The Golden Thread (19 page)

“Barb,” I said, “I don't get it.”

She held up the first little picture next to one of the auditorium. “Same patterns, see it? Force lines, like iron filings aligned by a magnet, but this time set up in the park.”

“Where'd you take that?” I said, pointing at the little print of the sticks in the rock.

“Castle Lake. It's a magic place, right? Bosanka has a nose for magic, so she knows that. She's trying to tap into the local current, put it to work for her.”

I handed the pictures out to Joel (the bathroom was just about big enough to hold Barb and me, squashed) and took another look at the enlargements Barb had tacked up under the smaller prints. I was shivering despite the warmth of the overheated apartment.

“What do they do when they find stuff like this in Barbados, Barb? Break it up?”

“Somebody else's spell-work? You don't touch it, not unless you know exactly what you're doing.”

“Hey, I know that girl,” Joel said, holding the pictures under Barb's bedside lamp. He pointed at the image of Bosanka. “When I played Paavo's violin on Boston Common that morning, that's the girl who ran away!”

 

15
Left With the Check

 

 

I
FELT INVADED BY THIS SLOW EXPLOSION
of understanding—which, for the moment, I managed to keep to myself. Barb showed Joel more of her pictures. I collapsed on my back on her bed to think.

This had to have been the “call” Bosanka said she'd heard, the signal that she'd chased back here to our world: Joel's try at making music, or magic, or both, by playing Paavo's patched-up violin. It was
Joel
, stupidly messing around with stuff he didn't understand. He'd probably been hoping to call Paavo back with the violin, but what he got—what we all got—was Bosanka Lonatz!

I wanted to strangle him.

“You okay?” Barb asked me after a little while.

“Fine,” I croaked.

“You don't look fine.”

She got some cans of soda from the kitchen. I sipped mine, watching Barb trying not to be too interested in Joel (Joel was handsome, but her boyfriend, Rodney, was the jealous type). I watched Joel trying to work out the implications of the fact that that the girl on Boston Common was also the person we knew as Bosanka Lonatz.

As for me, I did something new. I kept quiet.

Barb's whole attitude had changed. She sparkled like fireworks. She informed me that she was now looking forward to helping turn the tables on the Grand Wazoo of the KKK when the committee met tomorrow at Bosanka's bidding. In fact, she wouldn't miss that meeting for anything.

“Great,” I lied. “You are true blue,” which was what we had decided we were years ago when some jerk at school had objected that we couldn't be best friends because one of us was black and one of us was white.

For me there was no more Comet Committee, with Barb or without her. There was just what I'd started out with in Ninth Grade: Joel and me, magic, and a monster. But without Paavo, and without Gran.

So it was up to Joel and me to handle it, so I'd better come up with some terrific ideas about how to do that.

Well,
good
. I was fed up with the stupid committee. I was worn out with negotiations, flare-ups, arguments, and all of it.

The rest of that evening is a blur, though I remember taking a cab home with Joel and using the last of his cash to pay the driver. Joel didn't say much. Neither did I. He hadn't heard Bosanka tell us her story. He probably hadn't put it together yet: so how was I going to tell him that Bosanka being here and making all this trouble was all his fault? And what good would that do anyway?

I just wasn't up to it; so I didn't.

I didn't sleep much that night. Staring at the ceiling, I rambled around in my memories and my fears.

I thought about Paavo and the remains of the fiddle that he had loaded with so much love and care and power that it did all kinds of sorcery for him. I saw him sadly sinking the broken violin in the lake, and I thought about Joel fishing it out, probably in the middle of the night so nobody would see, and then waiting, dreaming and waiting, to try its magic that he hoped would answer to him now.

It had answered, all right, but not to Joel.

Bosanka had used that sound as her lifeline out of limbo. Rushing to find the source, she must have come skidding to a halt on Boston Common on that summer morning.

But then the violin had balked in the hands of a kid who was not its master, and the music had quit, leaving Bosanka with nothing to hang onto. Overwhelmed by the strangeness of an alien world, Bosanka had panicked and bolted, like a scared animal.

