The Thread (20 page)

What Dad did—sometimes it felt good.

Which means I’m just as sick as Dad.

And it means I can’t ever let someone as good and normal as Kirin get close to me. How can I?

“
Did
it go away?” My voice is so low he has to ask me to repeat what I said.

Once he’s heard me, he shakes his head. “You can’t undo the past. It’s what it is, you just have to accept that. And that means you have to stop spending all your energy fussing and brooding on it.” He’s stopped looking at the sky now, and instead, he’s leaning forward, watching me scrape the dirt out of the crack in the step. We’re both acting as though I’m doing something stupendous with the little pile of dirt I’m accumulating.

After a moment, he says, “I went to seminary, long time ago, hoping to find the answers. Didn’t find anything, just a head full of stuff that went round and round until I couldn’t stand it anymore. So I came here, to keep watch on the past best I could. Funny thing, in the end, I found my answers right over there, sitting on that grate.”

“So what were they?”
Do I have to become a street person too in order to find some peace?
In a scary way, it actually makes some sense. No one comes near street people. They don’t have to pretend they’re normal.

“Well,” he says, “it’s kind of hard to explain. But the only way to stop suffering over the past is to accept it. When you do—when you look square at yourself and say, ‘Yup, that’s who I am and that’s what happened, but it’s just a memory now, it’s not
real
anymore because it’s not happening
now
’—well, then, somehow you rise up. You get above it, like. Like all the old memories were an old hook, and you’ve been hanging on that rusty old hook way too long. And then you just stop. When you do, up you go. You’re free.”

He gives me his yellow-toothed grin. “That there is good Buddhist teaching. Back in my seminary days, I used to read about the Buddha, and I’ve been spending time in libraries again, refreshing my mind like. Now that I don’t get thrown out anymore on account of the lice.” He snickers a little, as though he thinks of his lice as a little joke, something fond and familiar from the old days. “Anyway, Buddha, he went through something like I did, just sitting, not taking care of himself. I gotta think he was as dirty as I was back in the day, what with him sitting under that tree for so long. And in the end, just sitting there, he figured out life. And it was pretty simple, all told.”

He looks at me, waiting for me to ask him what the meaning of life is, I guess. When I don’t, he goes on. “The world is full of pain, no way to get around it. But holding on to old pain, old anger? Wishing and wanting for things to be different?
That’s
what makes us suffer. When you let it go, what’s left is—I don’t know, cleaner somehow. The old pain is still there if you poke it, but maybe it’s like a scar that still aches after the wound’s healed. All the pus, all the nasty stuff, that’s gone. There’s a place now—a space—for something else. In time, anyway.” His voice gets quieter, as though he’s talking to himself now as much as me. “And waiting for it, whatever it is? That’s part of it too. Not grabbing at how things
ought
to be. Kind of like looking at your life every day and whatever’s there, saying, ‘Hello, thanks for dropping by, come on in.”

He smiles as though he’s just thought of something else that’s funny (besides his old friends the lice), and he gives me a nudge with his elbow. “We’re in good company, you know, you and me. Jesus still has his scars too.”

I can’t wrap my head around what Richard is saying. What happened with Dad happened. I know that. I’m not pretending it’s not true, the way Mom is. I’d rather be me and be honest about it than be like Mom, I suppose—but facing the truth doesn’t help any.

It doesn’t make my shame go away.

But I don’t like thinking about that, so I turn my attention to what Richard just said. That makes me think of the marks on the Jesus guy’s wrists; and
then
I start remembering the way the Grandmother talked about her child. I thought she meant Jesus, but if she did, she had him mixed up somehow with Ayana and Ricky.

I stop scraping at the crack in the cement and look up at Richard. “Do you know the Grandmother?” I could try to explain her to him, describe her, but I decide to leave it at that.

Richard’s smile grows wider. “Seems like I do remember dreaming something about
her
. Spent a lot of dreams with her for a while there.”

Somehow, I’m not surprised. “So—well, she said that you—that Ricky—was her child. That we had to go find you. And then we did, we did find you. And then you—Ricky—you were the one who saved me, who stopped me from—from doing something horrible. You risked yourself.”

I’m trying to talk my way through a new thought that’s niggling at me, still vague and unformed, but Richard just looks at me, patiently, blankly. I can tell he doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about, so I start again, from a different direction this time, because thinking about this stuff is easier than thinking about the other stuff, the Dad stuff.

