The Thread (7 page)

One of them nodded. “Go ahead. You can pick her up now. Just watch the lines. We’ve got fluids running into her. She’s dehydrated. But her heartbeat is strong.”

The woman scooped Ayana up in her arms, sobbing. The man wrapped his arms around them both. Then Ayana’s mother looked up at Kirin, her dark eyes wide and bright with tears. “You found her? You two children?”

Kirin nodded.

The woman smiled, her face suddenly so beautiful that Kirin blinked. “Thank you,” she said. “I prayed there would be someone like you. Someone who would hear my baby. Someone who would save her.”

Kirin could only stare back at her, too confused and exhausted to know how he should answer.

“My name is Safira,” the woman said. “Safira Jackson. Please, come see me—later. So I may thank you properly.”

Her attention shifted back to her daughter, and then the police were hustling Kirin and Callie down the stairs and outside. On the sidewalk, people holding television cameras surged forward as soon as they saw the police, microphones outstretched.

“Did you find her? Is she alive?”

“Are her parents with her now?”

“What role did these two teenagers play?”

“Do you have a suspect?”

“Were these teens involved?”

“Do you know who took Ayana Jackson?”

The questions came so fast that they blended together, their words jumbling, so that in the end, Kirin caught only single words here and there: “Ayana”; “teenagers”; “alive”; “suspect.” He turned his face away from their cameras.

The police officers shoved through the reporters. “Not now,” the man said. “We’ll have a statement for you soon.” He pushed Kirin and Callie into the police car “Come on, kids. Your parents will join us at the station.”

• • •

The night was never going to end, Kirin decided. He was so tired that everything seemed dreamlike and surreal, less real than the strange things that had happened earlier. All he wanted was to go to sleep.

The police officers had handed them over to two detectives, who took Callie and Kirin into separate interrogation rooms. Kirin got Detective Scott, a red-faced man who looked too big for his suit. The detective waved a hand at a chair beside a narrow table, then took a seat across from Kirin.

“We can wait for your parents,” he said. “Or we can get started now. Up to you, son. I for one would like this over as soon as possible so I can get back to my warm bed. How about it, Kirin? Can we get started while we’re waiting?”

Kirin nodded. Having Mum there wasn’t going to make any difference.

“Good.” Detective Scott pressed a button on a tape recorder. “So, son, how about you tell me why were you upstairs in the middle of the night?”

“I thought I heard something.”

“So you went upstairs to investigate?”

Kirin nodded.

“And your friend?” Detective Scott looked down at his notes. “Callie Broadstreet. Why was she there?”

“I’m not sure. I was surprised to see her. Maybe she heard something too.”
What is Callie saying? What if our stories don’t match?

Mum arrived then and took a seat next to Kirin. The questions continued, one after another. After a while, Kirin noticed Detective Scott asking the same questions he had before. Kirin struggled to remember how he had answered the first time.

“Okay,” Detective Scott said finally. “I’d like to take this from the top one more time. Tell me again, Kirin, everything that happened tonight. Right from the beginning.”

Mum shifted in her seat, and for the first time, she leaned forward and spoke. “Detective, is this really necessary? It’s nearly six a.m., and my son is exhausted. He’s told you everything he knows.”

Detective Scott hesitated. “Very well,” he said finally. “You can go. But be prepared to be called in again for further questioning, Kirin. I have a strong feeling there’s something you’re not telling us.”

“You can’t think he had anything to do with the little girl’s kidnapping?” Mum’s voice was weary.

The detective scratched his chin. “I think a very serious crime has been committed, ma’am. And I think your son knows something he’s not telling me.”

But he let them leave the room. In the hallway, Callie and her parents were just leaving another interrogation room, escorted by a woman detective. Callie was very pale, her hair tousled, and her eyes heavy.

“Can we go now?” Mr. Broadstreet asked the woman detective.

She turned to Detective Scott with her eyebrows raised. He shrugged his wide shoulders, and she nodded. “Very well. For now.”

“You might want to go out the back way,” Detective Scott said. “The media will be all over you in the front.”

“I won’t have my daughter on the news,” Mr. Broadstreet snapped.

Detective Scott shrugged again. “We’ll do our best to keep the kids out of the spotlight. But I’ll make no promises with a case like this. Come on, I’ll go with you and see you out.”

In the elevator, Kirin and Callie exchanged glances.
What did you tell them?
Kirin longed to ask her.
What did they ask you?

She edged closer to him. “Later,” she whispered.

The elevator doors opened, and Detective Scott pointed down the hallway to a door. “That leads out into an alley. You can follow it back to the next street.”

Before they could leave the building, though, an officer bolted through the stairway door. “Sir,” he called to Detective Scott, “a moment. We just discovered something upstairs.”

