The Thread (8 page)

I turn to him, but his eyes are fixed now on the cookie in his hand. He looks like he’s suddenly realized he’s eaten all the cookies he’s going to want for a long time.

“Oh
m’ijo
.” Safira reaches across the table and puts her fingers on his hand. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I didn’t know.”

Kirin looks up, and their gazes meet. “The police,” Safira says slowly, “do
they
know?”

“Yeah.” He looks back down at the cookie. “They talked to my mother for a long while after they questioned me. And then the next day, they wanted both my parents to come to the police station again.” Kirin shrugs. “I don’t know what the police asked them, and I don’t know what my parents said. They didn’t talk about it afterward. But it must have been about my brother.”

I’m thinking of threads again, threads that somehow run between Safira and Kirin—but those threads seem dark now, black and sticky and terrible, like something from a Halloween movie.

“The police think it is the same guy, maybe.” Safira says finally. “They don’t think it was the boy I saw who—who kept your brother. They say a little girl had disappeared from this neighborhood five years before that, and another one
before that
. Little girls disappearing every five, two, three years, going all the way back to the 1960s. Eleven of them in all. Just long enough between them that no one knew for sure. Eleven little girls, and your brother the only boy. Those poor, poor mothers.” Safira’s fingers tighten around Kirin’s hand.

Kirin lifts his head. “So who was the boy you saw? What do the police think?”

Safira shrugs. “They don’t know. The man’s helper. A son, a younger brother, a nephew. Who knows, they say. Someone under the man’s influence.”

“Did the boy you saw have an umbrella with him?”

Safira forehead wrinkles as though she’s puzzled, and she shakes her head. “I remember no umbrella.”

I turn and stare at Kirin, wondering what he’s thinking, but he’s already asking a different question: “So . . . why would he—this man—why would he wait so long before he . . . did it again?”

Safira tips her cheek down against Ayana’s head, and she looks like she doesn’t want to talk about this anymore. “They say maybe the man was in prison for some other crime,” she answers finally. “Maybe he just got out. They are checking, they say.”

She looks into Kirin’s face, and whatever she sees there makes her seem like she wants to cry. “I wanted to tell you kids all this, wanted you to know it is important we stop this man. I didn’t know what it would mean to you, Kirin.” She shifts Ayana in her lap, and I watch her fingers tighten around his hand. “Are you all right,
m’ijo
?”

Kirin shrugs his shoulders. “I’m fine. It’s not like it’s anything new to me.” This has been the story he’s grown up with, I realize, the thing that little-boy Kirin had to fit into the picture he made of the world.

“And your mother?” Safira asks, her voice very soft. “Your father?”

Kirin shakes his head. “My mother’s never gotten over it, losing my brother.” He meets Safira’s eyes. “It’s like the only thing in the whole world that matters to her. And she’s—she’s broken inside. She can’t go on. She can’t stop—can’t stop hurting and—being angry too. She and my father fight all the time.”

I feel as though something slammed into me, as though
Kirin
had slammed into me, knocking everything else out of my head.
This
is what his life is like, what it’s always been like, and I never knew, all those years when we stood next to each other in the elevator, passed each other on the stairs. I’ve been so worried about my own secret that I never thought to wonder if Kirin had one too. Maybe everyone has something they hide, something that makes them bleed where no one can see—but I don’t want Kirin to have this secret, to have had it all his life. I want to take it away from him somehow. I want so bad to be strong enough, brave enough to reach out and take his other hand.

But I’m not, so I’m just glad that Safira is.

“Oh Kirin.” Safira’s fingers interlace with his, and she pulls his hand across the table, presses a kiss on it. “Oh
m’ijo
, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Her eyes are full of tears.

Kirin looks uncomfortable, as though he’s not sure what to think about Safira holding his hand, let alone kissing it. His ears are that dark red they turn sometimes.

“Such pain makes a mother
loca
,” Safira is saying. “In Mexico, they tell the story of
La Llorona
, a woman who lost her children long ago, whose sorrow never heals. Century after century, she wanders through Mexico, always searching, always crying.”

Kirin winces as though something sharp poked him. “She’s a ghost now? She
never
let go of her pain,
never
stopped looking?”