“Kirin—” Just saying his name makes me have to go back to scraping at the crack in the step. “Kirin said that Kali—the Hindu goddess—is so hurt and angry that she destroys everything in her path. But then her husband lays himself down under her feet. And when he does, she stops stamping her feet and swinging her sword around. She doesn’t want to hurt him, so she comes to her senses. That’s what you—what Ricky did—for me.” I look up at Richard. “So is that like Jesus? Is that why the Grandmother called you her child? Is that what she meant?”

“Not sure I know exactly what you mean.” He scratches his beard. “It’s hard when I don’t really remember. So I can’t say. What I know—it’s the hurt children, the innocent victims, who are Jesus. Each one is Jesus.” He nudges my foot with his. “Even you and me, girl. Jesus is the lamb slain since the foundation of the world right inside you, right inside me. And yeah, he’s the one laid himself down, accepted the punishment of the world.”

“But
why
?” I’m angry now, with the old impatient rage I felt sometimes back when I talked to the Grandmother. “Why would God punish
children
? Even if Jesus is God too, even if he’s with all the victims in the world. Isn’t that like God punishing himself? It’s like some kind of sick circle.”

“Who said it was
God
who punishes?” Richard has gone back to talking to the sky again. “The world does the punishing. All of us who keep holding on to our pain. We make victims out of each other. We’re our own victims.” He sits up and touches my arm with one, long yellow fingernail. “And the Child of God is always there. In the pain and in the shame, the whole deal. Right there.”

I’m thinking about the things I hear every Sunday in church. “Jesus died for our sins,” I say, “because God would have to punish us otherwise. That’s what Christians say.”

Richard shrugs. “Some Christians, that’s what they say.”

“Are there Christians who don’t believe that?”
What else would Christians believe? It’s like the centerpiece on the Christian table.
“Don’t
you
believe it?”

He shakes his head. “I never got that whole idea that God’s up there needing to punish someone, anyone—so Jesus steps in and takes the punishment.”

I frown, thinking about what he just said. “But isn’t that exactly what Kali’s husband did when he lay down under his wife’s feet, to stop her? Isn’t that what you—what Ricky was offering to do?” I find myself wishing I could talk to the Grandmother about all these questions.

Will I ever see her again?

Was she real? I still don’t know.

“I believe Jesus just came to be with us,” Richard is saying. “To be down there on the ground with us when we’re getting stomped on. To keep us company.” He leans back, smiles up at the sky, as though he sees someone he knows up there. “And to show us there’s another way of doing things. Like playing Simon Says, where you copy whatever someone is doing? That’s what Jesus did. Gave us something else to copy. A way to stop the whole cycle of victim and violator, enemy against enemy, world without end.”

He laughs again, but this time it isn’t a snicker, it’s a big loud guffaw. I’ve never heard him laugh like that. “What a relief!” he says, and then just we sit there for a while. The traffic sounds flow around us, the sun shines on us, the wind blows through my hair. I don’t really get what Richard’s been saying. But I like sitting here with him. And alright, maybe I kind of like thinking about all this stuff, about Jesus and God and what it’s all about. It’s different from going to church with Mom, more interesting. And really, isn’t all this part of what the Grandmother was trying to tell me? She cared about all this stuff more than anything else.

If she were real, that is.

Real or not, whenever I think about her, I find myself smiling. I kind of love her. Whoever she was, whatever she was.

Richard’s smiling too, and it’s a sane, sweet smile, despite his yellow teeth. “Not saying it’s easy,” he says to me. “You’re always in my prayers, girl.”

“Thanks, ” I answer, because really, that’s all you can say when someone tells you they’re praying for you.

I still don’t know what good prayer does. But I do know that Richard’s prayers mean he hasn’t forgotten me. He’s been thinking of me, just like I’ve been thinking of him over the past months. And that makes me glad, makes my heart hurt a little less. So maybe our thoughts are a sort of third thing, like the Grandmother said. Maybe they’re a piece of the Thread, tying us together.

Just as I think that, Richard lifts his hand. “Here.” He presses something into my fingers. “I got a feeling you need this today.”

And there it is in my hand, the same old thread. Not something symbolic or invisible or intangible—
from the Latin,
tangere,
“to touch,” plus “not,” so “that which cannot be touched.”
This is something
touching
me. I feel it with all the nerve endings in my fingertips, the same thrumming line I used to find hanging in my dark bedroom last winter. After all these months, even after all that happened, I’ve nearly convinced myself that I imagined it. But here it is again, pulling at my hand. It’s strung tight, a tiny singing
zing
within my fist. All the cells inside me—neurons and red blood cells, muscles and skin, heart and lungs—all jump, like they’re standing up to sing along in harmony.

