The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  And necessary. Boy, was it necessary.

  I said, “We’ve got to be hard-nosed about this. She’s as wild as the eagles in that statue, Lennie. If we can’t stop her or hold out against her and she does hook up with her people, wherever they are, maybe they really could take over, just like Mimi said.”

  “Everybody knows Mimi’s a ditz,” Lennie pointed out.

  “Sure,” I said, “but even a ditz can be right. Look at her! Would she settle for being just a regular person? Did you hear her say those lines? Did you hear that—that chair? She’s a natural bully, a tyrant—she’ll want to be queen of the world!”

  “Well, then,” Lennie said patiently, “why doesn’t she just do it, if she has that kind of power?”

  “Because she doesn’t,” I said, “not on her own, or she wouldn’t need us. But what about these ‘people’ of hers? What if they’re all like her? And how long have they been here? How much do they know about us, and who knows anything about them? Everybody worries about nuclear war, but who’s seriously on the lookout for a bunch of aliens smart enough to fit right in? Even Bosanka hasn’t been able to find them!

  “We have no choice. We’ve got to take her by surprise and hit as hard as we can—make a, what’s the word? A pre-emptive strike.”

  “Now you sound like Peter,” he said.

  “So maybe Peter’s not completely crazy,” I growled. I’d come up with this plan and I hated it. It didn’t help a bit that Lennie obviously hated it, too.

  He quoted softly, his pained-looking eyes on Bosanka and Michael up on the stage, “ ‘What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?’ ”

  “Self-defense isn’t murder!” I said. “Lennie, if she didn’t need us, she’d wipe us out without a thought.”

  “There’s got to be something else we can do.”

  Lennie is very competitive in sports, but in every other way he is one of the gentlest, least aggressive people I know. Maybe because he’s really strong, he doesn’t have to do the macho thing.

  Normally I really appreciated this quality in him. Now it made me feel like a monster by contrast—but a monster who was right. However awful I was, Bosanka was a lot worse. This was not the time to get all squeamish about her.

  Lennie walked back to the band shell, head down, shoulders slumped, and I followed.

  Some team, I thought bitterly. There’s me, and there’s the rest of them. Nobody in the committee had had any experience of magic but me (except Joel, who was locked up; and Barb, maybe, but she was too furious to ever speak to me again so it didn’t matter).

  Lennie had never seen a duel between sorcerers that ended with one of them turned into dry paint, or a rogue wizard sinking in an oily pool of his own evil plans, or for that matter a gallant hero dying in the muddy wreckage of the sea monster he had just killed.

  I had.

  The others would react like Lennie, recoiling from what had to be done. I even recoiled myself. I felt like the bad guy. It was a repulsive feeling.

  Well, what if somebody on the committee really did come up with a better idea, how would I feel about that? If it came from Tamsin, for instance? I got kind of stuck on that thought, and not in a nice way.

  Bosanka and Michael had apparently finished their impromptu extra rehearsal. Michael grabbed his book bag and walked away whistling, and something in me died a quiet little death that I almost didn’t notice. If the Divine Michael could spend time with Bosanka and not feel anything of the menace of the girl, well, how divine was he?

  A man in a trench coat strode past swinging his briefcase and listening to his headset. The guy with the push broom had left.

  Bosanka sat on the edge of the stage ignoring us, though I was sure she knew we were there. She didn’t have a coat on, just that thick sweater she wore all the time. Her lips looked blue. More toughening-up for leadership, that was all. I wasn’t falling for her facade anymore. I couldn’t afford to.

  We walked toward her.

  “So?” she said.

  We stopped. Lennie grabbed my hand.

  I cleared my throat. “We have to talk, Bosanka, honestly. We want to help, but there are some problems.”

  “Problems,” she said, looking north toward the Bethesda Fountain and the rowboat lake beyond. The sculpture angel on top of the fountain ignored us all, observing its own feet as usual.

  I said, “Lennie and I are all set to go, and Lennie’s sister Tam, and Peter, I’m sure, when you—when he comes back. That’s four of the original committee, which is not bad.”

