The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  “ ‘Bosanka said so,’ ” she mimicked. “What do I care? I think she’s mad: You’re all mad.”

  Something in her tone reminded me of Joel, of all people. Then it dawned on me: the problem was not that Tamsin didn’t believe—she was the one with the guru, right? The problem was that she was jealous. She’d come up with the Comet Committee, but I was the one who turned out to have been mixed up with wizards and monsters and magic all along.

  “Tamsin, listen,” I said. “The whole point of Bosanka insisting on help from the whole Comet Committee is that she thinks all of us have magic talent. You heard her, Lennie?—Mimi? She said that separately we’re not much, but together we have the power she needs.”

  Mimi looked teary-eyed. “I don’t want any ‘power’! Where does it come from?” She turned pale. “Next time I go to Mass, will my foot sizzle off when I step over the threshold of the church?”

  “Of course not!” I groaned.

  Lennie got up and grabbed Mimi’s shoulders and shook her gently.

  “Come on, calm down,” he said. “It’s nothing like that.” He touched the chain around her neck. “You’re wearing a cross, right? It hasn’t burned you or anything, has it?”

  Lennie had spent some time in a Catholic school, so he knew what to say. Mimi pulled away from him, but she seemed to have calmed down. Tamsin caught my eye and looked away again, but for one instant we were both on the same wavelength: thank good for Lennie!

  “So where does it come from?” Mimi asked nervously. She perched on a tall stool next to Lennie’s work table, clutching her little silver cross with both hands. “Your power, Val? Where do you get it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The family talent had come to my attention through my Gran and Paavo Latvela, two people I loved. It just would never occur to me that good people’s magic could have anything but a good source. “All I can tell you is, I’ve never seen my family talent used to hurt anybody, except Dr. Brightner and his awful wife—and even then, my Gran tried first to get Ushah to come over to our side.”

  Tamsin inquired coldly, “Tell me something, who decides which people get to use this ‘power’ and which ones don’t?”

  “Maybe you have to earn it.” Mimi ventured. “Say, like if your great-great-grandfather saved the king’s life so all his descendants get to be dukes? It’s sort of a reward for brave deeds and things.” She smiled timidly.

  “Or it could be something like electricity,” Lennie said. “If you happen to be born with the right plug designed into your genes, you can learn to tap into this current that’s out there.”

  I said firmly, “I don’t know and right now I can’t find out, but from what I’ve seen, if you’re a decent person you use your talent for decent things. If you’re a creep you do creepy things with it.”

  “Like Bosanka,” Mimi said, with a visible shudder. “She’s horrible. Even if we can do what she wants, how do we know she’ll bring Peter back?”

  She was talking to me. I was the expert. Help.

  “She has to,” I improvised. “She needs us to be the Comet Committee again, and we need Peter in the group. He was here that night. He’ll have to be with us on Saturday, if she wants the whole committee’s help.”

  Mimi said, “But I don’t want to help her! She’s a wicked, awful witch!”

  “Wait. Think about it a second,” Lennie said in that calm, considering way of his that made people stop talking and listen to him. “She’s alone in a place that’s strange to her. She hates it, and she’s really scared. Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Scared?” Tamsin snorted. “That girl doesn’t know the meaning of ‘scared’!”

  “And, being the kind of person she is,” Lennie went on patiently, “being scared makes her angry, which feels a lot better. She’s mad at everything that’s gone wrong and put her in this situation, and everybody who doesn’t understand and just seems to be getting in her way, and most of all at herself, for being scared.

  “So she thrashes around looking for a way out of her problems. To everybody else, it just looks like she’s making trouble for no reason. But she has reasons, only in a strange place, and using a strange language, she can’t get that across to people. And that makes her more angry. And more scared.”

  He looked around at us. “And it keeps on going around like that, getting worse.”

  Mimi had stopped gibbering and began nibbling at her thumbnail, frowning. At least she gave the impression of somebody thinking instead of just freaking out.

  But now Tamsin was on a tear. She flipped her heavy black hair like an angry horse throwing its mane.

