The Thread (5 page)

Instead, I got Dad.

“Screw you, Jesus,” I say now.

And then I hear Dad coughing from across the hall, and the sound makes something inside me relax. He coughs again, and I suck in a breath, feeling my ribs inflate, and then I stretch out my arms and legs beneath the sheets. If Dad’s coming down with one of the bad coughs he gets sometimes, maybe he’ll be too exhausted from coughing to pay me any visits. He’ll be safe in bed before I’m even done with my homework.

“Merry Christmas, Callie,” I whisper again, and I give myself a tiny smile. It’s better than nothing.

• • •

I wake up with a jerk and lie in the dark, staring up at the emptiness above my head. I thought I heard something.

But the floor in the hallway doesn’t creak, and my door doesn’t open. I close my eyes again, and I’m just about to roll over and burrow into my pillow when something brushes against my face.

My eyes fly open. There’s nothing to see, of course, but I feel again that whisper of a touch on my forehead. I put up my hand and grope through the darkness.

There it is: that silky thread strung through the darkness, dipping and thrumming as though someone on the other end were tugging at it. My fist closes tight around it; this time, I’m not afraid it will snap because I’m somehow convinced that it’s stronger than steel. I hold onto it all the while I’m feeling on the floor with my other hand for a pair of sweatpants.

I have to let go long enough to pull the pants on, but I stand so that I can feel the thread against my face. In the darkness, I press my cheek against the invisible line that’s softer than my hair. Then, once I’m dressed, I slide my fingertips along it again, a sliver of sensation that’s somehow both cool and warm. One end of the thread seems to come from above the head of my bed, but the other end leads toward the window.

“Here we go again,” I say out loud as I open the window. And then I give myself a grin. I’m scared as well as curious, but I’m fond of myself all of a sudden, as though I were a friend who had offered to come along to keep me company. It’s a friendly feeling I haven’t had in a long time, not since I stopped having sleepovers with other girls my age about three years ago. With the thread clutched tight, I climb over the windowsill onto the fire escape.

It’s sleeting, a windy spatter against my face that makes me wish I’d pulled on a jacket over the sweatshirt I wore to bed. The fire escape creaks and shudders, and my heart pounds like a bird trapped in a cage. I climb from landing to landing, till I reach the thirteenth floor, and here, just like last time, the thread is caught under the window frame.

That same golden glow makes a circle on the dirty glass. Before it can disappear again, I shove the window up, suck in a breath, and climb inside.

7

Kirin

The sound of the child’s cries was driving Kirin crazy. He could no longer persuade himself it was just his imagination. Somewhere, a child was crying. He counted the nights: tonight, Christmas night, made the seventh time he had lain in his bed listening to the quavering, desperate voice. Or was it the eighth?

What difference did it make?

The sound seemed to reverberate through the walls, and at the same time, drift through the air. He knew it must be coming from another apartment, and he thought the cries came from above his floor, higher in the building, but the sound seemed to change, not just in volume but also in his sense of how close it was. Sometimes, he was certain the cries came from his parents’ room, though of course that made no sense. Other times, the wails seemed to come from nowhere at all; instead, they hung in the air above him, as though the dark itself had generated them. He told himself it was a trick of the building’s acoustics; the sound must be traveling through the plumbing or the heat vents, or maybe it was vibrations in the insulation or the bricks that carried it.

Or something.

But why didn’t he hear anything else except the child’s cries? Never adult voices. Never a child’s happy chatter. Nothing except the exhausted sobs that made his skin prickle.

Christmas Day had gone like all Christmases. For most of Kirin’s life, his father had moonlighted over the Christian holidays at a private boarding school; he monitored the students who for one reason or another didn’t go home during vacation, so that the Christian employees could have time off for their celebrations. Kirin’s mother didn’t work, since her office was closed. She, Kirin, and his grandmother had their own traditions for the day.

Kirin both loved and hated Christmas Day. It was the one day his mother spent with him, actually talking to him, seeming to actually see him. But the focus of the entire day was Amir, of course. He had disappeared on Christmas morning, all those years ago.