  “But,” she spat. “I hear ‘but’ coming. Why should I listen to ‘but, but, but’? I want to hear yes. I want to hear, we are ready, tell us what to do, make this show on the road!”

  “You already know part of the trouble,” I said. “We told you. Beth Stowers is in Ohio. There’s no way we can get her back.”

  Bosanka’s lips tightened.

  “Also, Mimi is gone,” I said doggedly, “the girl with the, uh, little mustache, and a mole on her cheek?”

  Bosanka looked blank—good grief, did we all look alike to her?—then nodded. “She ran,” she said indifferently. “She runs still, but not far. On Saturday she will come, more willing this time.”

  Lennie said anxiously, “She is okay though, isn’t she?”

  “Of course,” Bosanka said. She studied her fingernails, which I saw with surprise she had covered with purple polish. “She is needed, like the stupid Peter-boy, so I keep harm away. But this Beth—”

  “For Beth,” I said as firmly as I dared, “we want to substitute my friend Barbara.”

  “The black one,” Bosanka said, curling her lip.

  “That’s right,” I said, “the black one.” The important thing was not to blow up.

  She set her jaw stubbornly and looked over our heads.

  “Bosanka, come on,” I coaxed. “Do we need a whole committee or don’t we?”

  “What else, ‘but’?” she said harshly.

  “Joel,” I squeaked. “Joel is stuck in Boston.”

  “So, bring unstuck.”

  I tucked both my hands in my pockets because they were turning into fists. “I can’t, not right away—not by tomorrow! Maybe you can. You’re the one who’s in charge around here.” I was not doing this very well, maybe because I wanted to punch her as hard as I could.

  She said, “You get him.”

  Lennie said, “Val tried. She went to Boston. You have to help.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” she yelled.

  I yelled back, “Well, quit throwing tantrums like a little kid who has to be told what to do, then!”

  She actually bared her teeth at us. “You are so stubborn against me! Like enemies.”

  “Jeez,” I said, stomping around in a little circle of fury in front of the band-shell stage, “anybody would be against you, the way you behave! This is a free country, you know what that means? We don’t do royalty here, okay? Whatever you were at home, around here you’re just a scruffy tenth grader, like the rest of us! You have to bend a little bit, Bosanka, or you aren’t going to get anywhere!”

  “Oh,” she burst out in this kind of cold passion, “takes so long, everything here! Everything stands against me! Everything says ‘won’t,’ ‘won’t,’ ‘won’t,’ in not my language! No one is by me to speak my heart’s language, saying yes!”

  She sat there glaring at us with tears tracking down her cheeks. I was shocked speechless. Bosanka, crying?

  Lennie said, “Hey, look, Bosanka—”

  “Not my name!” She banged her fist on the edge of the stage. “My people don’t know this stupid name, Bosanka!”

  Lennie rubbed his forehead as if massaging the thoughts in there, an habitual gesture with him that made people think he was struggling to keep up. Sometimes it disarmed them. I’d never seen him use it deliberately before.

  He said, “Seven is the magic number, right? On New Year’s, the committee was seven, counting Joel. So even if Peter and Mimi are ok
ay and, um, available, what can we do without Joel or Barb? We’d still only be five. We need more time to arrange things so we can all be there. Tomorrow is too soon.”

  She pointed at him. “You don’t worry, hear? You think I leave to you, I trust to you? You leave to me. When I need you, I get you. Where I need you, there you go, and what has to do, you will do it for me. Tomorrow, in the night when your moon goes high, you find my people!” She threw back her lank blond hair with a sharp, dismissive gesture. “Go away,” she said. “I don’t like your foolish faces, your eyes shining false.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’re going.” And we did, without another word.

  Outside the park, I stopped at a phone booth and tried to call Barb at home. No answer. I was relieved. I would have to do some fast and furious talking if I did contact her in time, and I wasn’t sure I was up to that right now.

  When my change came jingling down the return slot, Lennie borrowed some and made a call of his own. I walked around, swinging my bookbag, watching my breath frost in the air and picturing what the world would look like under the rule of Bosanka and her “people.”