Richard nods. “You better follow that.”

He says it the way someone might hear a phone ringing and say, “You’d better answer that.” Like it’s perfectly ordinary, and he’s just calling my thoughts back from wherever they’ve been wandering.

“Yeah.” I try to see the strand that’s tugging at my hand, but it’s nearly invisible in the daylight. Here and there, though, the sun catches it, making it spark and glint.

“Yeah,” I say again, and now I’m grinning back at Richard. I get to my feet and stumble down the steps, letting the Thread pull me.

After I’ve gone a few steps, I look back over my shoulder at him. “Richard? Ricky?”

He laughs. “Be seein’ you, Callie.”

I set off down the street, my fingers sliding along a line that’s reeling me toward something, somewhere.

23

Kirin

From his window, Kirin watched as Callie reached the corner on the street below. Her bright hair shone in the sun, and then she was gone. After a moment, he turned away and stared blankly at his bedroom.

What had she and Richard been talking about for so long?
I’ll probably never know. Get used to it.
He picked up a paintbrush, dropped it; opened a book, slapped it shut. Then he wandered out into the living room where his father was watching television. Poppy was home most of the time now that school was out for the summer.

His father looked up at him. “Hey, Kirin. You look like you lost your last friend.”

Kirin flopped down on the sofa beside his father. His father clicked off the television and turned toward him. “Something wrong?”

Even after six months, Kirin still wasn’t used to having Poppy and Mum respond to him as though they were normal parents. He wasn’t invisible anymore, and no matter how sad he was about Callie, it still felt good every time his parents paid attention to him.

“Let me guess,” Poppy said. “Callie Broadstreet?”

Kirin nodded.

“So what happened?”

Kirin looked at his sneakers for a long, glum moment. “I kissed her,” he said finally. “She freaked.”

“Ah.” Poppy tossed the remote control from hand to hand for a moment. “You know,” he said at last, slowly, as though he were choosing his words carefully, “after what she’s been through—well, it might be hard for her to be in a—well, a romantic relationship.”

“Yeah.” He knew that. He’d been an idiot.

She was just so pretty, though.

His father nudged him with his elbow. “Believe me, kiddo, I know what it’s like to have a woman put you through hell.” He grinned. “Man, do I know.”

Kirin gave his a father a reluctant smile. “Yeah, guess you do.”

They sat there then, neither of them saying anything. Kirin kept expecting Poppy to turn the TV on again, but he didn’t. The silence felt awkward at first, but after a moment it didn’t. Kirin let out a long sigh and slid down so that his legs sprawled out long and loose. It felt good to relax. It felt good to just sit here beside Poppy.

Finally, his father said, “I don’t think I ever really thanked you, Kirin. For what you did for your mother and me. For saving us from ourselves.”

Kirin felt his face grow warm. His father gave his shoulder a squeeze. “You’re better than we deserve, kiddo.”

His father clicked the remote then, and they sat there together, watching an old Star Trek movie. Kirin had seen it about five times before, though, and his mind kept wandering. At first, like always, he was thinking about Callie, but eventually, that brought him back to that night last winter.

The hours at the police station had seemed as though they would never end. Poppy had stayed with him while Kirin made his statement. Finally, after he’d said the same things about twenty times, the police said they could go home. Kirin didn’t think he had ever been as tired in his life. He didn’t know what to think, he didn’t know what had really happened, and he didn’t understand any of it. But he knew one thing—he had kept his promise to Ricky. Mr. Broadstreet was never going to hurt Callie again.

Once he and Poppy were back home, he had planned on dropping into bed and sleeping for about eighteen hours. But then he remembered the door he and Callie had left open on the thirteenth floor. He remembered what was waiting in storage room 27.

Before he could think what he should do about it, the doorbell rang. He heard Mum answer the door, heard the murmur of voices, and then Callie was there beside him, taking his hand. Safira was standing in front of Mum, and she held the cardboard box, the one from the storage room, cradled in her arms.

“Mrs. Ahmed,” Safira was saying. “Mr. Ahmed. I need you to sit down, while the children and I talk to you.”

Mum turned to Poppy, but he was staring at the box. Kirin had never seen his face so pale. He looked like he was going to be sick.

“Please,” he said to Safira. “Please don’t.”

She gave him a sad smile. “What I hold here is not as bad as what you have kept hidden.” She turned back to Mum. “Please, Mrs. Ahmed. You truly need to sit down.”

