The Thread (10 page)

Something inside his brain clicked:
thread again
. He had to tell Callie. But first, there was one more question he was going to ask his father.

“Poppy, why are you so sure that Amir’s dead? Why couldn’t he have been stolen by someone who wanted a kid, someone who kept him and raised him? He could be out there somewhere. Isn’t that what Mum thinks?”

His father’s eyes shifted, and Kirin could see a door going shut behind them. Poppy was no longer seeing him, no longer even in the room with him. “Amir is dead,” he said.

And then Kirin heard himself asking, “Poppy? Do you have a storage room up on the thirteenth floor?”

His father turned to stare at him. “Why would you ask that, Kirin?” His eyes narrowed, and then he looked away. “No,” he said. “I don’t.” His voice was so cold that Kirin flinched.

12

Callie

That night, I lie in bed, listening. Mom has gone to bed, but Dad is still up, out in the living room, watching television. He’s still too sick to go to work most days, but tonight I can tell he’s restless. I feel something heavy, like hands pressing on me so that I can scarcely breathe. “Dread,” I whisper to myself. “From the Old English word
adraedan
. To advise against, to warn.”

More and more, the old Callie—the pre-Dad Callie—has been supplying me with word roots, playing her little game. It feels like an old friend suddenly e-mailing me out of the blue, sending me information that maybe isn’t exactly helpful or even relevant . . . and yet it’s still comforting somehow to hear from her again, to know she’s still there somewhere.

But what good does it do me to be warned, if there’s nothing I can do to escape?

The television goes silent, and I listen for the creak in the hallway outside my room. The dread is too heavy now for me to breathe. I try to remember something good—Kirin’s sideways grin; Safira’s sleek black hair and high, broad cheekbones; the spicy warmth of her cookies; her long, slender fingers spread wide in blessing; the thread.

Thread
, my brain whispers, a tiny stubborn voice.
A tightly twisted continuous filament of two or more strands used for sewing, weaving, and stringing objects together. From an Old English word used before the twelfth century meaning “to twist, to turn, to propel through the air.”

None of this is any help, of course. But for a moment I’m comforted by yet another e-mail from the past.

The floor outside my door creaks.

Dad stands out there for a long moment. I know he’s there, and I don’t want to think of Kirin now. I don’t want to think of Safira or Ayana or the thread or anything good. I don’t want them touched by what will happen next.

It’s nothing new,
I tell myself.
Nothing you haven’t survived before. Nothing you won’t survive again.

And then there’s a burst of coughing outside my door, followed by another and another. After a moment, the door down the hall creaks open, and Mom’s voice murmurs something about cough medicine. My father tries to answer but his voice is racked with another long spasm of coughing. The sound grows fainter as he goes inside their room and the door closes behind him.

After a long moment, I let out the breath I’ve been holding for so long. I stare up into the darkness, gasping. Breathe in, breathe out, I tell myself over and over. Just breathe. Finally, my chest stops jerking. Finally, I relax.

I’m fading off to sleep, when I feel the whisper of a touch against my face.

“All right already!” I sit up, feeling sleepy and cross. “All right.” I reach for my blue jeans where they lie on the floor beside my bed, and I shove my feet into socks and sneakers. The thread brushes against my face as I pull a quilted vest out of my closet and shrug it on. “I’m coming,” I mutter as I crawl out the window onto the fire escape.

The air is cold and sharp inside my nostrils, and tiny flakes of snow sting my cheeks. The thread is a strand of warmth against my skin. “If you’re not going to let me sleep, you can at least give me some answers. Enough of this.” I snatch at the air, catch the thread in my fist, and follow its trail up the fire escape to the thirteenth floor.

• • •

The old woman is in the room at the end of the hall, just as she was the last time, sitting in her circle of gold light. The spinning wheel whispers beside her, around and around and around, the thread gleaming as it unwinds between her fingers. She doesn’t look up at me, but she must know I’m there.

I shift back and forth, my heart hammering inside my chest. “Who are you?” I ask finally. My voice sounds loud and rude against the wheel’s soft hum.

The old woman still doesn’t look up, but her mouth puckers into a smile and I see the tiny lines crinkle around the eye that’s toward me.
Look at me
, I want to snap, but I hold my tongue. Maybe I don’t really want her to look at me.