Lennie was right, he was always right about stuff like this. She was not invincible, a girl of ice. She'd run away, losing the connection she might have made with Joel and the magic “voice” she'd heard: the voice of the violin. Until our Comet Committee connected her up with me, and through me, of course, with Joel.

But everything had begun with Paavo's fiddle. Which meant there was a way out. Maybe. An easy but terrible way out.

Joel had, as it were, reconstituted the fiddle from concentrate, and it had called Bosanka. What if we reversed the process? If he broke the instrument down again, if we returned the fragments to their watery grave, maybe that would
un
-call her, and she would vanish back where she'd come from!

Assuming I could convince Joel, or get the violin away from him (he had insisted on sleeping with it next to him on the couch) and smash it myself.

Suppose I was wrong? Suppose it didn't work?

It was so unfair—Paavo gone, Gran comatose, and just us, stuck with all this.

Saturday morning came, gray and chilly. I got up and had a tall glass of coffee-milk, loaded with sugar, while Mom buzzed around getting ready for work. One of her authors was in town for a weekend writers' conference and they were going to have a business lunch together.

Joel was just a lump wrapped in a quilt on the living room couch. Fine with me. I wasn't ready yet to take him on.

Mom, quiet and worried-looking, hunched over her coffee cup and watched me. She wore her faded velour bathrobe that I hoped to inherit someday, it was so soft and drapey and rich-looking. She was like a picture, my mom, slightly removed from the events at hand. Our lives, lived close together in mutual support for so long, had really taken two different paths, back when the family talent that she rejected had first tapped me on the shoulder, and I had gone with it into my first magical adventure.

Now maybe I was launched on my last one.

“Sweetie,” Mom said. “What's wrong?”

I said, “Something, Mom, but you can't help.”

Reaching across the tabletop she took my hand and stroked the back of my knuckles with her thumb. I let her. I even squeezed back a little.

In a sheepish tone she said, “Am I smack in the middle of it acting like a damn fool, like last time? And not even knowing it?”

So she did remember something about having been wooed and almost won by the horrible Dr. Brightner! She had never mentioned that episode since Gran and I had set Mom free from his enchantment.

I said, “Not this time. This time it's definitely me in the middle, and if anybody's acting like a fool, that's me too.”

“You'd tell me if I could help, wouldn't you?” she said.

“Mom,” I said, “if there was anything you could do, believe me, I'd ask.”

“You're sure there's nothing?”

I shook my head and got up. “I better go wake Joel,” I said. “I'll take him down to the coffee shop for breakfast.”

I knew Mom would feel easier about leaving the two of us alone if we were up and on our way somewhere. My silver wish would keep her from interfering in any case, but I felt better behaving the way I knew she would have expected if there'd been no silver wish.

I also wanted to be in a public place when I broached the subject of re-trashing the violin, so Joel would have less scope for dramatics. You don't want to look like a spoiled baby in a coffee shop full of people on their way to attend to the business of the grown-up world.

As it turned out, we all left the apartment together. Joel had the violin case with him because I'd asked him to bring it.

Mom flagged a cab. She pulled my head down and gave me a quick kiss on top, the way she used to when I was a little kid. “If anything comes up,” she said, “leave me a message on the answering machine.”

She ducked into the cab and zoomed off down West End Avenue.

At the coffee shop I had juice and a chocolate éclair, for energy; too much energy, I guess, because after all my careful thinking about how to approach this, I just blurted it out to Joel that he would have to smash the violin and throw it back in the lake.

His eyes got wide. “No,” he said, very loud.

“Sshh,” I said. “People are staring.”

He shoved away his plate of half-eaten omelet. His fork fell on the tile floor with a deafening jangle. Anybody who hadn't been staring before was staring now.

“You can't ask me to do that,” he said. “You can't! Look, I'm not an idiot, all right? I know why this Bosanka person is here. It's because I played Paavo's violin. No, don't talk, I need to say this: he didn't give me the violin, he gave it to the lake.