  “Listen, who is this person, anyway? She says she comes from another planet, and she’s royalty at home. Really? I mean, what is she? Witchella of Woo-Woo, or what? How do we know that anything this oddball from nowhere says is true?”

  Lennie carefully set his scuffed boots, now with a gleaming shine, on the floor by his bed. “Tam,” he said, “I heard what she said. It sounded right from the gut to me. Maybe you don’t remember being a foreigner in a totally new place, but I do.”

  Tamsin opened her mouth and then shut it and turned to look out the window.

  I thought of the first time I’d seen Lennie, with his funny haircut, stumbling through accented English, which he only spoke at all if he absolutely could not avoid talking. He’d been a big kid even then, so he hadn’t seemed scared; but of course he must have been.

  Mimi said timidly, as if she was afraid of what she was saying, “Val, could we bring Peter back ourselves with—with our ‘power’?”

  I had a strong wrench of longing for Gran, who would know how to do that. But as Mom had said, I wasn’t Gran. So I said, “I think we’d better leave that to the person who changed him in the first place.”

  “Yeah,” Tamsin sniped, “we don’t want to ‘bring him back’ halfway, say, because we don’t know what we’re doing, family gift or no family gift.”

  “So what’s your plan, Tam?” Lennie flashed, and she glared and folded her arms hard across her chest. Lennie mostly didn’t get angry, so even his sister backed off when he did.

  He turned toward me expectantly.

  I took a deep breath and laid out the only plan I could think of. “We say we’ll help. Bosanka brings Peter back to complete the committee so it can do what she wants. But we all grab hands and we use our power against her.” I sounded like a comic book super-character. If they didn’t all laugh me out of the apartment over this, I’d be getting off lightly.

  I pushed on. “We make another comet, like we did New Year’s Eve, and we wrap it around Bosanka and sling her back into outer space or wherever she came from.”

  Lennie scratched his neck. “Uh, problem: that girl, Val, the one you didn’t recognize? It was Beth Stowers.”

  “Beth Stowers!” I said. “Beth Stowers from eleven B who got pregnant and had to leave school?”

  He nodded. “Her parents sent her to stay with some relatives in Ohio. She left New Year’s Day.”

  Tamsin said to him darkly, “You didn’t tell me any of this. So what was this Beth doing here on New Year’s?”

  “She didn’t want to see any of her friends,” Lennie explained uncomfortably, “but she really didn’t want to be all alone with her parents, either. I told her no other kids from her grade would be here. And don’t ask me anything more about her because a, I don’t know, and b, it’s none of your business.”

  “Listen,” I said, “what we should be worrying about right now is what Bosanka will say when we tell her that Beth Stowers isn’t coming.”

  Lennie said, “Hey, she’s not some bug-woman from Betelgeuse. She won’t go on a rampage just because of one person.”

  “You think?” Tamsin said, eyeing him. “So are you going to tell Bosanka about this?”

  “I will,” I said, with a sinking heart. “I’m her student host.”

  Tamsin slung her hair again. “Valentine, if you have these magical connections, ‘Sorcery Hall
’ and everything, why can’t you get them to take care of Bosanka?”

  “I tried,” I said. “No dice. They have their troubles, too, some kind of wizard war they’ve been fighting for a long time. We have to go on the assumption that we’re on our own.”

  Tamsin said, “Well, why does it have to be such a big deal? Why not just walk away, refuse to cooperate? So Peter gets to be a deer for the rest of his life. Sounds like he asked for it.”

  Lennie got up and paced around silently in his socks. “Peter wouldn’t have been anywhere near Bosanka if he hadn’t been hanging with me in the first place. I let him stick around because he’s, you know, such a loner, such a—”

  “A dork,” I said.

  Everybody giggled.

  I said, “He’s a dork, Lennie, we all know that. It doesn’t make what’s happened to him any better, but it’s been true since he started at Jefferson and it’s still true. If he hadn’t blasted off with his moron mouth, this never would have happened to him.”

