puzzle I’d thought was mostly put together has been torn apart, as though I’m being asked now to put it back together using an entirely different picture on the box cover. I think back over everything that happened, trying to fit the pieces together into a new image. “Then,” I say the word again, slowly, trying to think, “it was
Dad
who . . . ?” I look from the young man’s face to Dad’s. “
Dad
told us what happened to Amir? It was him up on the roof with his father?”

But there’s even more, something that just doesn’t make any sense. “Dad told Kirin about—about me, to make
himself
stop what he was doing? How could he?
Why
would he?”

The young man’s dark eyes just meet mine steadily, waiting for me to understand what this means. But I can’t. How can Dad be both the man who hurt Ayana so terribly—and the boy who was so brave?

I turn back to Dad—but he’s not there. In his place is a scared little boy looking back at me. He’s a grubby, not particularly attractive kid, but his eyes are steady. I see guilt in them and shame. I also see the same desperate courage I saw there on that night last winter when he was willing to let me raise my sword and kill him. And I see something else.

I see something that looks like love.

“You’re a rotten father.”

Ricky nods.

I give a snort of angry laughter. Of course this boy is a rotten father. He’s just a messed-up kid. What did I expect? How could a kid like this be anyone’s father?

“I don’t have much to offer you,” Ricky says. “I never did. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I pretended all those years, that I—” His voice cracks. “But anything I have, Callie, whatever I have—it’s yours.”

I look at him for a moment. “There’s nothing of yours I want.” I’m not trying to be mean. But it’s the truth.

He nods again. “I know. But—if you ever— Anything.” He shrugs, then his head drops. “I’m sorry, Callie,” he whispers. “I turned into Pop. I never meant to. But I did. I did to you what he did to me.” He looks up at me. “But I never hit you the way he hit me, Callie. Never beat you.”

Does he expect me to thank him because he sexually abused me but refrained from beating me? “You did worse than that,” I say, my voice hard now. “You took a little girl. Just like your father.”
My grandfather? Grandma’s husband, Aunt Mickey’s father?
I can’t make sense of it all.

“I didn’t mean to take her,” Dad’s saying. “I was confused—stupid. But I was so sick, and somehow I got mixed up with the past. My head—it was like when I was kid, my crazy times. I thought I was saving her from Pop. I thought Pop was still alive—and if I kept her hidden long enough, he would forget about her. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just didn’t know how to keep her quiet.” He sniffs, wipes his nose with the back of his hand. “It was crazy. I know that now. Wrong. I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

I stare at him.
Ricky. Dad is Ricky.
A messed-up kid with a snotty nose who was too stupid, too crazy, to know what to do.

I still can’t forgive him. But I feel the warmth of the young man’s fingers in one hand, the Thread’s tiny burning strand in my other, and I’m like one of those seeds Jesus was stringing back on the thirteenth floor that day; I feel as though the Thread runs straight through my body. It’s strung between my two palms, it runs through that narrow piece of me that’s left inside. The Thread is pulling, gently, insistently, pulling me forward, toward something new, something I can’t even imagine.

One of the guards along the walls steps forward and blows a whistle. “Time’s up,” he says. “Visitation is over.”

The Jesus guy and I get up and file out with the other visitors. I look over my shoulder to catch one last glimpse of Ricky. He looks lost in the orange uniform, his narrow shoulders slumped as he shuffles along . . . and then he blurs, and I’m seeing the grown-up man again. Dad turns his head, and for one second our eyes meet. Dad gives his head a tiny nod.

After another second, I nod back.

• • •

Outside the prison, I turn to say something to the Jesus guy—but he’s gone. I no longer feel the Thread in my hand. I stand on the sidewalk, and I still have that clean, empty feeling inside, as though my heart is a windswept sunlit space waiting to be filled. I’m not sure what to do next. Go home, I guess, but then what?

“Callie? Callie!”

I turn around. There’s a woman behind me wearing dark glasses, her thin body wrapped in a long raincoat, her hair hidden under a scarf. She looks like someone pretending to be a twentieth-century spy, and I don’t recognize her at first—and then I do. “Aunt Mickey! Did you come to see Dad?”

She pulls off the dark glasses and makes a face. “I’m stupid, aren’t I? I haven’t been able to make myself visit him yet. Today I got the idea I could bring myself to come here if no one could recognize me. I didn’t realize you had to get permission ahead of time for a visit.” She squints at me. “So
you
visit him?”

“This is only my second time.”

“I’m surprised you can bring yourself to see him.”

“Yeah.” I glance at the bus waiting by the curb. “Well.” I shrug. “Are you going back now?”

She nods, puts her dark glasses on again, and we get on the bus together. We ride along in silence, both of us thinking our own thoughts, our hands folded in our laps, and then she says, very quietly, “I’m so ashamed of him. So . . . horrified.” Her hand reaches out and grips mine. “But I’m more ashamed of myself, Callie. I should have been paying better attention to you. I should have known what was happening. I should have stopped it. But I didn’t
want
to know. I wanted to think that once my father died, we could be a normal family. Grandma and I, we didn’t know how terrible it was for Fred, but we knew a little, we
didn’t know
what Dad had done, we didn’t know. But we knew a little. And we left Fred to deal with it by himself. We pretended he was fine. We knew, we
knew
inside he wasn’t right, that Pop had hurt him. Maybe we didn’t know exactly how. We didn’t want to know. When he married your mother, we told each other he’d be fine. We left
you
to deal with him.”