The two men huddled close together while the officer spoke into the detective’s ear. All Kirin could make out was a phrase here and there, but he only needed to hear the words “twenty-one years ago” to know what the officer was telling Detective Scott. They had found out about Amir.

The detective turned back to them. “Ma’am,” he said, “Mrs. Ahmed, I’m going to need to talk to you. Your son can go home with the Broadstreets. I’d like you to come back upstairs with me.”

Mum nodded. Her face was paler than Kirin had ever seen it. “Go on home, Kirin,” she murmured. “I’ll be there soon.”

He hated to leave her. “Should I call Poppy?”

She nodded again, and then she went back inside the elevator with the detective.

“Come on,” Mrs. Broadstreet said. “Let’s get you kids home and into bed. You’re both exhausted.”

• • •

Back in their own apartment building, Callie lagged behind her parents as they got off the elevator on the third floor. Her eyes met Kirin’s. Between them lay all the strange things that had happened that night. “My phone number,” she said and recited a string of numbers. “Text me.”

The doors slid shut. While the elevator carried him to the fifth floor, Kirin put the numbers in his phone. Then he tried to call his father, but the call went to Poppy’s voice mail.

“Call Mum,” Kirin said into the phone. “She’s at the police station on Twenty-Eighth Street. She’s all right, I’m all right, but I think Mum needs you.” He hesitated, but he didn’t know what else to say, so he ended the call.

As he got off the elevator and walked down the hall, he was nearly staggering with weariness. He let himself into the empty apartment, too tired to think anymore, too tired to wonder what the police were saying to Mum, too tired to do anything at all but sleep for hours and hours. Still in his jeans, he fell into bed, pulled the covers over his head, and fell instantly asleep.

He slept soundly, dreamlessly, at first. Then he found himself standing by the window next to Amir, looking down at the street, and he knew he was dreaming.

“So was this what you were talking about?” Kirin asked. “Was this what you wanted me to do?”

“Hey, little brother,” Amir answered in his dream, “you did good tonight—but that little girl’s not me. You still have to find
me
.” He slung an arm around Kirin’s shoulders. “I have to tell you a secret. Something no one else knows—just me and Poppy.”

And then Amir whispered something in his ear.

Kirin sat bolt upright in bed. “No,” he said. “That’s not true. You’re just a dream.”

10

Callie

A week after that weird and terrible night, Safira, Kirin, and I are all sitting together at Safira’s kitchen table. We’re watching Ayana as she plays on the floor with a set of plastic measuring cups. She picks them up one by one and stacks them, then takes them apart again and carefully places them on the floor in order from smallest to largest. She points to the one-quarter cup with her pudgy brown finger, then glances up at her mother. “Baby cup,” she says. She points next to the one-half cup. “Mama cup.” Then the whole cup. “Daddy cup.”

Safira smiles. “That’s right,
m’ija
.”

Ayana picks up the one-third cup and studies it gravely. Suddenly, she throws it across the room. “Bad cup,” she announces.

Safira turns back to Kirin and me, her mouth a hard square line that looks like she’s trying not to cry. “Maybe she would do the same thing a month ago,” she says after a minute. “But now I see something different in everything. I wonder what she is trying to say, what is in her little head.”

Kirin and I glance at each other. I can tell he feels as awkward as I do, sitting here in Safira’s kitchen. But Safira told the cops she wanted us to come over and talk to her now that Ayana is home from the hospital. And so here we are.

Ever since that night, Kirin and I have been trying to make sense out of what happened. We both told the police as much of the story as we thought they’d believe, and it turned out—luckily—that our stories weren’t all that different. We told them the truth, and then we both left out pretty much the same things. Kirin is the only one I’ve told almost everything, about the thread and the old lady on the thirteenth floor and the things she said. (But I haven’t told him about the dark ball she broke open in her lap. That I’ve kept to myself.)

We’ve been talking every day, waiting for the bus together, in art class, standing in the hallway outside my apartment after school. It feels strange to have a friend again.

It feels good.

But it scares me. He doesn’t really know me, of course, and I can’t ever let him know me. Not the part of me that Dad knows.

No shame
. That’s what Mary said inside that second dark cave in my vision—
hallucination?
—but she was wrong. I’m just trying not to think about it, and with Dad so sick now, I can push it out of my head for hours at a time. During those hours, I pretend I’m a normal girl again.

This morning, Kirin texted me on the bus that he was going to walk over to Ayana’s house after school. Mom is never home from work until six, and Dad’s still sick, so I didn’t even bother to ask them if they minded if I went with him. I like the feeling that I’m carving out little spaces in my life that Mom and Dad don’t even know exist, like tiny sanctuaries. (
Sanctuary:
from a fourteenth-century word that meant a place where fugitives could be safe from punishment, a holy place, a safe place.)