  Tamsin interrupted impatiently. “He’s not even the real problem. Nobody’s using their heads here. What if we do find Bosanka’s people for her? I mean, what’s to stop them from taking over everything, if they’ve all got magic powers? Maybe they’ve just been waiting for her to come and lead their conquest of Earth, unless we stop her.”

  “We?” Now Tamsin was in, and I was beginning to wish she’d stayed out after all. She sounded like paranoid Peter, but worse—witch-invaders instead of Russian mobsters or jihadi spies.

  “Well, what if?” she demanded, striking what they call in ballet an “attitude.” Maybe she didn’t believe this theory of hers at all, maybe she was just stirring up trouble because she was a Drama Queen.

  Mimi the suggestible picked up on it right away. “Oh, God! Bosanka said her own world was ruined, didn’t she? They don’t have a home anymore. And they’re here already, just waiting to move in!”

  “Wait a minute, wait,” I said, waving my hands. “Nobody said we were going to do what she wants, remember? We pretend we’re going to signal her people for her, but what we’re really going to do is get rid of her—return to sender.”

  “How? You couldn’t stop her from turning Peter into a deer,” Mimi accused me. “You didn’t even try.”

  “Not just me,” I said. “All of us will be working together, the whole Comet Committee.”

  Mimi said, “You mean take on a whole race of secret aliens? Just us?”

  “Not if we can help it,” I said.

  Tamsin said, “And what if we can’t help it? What if she’s just too much for us, with her people or without them, and we have to do what she wants?”

  “Then we are all in big fat trouble,” I said, “but since we’re already all in big fat trouble, what difference does it make?”

  I was running out of patience. My own share of the big, fat trouble was weighing heavily on my mind, starting with the fact that somehow I had to get hold of Joel and convince him that he was in, too.

  10

  Leather Walls

  INSTEAD OF GOING TO SCHOOL the next day I took the air shuttle to Boston. Mom paid for my ticket with a credit card at a machine downtown, and promised to call in an excuse for me at school.

  “Do you want me to go to the plane with you?” she said.

  “No, Mom,” I said. Good grief, did she think I was twelve?

  “I don’t know why you can’t do all the research you need for your paper here in New York,” she said.

  But she didn’t push it. I hated the way my silver wish made Mom go softheaded whenever she got close to what I was doing. But it was better than having her keep me from doing it.

  She told me to have a good trip and not to talk to strangers, and she left me at the stop for the airport bus. I haven’t flown much, but I was too tired to be scared. In fact, I fell asleep. When we landed, a guy a few seats ahead of me took from the overhead bin what I recognized as some kind of an instrument case. I worked up my nerve and asked him about it.

  Not only was he a musician (a flute player, it turned out), he was a faculty member at Joel’s school. He commuted to Boston three times a week from New York where he lived and played with a wind ensemble. He showed me how to get into town from the airport by subway.

  Downtown Boston struck me as a version of lower Manhattan, but with more red brick. Cleaner, too. Boston Common, which the flute teacher pointed out to me as we passed it, looked small inside its iron fence. It didn’t look complicated enough to have park magic, like Central Park, but who knows?

  We shared a cab to the school, a huge old building like a castle that leaked music at every seam. The flute teacher dropped me at the main office. I asked where I could wait to catch Joel between classes. The guy behind the desk said Joel wasn’t around.

  In fact Joel hadn’t been in school today, or yesterday, either. If I wanted to see him I would have to get in touch with his uncle, Abraham Wechsler. The man at the desk, Mr. Rush, asked me if I had the address.

  I said I did, wondering out loud how much longer it would take to locate Joel, because it was important.

  “He isn’t actually at his uncle’s either,” Mr. Rush said uncomfortably. “I guess you don’t know, is that right? About Joel?”

  “What about Joel?” I said, utterly clutched.

  Mr. Rush ran his palm over the bald top of his head and sighed. “He’s more or less withdrawn himself from student life here,” he began, and then I guess my stunned look got through. He added hastily, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but everybody in school knows anyway. Joel has signed himself into a mental hospital. He’s been sending away anybody who tries to visit him, but maybe a talk with a friend from home is just what he needs.”