But she turns her head and looks steadily at me (while the thread slides just as steadily through her fingers). She’s read my thoughts again, and my own eyes drop.

“Who do you
think
I am?”

I give a hiss of exasperation. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. I don’t know anything. I don’t understand what’s going on. Everything’s weird. What’s going on? I don’t know
anything
.”

“But you do know
something
, Callie.” She’s looking at me, waiting, but I look down at my hands and shrug.

Silence fills the room again for a long moment, only the
mm-zzz-mm
of the wheel sliding through my ears, a sleepy, soothing sort of noise. “I know something strange is happening,” I say at last. “Something outside the normal world.”

“Ah, but are you sure about that last bit?” She cocks her head to one side, then turns her gaze back to the wheel, as though she knows the strength of her gaze is more than I can comfortably bear. “
Strange
—that I’ll grant you,” she continues. “When that word was first used—back, oh, seven or eight hundred years ago by your reckoning—it meant something unfamiliar. Something that came from elsewhere, from the unknown. And yes, my dear, I’ll grant you that all this is unfamiliar to you. This room, my wheel—they lie outside your experience thus far in life.”

She gives me her puckery smile again. “But
normal
? Well,
that
word started out as a reference to those squares carpenters use. They’re for determining right angles, for making sure that houses are built true and square, with all their beams perpendicular to one another. The kind of house that won’t fall down when the wind blows. Nowadays, I suppose the word means that something conforms to a standard—like a normal body temperature, you know. Something that’s healthy, just what it’s meant to be. Either way you look at it, sweetheart, I assure you, all this—” she waves her free hand at the spinning wheel—“is totally and absolutely
normal
.”

I’m trying to makes sense of her words, but they slip away from me. I shrug again, but in spite of myself I feel the monkey-curl of curiosity.
Strange. Normal.
Words with roots that fascinate me, the way they did when I was younger. I bite my lip, my eyes still on my own hands where they lie in my lap, and I suck in a long breath. My heart’s hammer is slower now, and the tension slips from my muscles as the whirr of the wheel goes round and round.

“You have your mother’s hands, don’t you?”

I glance up at her quickly, then look back down at my hands’ familiar shapes. When I was little, I loved to place my palm against my mother’s, and see the way my smaller fingers echoed the shapes of hers. Now, it’s one more thing that makes me impatient with myself. I don’t want to be like my mother, living in a make-believe world, refusing to see the truth. And yet each time I lie silent beneath my father, listening to him tell me he loves me, some part of me—a part of me I hate, just like I hate my mother—believes the lies.

“They’re lovely hands.” The creaky voice is very gentle.

I shake my head. I won’t be distracted, I won’t be like my mother. I force myself to lift my head and meet her gaze full on. “I want to know the truth. Who are you?”

“Who do you think I am?”

I shrug away her question as though it were a fly, something small and annoying, but her free hand reaches out and turns my face toward hers, forcing me to meet her eyes again. “I am not deflecting your question with one of my own, child,” she says. “This question—who do you think I am?—is the one that lies at the center of your being. It is the question that must be answered by each person for herself.”

Her hand drops from my face, and my gaze follows it; I can’t keep looking into her eyes. Her fingers are like roots or twigs: gnarled and brown, the knobby bones stretching the skin as smooth as polished wood. She’s silent now, but the silence pulls at me, waiting.

“Are you God?” I mutter finally. The question makes me instantly uncomfortable, and I have to amend it. “Are you trying to tell me you’re God?”

I glance up at her, and her face wrinkles into smiles. “I am not trying to tell you anything, sweetheart. I am simply asking you the question I always ask my Beloved. Who do
you
say that I am?”

I stare back at my own hands, feeling resentful and impatient. By turning the question back at me, it’s like she’s forcing me to take seriously something silly. This isn’t about what I think—I refuse to think anything. It’s about what she thinks about herself. Just how crazy is she? That’s the question by which I can gauge my own identity. (
Because if she’s insane, then I’m not.
) And then maybe I can figure out how she connects to what happened to Ayana.

