The Thread (14 page)

16

Callie

Richard’s hair isn’t really gray, the way it looks. Instead, it’s threaded with milky lighter strands, as though some hairs have been dipped in Elmer’s Glue. One time I asked Mom how he made his hair look like that, and she said, “Nits,” in that absent-minded voice of hers that tells me her thoughts are far away. I thought she meant “knits,” so I was still thinking it was some weird thing he did to his hair until I looked in the dictionary, and then I understood: louse eggs. Richard’s hair has those thick white strands because he has so many tiny eggs wrapped around the individual hairs.

Now, as I look down into his face, I see three specks move across his cheekbones, tiny dots with legs. He swipes at them with a grimy knuckle, and I jump back, pulling Kirin with me. He’s looking scared by what Richard just said, about his brother, but now Kirin looks at me, asking me with his eyebrows why I jumped like that. He must not have seen the lice, and he already thinks I’m acting weird today. I let him pull me a step closer to Richard again.

Only two of the lice have disappeared from Richard’s face; the other one is more tenacious. It rights itself and begins again its journey across his cheek. Tenacious little bug.
Tenacious
, whispers my own tenacious brain,
from the Latin
tenet
, “to hold, to keep, to maintain.” From the older Sanskrit,
tantram,
“loom,” and the Persian
tar
, “string.” From the Greek words for “stretched tight,” “thin,” “fine.” From Old Church Slavonika—whatever that is—
tento,
“cord.”
Threads are everywhere, even in another e-mail from the old Callie, even in Richard’s lice. And for the first time since Dad’s little visit last night, I’m comforted.

By a louse. I give a tiny snort of laughter. Kirin gives me another look, but Richard grins up at me, as though he knows exactly what I’m thinking.

I can’t help but smile back, but then I remind myself of our suspicions. “Richard,” I blurt, “did people used to call you Ricky?”

He looks up at me through the snarled hanks of lousy hair. “Ricky,” he repeats, and then his grin widens. “Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long while.”

“Are you—are you Ricky?”

He just stares at me for a long moment, not answering. Once again, I could swear his dark eyes are sane, filled with something deep and soft, as though he loves me. Not in any weird, scary way either. In a way that asks nothing of me, that just sits there and regards me.
Regard: from the same Latin root as
guard,
“one who keeps watch.
I blink away tears.

“So
that’s
what you want to know?” His smile returns, and his eyes slit with merriment, as though I’ve told him a joke. “Well then, sure I am,” he says. “I’m Ricky. Yes indeed. Haven’t heard the name in years, but that’s me.” He stabs his chest with his filthy thumb. “Ricky. Yours truly.”

Kirin and I look at each other. There it is. As easy as that. We’ll have to tell Safira. We’ll have to tell the police.

“What’s your last name?” Kirin asks.

But Richard shakes his head. He pushes himself with his arms so that he’s sitting up instead of sprawled on his back, and then he leans toward me. His filthy fingers wrap around my shoe, holding me back so I can’t run away. “Callie,” he whispers, “I’m not the only one. There are more of us. There are lots of Rickies.”

• • •

“What did he mean?” I ask Safira later. Kirin and I are sitting at her kitchen table again, and already it seems like a familiar place, a safe place. I wish I could live here.

Safira puts her chin against Ayana’s head and stares into space. We’ve told her everything, or almost everything. She knows about the child Kirin heard crying, she knows about the thread, she knows about the Grandmother, and she knows about Kirin’s dreams. There are just a few details here and there I haven’t told her, things I’ll never tell anyone ever.

Safira’s eyes narrow, and she says slowly, “Does he mean there’s a
group
behind . . . this.” She hugs Ayana closer to her chest. “That horrible man you saw with Ricky—however you saw him, whatever miracle it took, that does not matter. Did he turn other boys into his image? Not just his son, not just Ricky, but others? Into monsters like him?”

Her brows pull together, and she gives her head a tiny shake. “What else did this Richard say?”

“He didn’t say anything after that,” Kirin says. “He lay back under his umbrella and went to sleep.”