  So that’s how I came to visit the Minuteman Psychiatric Center. The place was on the outskirts of the city, which I reached via the Boston subway, again, and by talking to a lot of strangers (sorry, Mom) to get directions.

  The grounds were enclosed in a wall made of pale green breeze block. At the tall front gates a uniformed man in a little kiosk stopped me. He took down my name and passed me through with a visitor’s badge pinned to my coat.

  The inside was not what I expected. No iron bars, no straightjacketed inmates parked on benches to take the sun, only a gardener clipping a hedge and a couple of women in ugly white nurse shoes walking together and consulting over a clipboard in front of a long, two-story brick building.

  By now it was lunchtime. The receptionist in the front office suggested that I go look for Joel in the cafeteria, where I found a scattering of ordinary-looking types eating at plastic tables.

  Looking more closely I noticed how one guy sat moving his plate and his plastic fork and his cup around (trying to get them into some sort of crucial alignment, I guess) while his goopy-looking mac-and-cheese cooled. And there was a girl about my age who sucked her thumb instead of eating. Otherwise, it was nothing special. Usual cafeteria smell: awful.

  I consulted the nearest person with a name badge on. She said Joel would be in the West Lounge watching television.

  Daytime television? Joel? Joel the snob, the compulsive practicer? What had they done, lobotomized him?

  I hurried down the corridor. Through open doorways I caught glimpses of beds and chairs and people sitting in little rooms. Clashing waves of radio music mixed in the hallway. I found Joel, in pajama pants and a sweatshirt, in front of the TV as promised. He sat hunched over with his chin on his fists, apparently watching cartoons. A girl with frizzy hair was also watching, sitting on the floor. She looked at me out of the corners of her eyes.

  “Joel,” I said.

  “What?” He swung around to face me, banging his hands down on his knees. “I said I didn’t want—”

  He looked absolutely awful, like an actor playing a dope addict, with stubbly cheeks and circles under his eyes.

  “Shit!” he said, and he jumped up and grabbed my wrist.

  “Hey, hold it, what—”

  �
�Shush, the place is full of nuts and their keepers,” he said. “Come on, we’ll try the pit.”

  “What pit?” I said, yanking my hand free.

  He said, “Relax. If you turn purple they start paying attention to you.”

  So we walked, in tense silence, to what turned out to be the Minuteman Center’s padded cell. It was a small, empty room with thick brown leather mats all over the walls and floor. The one window had steel mesh over the inside.

  “So you can’t get to the glass,” Joel said, following my glance up to that one source of outside light. “Glass cuts. They worry a lot about suicide in here.”

  I stood in the middle of the room, not wanting to touch any part of it. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Joel shut the padded door behind us. “Who told you where to find me?” he said.

  “A guy at your school. In the administration office.”

  “Mostly bald, kind of sweet?”

  “Uh, yeah—”

  “Ted Rush,” he said.

  “ ‘Kind of sweet’?” I said.

  He gave me this sardonic look. I could tell he was reading my thoughts and finding them, to say the least, wanting.

  He said, “Ted’s a nice guy. I like him, period. Look, in the music world, which is full of family men and women by the way, you get used to gay people. I’ve had to make my position clear since I was pretty young, and my position is that I’m just not inclined that way. So Ted Rush is nothing special to me, okay? Just a decent kind of guy. What did he say, anyway?”

  “He said I could find you here,” I mumbled, feeling unfairly chastened. Embarrassment made me irritable. “Joel, what are you doing in this place? I thought you said you’d rather die than get stuck in some hospital!”

  “I’m not stuck,” he said. “I signed myself in here and I can sign myself out.”

  “But why did you sign yourself in?”

  “I failed my auditions.” He pushed away from the door and began to pace.

  “What auditions?” I asked. “You’re still in music school, how can you have auditions?”

  “Auditions for the school orchestra,” he said.