When we got off the bus after school, Kirin and I walked up 58th Street together, not saying anything. I felt his shoulder bump against mine a couple of times, and mostly, that’s all I was thinking about, just that solid touch of another human being aside from Dad and Mom. I couldn’t say how it made me feel. Not bad.

Not good exactly.

Interesting, though.

Not boring. I found myself smiling.

“You look happier than usual,” Kirin said.

I made a noncommittal little
mmm
noise. But yeah, I guess I am happier than I’ve been in a long time. Dad’s still hacking and snorting all night long down the hall. Mom complains every morning that she can’t sleep because Dad’s cold is so noisy, but I love the sound of every cough. It won’t last, I know, and the stuff with Ayana scared me, still scares me—but for the first time in three years, I have plenty of things to think about besides Dad.

“Do you think it will be weird?” Kirin asked me then. “Talking to Ayana’s mother?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

We turned the corner onto Freshwater Avenue. Ayana’s apartment building was just ahead. I could see the top floors of Grandma’s building poking up over it, one block over, and I pointed it out to Kirin. “That’s where my grandmother and my Aunt Mickey live.”

“So you’ve lived around here all your life?”

I nodded. “My mom and dad grew up in this neighborhood. What about you?” Kirin had lived in our building as long as I could remember, and I’d never given him a second thought. Now I found myself thinking about him, wondering all sorts of things about him, more and more often.

I’m curious
, I acknowledged, and I smiled to myself again. More monkey tails curling around me, pulling me . . . somewhere.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” Kirin said, and I thought about him growing up all these years so close to me. The trajectories of our lives seemed like invisible threads wound around and around, like the string we’d used to make our filography in art class, circling near each other, and now at last intersecting.

While I was occupied with these thoughts, we had climbed the front steps of the Jacksons’ building. Kirin’s shoulder brushed against mine again as we studied the list of residents, and I forgot all about invisible threads.

“There it is,” I said. “Apartment 6G.”

Kirin sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do this.”

And now here we sit, side-by-side, drinking Cokes and trying to make polite conversation with Safira. Mostly, I just watch Ayana. Like Safira, I’m wondering what’s inside her head. Will she grow up with no memory of what happened to her? Will she be whole and happy and loved? Or will she have a dark ugly thing inside her that she won’t understand? Will it stay there all her life?

“I just want to thank you,” Safira says into the silence that’s fallen over us. “I know the cops don’t understand exactly why you
did
find her,
how
you did find her. But that doesn’t matter to me. I’m just grateful you did.” She reaches across the table and her long slender fingers close around my hand. “Whatever it was made you go up to that thirteenth floor that night, I figure you didn’t have to listen to it. You could have just rolled over in your warm beds and ignored whatever it was. I figure it probably didn’t make a lot of sense, whatever it was. But you listened. You found my baby.” Her eyes shine with tears. “Lamar is so angry at whoever did this to our baby. He is so angry he doesn’t know what to do with himself. But right now, I’m just glad she is back. She is safe. She is home. Whatever was done to her, it is over. We can go on, no matter how hard it is.” She moves her hand from mine to Kirin’s. “It’s because of you two that she’s home. If not for you, my baby would be dead right now.” The tears spill out of her eyes and roll down her face, but she doesn’t wipe them away, she just keeps looking at Kirin and me. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Kirin’s voice is gruff. “We’re glad—”

“We’re glad we found her,” I finish. “We . . .” My voice wobbles, and I feel embarrassed and sad and happy, all at the same time. “I’m glad she’s home. I’m glad she’s safe. Is she . . . is she okay?”

Safira shrugs, and something dark and angry changes her beautiful face. “Babies’ bodies heal fast,” is all she says, though, and then she picks up a napkin and wipes the tears off her face. “Want a cookie? I baked them this morning.” She jumps to her feet and shakes back her shiny black hair. “And I bake good.”

Ayana toddles across the floor and leans against her mother’s legs, looking up at her. “Cookie?”

“You bet, baby. Cookies for everyone. Including Mamá. We are celebrating.”

And suddenly, Kirin and I don’t feel awkward anymore. Safira chatters to us as though she’s known us forever, telling us how she met her husband Lamar, about Mexico, where she used to live when she was a little girl with the grandmother who raised her, and about the Redeemed Light Church she attends. All the while, she’s touching Ayana every two seconds, as though she needs to keep feeling her daughter’s flesh to know she’s really there.

Then Ayana climbs into her mother’s lap, and Safira buries her nose in her daughter’s curls. She falls silent now, as though the wave of nearly giddy happiness has passed over her and left her sad and sober in its wake. After a moment, she asks, “Is he still out there?” Her voice is muffled against Ayana’s head. “The man who did those horrible things to my baby—you think he’ll do it to some other child?”

“Maybe he won’t,” Kirin says.

