The Thread

The Thread

Ellyn Sanna

The Thread

Copyright © 2014 by Candlewood Young Adult, a division of Harding House Publishing Service, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.

Candlewood Young Adult

Vestal, NY 13850

www.candlewood-books.com

Anamchara Books

Vestal, NY 13850

www.anamcharabooks.com

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-937211-78-3

ebook ISBN: 978-1-937211-79-0

Author: Ellyn Sanna

Interior design by Camden Flath.

Cover images: Fotolia—Olly, Elen Studio, and Javarman.

With gratitude to

Julian of Norwich

George MacDonald

Elizabeth Goudge

C. S. Lewis

Madeleine L’Engle

1

Kirin

Kirin stared at the knife in his mother’s fist. It was small but very pointed on the end, like a little dagger. He flicked his eyes at his father’s chest—
How thick is the muscle over Poppy’s ribs?
—and then he fixed his gaze back on the knife. Mum’s knuckles were white, and the bones of her wrist showed hard and sharp. Her arm could lift so easily and plunge the knife into his father’s heart.

And then, from one moment to the next, life would be destroyed.

If she raised her hand even an inch, Kirin decided, he would leap at her, knock her sideways. If she had time to come back to her senses, she’d be okay. She wasn’t truly insane, not most the time. He could stop that other terrible moment from ever happening. Poppy would never fall to the floor with a knife in his chest.

Don’t worry, folks. Everything’s fine, just fine.

“Calm down, Shashi.” Poppy’s voice was quiet, bored almost. He didn’t look as though the knife in his wife’s hand worried him at all.

Kirin tried to take comfort from his father’s calmness. But he felt his legs trembling beneath the kitchen table.

“My
son
is gone!” Mum screamed the words, as though this were something new, instead of something that had happened years and years ago. “How can you expect me to calm down? What do you want from me?” She spun around, flinging her long hair behind her like a silver-streaked black curtain, the knife still clenched in her hand.

The fight had been building ever since his father came home from work and told Mum about a little girl stolen from a playground two streets away. As Mum had listened to the story, her face turned pale and she’d given a tiny gasp. Kirin had known it was too much like what had happened to his brother. The story irritated the open sores inside his parents, and the wounds had oozed their poison, spilling into an argument that had begun over something small and unimportant. It had ended up at the same place all their fights ended: here with Mum suspended on the edge of violence.

Kirin shoved his chair back against the wall, ready to leap to his feet. The food was on the table, waiting to be eaten, but he wasn’t hungry.
No, folks, forget about dinner. It’s the
Mum-and-Poppy Show.
Will this be the night when Mum kills Poppy? Stay tuned, folks. Keep your eyes glued to the TV.

Sometimes the running commentary inside his head was a friendly voice calling to him from the land of sanity. He imagined that it belonged to an older, steadier version of himself who watched from somewhere safe and far away in the future, who could look back at his parents’ antics as though they were playing out on a television screen. The voice sounded thin tonight, though, its good humor forced. It wasn’t going to be much help this time.

Times like this, the only thing that helped him was putting together shapes and colors. He slid to the edge of his chair, his fingers itching for a pencil, a paintbrush, a crayon, anything that would let him create a picture where he could hide himself from his parents’ anger.

Sorry, folks, no art this time. It’s that happy time in the Ahmed family, the dinner hour. No art materials here. Not unless you’d like me to sculpt a little something from a chicken bone and some lentils and rice.

His father had been standing beside the refrigerator, a plastic milk jug in his hand, for the last five minutes. He appeared to be studying the jug.

That’s right, folks. Thirty percent of your daily requirement of calcium in every cup.
The announcer in his head was definitely sounding strained now.

Mum lifted the knife. Kirin jumped up from his chair, but before he could reach his mother, she let her hand drop to her side, as if she were suddenly too tired to hold it up. The kitchen was silent for a moment, none of them moving, as though time had become slow and thick, stuck here in the bottleneck of this moment. At last, Poppy gave a sigh, and time flowed again.

“I don’t expect much from you, Shashi.” His words were heavy with an old and weary anger. “Not after all this time. What I
want
. . . I
want
you to move on. Bad things happen. Most people live with it. They get on with life. But not you. You act as though Amir disappeared yesterday.” He set the milk jug on the table. “Your son, Shashi, has been dead more than twenty years. It’s nothing new. He’s not coming back.”

