The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “I have to do something,” Mom said, reading my expression. “Someone has to put a stop to this.”

  “Fine,” I yelled, terrified. “Maybe you could really help, if you’d quit fighting the family talent and try using it for a change! Without it, well, good luck!”

  I got up and ran to my room, put the Out Forever sign on the doorknob—Mom always respected that sign, it was one of the rules that kept life manageable between us—and made loud going-to-bed noises. I opened and shut the closet door, ran the water in my bathroom, and so on. Then I stood in the dark and listened.

  In spite of what I’d said in anger, I couldn’t risk my mom mixing into this with or without the family talent. Her rejection of our magic forced me into using it myself and keeping her safely out of it as much as I could.

  When things quieted down out there, meaning that Mom had retired to her bedroom with Manley’s manuscript, I slipped out of the apartment. But first I took something out of the top drawer of my dresser, from under the scarves and socks.

  I went to Riverside Park, in goose bumps all the way. Any New York park can be dangerous at night. For the moment, though, all I saw was bundled-up people out walking their dogs or running themselves.

  One thing Gran had taught me was how to make a wish and get what I wished for, a technique I reserved for emergencies. It’s not the kind of thing you want to risk wearing out.

  I ran down the steps to the metal railing beside the walkway along the bank of the river. It’s not my favorite place. Dark rocks drop straight down from the edge of the path to the water. You sometimes see rats there in daylight. I thought I could hear them scuttling around down there now.

  On the other hand, something’s got to eat all the crud we fling around, and I needed the river, rats or no rats.

  This is what my grandmother had taught me, not all that long ago: “Make a wish by running water and seal it with silver.”

  In my pocket I had the first thing I’d ever bought for myself with babysitting money: a silver-plated mechanical pencil that was too precious ever to be taken to school where it might get lost or stolen. For running water I had the whole Hudson River, sliding along in overlapping coils with a soft seething sound.

  On the way over I had worked out a wish that I figured was fair and not too likely to boomerang. The thing was to keep it modest and positive.

  Like, Sorcery Hall, send help! If I couldn’t turn to my Gran, maybe I could get some attention from the place where she had studied magic.

  But I also needed protection against my mom’s well-meant interference. Well, more like protection for her than from her. Last time I gotten into magical trouble, Mom was caught up in it too, helpless and ignorant. I’d nearly lost her, for good. I wasn’t about to take a chance on that happening again. And I didn’t think I could cover both of us with one silver wish.

  I needed help with Bosanka, and Mom had to be protected. One out of two seemed reasonable to try for, so I concentrated on both.

  Watching the lights of the buildings on the Jersey side and the glowing night sky beyond, I tried to clear my mind completely. I clutched the silver pencil in my fist and shut my eyes. My wish came to me in rhyme, which had never happened before:

  “Sorcery Hall, Sorcery Hall,

  Granny Gran, wizards, and Paavo and all,

  Hear my petition of worry and need,

  Come if you can and come at speed!

  But if you can’t come at my beck,

  At least keep my mother off my neck!”

  Not exactly the tone I was after, but I think my sincerity came through. I repeated this three times, including Paavo’s name even though he was dead, and threw the pencil out over the water. I saw a little flick of white spume out there, and something that might have been a fish jumped and fell back in right where my pencil had landed.

  When I got home, it was nearly midnight. I took a deep breath and walked right in, not trying to be especially quiet. I really hate sneaking around.

  Mom came to the door of her bedroom and looked out at me with a puzzled expression. “Hey, sweetie, you look a little funny,” she said in a concerned voice. “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?”

  I knew which wish I’d gotten.

  6

  Tears by Joel

  IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT the phone rang. I was too tired to talk to anybody, but suppose it was Barb and all was forgiven? I grabbed the receiver on the first ring. The fact that there was not a peep out of Mom’s bedroom told me that my silver wish was operating nicely. She’d probably never even heard the phone ring at all.

  “Val?” said a familiar voice—not Barb’s, but Joel’s.