Mum was looking at Poppy’s face, frowning. Then she turned to Safira, and fear flickered across her face. She wasn’t looking at the box, though, but at Safira, as though Safira herself frightened her.

“Sit down, Mrs. Ahmed,” Safira repeated. “Please.”

Slowly, moving like some sort of zombie, like someone whose mind no longer occupied her body, Mum dropped down on the edge of one of the living room chairs. “What is it?” she whispered. “Did you—” Her words broke, and she did not finish her question.

Poppy looked from Safira to Mum. He swallowed hard, took a breath, looked at Kirin and Callie. “You know?” he asked, his voice very low. “You both—you know?”

Kirin nodded. “We know, Poppy.”

“And now,” Safira said softly, “your wife needs to know. She needs to know at last what happened to her baby.”

Mum jumped, and the color suddenly flowed back into her pale face. “What?
What?
” She seemed to notice the box in Safira’s arms for the first time. “What is that?” she whispered. “What is inside that box?”

Safira met Mum’s eyes. “I think you know. How could a mother not know?”

Mum gave a shuddery little gasp. She closed her eyes for a long moment. Poppy took a step toward her, but Safira held up her hand to stop him. They stood there silently, waiting, watching the tears leak out beneath Mum’s eyelids.

Then she held out her arms. “Give him to me,” she said. “I want to hold him.”

Safira placed the box on Mum’s lap, as gently as though it were a living baby. Mum held the box in her arms, rocking it a little, running her hand back and forth across the lid. At last, she sucked in a breath. She lifted the lid.

The room was very quiet. When Kirin’s eyes met Callie’s, he saw she was crying. Safira was crying too, silently, her eyes on Mum’s face. Poppy hovered over Mum, his hand held out to her, but Mum didn’t notice him. Her face was very still as she stared down at the contents of the box for a moment that seemed as though it would never end. No one made a sound; they were all holding their breaths, Kirin thought, glancing quickly at the others.

Then, very gently, Mum put out her hand and touched the tiny skeleton. “Amir,” she said. “Amir.” Her frozen face broke, twisted, and her eyes screwed shut. She sobbed out loud.

Finally, she looked up through her tears at Poppy, a question on her face. “Tab?”

“Oh Shashi.” His voice was choked and ashamed. He came and stood in front of her, and then he went down on his knees and told her the whole story, about finding the box outside the door, about hiding it in a storage room on the thirteenth floor. At last he fell silent, his head bowed now as though he expected Mum to raise Kali’s sword and behead him then and there.

But when Kirin looked at his mother, he didn’t see Kali. Mum’s face had gone very still again as she listened to Poppy. Now, the moment hung there, suspended. He felt Callie’s fingers squeeze his hand. He sucked in his breath, terrified of what would come next. Here it was at last. The moment he had hoped would never, ever come.

Mum gave the same little shuddery gasp she had before, breaking the stillness once again. “Oh Tab.” She looked down at what she held in her lap. “All these years? You knew, and you kept it from me. You kept him from me. How could you?”

“I—” Poppy cleared his throat, and then started over. “I didn’t think you could bear it, Shashi. I could hardly bear it, seeing him.” He glanced down at the tiny skeleton in her lap, and his eyes were bright with tears. “Our Amir. I couldn’t let you see him like this. I couldn’t let you. And then—at first it was days that went by while I waited for the right moment to tell you, to show you. And then it was months. Finally, years had come and gone. How could I tell you then? How could I explain?” He bowed his head again. “By then, I knew how wrong I had been. I knew I should have let you know the truth, so you could heal. But it was too late. I didn’t know how to tell you now. So I kept the secret. Year after year. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Oh Tab,” Mum said again. Kirin stared at her face, waiting for the rage to come, bracing himself. If Callie could turn into a giant blue woman, there didn’t seem to him to be any reason why Mum wouldn’t too. The night had turned into a nightmare, and anything could happen.

And then Mum’s face changed, softened. Maybe that’s what Kali looked like in Nani’s story, when she finally realized she’d been stomping on her husband. Mum reached out a trembling hand and touched Poppy’s face. “How could you carry that secret all by yourself for all those years? Oh Tab! You should have told me. You should have shared it with me. We could have been together then. Together we could have stood it.” She blinked away her tears, straightened her shoulders, and then she said quietly, “Tab, it must have been so terrible for you. I don’t know how you stood it.”