“It is just a story,
m’ijo
,” Safira says quickly. “An old folktale.” She straightens her shoulders. “Whatever has happened, has happened. It is God’s business. That’s what my
abuela
always said. But the here and now, she said, that is where we need to be the hands of God.” She looks from Kirin’s face to mine. “If you think of anything, if you see anything, if you remember anything, anything that will help the police catch this monster—you will tell the police. You promise?”

I find myself nodding automatically, though I know there’s nothing I can tell the police that they don’t already know, nothing that will help them. “We will,” I say, because I want to give at least that much to Safira. “If we think of anything . . . if we see anything.”

She studies my face, as though she’s trying to solve a puzzle she sees there, and then she gives her head a little shake. “Something happened, something strange I think, something that made it so God could use you two to save my baby. I don’t know what you are not telling. I guess I do not care. But promise me, both of you—do not be shutting yourself off from whatever told you to find Ayana.”

Kirin has been slumped down in his chair, but now he sits up straight. He glances at me, and I know we’re both thinking about the voice crying in the night, the thread. I look back at him, and I nod, as though I’m answering a question he’s asked me. He turns to Safira. “We promise.”

Safira nods too. “You will have to trust each other, you two. Two heads know more than one, my
abuela
said, and two hearts together dare more than one alone.”

At this, I give Kirin an uneasy glance and find him giving me one of his sideways looks at the same time. I turn my head away quickly, and Safira smiles at us.

“I’ll help you if I can,” she says. “If you need me.” She gets to her feet, Ayana still in her arms. “Let me put this little girl in her crib. And then I will get you some cookies to take home.”

The brown paper bag she hands me when she comes back is warm from the cookies inside, and when she pulls me against her in a hug, I smell the molasses and ginger on her clothes and in her hair. “You have my phone number now,
m’ija
,” she whispers in my ear. “You need me, you call me. And I don’t mean only about this thing. I mean about anything, anything. You did for my baby what can never be repaid. But I will try, if you will let me.”

I don’t like it usually when people touch me, but I want to stay right there, close to her warmth. It feels like the safest place I’ve been in a long time. But out of habit, I take a step backward, and Safira turns to Kirin.

“You too,” she says to him. “If you need anything, if you are scared, if something, anything, happens that you cannot handle alone—call me. Anything, whatever, whenever. Come knock at my door. Even if only to ask me to pray.” She stretches out her hands toward us, her long fingers spread wide. “I’ll be doing that anyway, praying. Blessings on you, wonderful children. Jesus bless you both.”

• • •

The afternoon is turning into night as we walk down the street, back toward 58th Street. The wind is cold in my face, and I’m glad that Kirin is beside me. I’m thinking about Safira’s words, about Jesus and blessing. For the first time in a long time, those words, coming out of her mouth, didn’t make me angry.

“Do you believe in God?” I hear myself ask Kirin.

“Yeah.”

We walk a few more steps in silence, and then I ask, “What about Jesus?”

He smiles and gives me that shy, sideways glance of his I’m starting to love. (Well, maybe not
love
. That can’t be the right word.) “What
about
Jesus?” he asks. “You mean, do I believe that God came down to earth and walked around as a human being? Or do you mean do I think of myself as a Christian?”

“Well, both, I guess. Aren’t they the same thing?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. My dad’s a Muslim. My mother’s a Hindu. They both seem to take for granted that Jesus was real. Not that they pray to him the way Safira does. But my grandmother—she’s Hindu too—she prays to Jesus all the time.”

I should have known he was Muslim or Hindu, something anyway, with the name he has, but I never thought about it until now. “So what are you? Muslim or Hindu?”

He shrugs again. “Nothing, I guess. I don’t know what I believe. Just that there’s—something.”

“Are your parents . . . religious?” I’m thinking about my own parents, about the way they’ve been talking about God my whole life. Are Muslims and Hindus like that? I feel stupid and ignorant, but Kirin smiles at me. He has such a kind, sweet face, I’m thinking, even the dark beard that’s starting to grow along the hard line of his jaw . . . And then I shake my head at myself, embarrassed by my silliness. He raises an eyebrow at me in an unspoken question, even while he goes ahead and answers me.

