The Golden Thread (24 page)

So I followed the line of light, like a person feeling her way along a rope. I could actually put my hands on it. The guideline was warm to the touch.

My shin collided with something, and by squinting and looking to the side of the line of light, I saw that I had arrived at the edge of Gran's bed. I stood holding a loop in a thread of light that seemed to come from the center of Gran's still form. The main length of the line curved away upward from my hand into a huge darkness where the ceiling should be.

Gran lay on her back like a doll of dry, yellow wax. But the real Gran hovered someplace past sight, tethered to what was left on the bed by this cord of light. The machines around the plastic oxygen tent over Gran continued to make their breathing and sighing noises.

I let go of the golden loop I was holding, and all the length of it that I could see rippled and then slowly resettled itself, floating upward into the dark in one long, smooth curve.

Mom was watching me. Her eyes looked puffy. I wondered how much she could see; everything, I suspected.

“Val,” she said, barely in a whisper. “Oh, honey, you look so
tired
.”

I didn't answer. I think I was actually too tired to talk.

My mom is a lot shorter than I am, but she didn't look it then. There was something tall and firm about the way she sat in that ugly hospital chair. She showed no sign of fear, not even when she turned her head to look up at the line of light, toward where it disappeared into what looked like the deepest place in deep, deep space.

Which was where Gran wanted to go, with Paavo. If only she was let free to go.

I wanted to help, but at the same time I knew my hands would sooner fly up and throttle me than do what Gran needed done. She'd told me often about how long her own mother and grandmother had lived, back in Scotland. Her forebears were physically little but “tough as old boots,” she'd said.

Too tough for an easy ending. And I wasn't tough enough.

“Mom,” I said. “I can't do this.”

She got up. “You don't have to,” she said. “My daughter didn't save me from a wicked wizard for nothing.”

She reached up for the line of light hovering above Gran's body and drew a floaty curve of it down to her own chest level. She bent down to kiss Gran's cheek. Then she parted the thread of light with the lightest, most delicate tug, and she opened both hands and let go.

We watched as the bright thread curled quickly away and disappeared into the darkness overhead.

I heard my mother say softly, “ 'Bye, Mom.”

Then she and the bed and the oxygen tent and all rushed away from me. I toppled like a tree, thinking, Aha, fainting from hunger—you should have had a candy bar while you had the chance.

 

19
The Hands of Wechsler II

 

 

G
RAN—THE PART OF HER
that had been lying there living off the support machines—lingered for nearly two more days. Mom and I both knew that she was gone long before that, but we didn't even talk about it: we just took our turns at the side of the hospital bed until the doctor was satisfied that what she seemed to think was still Gran had died.

The members of the Comet Committee came to the memorial service, though most of them had never met Gran. We talked afterward, in the little graveyard attached to the church. It turns out that each of us was met by the lake that night by somebody important to us that night. No one went into detail about it, which seemed to be okay all around. Even in a committee, privacy is privacy.

Anyway, there was good news: Lennie's ear infection had cleared up and he was going to Hawaii on the dolphin project, with special leave from school and despite being younger than anyone they'd ever had. He said he had mixed feelings about being gone so long, but I think he was just worried that while he's away, Joel and I are going to get, well, closer.

Strolling around the graveyard after, I told Lennie to relax, nobody was making life decisions here.

“How do you know?” he said, carefully not looking at me. “It's a good place for it.” He cocked his head at the nearest tilted headstone. The only part of the inscription that hadn't been worn away were the words “Beloved husband.”

Corny, but nice.

Our good-byes were a little awkward (what isn't these days? I can't wait to get
older
). I keep hoping that while Lennie's away he'll grow a few inches so he's my height or over.

It's a stupid prejudice, to favor boys who are taller than I am, but I can't shake it. Hanging out with the whales did not make me perfect, I notice. Darn.

Lennie sent me a postcard with a picture of a dolphin on it a week after he got to Hawaii. He sure knows how to make me miss him.

On the postcard he wrote that he feels like he knows all this stuff about cetaceans that nobody else knows, but there's no way to tell it without becoming very unpopular. Scientists are not big on visionary experiences, which is a neat way to put it. So he keeps his mouth shut and helps teach dolphins to do goofy things like carry plastic rings and squares around on their noses.

None of us still have our understanding of the sea-speech from that night, though sometimes Mimi says she almost remembers. But with Mimi, who knows? She reads books about primitive religion and shamanism, but if you ask her a serious question—about what it's like to be a deer, say—she says she doesn't know what you're talking about. She's probably still a ditz, though it's hard to tell.

My mom, who never wanted anything to do with the family talent let alone Sorcery Hall, has figured out her own way to deal with what happened.

“I had a very odd dream,” she said to me while we were going through some of Gran's things, picking out stuff for donations and so on. She started describing that night at the lake and the hospital.

“It wasn't a dream,” I said. “You know that, Mom.”

“Sweetheart,” she said, shoving a stack of hatboxes into my arms, “when it comes to this business, you're going to have to go your way, and let me go mine. I did what I could, but I'm the same person I was, and that person does not attend magic school.”

And she gave me a look, sort of distressed but determined, that meant this was what she'd intended to say when she brought the subject up: that she's pretty well given up on trying to keep me clear of magic, but that she wasn't ready to opt in, herself.

I can't accept this. I mean, what happened that night was incredible, and I can't stand to see my mom shut herself away from it all. She's a good person, she
deserves
something special.

Of course, she thinks she has it: Manley has asked Mom to marry him. She could do a lot worse (she almost did, once), and it seems undeniable that my mother was not designed to live alone.