So Kirin and his mother had gone downstairs to Nani’s apartment, a picture album tucked under his mother’s arm, just as they did every Christmas morning. Nani was waiting for them, trays of sweets spread out on every table—gulab jamun, gajar ka halwa, different kinds of ladoos, all of them so sugary and sticky they made Kirin’s teeth ache when he ate them. His grandmother’s shrines had been freshly decorated. The garlands of flowers he had helped her string now hung over Ganesh’s plump golden shoulders, and bananas, apples, and oranges were piled around the picture of the Child Krishna, a blue-skinned, deep-eyed boy with a peacock feather in his hair and pearls hanging from his ears.

“Merry Christmas, Maa.” His mother stepped over the chalk markings Nani had drawn on the floor as part of her worship. “Are you done with your puja?”

His grandmother’s hair was still damp from her devotions, and the air in her apartment smelled of incense and burning ghee. Sometimes, on the important Hindu days like Diwali and Kali Puja, Kirin and his mother celebrated puja with Nani, but he knew his mother did not consider Christmas to be a holy day, at least not in the sense that Nani did.

For Kirin’s mother, Christmas was the day when she remembered down to the tiniest detail her last moments with her first son.

She placed the photo album on Nani’s dining room table, between the candles and roses. “Shall we begin?”

Kirin and his grandmother glanced at each other as they took their seats. Kirin wasn’t certain what message Nani’s gaze held, but he knew she did not approve of his mother’s Christmas tradition, even though she always went along with it.

His mother carefully flipped open the album.
As though she’s opening holy scripture
, Kirin thought. She turned the pictures so that Kirin and Nani could see better, and then she leaned across the table, her eyes fixed on Kirin’s face. He felt the same flush of warmth he felt every Christmas: his mother was actually looking at him; she actually seemed to see him.

“That Christmas morning,” she said, using the same words she always did, “began with joy, Kirin. It was twenty-one years ago today. If your brother had lived, he would be twenty-three.”

She paused, as though the thought of her son as a grown man was difficult for her to comprehend. After all, Amir’s story never changed, so how could time affect Amir? In Mum’s mind, Amir would forever be two years old. She shook her head, as though dislodging the odd-shaped thought from her mind.

“In those days,” she continued, “we decorated the house with Christmas lights, and we put up a Christmas tree. We celebrated Diwali, and we celebrated the Muslim Eid-ul-Fitr too. In fact, we celebrated every chance we could get—Christian, Hindu, Muslim festivals. For us, they were all opportunities to rejoice that we were together. We were so happy . . .”

Her voice trailed away, and Kirin wondered if his mother ever once thought about how different his own reality was from the life his parents had lived before Amir’s death, if it ever occurred to her that he might care that they found no reason to rejoice now.

His grandmother curled her small brown fingers around his hand and squeezed. “You should still celebrate, Shashi, for Amir was given back to you. He is here with us now.”

Kirin’s mother didn’t even glance up from the upside-down photo she was studying. “Kirin is not Amir, Maa.” Her voice was flat.

Kirin looked down at the picture of the little boy sitting beneath a Christmas tree. He had always thought Amir looked like Nani’s picture of the Child Krishna—the same long dark curls and round dark eyes, the same grave smile. Except his skin wasn’t blue of course.

“Amir woke us up early,” his mother was saying. “He was just a tiny boy, but he knew it was a special day. We could hear him singing ‘Jingle Bells’ in his crib.” She smiled, her eyes misty and tender. “He was always so happy.”

Yeah, yeah,
Kirin wanted to say.
Amir was a little saint, we know. And then you got him up and got him dressed and it had snowed, so you and he went to the playground over on 56th Street, while Dad stuffed the turkey.

“I got him up,” his mother said, “and I put on his red corduroy overalls with a little shirt that had tiny Santas all over it. It had snowed overnight, so while your father stuffed the turkey, Amir and I decided to go for walk. I bundled him up, and we walked over to the little playground on 56th Street.”

She flipped the page of the album. “See there he is. In his stroller.”

He and Nani obligingly bent over the photos that followed, examining each one, as though they hadn’t seen them all every year, over and over.

Then his mother turned the page to the last photo in the album. “And this is the last picture I took.”