And that was it. Mum looked down at what she held in her lap, her face calm despite her tears, and her eyes were filled with love as well as pain.

“Kirin found him,” Safira said softly. “He had a dream. He dreamed his brother told him where to look.”

Mum lifted her head and looked at Kirin. She smiled, held out her hand to him. “Oh Kirin.”

Callie let go of his hand, and he took Mum’s instead. She pulled him closer, and Poppy’s arm came around him. He could hardly breathe, because there they were, all four of them—Mum, Poppy, Amir, and Kirin. Maybe it was terrible that there was a tiny skeleton lying on Mum’s lap, but it didn’t seem that bad somehow. It just seemed—well, true. Real. As though for the first time, they were really a family.

• • •

Now, all these months later, Kirin turned his head and looked at his father sitting beside him on the sofa. “Hey Poppy?”

“Yeah, Kirin?”

“Do you still dream about Amir?”

His father sighed. “No. I don’t.”

“Me neither.”

“I miss him.”

Kirin thought about the older brother who had talked to him in his dreams. He missed him too. But he had seen him one more time.

After that terrible night last winter, they had to go back to the police the next day and make yet another statement. The police had lots of questions for Poppy, but in the end, after days of questions, nothing could be done except release the little body back to the family. Only Callie and Kirin knew how the body had ended up outside the Ahmeds’ apartment door—and they had decided not to tell. The terrible man who had killed Amir was dead, and telling the story might get Richard in trouble. Besides, who would believe them if they said they had gone back in time to discover the secret of Amir’s murder?

When the tiny coffin was put into the ground, Mum, Poppy, Nani, and Kirin were the only ones there. Mum was crying softly. No, Kirin realized, looking around the circle of his family: they all were crying.

Nani spoke the holy words from the Bhagavad Gita: “The soul is a spirit that a sword cannot pierce, the fire cannot burn, the water cannot melt, and the air cannot dry. The soul is free, unbounded, holy, pure, and perfect.”

The words seemed to hang in the cold air like tiny bells. Mum sniffed. Poppy put his arm around her, and she leaned against him. Kirin lifted his head, and looked at the sun streaming across the snow-covered graves.

He saw someone standing about twenty feet away, watching them. Before Kirin could say anything, the figure lifted his hand, as though telling him not to speak. Kirin recognized him then, the tall young man who looked a little like Poppy. He saw the flash of teeth as his brother grinned at him—and then Amir turned and walked away.

Or maybe Kirin imagined it all. He hadn’t told anyone what he thought he’d seen at the cemetery, not even Callie. But he thought about it a lot.

He thought about all of it, the whole strange experience, from start to finish. It still didn’t make any sense—and now there was no one with whom he could talk about it. No one with whom he could spread out all the facts and put them together again, first one way and then another. Without Callie to talk to about those days back in the winter, would they fade away in his memory? Eventually, would the whole thing seem like a dream?

Was it a dream?

And what are dreams?

Poppy put his hand on Kirin’s head, interrupting his thoughts. “I miss seeing Amir in my dreams. But I’m glad I’ve got you, kiddo, right here where I can touch you.”

Kirin felt the peculiar warmth he always did when his parents touched him, smiled at him, spoke to him like normal parents who loved him. He wondered if he would ever get used to it, if he would ever just take it for granted the way other kids did.

While he was still trying to find words to answer Poppy, they heard the door opening. Mum was home from work.

She kicked off her shoes and dropped down on the sofa beside Poppy. “You two are so lucky. Nothing to do all day while I’m off slaving.” She shook her hair back from her face, then turned to look at them both.

“What wrong with Kirin?” she asked Poppy. “He looks like he lost his last friend.”

Poppy laughed, then sobered quickly. “Sorry, Kirin, I wasn’t laughing at you. But that was exactly what I said, Shashi, when I took a look at his face.”

Mum leaned closer to Kirin, examining his expression, a tiny frown pulling her eyebrows together. “So what’s up?”

Kirin shrugged, but Poppy answered the question for him. “Callie broke up with him.”

“Oh.” The lines between Mum’s eyebrows were deeper now. “Oh Kirin, I’m sorry.”

So is this when parents say things like, “You’ll get over it”?
Would they tell him he was too young for a serious relationship, and there were lots of fish in the sea? He braced himself for their words, because even if they said those things, at least they’d be acting like normal parents.

“Kirin?”

He looked up, met his mother’s eyes.

“You know what Kali taught me about broken hearts?” she asked.

“What?”

“That love doesn’t give up. Even when it’s broken.”