Barb said, “You got nothing to complain about. At least your mom stays out of your face. Mine is always after me. My clothes are too sexy, my table manners are too sloppy, my friends are scuzzy—well, some of my friends, anyway. She thinks you're all right, Valentine. She should know what you've gotten me into!”

“Oh, come on,” I said, “how's it different from the magic guy you met in Barbados with your aunt right there?”

Barb rolled her eyes heavenward. “My mother thinks it's extremely racially retro to give any kind of recognition to ‘the paranormal', as she calls it to put down words like ‘witch doctor', ‘spooky', and, heaven forbid, ‘juju'. I haven't even shown her these pictures.”

She had called me to come see what had come out of the Leica, seawater and all. Something had preserved the camera and the film, and the images were of things we had seen with our own eyes that night in the boat—leaping forms curved above waves, the huge bulk of the monster whale rising against the grainy moonlit sky, glimpses of our faces big-eyed and openmouthed or smiling crazily—pictures there hadn't been enough light to take, impossible pictures.

“What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

“Keep them,” she said. “I'll just keep them. And keep them to myself.”

We both were quiet for a minute, thinking about the great undesirability of letting the pictures fall into the wrong hands, like, say, those of her brother, who would probably run out to sell them to the
Post
or something, if he could make up a wild enough story of his own to account for them.

I glanced over the pictures again. “Funny, there isn't a single picture of Bosanka here.”

“I wouldn't keep one if there was,” Barb said. “Goodbye and good riddance.”

I laughed. “Well, I wasn't exactly thrilled when I figured out that we were just, ah, secondary characters in her heroic quest,” I said. “But what the heck, I'm learning to appreciate it. A little. I think.”

Barb said, “Are you thinking about writing about it, like it really was a story? If you do, do me a favor. Leave me out of it.”

“But you were part of it,” I objected. “Even if you did have to put aside some pretty strong feelings, when it came down to it.”

“Some feelings don't get put aside.”

“Hey, come on,” I said. “Did you or did you not help us do that second comet to get Bosanka back to her people?”

She just looked at me.

“Barb,” I said. “You did, or we wouldn't have been able to do it!”

She said, “There were seven people in the original Comet Committee. Lennie's right, people who know about this kind of stuff say that seven is a special number. But with Bosanka herself in the circle, there would have been
eight
. Joel handed me the violin. I took it so his hands would be free. Joel was your seventh, not me.”

She hiked up a hip on the corner of her dresser and bonked her heel against the bottom drawer, making a hollow rhythm. Her expression dared me to pursue this.

So naturally I did.

“If Joel hadn't been there, you wouldn't have pitched in and joined us?”

“Are you kidding? I wasn't about to give that honky creep anything but a kick in her big, square butt.” Bump, bump, went her heel. “Let me put it this way, Valentine: being chased through the woods by an evil person
with a pack of dogs
just doesn't have the same historical resonance for you that it does for some other people.”

That brought me up short. I'll never forget how we deer would falter and just stand there, gasping and shaking, while the dogs seethed around barking and howling but not attacking, just waiting for Bosanka to catch up. Then we'd spot her, running through the woods as strongly and steadily as a cantering horse.

She didn't even speed up when she saw us. She'd just stop and whistle the dogs back to her, before siccing them on us again, making her “fun” last longer by giving us that little time to rest before racing away from her again, a bunch of terrified deer fleeing from the First Hunter or whatever she called herself.

I still sometimes heard those dogs barking, and her whistling them up, in my dreams, and woke up in a cold sweat. I hadn't thought about how extra horrible that chase must have been for Barb.

Well, now I did.

We sat without saying anything for a while.

Then I said, “Do you think we did the wrong thing, helping her?”

“No,” Barb said, but she was angry. “I know blackness from darkness even if
she
couldn't tell the difference. And I'd sure rather have her living under the ocean than out on the land where
I
have to live! And plus, from what the sea people said they've all learned some serious lessons that she missed out on, so maybe they'll teach her to know better too. It's better that you all helped her go dolphin.”

“But,” I said. My calves were cramped from sitting cross-legged so I unfolded my legs, being careful not to mess up the prints laid out all over the bedspread.

Barb shrugged. “But, I wasn't about to join in.”

“Okay,” I said, “I get it.”

“Think so?” she shot back. “I don't.”

“So maybe not,” I said. “And if I ever do write this story, I'll put you in saying exactly what you just told me, okay?”

“Valentine, you don't need my okay,” she said. “It's not like I'm your mother or something. Just do what you're gonna do, and don't bother me any more about it.” Thump, thump, but not so hard. She was not going to give herself a bone bruise and not be able to play basketball next week, over beastly Bosanka Lonatz.

She hopped down from the dresser and came over to study the prints again.

She said, “So how am I going to tell Rodney about my PSAT score? He thinks those tests are all fixed in favor of white kids, so he's gonna say I must have cheated or something.”

“They are fixed,” I said, “in favor of mechanical-minded brains, that's what Lennie says. But some people jump right over these stupid categories so that our natural brilliance shines through.”

“Your marks weren't so bad either,” she said. “Anyhow, writers don't have to be brilliant. Look at what gets published! And my mom reads it
all
.”

“Barb,” I said, “can I have one of these shots? I'd like to hang it up in my room.”

The picture of the Big One, which you wouldn't even be able to identify as a whale if you hadn't been there, kept drawing my eye. I could almost taste the salt on my mouth and feel the vibration of sea-voices in the air.

“Sure, I'll make you a print,” Barb said, glancing at it. “Nice, isn't it?” She selected another one. “I was thinking of making one of these for Lennie.”

“Not that one!” I yelped. “It makes me look like an idiot!”

“Let's see what Lennie says, all right? And maybe this one, for Joel.” She pointed at the silhouette of Joel playing the violin, looking very Byronically handsome and romantic.