Amir was sitting in one of the playground’s baby swings, his legs dangling in their snowsuit, his cheeks rosy and dimpled, his dark eyes shining beneath a red hat with a white pom-pom.

“I meant to just turn away for a second. The wind caught his little hat, and I ran to catch it. It kept flying away from me, though—I kept running after it— When I turned around, he wasn’t there. The swing was still moving, but he—”

Something inside Kirin ached at the break in his mother’s voice. He would take away her pain if he knew how. Every Christmas for as long as he could remember, he had wanted to comfort her. But he couldn’t. He was invisible to her again, now that he had served his purpose as a witness to her ceremony of grief.

He heard again his grown-up brother’s voice:
Find me. That’s your job.

But that had been just a dream. His grandmother thought dreams were as real as the waking world, but he didn’t believe that. A dream was just a bunch of fears and wishes and leftover thoughts. His unconscious talking to him, the way Jung said. Not real.

He pretended to study the last photo of his brother. Then he leaned closer, seeing something he had never noticed before. Behind the swings, an open umbrella was tipped over on the ground, its spokes caught in the chain-link fence.

Kirin pointed at the picture. “What’s that doing there?”

His mother shut the album as though she hadn’t heard.

“That’s Richard’s umbrella,” Nani said. “He’s had it all these years.”

“Richard? You mean the homeless guy? He was there?”

His mother stroked her hand back and forth across the album cover, as if it were something alive she was petting. “I suspected him for a while,” she said tonelessly. “He was just a kid, but there was something not right about him, even then. But the police said they cleared him. They said it wasn’t him.”

“Of course it wasn’t Richard,” Nani said. “He’s a good man. I ask him for dinner over and over, but he never comes.”

His mother let out a surprised breath of laughter. “Oh Maa, I should hope not. The man gives me the creeps. Even if the police were certain it wasn’t him, I’ve always wondered. He looks at me as though he knows something, something terrible. Every time, I have to walk by him, I want to scream at him to tell me the truth.” The soft look on her face was gone now, and two dark creases pulled her brows together. “For goodness sake, Maa, you see the good in people where no good exists. That terrible, filthy man.”

She shook her head and gave another tiny dry laugh that held no humor. “You were the only person I know who was sorry when they killed Osama bin Laden. You probably would have invited bin Laden to dinner too if you’d ever run into him.”

“I always thought I saw something in that man’s eyes too, something gentle.” Nani’s face puckered. “I know he did terrible things, evil things. But he was once innocent. There is something of God in everyone.”

Kirin couldn’t help but grin, imagining Nani serving Osama bin Laden her vegetable curry.

Nani sighed and pushed her chair. “Well, now,” she said. “Speaking of dinner . . .”

• • •

Now, his stomach still full of Nani’s food, he lay in bed, listening to the child’s cries—and he found himself wondering if he might truly be going crazy.

Because he kept thinking that the child he heard crying was his brother Amir.

But if Amir hadn’t died twenty-one years ago, if he were somehow still alive—as he knew his mother hoped—he was a full-grown man, not a baby crying in the darkness. You couldn’t have it both ways.

Finally, still hearing the quavering sobs, Kirin drifted into a shallow sleep—

And then jerked awake.

He’d been dreaming that he was a baby again, standing in a crib, his hands curled around the bars, crying for his mother. But she couldn’t hear him, and he’d been crying so long that he was exhausted and shaking.

He shook his head, pushing the dream away. The child’s cries seemed fainter and shakier too. He rolled over, trying to ignore them, trying to go back to sleep. But he couldn’t.

Finally, with a sigh, he threw back his covers. “Enough!” He pulled on a pair of blue jeans and picked up the flashlight he kept on his desk. “I can’t take this anymore.”

8

Callie

I tumble inside the window.

I’m standing at the end of a long, dark hallway that smells like dust and mildew. I can see the halo of light faraway in front of me, and between it and me, the dark rectangles of doorways along the corridor. Now that I’m inside, the halo looks more like a coin, a glowing three-dimensional something that seems to be hanging a couple of feet above the floor. I take another deep breath and grab hold of my curiosity. I try to ignore how scared I am.