“My dad—he’s both proud and ashamed of being Muslim. Ever since 9-11, you know? Being Muslim is part of who he is, part of his heritage, he says. And he hates that some people judge him, think he’s a terrorist or something just because he’s Muslim. But he’s not really religious. He doesn’t pray on his knees the way a good Muslim should, at least not very often. And my mother—” Something flickers across his face, but I’m not sure what it is. “My mother’s kind of into Kali. The goddess?”

“Callie?” I repeat. “There’s a goddess named
Callie
?”

He grins. “With a K, not a C.”

He spells it for me, and I nod as though now I know what he’s talking about. When I get home, I’ll look on the Internet for this goddess who almost has my name. We turn the corner, walking slower now that our building is only a block away.

“My grandmother prays a lot, every day,” Kirin is saying. “She says Krishna, Kali, Jesus are all just different ways to see the One God.” He shrugs. “Who knows? She’s right about a lot of things. Really wrong about some other things.” He turns and looks at me. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”

I shove my hands deeper in my pockets and hunch my shoulders against the cold. “I don’t know.”
I don’t know anything anymore,
I want to say.
I haven’t in a long time. All my stories fell apart three years ago.
But I can’t tell him that, so instead I say, “When I was little, I believed in God and Jesus. But now . . .” I shrug. “How can Safira still believe in Jesus after what happened to Ayana?”

Kirin doesn’t answer, and after a moment, I say what I’m really thinking: “Why isn’t she angry with God?”

“Maybe she is. That wouldn’t mean she stopped believing in Him.”

I kick at an empty beer bottle on the sidewalk, send it rolling into the street with a clink. I think about that pronoun Kirin just used—
Him
.

“Well, who needs Him?” I say as I step around the street guy by our building.

The street guy—Richard—looks up at me from under his umbrella. “I am the son of God,” he announces. “Made in His image.”

Kirin gives me his sideways grin. “Well, there you are, Callie. The son of God.”

Richard grins too, and his teeth behind the gray snarl of his mustache are as yellow as an alley cat’s. “I’m a Trinitarian, mind you. Do you get that?”

Kirin stops with one foot on our steps, then turns back toward Richard. “What do you mean?”

“I believe in the creator, the word spoken, and the other thing,” Richard says. “The thing that ties the word to the creator. The thing that ties me to the creator. The third thing that makes the one. You know. The Trinity. The Ouisia. The wheel that never stops spinning.”

I look down at Richard, and I’m shivering now, but I’m frightened more than cold, though I can’t say why. It’s not Richard who’s scaring me, not really. He’s always muttering nonsense, and I know this is probably no different. Whatever stories Richard tells himself must be a bunch of fragments, just jumbled up pieces.

But the world seems too strange suddenly, too cold and dark, too full of coincidences. And there’s nowhere I can go to escape the strangeness. The only place I can go is inside, to my apartment—and what good does that do me?

Richard’s eyes shift from Kirin to me. “I too am ashamed,” he says softly. “For my sins. The sins of my father, and my own sins.” He holds up a filthy hand to me. The nails are long and rimmed with black. “You and I, we are brother and sister, different and yet the same.”

I step back from his hand. “My parents will be home soon,” I say. “I gotta go.”

Richard lets his hand drop. As he looks up at me, his eyes are dark hollows, his cheekbones as sharp as a skull’s. “Sometimes suffering is the only truth. Can you accept the truth?”

I shake my head. I don’t know what he means, but no, I will not accept the truth that Dad shows me over and over. I will not accept the truth that little girls like Ayana can be hurt. I won’t.

He nods, as though he understands, and his eyes seem again to hold a tired and sorrowful sanity. “But in the midst of truth, even terrible truth, there the wheel spins.” He turns back to Kirin. “Jesus bless you,” he says and closes his eyes, as though he’s some wise man whose audience with us is over.

“Yeah,” Kirin says. “You too, man.”

Kirin grabs my hand and pulls me toward the steps. His fingers are as cold as mine are, but they send a tiny stream of something hot and shiny tingling through my wrist, up into my shoulder, and then down into the center of me.