  Like a foggy forest full of leaf-takers who had once been people, maybe? And trees that screamed when you hit them if you happened to be in a bad temper that day?

  Lennie came and put his hands on my shoulders. He looked mournfully into my face.

  “Brace yourself,” he said. “Tamsin’s gone, too. She took the train to Connecticut to stay with an old friend of my father’s so she can attend a dance recital there tomorrow evening. She’s not due back until Sunday morning.”

  “Oh, no,” I said hollowly. “That does it, doesn’t it? No committee.”

  “I’ll phone up there tonight and try to get her to come back,” he said, but without real hope. “Hey, I’m sorry. She’s always been—you know—she goes her own way, that’s how she is.”

  “I’m sorry, too. I’m sorry I couldn’t hold things together better,” I said. Team captain, yeah.

  “We couldn’t,” Lennie said. “I told you, you’re not hanging out there alone on this—not that the company you’re in has done you much good so far.”

  We sort of leaned our foreheads together and looked down at the space between our feet. I felt so tired, as if Lennie had to hold me up or I’d just drop.

  “Listen,” he said huskily, “I’m going to take off now—I want to go swim at the Y. Swim and think. Are you okay going home on your own, Val?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Call me later, will you?”

  He brushed my cheek with his mouth, and we ended up kind of wrapped around each other. We had been through the wringer together with more to come, so I guess it’s not surprising.

  The surprising part was the kiss. It was a real kiss, with us jammed together from our noses to our knees. When we unjammed, Lennie gave me this wild look and said something I don’t remember (his voice cracked in the middle of it, I remember that) and then he turned and loped away.

  I stood there saying, “Oh boy, oh boy, what was that?”

  It was not going to the movies and half kissing, half fighting to keep a boy off your entire body. In my limited experience dating always seemed to end up as a wrestling match with a person I didn’t know if I even liked, let alone wanted to let anywhere near my physical self.

  This was different. This was the kind of kiss you think about when you think about kissing—about how it should be. With somebody who matters to you. It left me feeling dazed but enlightened: so that’s why people did it!

  What a thing to find out the day before doomsday.

  13

  The Patchwork Fiddle

  MOM WAS SETTING OUT ASHTRAYS in the living room, which meant she expected Manley the Author. She only put out ashtrays for Manley. Everybody else had to stick their ashes in their pockets if they insisted on smoking in our place.

  I leaned in the doorway and watched her. She looked nervous and happy but tired, and all of a sudden I saw that she wasn’t young any more. It was a shock to realize this. I guess I had just gone on seeing her as I remembered her from earlier, not noticing the changes. I noticed now and I felt a pang of regret, or something. At least, though, I had managed to keep her safely out of my problem with Bosanka. So far, anyway.

  She saw me watching her, smiled, and said hesitantly, “Darling, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Any calls for me, Mom?”

  “There was a message on the machine,” she said, bustling out to the hall closet to make sure we had a big hanger in there for Manley’s heavy coat. “I wrote it down someplace. Tomorrow’s Saturday; how about coming with me to Banana Republic? There’s a shirt in the window that looks nice, for either of us.”

  I said, “I’m busy tomorrow.”

  She headed for the kitchen. “We’re out of cheese again. Think you could pick up a wedge of Jarlsberg somewhere in the middle of being busy?”

  It was creepy. Did the smell of danger leak right through my silver wish? She was trying to divert me from my course of doom without even realizing why.

  What kind of mom did Bosanka have? Now there was a truly weird thought. I quickly shook it out of my mind.

  “What about my message?” I said.

  “Oh, is it important?” Mom said absently, looking over the bottles on the wine shelf.

  “For Pete’s sake,” I yelled, “of course it’s important! Isn’t it important when somebody calls and leaves a message for you?”

  “That depends,” she said in the sarcastic tone that meant she was getting ticked off, “on whether the phone is free for a call of mine to get through in the first place. What are you so uptight about? What happened to TGIF?”