When I step forward, the thread brushes against my face, and its touch is somehow reassuring. I slide my fingers along it as I creep down the hallway, the floor creaking beneath my feet, past the doorways that loom darker against the darkness. I don’t really need the thread anymore to tell me where to go, but I still clutch it in my fist, feeling it thrum and hum against my palm. The light grows steadily brighter, and now I can see that it’s spinning in the air, like a wheel.

The closer I get, the less sense it makes. It’s definitely a wheel, or maybe a tiller, like on an old-fashioned ship, with spokes that are visible when the spinning slows. It’s not the flat disc I thought it was, though, but more like a wheel within a wheel, like one of those old-fashioned toys Dad gave me when I was younger—a gyroscope—except that it’s spinning on its side above the floor.

The light spilling out from the room at the end of the hall is so bright now that it dazzles my eyes, and then, as I go closer, I can see nothing but the blur of spinning gold, while my ears fill up with a humming sound that makes me think of bees and sunshine. When I finally reach the end of the corridor and step inside the room, my wet, chilly body is suddenly warm, as though I were standing in the sun. I stand there dazed, barely thinking. It comes to me slowly, dimly, that I feel better than I’ve ever felt in my life. And that makes absolutely no sense.

“Merry Christmas, child.”

I blink . . . blink again, and then I see her in the midst of all the spinning light: an old woman with a round, wrinkled face and silvery hair wrapped around her head in a fat bun. The thread slides between her gnarled fingers as it feeds onto the wheel from a pointed distaff that’s hazy with swirls of golden fiber.

“Who are you?” I’m still holding tight to the thread that vibrates within my hand. The thread seems to tug at my hand, as though it’s urging me closer to the old woman. As my eyes grow more accustomed to the light, though, I’m aware again of my own wet clothes, my hair hanging in strings around my face.

For the first time, I pull back on the thread, unwilling to go any closer. My legs are suddenly weak; they shake, buckle, and I drop on my knees onto the wooden floor. “Who are you?” I ask again, louder this time, squinting up through the light to see the woman’s face.

It’s lined and worn; when she smiles, her wrinkles pucker and deepen, and her eyes look out at me from between the folds, as dark and shiny as blackberries. “I have many names, child. For now, you can call me Grandmother.”

I sit back on my heels and try to make sense of what’s happening. “Am I asleep?”

She cocks her head at me, and her eyes catch the light. For a moment, they’re silver instead of black. “Do you think you’re asleep?”

I consider this for a moment. In some ways, this definitely feels like a dream, a scene my brain has conjured from one of my daydreams: a fairy godmother spinning gold in the shadows of an old castle; an enchantress casting a spell with a shining wheel that turns round and round in the darkness. And yet the floor feels hard under my knees, and the shut-up musty smell of the thirteenth floor fills my nostrils. My sweatpants and sweatshirt are damp against my skin, and my hair drips little dark circles onto the dusty floor.

“I don’t know,” I say finally. “I don’t think so.”

“It doesn’t really matter, you know.” When she looks at me, her smile is so kind that my eyes fill with tears, and I duck my head, embarrassed. “Dreams can be just as real as the rest of life—and sometimes, life can be just as unreal as dreams. What’s real is always simply this.” She nods her chin at the wheel that never stops its spinning.

“What is it?”

“Hmm, well . . .” Her face creases into countless laughter lines, so many smile-shaped wrinkles that she must have spent the last hundred years or so laughing. “It has many names, just as I do.”

She moves her hand up and down along the thread that feeds from the wheel. As I watch, I can’t really tell if the thread is spinning out from the wheel to spread in loops of gold through the air above her head—or if the action is reversed, and the spinning wheel is actually pulling the thread in from the air, winding the golden strand tight around its central axis.

The old woman is still smiling. “The Greeks called it the Rhombus, the magic wheel,” she says. “Long ago, that was, of course, by your time. They said it could bind hearts together.” She pinches the shining strand tighter between her fingers, and I feel the tug of the thread within my own hand. “People have told stories about me and my wheel for century upon century. The stories turned into fairy tales and legend, with only threads of truth still woven through them. It doesn’t matter. My spinning wheel never stops turning, and the thread is always there. It never breaks.”