Safira runs her fingers up and down Ayana’s round arm. The little girl’s eyes are heavy; she’s leaning back against her mother, and now her body grows limp. Her mother hums under her breath, rocking her gently, and then she whispers, “She does not sleep anymore, not when she is in her crib. She has only nightmares, every time I put her down. She can sleep in bed with Lamar and me, she will sleep in my lap, but she can’t sleep in her crib. She comes awake screaming every time.”

Her words make me angry, and my fingers clench. I want to jump up and
do
something. I want to hurt the man who did this to Ayana. I want to kill him, so that he’ll never hurt another baby.

But I’m only angry, I know, because it’s better than being sad. I don’t want sweet little Ayana to have nightmares the rest of her life. I hate the thought that she’ll always, in her deepest heart, feel small and helpless. That she’ll be haunted and scared.

I don’t want her to be like me.

Finally, Ayana sighs, and Safira’s sigh echoes her daughter’s. She looks up at Kirin and me, and when she speaks now her voice is soft but it’s clear she’s made up her mind. “We don’t know enough yet to go to the police. There are too many ways to look at this. It looks like one thing—but we could be wrong.” She shifts Ayana a little, then reaches across the table and touches my hand. “Callie, you need to go ask this grandmother. Whatever,
whoever
, she is—she is the one with the answers.”

“I’ve only seen her in the night.” I’m filled with doubt. One part of me knows the Grandmother is real, but another part still thinks she’s a delusion, that I’ve made her up, that I’m truly and terribly crazy. But I force myself to set all that aside, and I ask Safira, “Should I wait till tonight? Try to find the thread and follow it?” I look from Safira to Kirin, as though they know more about this business than I do, though of course they don’t. “Or should I just go to the thirteenth floor now? See if she’s there?”

“Go now,” Safira says. “And then come back here.”

• • •

And so I leave the two of them sitting at Safira’s table, and I quietly let myself out of the apartment and head out into the street. It’s cold and getting dark, and I’m filled with a heavy, fearful feeling.
Foreboding: Old English: “before-messenger”; from Proto-Indo-European, five thousand and five hundred years ago: “an awareness from the future.”
What message am I picking up from some terror that waits ahead of me?

Doesn’t matter. I shiver and hurry faster, dodging between people on their way home from work. We’re all bundled in our puffy coats, our breath hanging in clouds around us, our heads down against the cold. So many people around me, and yet I’m all alone.

I’m always alone.

Except when Dad visits me.

But I’m not going there. Not now. I have to do this for Safira and Kirin, for Ayana and Amir. Nothing else matters.

And just as I think that, I feel something against my face, like the touch of a feather, as soft as a snowflake except that it’s warm, not cold. I pull off my mitten and put my hand up to my face . . . The thread slides into my hand.

I must look like an idiot, walking down the street in the dead cold with my bare hand circled around something invisible. But no one seems to pay any attention to me. And I don’t care. That warm, humming line is pulling me forward, and my blood is thrumming along with its gentle rhythm. I’m no longer cold, no longer scared. I can do this. Whatever
this
is.

Right now, it’s just letting the thread pull me along the sidewalk. Past Richard’s spot on the sidewalk—but he’s not there now, and before I can stop to wonder about that, I’m climbing the steps to my building. Mom will be home from work soon, Dad will be waking up after sleeping all day. They’ll be worried about me if I’m not there, but I don’t care, not now. Inside, I duck into the stairwell, and I take the stairs two at a time, up to the thirteenth floor.

When I push through the door at the top of the last flight of stairs, the long hallway that lies ahead is nearly pitch dark. I wish I had Kirin’s flashlight. The air is chilly and musty, but I’m breathing something worse than just the ordinary scent of empty storage spaces. It smells like dead mice and old things, it smells like fear. Who knows what lurks up here?

Someone brought Ayana here. I sniff the air. Is that Richard’s sick sweet odor I’m inhaling, the scent of his unwashed lousy body? Is he here in the darkness somewhere, breathing softly, waiting for me?

Or is there someone else here?

I remember the sound of Ricky’s father’s voice. My mind instantly manufactures the image of an old, old man standing just ahead of me in the darkness, his hands outstretched, waiting to grab me, while he smiles with stained cracked teeth . . .

Whatever, old man! You can just stand there and wait.