I know he is trying to reassure Safira—but my guess is that whoever took Ayana will do the same thing again, sooner or later. At least that’s what my own experience tells me. Bad things don’t just happen once. They keep happening. When I meet Safira’s eyes, I know she thinks the same thing.

“She was just there one minute, standing right beside me,” she says. “I turned to help an old lady who had spilled a bag of groceries. Only five minutes, six or seven at the most. When I turn around, Ayana was gone. Just gone. No sign of her. No one notice anything.” Her English becomes more accented the more upset she grows, but then she takes a moment to calm herself before she continues.

“The police are still trying to find people who were in the park that day. They are still asking their questions. But they are not finding out anything.” She holds Ayana tighter against her chest. “I’m not like Lamar. I don’t want to find the man and kill him. I don’t want Lamar to ever know who it was, don’t want him to ever
see
the man, because I don’t want Lamar doing something angry and stupid. I don’t want the police having to come after Lamar.” She presses a kiss against Ayana’s head. “But I don’t want that man out there, doing this to some other woman’s child. Even if it’s another twenty-one years from now. He can’t be
allowed
to do this again.”

Kirin has just taken another cookie—his sixth—but now he stops before he takes a bite. “Twenty-one years?”

Safira nods. “When I was a little girl,” she says, “twenty-one years ago, I was in that same park on Christmas Day with my
abuela
. It was my first Christmas here, we’d just come from Mexico. I remember that day, how excited I was because I had found a baby doll under the Christmas tree.” Safira smiles, but her smile twists around the edges with some other feeling that’s not happiness. Beside me, Kirin has gone stiff, as though this story Safira’s telling means something to him I don’t understand.

Ayana is growing limp, her eyes falling shut, her hand opening and closing around a strand of Safira’s hair. Safira shifts her daughter’s weight in her lap, then settles back more comfortably in her chair. She sighs, as though this story of hers is one she wishes she didn’t have to tell. “There was a woman there with her little girl,” she says. “Pushing her in one of the baby swings. I didn’t really notice the baby at first, just this pretty woman with long shiny hair. And then she was gone, and a big boy was there with the baby. Boy must have been eleven or twelve, I think now, looking back, but I was only five, and he looked big to me. The boy took the baby out of the swing. He looked at me, saw me watching him. ‘Don’t tell,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell or I’ll have to punch you.’ And then he ran away with the baby in his arms.”

Kirin makes a funny noise, as though he has crumbs caught in his throat, but Safira doesn’t hear. She’s staring into space, still telling her story. “My
abuela
took me home for Christmas dinner,” she’s saying, “and I remember how scared I was feeling. I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew it was something wrong. I never told anyone, though.” Her mouth twists. “I didn’t want the big boy punching me in the face. And then pretty much I forgot about it. It was just one of those things that happen when you’re little. When you are small, the world does not make much sense, none of it. You don’t know what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s okay, what’s not. You take whatever happens and add it to this picture you grow in your head, this little story about life you make up as best you can. You figure the grownups got it all under control, so whatever happens must be what’s supposed to happen. You know?”

She glances at me, and I nod, because I do know. Back when I was a kid, I trusted the grownups. I thought they knew what they were doing. If something didn’t make sense, it didn’t really matter, because it was the grownups’ job to take care of it. But then suddenly, nothing made any sense at all. There was no story I could tell myself to put it all together, and there weren’t any grownups who could make it right.

“Then you grow up,” Safira is saying, “and sometimes you look back and realize you had it all wrong.” She looks down at Ayana’s head. “She will already have made some kind of sense in her little head about what happened to her, told herself a little story. That’s what babies do. That’s what we all do. I just wish I knew what the story was inside her head.” She sighs again.

“Anyway, this thing that happened in the park when I was little . . . I used to wonder if maybe I had dreamed it. But after Ayana was taken, the police told me what happened back then, back when I thought I saw a big boy taking away a little girl.”

“It wasn’t a little girl.” Kirin’s voice sounds as though he might be choking on his last cookie.

Safira glances at him, and she seems to notice now how upset he’s looking. “That’s right.” She frowns a little as she studies his face. “It was a little boy. He had dark curls, a pretty little face, and I thought he was a girl. Policewoman told me he disappeared from that same park on Christmas Day twenty-one years ago. And never found, poor little thing, never found.” She falls silent, staring into space again. “That poor mamá,” she whispers at last. “Maybe if I’d said something back then, told someone what I saw. But I didn’t understand. I never knew what happened. My
abuela
must have heard, of course, but it is not the sort of thing you say around the little ones. So I never knew. Until my own baby was gone.”

Kirin leans forward across the table. When his arm brushes against me, I can feel him tremble. “My brother,” he says, swallows, then starts again, “My brother was the little boy who disappeared twenty-one years ago.”