I open my fingers and look at the wisp of light that’s caught inside my fist. I try to follow its line through the winding coils that twine around the woman’s head, but the lines intersect too many times for me to untangle them with my eyes. It’s hard to believe those swirls of light are a single line rather than many strands, and yet I see only one steady thread spinning from the turning wheel.

“What is it?” I whisper.

“It is the thread we spin to tie me to my Beloved.”

This explains absolutely nothing, of course. I hear an ugly whisper inside my head—
crazy old bag
—but it’s a small, faraway voice that can’t compete with the spangled light that fills my eyes. “We . . . ?” I look around, searching the shadows. “Are there more of you here?”

“Just me. Just you. Do you see anyone else?”

“No.” I hesitate, trying to sort through her words. “But what did you mean—we spin the thread?”

“I meant you and I, of course. Isn’t that what you have there in your hand?”

“But—” This doesn’t feel like a dream, and yet her words make no more sense than something from
Alice in Wonderland
. And Alice’s story was a dream, wasn’t it? “I didn’t have anything to do with making the thread,” I say. “I found it. In my bedroom. All I did was follow it. Here. To you.”

She gives me her smile again. “Yes, that’s the way it works. The thread ties us all together, me to my Beloved, my Beloved to you, you to me.”

“But—” I look down, away from her face with its puzzling smile and its terrible tenderness. She’s wearing some sort of long gown or robe, and its deep blue fabric billows around the spinning wheel, trails onto the dirty floor. If I reached out, I could touch its folds, but I’m afraid. I gulp, suck in a breath, look back up at her face. “Who is your Beloved?”

“Why, you are, child.” A single tear trickles out of one dark eye and follows the smiling creases of her face, then drips onto her robe. “I know you didn’t know you were. But you are. You have always been. Always and always.”

My heart gives a funny leap inside my ribcage, terror or joy or something else, I can’t tell.
She’s a homeless person hiding out here,
my brain whispers to me. But I ask what I’m longing to ask: “Do you know me?”

I want her to know me. I want her to love me.
Fairy tales. Feeble. Foolish. Fucked-up fantasies.
“How do you know me?”

Her smile widens into a toothless grin. “You’re quite alliterative, my dear. And I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb.”

And now there’s nothing else to say. She read my mind? And . . . oh shit, I’ve sat through enough sermons to know she’s quoting the Bible, the Book of Jeremiah, to be precise, or is it the Psalms?
She’s saying she formed me in my mother’s womb? Come on now. Like she was God?
Either I’m asleep and dreaming, or she’s a crazy old lady who wandered in off the streets.

“There are actually several other possibilities,” she says. “You could be hallucinating. That would make you the crazy one, by your definition, or at least imbalanced in some way. This vision you’re having could be caused by a fever or an illness. A brain tumor maybe. Even a severe vitamin deficiency could do it. Or I could be pulling your leg. I might be leading you on, playing an elaborate joke on you. I could be lying to you. Maybe I’m just bored. Maybe,” she leans closer to my face, her dark eyes gleaming, “maybe I’m
evil
.”

I hear the echo of my own thoughts in her last words. That’s exactly what I was thinking about myself earlier today after Mom talked to the homeless guy.
Maybe I’m evil.
I shake my head. Another coincidence. But I don’t understand . . . well, anything. I don’t understand one single thing about what’s happening. Is she trying to prove to me that she can read my mind? Or is she really just something from my own brain, someone I’ve created in a dream, a mish-mash of all the day’s bits and pieces, the way dreams so often are?

She touches the side of my face with a knobby finger. “Which explanation do you like best, Callie? Which would fit most easily inside that busy brain of yours? Because I can work with anything, you know.”

Her touch on my skin tingles, a warm little buzz that reminds me of the way the thread feels inside my fist, as though my cells are somehow dancing in response. I try to find something to say, but instead, I realize I’ve slumped forward, my head hovering above her knees.

I don’t think she’s evil.