  “Mom,” I said. “My message. What was it?”

  She gazed at the ceiling. “Abraham Wechsler called from Boston. He wants you to call him back if you’ve seen Joel today.”

  “Seen Joel?” My mouth dropped open. “Seen him where? Joel’s stuck in a nuthouse up there!”

  Mom checked the ice-cube trays in the freezer compartment. “Mmmm, I had a call from Joel’s mother about that this morning. You didn’t tell me that the boy had committed himself! Apparently now he’s changed his mind. According to his uncle’s phone message, Joel has eloped.”

  “He’s what?” I screeched.

  My God. Not that frizzy-haired girl who’d been sitting on the floor in the TV room! And us with Bosanka and her “people” on our hands! Was Joel really crazy after all?

  “It’s just a term, Valli,” Mom said, standing back for a critical look at the glasses she’d set out on the counter. “It doesn’t mean he’s run off to get married, just that he’s flown the coop. He escaped from the Minuteman Center and they don’t know where he is. Now how about a bite to eat, like two civilized people?”

  We had sandwiches while Mom talked about Manley and his Book and his Career and what a talented, wonderful Writer he was. I suppose I answered. What I was really doing was listening for the phone and willing it to ring.

  Lennie probably hadn’t even tried reaching Tamsin yet. I pictured him churning through the Y pool, his one continuous eyebrow flexed with concentration. The waiting was hard—my waiting, Mom’s waiting. Her mooning about Manley didn’t help.

  Manley was a published author. I was just me, and now the stories I had lovingly crafted or sketched out or made notes for would never get into print, except maybe posthumously.

  Maybe none of them were any good, anyway. What with the PSATs and finals and so on, I hadn’t touched any of that stuff in months, except for the loony-bin story, and we know where that ended up when I reread it after visiting Joel in Boston. Maybe I was going to have my mortal coil shuffled off for me without leaving anything worthwhile behind me, anything my mom could point to afterward and say, “Val did that.”

  The more Mom extolled the virtues of old Manley, the more my gloom deepened. At one point I believe I said that I thought Manley was about as suited to writing fiction as any ordinary b
aboon would be if you gave him a word processor to play with. At any rate, Mom was clearly not a bit sad when I chose to absent myself from the scene rather than sit there slowly going crazy.

  How in the world was I going to stand a whole day of this tomorrow, until the moon went “high” enough for Bosanka?

  I went out and walked through the cold night air to Central Park, crossed the bridle path, and trudged up the hill to Castle Lake. There was the Delacorte Theater, there was the little castle on top of its modest cliff. On the big field north of the lake a monster and my friend Paavo the wizard had died locked in mortal combat, one night last spring. How could the place look so innocent and peaceful now?

  My senses felt as if they’d been cranked up high. I heard every whisper of branches and smelled every smell and saw bright, hard edges around everything.

  The rush of traffic sounded far away. On my right the lake mirrored the dull glow of the overcast night sky. On my left the meadow stretched wide and empty. Pale cement pathways wound away into the dark among the isolated lampposts. Except for the glow of the widely spaced lamps, it was pretty dark.

  It’s nighttime and I shouldn’t be out here, I thought, but I am and I don’t care. This place is magic and it’s mine, I thought. Damn it, I earned it, and I’m going to enjoy it while I can!

  A pinpoint of fire flared and disappeared again immediately, at the east end of the lake under the statue of King Jagiello. Someone was over there smoking a cigarette.

  My body went all watery-weak and my feet felt rooted.

  Paavo Latvela had smoked—a bad habit he kept, he’d said, to remind himself what it was like to have one. And because he liked it. My heart swelled up with longing. Suppose that was Paavo, come back from death to help me?

  Oh, if only!

  The longing passed and I felt quiet and sad. Whoever was having a smoke in the dark down by the statue, it wouldn’t be Paavo. But who else was fearless and foolhardy enough to hang out here at night, besides me?

  I walked softly, on the grass, down toward that end of the lake to have a peek. The smoker cocked his head to blow smoke at the sky, and lamplight fell on his thin face.