  I stuffed my pillows against the headboard behind me and settled back against them. “Joel? Where are you?”

  “Boston.”

  “Wow,” I said. I don’t often get long-distance telephone calls.

  He said, “I’m sorry I was such a pain on New Year’s.”

  Good grief, an apology! Did they give courses in basic human courtesy at that music school? I was impressed.

  He went on, “I was kind of rocked back by the news about your grandmother. Is there any change, by the way? About her, I mean?”

  By the way, my foot. Joel wasn’t calling because he wanted to talk to me, he was calling to see if by any chance Gran was well enough to maybe help him with his hands.

  “No,” I said.

  So, same old Joel, selfishly fixated on himself and his own concerns and probably secretly pining for his chamber-music partner, whatever her name was. Well, I had something to tell him, something that would knock his socks off.

  I began by saying that I had this extremely foreign student on my hands at school.

  “Oh, boy,” he cut in, “have they roped you into ‘building international friendship’? Don’t waste your time.”

  “Hey,” I said, provoked, “what’s wrong with international friendship?”

  “What could be wrong?” he said ironically. “There’s nothing to it, right? For God’s sake, Val, don’t you ever watch the news?”

  Something sharp and biting in Joel’s tone told me I’d better find out what was going on with him before pushing on any further with the tale of Bosanka. Otherwise, I might just as well talk to myself. Besides, maybe he hadn’t just called to find out about Gran. Maybe something was up with him that I should know about.

  “Don’t tell me you watch the news,” I said. “You don’t have time, you have to practice.”

  Dead silence. Then he said, “I used to, yeah, that’s right. Thanks for reminding me. I’m feeling so terrific because I did try to practice today.”

  I saw an image of Joel clutching the phone with dried-up little bird-claw hands. It made me wince.

  “Not that it matters,” he added. “I mean, who am I kidding? In the first place, there are lots of people who play better than I did even when I could play. In the second place, great music has nothing to do with the real world of ozone depletion, famines, and nuclear meltdowns, which is why nobody writes anything remotely like a Beethoven quartet anymore. In the third—”

  “Joel, it doesn’t help anything to get all depressed about it.”

  “In the third place, pretty soon nobody will be here to listen to anybody play this or any kind of music. Either we’ll all choke to death on our own poisons, or our mighty leaders will get into a stand-off they can’t get out of and somebody will push The Button. Boom. No applause.”

  I was really alarmed now. “Joel, is there anybody there with you right now? Are any of your friends around?”

  “Nope.” He chortled. “None of them can stand me when I get like this.”

  He sounded a bit blurred, actually. A suspicion struck me. “Joel—are you drunk?”

  Silence.

  “Joel?”

  He sighed. “Maybe a little. I could be possibly maybe an eighth-note drunk. A sixteenth, even.” A pause. “Maybe I’ll go enlist in the Army. If I time it right, I might just
make it into a drug war in Central America somewhere, or the invasion of Libya. I could be Joel of Arabia.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said sharply.

  “Well, why not?” he said. “If I can’t even make the world a little better the only way I know how, with music, then so what if I turn around and make it worse? Maybe I could get into developing new techniques in germ warfare. That’s a very promising field, I hear.”

  “I wish you’d stop talking such crap,” I said. Not very tactful, but I was pretty much at a loss about how to handle this barrage of gloom or, for that matter, someone who was even an eighth-note drunk.

  “Latest word is,” he said, “they’re training dolphins to carry underwater explosives. Cetacean suicide squads.”

  “Nobody knows whether that’s true or not,” I said. “The Navy says it isn’t.”

  He laughed, not nicely.

  I held the phone a little away from me. “Listen, this is all too morbid for me.”

  “Val?” he said. He sounded more alert now, more focused. “Are you listening? I’d try something, anything, if I thought it might change things, actually make them better. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Try something?” I said. “Such as?”