“I wasn't supposed to fix it up and play it. That was a mistake, a big mistake. And I paid for it right there, on the spot, because my hands froze up to stop me using an instrument that wasn't mine to play. You get it? I've paid. And the damage is done. A lot of god damn damage, and I'm sorry, but you have to understand, Val. I'm obviously never going to do anything like that again, because my damn hands won't play any more.

“So what the hell is the point of destroying the instrument now?”

I leaned across the table toward him. “Joel, think a minute! It's our best chance, and if it works, you'll probably be cured at the same time.” Two ladies near us had suspended their conversation to listen in, looking nervous.

I dropped my voice to a whisper. “If we can throw this whole thing into reverse and sling Bosanka back wherever she came from, I bet we fix your hands at the same time. You didn't
mean
to bring her here, with her threats and her spells and her whole horrible attitude. Put the violin back the way Paavo left it, and we un-make the music and un-call Bosanka! We do everything we need to in one fell swoop, without any of us getting hurt!”

“
I
get hurt!” he answered. “What about me?”

“I'm sorry about the violin,” I said. I knew what that violin meant to him, at least a little. It meant a lot to me, too, but it wasn't the same. I wasn't a musician. I hadn't lost my chance to study music with a great violinist whose music was also real, honest-to-god magic.

Joel glared at me, holding on to both sides of the table as if that was all that kept him from exploding through the ceiling.

“If Joel will only take it all back,” he snarled, “like a good little boy, a lot of bad things will just not have happened? How's that supposed to work? You're not even sure it
can
work. You're just guessing!”

His lips were paler than the tablecloth. I'd never thought a person could look like that.

“I know,” I said. “But that's all I can think of, Joel. Look, we're in charge here. There is nobody else. The others are only in this mess because between us, we sort of roped them in without meaning to. It's up to us, and ‘us' is me, you, and Paavo's violin, before any of it has even a chance of being fixed.”

He didn't say anything, just went on looking desperate.

I said, “Come to the lake with me, right now, and give the violin back to the lake. Bosanka wants magic when the moon is high, so we'll do our thing first, in daylight, just the two of us with the sun right overhead, to make things as opposite as possible to whatever she has in mind. We'll do it together.”

“No,” he said, very low.

“No?” I said. “Have you got a better idea?”

He lowered his head and held it between his fists, not speaking.

“Joel, what's the difference?” I said. I was starting to lose it. “I know it sounds cold, but you said it yourself: you can't play, so what good is that fiddle to you anyway? Our only chance is to put it back where Paavo left it. We have to undo what you did.”

His chair flipped over with a crash. Joel snatched up the violin case and ran out of the restaurant.

“The lake at noon, we've got to try!” I screamed. I would have run after him, but the waiter stopped me.

Joel had left me with the check.

By the time I'd paid, he was gone. Whether he would come to the park at noon or not was up to him. There was nothing more I could do. It seemed like I had done more than enough already, and nothing that I did worked out right.

It was still early in the morning. I headed for the hospital, feeling as if I weighed a million tons. They let me in to see Gran even though it was before official visiting hours started. I must have looked totally desperate, which I was.

Gran lay curled on her side with her mouth open and a damp patch on the pillowcase under her cheek. Nothing that I did got a reaction, not words, not tears, not patting her hand and kissing her cheek and trying to hug her, which was the point at which the nurses hustled me out of there.

I walked around the city like a zombie. I couldn't rest anywhere. Without planning to, I traced my past through the places where I'd learned what little I knew about the family talent and magic as Paavo and Gran had shown it to me. I guess I was looking for comfort, for courage. All I found was strangeness, questions, losses, and doubts.

The Indian restaurant once run by Ushah had been turned into a doughnut shop. I went to the little midtown waterfall park where Paavo had gone to rev up for his final assault on the kraken. I walked to the sidewalk grating that had once let me conspire with Joel, the blind prisoner of a phantom subway station.