But her silence is pulling at me again. I look up, my gaze shifting from the sly, kind gleam of her eyes to her old, twisted fingers. She’s weird, that’s true. All of this—her, the thread, even Ayana and Kirin—it’s all way outside how I’ve always thought the world works. But she’s too . . . particular. That’s the only word I can think of to explain why I can’t even begin to take her crazy claim seriously. Someone who was . . . well, okay, I’ll say it: someone who was God wouldn’t be so definitely and precisely herself, the way this crazy old lady is, with her wrinkles and bony fingers, her creaky voice and wispy hair. Even the fabric of her dress—some sort of rough-woven blue cloth, like soft burlap—it’s just too—

“Particular?” She nods. “Yes, that’s true, Callie. In each of my manifestations I am always particular. In fact, I
love
particularity. But dear-heart, think about what the word really means—
having to do with a part of the whole
. And then there’s that old word
part
. A thousand years ago, folks started talking about ‘parts’—small pieces of a larger whole, fragments of the greater unity. But each itself.” She touches my chin again, her fingers warm, tilting my face toward her. “Understand?”

I meet her gaze once more, staring into those shiny eyes, and this time I don’t look away. I feel something opening inside me, something I can’t name.
Possibility . . .

I’m not even surprised now when she echoes my thought: “Possibility. A wonderful word, child. From
posse
, the Latin word for ‘able to be’—possessing power, potency, capability. I am well content with that much.” She nods again, the corners of her mouth tucking into her cheeks. “Don’t be afraid to go into the space where possibility lives. Your life is full of possibility, Callie. I promise you.”

I suck in a breath, blink away the tears that prick at the backs of my eyes.
Don’t manipulate me, old woman
. But I feel that open space still there, like something . . . well, something interesting. Something that makes me curious, in spite of myself.

But I’m going to ignore it for now. It can just sit there, waiting. If it amounts to anything, maybe something will come of it.

“So if you’re God—” My voice sounds sullen and silly in my ears, but the conversation is too stupid to take seriously. Still, I can’t keep myself from thinking about what Richard said earlier tonight. “If you’re God, who’s Jesus?”

She laughs, the sound of squeaky hinges swinging open. “Now who’s being particular? Child, do you even know what those words mean? God? Jesus? Tell me your definitions. Who is God?”

I think about church, about the words I’ve heard in Sunday school my entire life, the same words my parents have prayed out loud before every meal:
Heavenly Father
.

She chuckles. “Do I look like a father?”

I look at her round pigeon’s bosom and the bun of wispy white hair that wraps around her head, and I find my own lips twitching—and then I think about the way she touches me, carefully, gently. As though she respects my skin and would never seek to penetrate my boundaries without permission. “You don’t look like
my
father,” I blurt.

Her wrinkles shift from laughter lines into sadness. “I am sorry, sweetheart.” She sighs, and I feel her warm breath against my face. “I am so sorry.”

For a moment we sit there together silently, but this time the silence asks nothing of me. I find myself relaxing into it, letting it slide against the edges of my mind like an old friend, a companion I might trust.

Possibly.

Finally, I stir and bring my thoughts back into focus. “Are you saying Christianity is wrong? You’re . . .
God
is a woman? Not a father but a . . . grandmother?” The idiocy of this conversation comes over me again. I think of my own stodgy grandmothers, with their no-nonsense voices and busy hands, and I can’t help but giggle.

She giggles too, a squeaky little laugh that makes me want to giggle more, but I choke back my laughter. When I do, she sobers as well and says, “Christianity is not wrong. I am father and mother, friend and foe. I am brother and sister, beast and bird. I come in many shapes, sweetheart—and each shape breaks me. Each shape reveals me. Each shape hides me. Christianity is both true and untrue. That is the way of things.”

She spins the thread silently for a long moment, the wheel turning and turning in the air while I sort through her words.

“Each person must find me as she is able, where she is able,” she says finally. “I am in all things. But I cannot be found in lies, for lies are that which is not. I am only in truth.” She turns toward me again. “Callie, I could not come to you as a father. You know that. Nor as a mother. Not now. At least your grandmothers have not harmed you.”

My eyes fill with tears again, but I blink them away, impatient with how easily I let her pull my strings. “So what about Jesus? Is he real?”

She smiles. “My Child? Of course he is real.”

“Then what does he look like?” I find myself thinking of Aunt Mickey’s wooden baby, but I’m also remembering Ayana lying spread-eagled on the stained mattress. And then I think of Richard with his snarled hair and smelly, ragged clothes. I push all three images away. “Do you . . . like, hang out with him?” I glance around the shadows along the empty edges of the room. “Do you and he sit around up here all day?”