  “I don’t know, something! Positive thinking, mass hypnosis, dancing around Stonehenge smeared with butter in a hurricane! If you had something you thought might—might give you just a little edge on the awfulness of things, wouldn’t you try to work with it even if it was risky?”

  I sat up in bed, wide awake now. “Joel,” I said, “have you done something crazy?”

  “Me? What could I do?” he said. “You’re the one with the magic. All I have is my dinky little musical talent. Can’t change the world with that.”

  “My Gran has my family’s magic,” I said, “and she’s probably dying. So will you cut it out, please? Quit feeling so sorry for yourself!”

  He said, “Oh. Right. Fine,” and hung up on me.

  Depressed people sometimes do drastic things. Megan knew a girl at another school who had taken sleeping pills because of some bad test marks. I lay there in the dark replaying the conversation in my head to see if Joel had actually said anything seriously suicidal.

  Should I talk to Mom? That seemed like an invasion of Joel’s privacy. He had called me, not my mother or anybody else. Maybe I should try to call Joel’s parents here in New York? Or his brother, the conducting prodigy, except I had no idea where to find him.

  The phone rang again. I grabbed it.

  He said, “Val? I’m sorry. My hands are bad tonight. My fingers feel as if they’re going to turn around and grow back into my palms, like with leprosy.”

  “Joel,” I said desperately, “cut it out! Or I’ll call the Boston police and ask them to go make sure you don’t stick your head in a plastic bag.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “I shouldn’t have called in the first place. I was just feeling stupid about New Year’s. I didn’t exactly cover myself with glory, did I? God, why do I do this stuff?”

  Hugely relieved to hear him sounding human again, I said, “You mean like calling girls you know in New York and getting them all depressed with you?”

  “I do it all the time,” he said, with an evil chuckle. “I have hundreds of victims. There’s a regular subscription service: Tears by Joel, Moans and Lamentations. Next time I call I’ll read you some jokes and we’ll have laughs instead, okay?”

  I said, “Don’t you know any jokes by heart?”

  “I can’t remember them,” he said. “It’ll have to be strictly a literary exercise. Meantime, don’t let me take you down. Make friends with your foreign guest. Who knows, maybe someday she’ll be in charge of pressing the red button and she’ll remember how nice Valentine was to her in far-off America, and she’ll refrain. Voilà, the world will be safe—for another five minutes. Now, I really am going to be eating Fancy Feast for lunch if I don’t get off the phone.”

  “No, Joel,” I said quickly, coming down with a thump. I needed to talk with somebody too, and there was no one better qualified to hear about Bosanka than Joel. “I have to tell you something, no kidding. It’s serious.”

  “Now who’s in love?” he said lightly.

  “Nobody,” I said. “It’s magic, Joel. And it’s dangerous.”

  I began to tell Joel about Bosanka Lonatz.

  He didn’t say a word, but when I finished the part about the leaf-taker in the jeans store, I heard a click at the other end of the line.

  Joel had hung up on me again.

  7

  N.U.T.

  “THIS IS THE STUPIDEST, craziest load of baloney I’ve ever heard,” Peter Weiss said. “You’re telling us Bosanka Low-Nuts is some kind of magical royalty? That’s crap! She puts out some weird vibes and you’re dippy enough to fall for it, that’s all.”

  Mimi snorted. “Why should she need anybody’s help, if she can turn people into kangaroos?”

  Peter said, “Where do you get off thinking we’re going to fall for this fairy tale, Val? Are you going into partnership with this weirdo, Val and Bosanka, Bullshit Inc.?”

  I could tell he enjoyed giving me a hard time, Peter-style. He didn’t even bother to look up from fooling around with a little screwdriver in the innards of what might have been a TV remote control unit, but he was smiling his wise-ass smile.

  We were sitting together in the chem lab, Lennie and Mimi and Peter and me, waiting for Bosanka. It wasn’t the whole Comet Committee, since Tamsin didn’t go to Jefferson, and Lennie said the other girl couldn’t make it. Four out of six would have to do.