Her free hand, the one that’s not holding the thread as it unwinds from the spinning wheel, settles on my hair. Her touch feels the way sunshine warms your head on a spring day, that sense of comfort and well-being that soaks through you. “There,” she murmurs. “There, child.” And for a moment, I give in; I let my cheek rest on her soft robe.

But I can’t stay like that. There are too many questions in my head to let me relax, even though I’m so, so tired. I feel as though I’ve been tired for years, as though I haven’t slept at all in three years, and now it’s suddenly caught up with me, like a huge wave of exhaustion breaking over my head. I feel myself tremble, nearly pushed over by the weight of weariness crashing on me, but I force myself to pull back, to sit up straight again. When I finally manage to lift my head enough to look up into the old woman’s face again, she’s still smiling.

“Merry Christmas, Callie.”

I must have made a face at her words, because she laughs, a creaky little cackle that makes me think of a squeaky door swinging open. “Not a fan of my child’s birthday? Santa wasn’t good to you this year?”

Now she’s echoing the homeless guy. Her voice is gentle, her smiling eyes filled with kindness, but after the Christmas Dad gave me this year, two visits in a row, I don’t much appreciate this bit of irony. Instead, all at once I’m rocked—literally, physically, thrown off balance so that I feel myself sway—by yet another huge tide of feeling. This time, though, it’s not exhaustion I’m feeling. It’s anger, the way I feel when Mom is all motherly and worried acting, as though I’m the same little girl I used to be, as though she doesn’t know that our family no longer lives in a happy shiny world. Anger’s not even a big enough word for what I’m feeling now. Anger’s a growly kind of word, but what I’m feeling is fiercer, darker, uglier. It’s rage.

Rage: from the same Medieval Latin as “rabies.” Like a dog that’s gone mad, that’s sick with fury.

But I have no time for my old word games now. “If,” I say, biting off each word between my teeth as though it were something hard and sharp, “Santa and Jesus are real—
if
they were real—then they’d be just two more men who have never done anything for me. Two. More. Fucking. Men.” Spit sprays out of my mouth as I speak.

And in some little corner of my mind, I’m horrified. Invisible Callie doesn’t talk like this out loud. Callie keeps her head down and acts polite. She doesn’t swear anywhere except inside her own mind. She doesn’t talk back to anyone, not even crazy old women who are maybe claiming to be God.

The old woman doesn’t seem fazed by my anger. Her head is cocked to one side again, her shiny eyes fixed on my face. “Well,” she says after a moment, as though she were waiting to see if I had anything more to say before she spoke, “let’s leave my good and faithful servant Nicholas out of the conversation for the moment, shall we?”

I find myself nodding automatically, maybe because I’m ashamed of my rage, but even as I think that, her free hand comes up in the air, like an old-fashioned policeman saying,
Stop!
“Don’t be ashamed of your anger, Callie! You can’t hurt me with it—I am more than big enough to contain it, believe me—but you can hurt yourself if you keep it inside you. It will fester and infect you from within. Let it out—put it here,” she gestures to her lap, “and it will become something new. Something you and I may find useful.”

She waits a moment, her hand open, as though she’s thinking I’ll put something in her lap, something actual and solid that I could just hand over and be done with. I shake my head, and I realize even if I could do what she’s suggesting—
crazy old hag
—even if what she just said made any sense,
I don’t want to
.

Maybe my rage is all I have. Maybe it will turn rotten and smelly inside me, like the bottom drawer of the refrigerator when Mom forgets to clean out the slimy old carrots and celery—but right now, it’s all I have to make me strong. It doesn’t feel rotten. It feels like something hot and bright and powerful.

She gives me a little nod. “I understand—but let me see. I’ll give it back to you afterward.” Her hand is still open and waiting.

The old lady may be crazy, but she can definitely read my thoughts.

So maybe it’s me that’s crazy.

Maybe she’s not even real. Maybe I’m asleep.

What happens next is the craziest thing of all so far. Because I look down and I realize there’s something round and bright in my lap, something that glows like an ember, with a skin of red-orange-blue fire flickering over the dark, dark center. Slowly, I pick it up, but it’s too hot to hold, and I shove it away. It drops into the woman’s lap, as though it were one of the oranges Mom gave the homeless guy.