“You don’t know that.” Mum’s voice was thin with misery, all her rage gone now.

“I do know that.” Something flickered across Poppy’s face, something Kirin couldn’t read, and then his father reached out, took the knife from Mum’s hand, and dropped it into the sink. Kirin let out the breath he had been holding and slumped down in his chair again.

“Trust me, Shashi—Amir’s not coming back,” Poppy put his hands on Mum’s shoulders and leaned in close to her face. “Live with it.”

Mum’s eyes narrowed as she looked up at him. “You want me to forget our son?” Her voice was soft, but Kirin could see the dark energy building yet again inside her.

Poppy stepped back from her and shoved his fingers through his hair. “No, Shashi. I do not want you to forget Amir. How could we ever forget him? What I want—I want you to let him go.” His voice softened. “It’s been so long, Shashi. I want to have a life with you again.”

Kirin could tell Mum wasn’t listening anymore. “I will never let Amir go, Tab. Never.” Her dark eyes glittered, and Kirin slid to the edge of his chair again, tense, waiting, his gaze fixed on her.

Poppy turned away from her. He opened the refrigerator door again and stared inside, as though he were searching for something else. “Of course not,” he muttered. “You’re too damn stubborn. Why do I even bother when you’re incapable of being rational, when you
refuse
—”

“
What
did you say?” Mum interrupted.

Poppy slammed the refrigerator door and faced her again. “I
said
, Shashi, you’re too damn stubborn to do anything that makes sense. You’ll never change, will you? You don’t want to. I’ve tried so hard to protect you—to help you. Maybe that was a mistake. You refuse to submit to the will of Allah. You’d rather go through life ripping out your guts and mine. Year after year after year. I swear it gives you some sort of sick pleasure.”

Mum’s chest was heaving. Tears streaked her face, but she bit back her sobs and screamed, “I hate your Allah if he takes away children! And I hate you, Tab. I hate you!” Her fists shot out and pummeled Poppy’s chest.

Poppy put his hands on his hips, absorbing his wife’s blows as though they were too small to bother him. “I dare, Shashi, because it’s true. Remember truth? It’s this thing a lot of people think is important? They live with it, they accept it, no matter how much it hurts. But not you. Not my Shashi. You’d rather live in a fantasy world.” He sighed. “It’s my fault. I should have done things differently years ago. I should have made—”

But Mum wasn’t listening. She snatched up the milk jug from the table and heaved it straight at Poppy. His arm flew up to block it before it could hit his face, and the plastic container smacked on the floor.

Kirin stared down at the milk streaming across the tiles, soaking the black and red mat beside the sink. His parents seemed not to notice. The friendly broadcaster’s voice in his head had fallen silent now.
If I were painting the milk
, Kirin thought,
I’d use titanium white. With a little Prussian blue mixed in. I’d use pure cadmium red for the mat, cadmium red and black, the black grayed with a little white.
His fingers twitched, and he concentrated on the pattern of color on the floor, pretending he was painting it, imagining he was alone in his room.
Where the milk’s soaked in, the red stripes will need to be darker, a little black added to the red, but the black stripes that are wet are darker, no white in them at all when they’re wet
. . . But no matter how much he focused on the colors, he couldn’t totally block out his parents’ voices.

“Truth!” Mum spit the word out. “Amir is truth, Tab. Our child is a truth!”

“Yes.” Poppy pulled off a length of paper towel and dropped it on the wet floor, where it sopped up some but not all of the spilt milk. “Amir was a beautiful truth. But now he is gone. He is dead. And that is a terrible truth. But it is still true. It is the will of Allah.” He sat down at the table, picked up his fork.

After a moment, Mum took her seat as well, but she only stared down at the plate of food in front of her. “The will of Allah!” she repeated, turning the soft syllables into something sharp and staccato, like scissors snapping open and shut. “
That’s
your answer? I swear, Tab, you are so stuck inside that Muslim head of yours, you can’t see anything else.”

Poppy put a bite of chicken in his mouth and chewed so hard that Kirin could see the muscles working in his jaws. His father swallowed and said, “There is no god but God, Shashi. I must submit to his will.”

“What does that
mean?
” Mum’s voice was still like scissor blades. “You just recite the words you’ve been taught your whole life. I swear, Tab, your mind is stuck shut so tight. What happened to all those ideas you used to talk about when you were in university? You’ve turned into your father, a tight little man, praying to Allah every morning. And then off you go to your narrow little life, teaching your high school physics classes, as though that were enough, as though that
truth
was all you need. I don’t even know how you manage to teach in a public school, Tab, with your narrow little brain. You must be offended every two seconds by all those heathens out there.”