  Four out of six, and two of them were jeering at me openly for the story I’d told them. Only Lennie was quiet, watching me with a brooding, slightly spacey expression—remembering, I was sure, what I’d told him about my last magical adventure while I was still recuperating from the aftereffects. I had been a little loose-mouthed about it all with him, as well as with Barb.

  If only he would keep his own mouth shut now about my family talent. I tried to signal him with my eyes to keep quiet.

  “Sure, it’s baloney,” I said to Peter. “And Bosanka’s just another transfer student, right? So how come she’s quit going to classes but nobody seems to notice? She wanders around Jefferson just as she pleases, and nobody says a thing.”

  “So what?” Peter said. “She’s got special clout because her family’s rich Russian gangsters with great crime connections, or something. So she gets to do what she wants, and what she wants is weird because she’s weird.”

  Mimi wrinkled her nose. “She wears the same clothes all the time, did you notice? I don’t mean she’s actually dirty or anything, but she’s not exactly pristine, either. Sort of junior Earth Shoes.” Whatever that meant. Mimi was an air-head.

  “You can sometimes spot foreigners by their clothes,” Lennie said. By the look in his warm brown eyes I could see that he was thinking hard in that solemn Lennie-way that made some people think he was a little slow in the head. “Maybe she just hasn’t figured out how to fit in yet.”

  Mimi frowned. “But something is going on with her, too. There’re these thefts from the lockers, just in the past couple of days. Since she came.”

  Theft was not exactly the major thing on my mind in connection with Bosanka.

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “the school has broken out in rashes of locker-break ins and missing money before, usually because of Sandy Mason and her friends. On the other hand, Bosanka did pay for her jeans with a lot of small bills, and she had no wallet. She carried her money just stuffed into her pocket. I guess a person who would turn another person into some kind of an animal wouldn’t be above a little light theft to keep herself in jeans and Jell-O.”

  Peter jeered, “The only person she’s turned into an animal is you, Val—a donkey, get it? A horse’s ass! Well, don’t expect us to go galloping after you.”

  “All I’m trying to do is warn you,” I said. “This is something a little special, okay?”
r />   “A little special!” Peter said. “Don’t make me laugh. A spy, maybe, or some kind of Jihadist. They have muslims in east Europe, you know, from when they were part of the Ottoman Empire. Maybe she’s a terrorist agent checking out targets to blow up. She could be a suicide bomber. She looks like a suicide bomber, with that stone face of hers!”

  “Oh, come on,” I said. “Would a spy or a terrorist tell a story like this, about how our Comet Committee has supernatural powers she wants to use?”

  Peter said, “Listen, I’ll believe all this junk when I see her turn somebody into an animal right in front of my eyes, okay? Without that, forget it. And she better show up in the next five minutes to do it, too, or I’m taking off.”

  “Turn who into an animal?” Mimi asked nervously. “Are you volunteering, Peter? But look, if she doesn’t show up soon I’m out of here too. This room stinks.”

  It always smelled in the chem lab. Today’s fragrance was hydrochloric acid.

  Lennie said, thoughtfully, “How did she know about the Comet Committee at all?”

  “Val told her, of course,” Peter said, pausing to swear at something extra hard to reach inside the remote unit. “You probably don’t remember, Val. You were just yakking, you know, trying to break through the Great Stone Face there, and you said a few things.”

  “I didn’t,” I said.

  “You did,” Peter said, with his usual charm. “You must have.”

  I said, “Peter, I know what I’ve said to her, and I never mentioned the Comet Committee. Why would I?”

  Peter said loftily, “How should I know, I’m not a girl.”

  Bosanka walked in wearing her usual: soft boots, jeans, baggy sweater. No books, no purse, just Bosanka as always, with her broad, unreadable face.

  Peter sang out, “Well, hi there, your royal majestic and magical Highness. Are we supposed to bow or something?”

  “Supposed to listen.” Bosanka said. She faced us and did a slow sweep, taking us in one by one. “And supposed to be here all together.”