I put my free hand on the wall to orient myself in the dark. My breath still comes fast and my heart thuds. But the thread is pulling me through the darkness. All I have to do is follow.

As my fingers trail along the wall, I feel patches where the plaster has crumbled away. Around a corner . . . and ahead I see a lessening of the darkness, and the cold air softens. The light expands, brighter and clearer as I walk closer.

Warmth and light spill out of a doorway, a shining rectangle burning in the darkness. I hesitate, still outside in the dark. This is why I’m here, I know that, but it feels like more than that now. I take another step, and now I can see the glowing coin of light hanging in the darkness, shedding its light as it spins but never growing dimmer. Shadows move around it.

I’m not thinking anymore about my reason for coming here. I’ve nearly forgotten my mission. I just want to be closer to that light, the center to which the thread is pulling me. So I step inside the same large room I reached from another direction when I came through the fire escape window.

And she’s there, just as she was the other times. She’s seated beside the spinning wheel, while the hazy swirls of gold thread shift and twine in the air above her head. But this time she isn’t alone.

A young black man sits on the floor beside her. He has a needle in one hand, and with the other he reaches into a round clay pot and pulls out what looks like a watermelon seed. Very carefully, he pierces it with his needle and slides it onto a length of the glowing thread, the same thread that spins out from the old woman’s wheel. He looks up at me and grins, such a wide white smile that despite the nervousness jittering through me, I find myself smiling back.

“What do you think?” He holds up a length of the thread, and I see he’s strung seed after seed on it. Tiny ones the size of poppy and sesame seeds, larger ones like sunflower seeds and beans, shiny round nuts, and bulging things from the insides of fruit: red wrinkled peach pits, hairy mango pits, avocados’ enormous round globes. The strung seeds coil across the floor between him and the Grandmother. I can see no perceptible pattern, and yet there’s something so beautiful about the shades of color and differing sizes, that my eyes cling to the circles of seeds, following again and again the line from the boy’s hand to the coiled thread that has no visible end. As hard as I try, I can’t find the place where the seeds begin. The tiny silver needle pierces them smoothly, easily; they slide onto the gleaming line of gold, and then they slip away into the spiraling circle.

I look back at the young man’s face. He’s waiting for my answer, his eyebrows raised, his lips still parted in that wide, white smile.

“It’s beautiful,” I say. “What is it?”

He nods toward the Grandmother. “Ask her. But first—” He waves his hand at the floor beside him. “Have a seat. Be easy. Don’t perch there in the doorway like a scared pigeon.” He laughs, and the humor in his voice makes me want to laugh too, even though I know we’re laughing at me. “We’re all friends, boo,” he adds, and his voice is gentle now.

I cross the floor, still frightened but in a different way now. My reason for being here has slid completely from my grasp. Right now, all I can think about is this young man with his smile and his soft voice that sounds both ghetto and foreign, as though he comes from some faraway, sunny African nation. I settle cross-legged on the floor beside him, and then at last I do what I’ve been wanting to do all along. I look up at the Grandmother.

She looks back at me, her face puckered with laughter. “Child,” she says, “this is my Son, my Firstborn. And these are the seeds of new life.”

I turn from her to the boy beside me. He doesn’t look much older than me, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He’s wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie, and except for the pure blackness of his skin—not brown like most of the black people I know—he could be any of the guys I see on the street every day. As his hands move, I catch a glimpse of what look like tattoos on the paler skin inside his wrists.

“Jesus?” The name sounds high pitched and silly as it comes out of my mouth. “You’re saying this is Jesus?”

The young man dips his head at me. “Yes’m, that would be one of my names.” Now he sounds like one of the well-brought-up black boys at school. “Not that I always look like this,” he adds. “But that blue-eyed, white-boy gig needed a break.”

The hand that holds the needle comes to rest on his knee, and instead of reaching for another seed with his other hand, he holds it out to me. I look down at the pink palm, the long fingers, and I’m suddenly so scared I tremble.

“Callie,” he says softly, “Callie. It’s just me.”

For a second there, somehow, he sounds like Kirin. I look up from his hand and meet his kind eyes. “I can’t,” I whisper. When I look down at my own hand, I see that my nails are dirty. Clumps of something nasty cling to my fingertips.