His father shoveled a spoonful of lentils into his mouth, his jaws ground back and forth, and then he leaned toward his wife. “You know what, Shashi? No one offends me the way you do. No one.” He put his fork down, leaned back, and stared at her as though he hated her. “Why don’t you go talk to Kali or Krishna or one of your other imaginary friends? Maybe you’ll feel better.”

Mum sucked in her breath. “You are an arrogant bastard, you know that, Tab? You just never change. I am sick to death of your Muslim arrogance. Sick to death! Where was Allah when Amir died, tell me that.”

Poppy put down his fork and shoved back his chair. “Where was
Kali
, Shashi? What good did your goddess do our son?” He stood up and leaned over his wife. “Maybe if you had prayed to Allah, Amir wouldn’t have been killed. But no, you offered your devotion to Kali, that . . . that black witch!”

Mum jumped to her feet to face him. “Don’t you dare, Tab. Don’t you dare! Kali is my only comfort.” Her voice shuddered as she held back a sob, and Kirin saw the muscles in her throat move up and down, up and down, as though she were gulping something thick and nasty. “You certainly weren’t any good to me,” she said finally, quietly. “Maybe it’s time I went downstairs to live with Maa for a while, the way I’ve been saying.”

Poppy turned away from her and went to the kitchen sink. He stood there, his back to her, staring out the window. “Here we go again,” he said. “What is it, Shashi? That time of month again already? Aren’t you old enough yet to be done with that, to have the change? Maybe then we could have some peace around here.” He swung around and faced her again. “But in the meantime, go ahead. Stay with your mother! Just go. Stop threatening me. I could use the quiet for a change, believe me.”

“You!” Mum shrieked. “You!”

Poppy bent over to finish cleaning up the floor with a sponge. “Go
somewhere
, Shashi. Get out of here. Don’t come back until you can leave this terrible place you go to, this fantasy land where you think Kali will return your son to you.”

His mother’s chest heaved as if she were running a race, though she was standing still. “It’s
not
a terrible place. And I
wish
I could live there. Or that I could find one of those other universes you used to talk about.” The sobs she was holding back made her words jitter. “Somewhere my son is still alive. Somewhere he’s still with us. But I can’t. Every day he’s still gone. Every damn day, Tab, every damn day.” Tears spilled out of her eyes, and she gave in to the sobs that shook her.

Poppy’s face softened. “Shashi.” He put both hands on her shoulders again, but this time he drew her against his chest, his chin pressed against the top of her head. “Oh Shashi.”

Kirin picked up his fork, stabbed it into the cold food on his plate.
Show’s over for now, folks. But don’t worry. There’ll be a new episode tomorrow, next week, next month, sooner or later.
His parents’ eyes were closed, and he knew they were locked together somewhere far from him. He’d been invisible through the entire fight, and they still didn’t see him.

Maybe his parents would eventually sit down at the table and eat the cold food. Kirin decided he wouldn’t stay around to see. The danger was over for tonight.

“Excuse me,” he muttered and fled the kitchen.

He hesitated in the hallway by his bedroom, but he didn’t want to be anywhere he could hear his parents’ voices. “I’m going to see Nani,” he called as he escaped the apartment, in case they ever noticed they still had a son.

Outside in the hall, he stood breathing the corridor’s stale air that was somehow better than the smell of the uneaten chicken curry. Then he pushed the elevator button and waited while it creaked up from the first floor.

I know, folks, I know. The
Mum-and-Poppy Show
makes no sense. Get used to it. The Ahmed family has a second son, a son who is alive and well—but here’s the thing. He’s just a shadow. Not even a shadow, more like an invisible ghost.

The elevator doors slid open, and he ducked inside.
You’d think it was the
dead
son who was the ghost, wouldn’t you? But you’d be wrong, folks, you’d be oh-so wrong. It’s the living son who’s the ghost in the Ahmed family. Just to be different from the ordinary, just to add some interest to the story line, you know. Still, the story gets boring after a while.

The doors opened onto the first floor, and Kirin stepped out.
If you don’t like it, folks . . . well, suck it up. ’Cause nothing’s going to change.
He sighed and knocked on his grandmother’s door.