The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  Shock jolted me. I marched up to him. “Joel!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Smoking.” He took another puff.

  I noticed the way he held the cigarette, tucked well down between his fingers the way Paavo used to hold his—but I didn’t think it would be tactful to say anything. I felt a sudden ache for Joel. He had loved Paavo too.

  “Are they after you?” I said. “Are you hiding out here from the Minuteman Center people?”

  He shook his head. “Turns out that if you just take off on your own, that’s it. Their position is that they did their best to protect you by not agreeing to let you out. If you’re crazy enough to refuse their protection by actually leaving the premises against their best efforts, legally they’re off the hook and good riddance, as far as they’re concerned.”

  “Terrific,” I said. “So how did you get down here from Boston so fast?”

  “My aunt called her lawyer, after she found me raiding her refrigerator, and he told her all of the above. Since I was home free anyway, she lent me the fare to fly down.”

  Joel had a thin dark coat on over his sweatshirt and jeans. Didn’t he ever feel the cold, for Pete’s sake? He did look very tired, though.

  “I’m glad to see you,” I said, and I meant it, though I wasn’t sure whether the Comet Committee’s chances were better now or not. With Tamsin in Connecticut and Barb too insulted to join us (and who could blame her?), we would still be only five out of seven.

  “You’re glad?” he said with a nervous laugh. “Don’t be too sure.”

  “What does that mean?” I sat down on the low stone wall that frames Jagiello’s terrace.

  Joel was quiet. Then he said, “Remember the day you and I heard Paavo playing music here on this terrace? He drew us like a pied piper.”

  “Sure I remember,” I said. “I think about him a lot.” Lately, anyway.

  Joel said, “He was a master. He could have taught me to be one, too, if anybody could.”

  “How are your hands?”

  “Rotten,” he said.

  “Hell,” I said. “If only Bosanka was a reasonable person, I’d ask her to help you. It wouldn’t hurt her to try to use her magic for something good, for a change.”

  He shook his head impatiently. “She’s no use to me.”

  “You haven’t even met her,” I objected, thinking, Some people have all the luck.

  “I don’t have to meet her,” he said. “This is nothing to do with her. It’s between me and—somebody else, somebody much older and wiser.” He began pacing up and down. “How did I get into this mess, anyway? I always thought music was a way I could live without going nuts.”

  “I’m sorry about your hands,” I said, thinking, older and wiser? That sure wasn’t me, so who was it? I could think of one likely candidate, but I didn’t know how to ask tactfully about Joel and Paavo Latvela.

  “I know what’s wrong with my hands,” Joel said abruptly. “I’ve known since it happened.”

  “That’s not what you told me at the coffee shop.” I began to quiver inside. Oh, oh, here it comes, the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

  My back.

  “You’re so upright, Val,” he said, squinting sidelong at me. Smoke streamed out of his mouth. He coughed and lifted his shoulders. “I didn’t want to tell you.”

  Upright? Meaning self-righteous, square? “You still haven’t told me,” I said.

  He mashed the cigarette on the stone wall and flicked the butt out into the darkness. “Think back,” he said, “to when those three thugs jumped us here while we were doing magic with Paavo. To the one time you thought I was brave, as you told me up in Boston. Remember what happened right afterward?”

  Of course I remembered: Paavo, old and sad, gently putting the broken pieces of his magic violin into the case and kneeling to sink the case into the shallow waters of the lake.

  I leaped up, my heart pounding. “You didn’t! Joel, you didn’t sneak out here and—and—”

  The term that came to mind was “grave robbing,” but it was too silly to utter, under the circumstances.

  Joel stared past me at the lake. “He sank it right there in front of us for a reason, Val. He wanted us to know where it was. He wanted me to know.”

  Well, of course—this was Joel, who would do anything to get what he wanted in terms of his musical career. This was what he had been hiding from me, right from when he’d first come to me hoping that my Gran could help him. He just hadn’t bothered to fill me in on exactly what he’d done to spoil his hands in the first place, which was to mess with Paavo’s magic violin!

  “But how?” I asked angrily. “That violin was smashed to bits!”

  Joel bent over something I hadn’t noticed, something he’d left propped in the shadows at the foot of the wall: a violin case.

  “The wood was in good shape,” he said, kneeling to open the catches. “The water hadn’t affected it all. Of course there was no way to restore the original instrument. I knew that when I took the pieces to the man who works on my father’s instruments. What this guy did for me was to rebuild an old fiddle of mine, using parts of Paavo’s broken one—the neck, the bridge, other parts here and there.”

  He stroked the shining wood of the instrument with his fingertips.

  “Joel, you are crazy!” I said. “That’s not Paavo’s fiddle at all, any more than this statue is the real statue of Jagiello, which the kraken destroyed! They put up a new version of the statue, but it’s not the same, and this violin’s not the same, either.”

  “It’s close enough,” he said softly.

  “You mean it works?” I said. “You tried to play it?”

  “Val. That was the whole point.” He let his spine sag back against the marble plinth of the statue, his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging. “It was ready at the end of the summer. Well, you know what happened. You can figure it out for yourself.”

  “My guess,” I said, “is that that’s when your hands went bad on you.” I hunkered down facing him and hit him on the leg with my fist. “Damn you, Joel, why didn’t you let me in on this? You shouldn’t have tried to use Paavo’s magic without me! He was my friend before you ever met him!”

  That made him sit up all right. “So what? You think nothing can happen without you?” he demanded indignantly. “Anyway, you never would have agreed and you know it. You still don’t understand. I wanted something for myself.”

  The reconstructed violin lay between us, gleaming faintly in its dark, plush bed. Joel’s big secret was out at last. No wonder he’d been so skittish when I’d first tried to tell him about Bosanka! He’d been dabbling in magic himself with disastrous results, so naturally he shied away from any more of the stuff, especially since it came in the threatening form of Bosanka Lonatz.

  “Joel, you idiot,” I said. “You have to be trained to use magic. I’ve learned a little from my Gran, but I don’t know what I’m doing half the time. I’m not exactly on top of things at the moment, in case you hadn’t noticed. Did you really think you were so brilliant that you could pick up where Paavo left off just by playing his violin?”

  “I hoped the violin would teach me,” he said. “Something has to teach me!”

  “I don’t believe this,” I said. “You thought this thing you had made, this Frankenstein-monster of an instrument, would turn you into what, some kind of performing genius overnight? And that would show your family and your brother the conductor and—everybody!”

  “Oh, what do you know about it?” he said hotly. “Magic, yeah, okay, but music? You don’t know beans. As a performer you either have it in a big way or you don’t. With this instrument, I thought maybe I had a chance, at least. Sounds pretty selfish, right? Well, talent does that to you. Maybe a little talent does it worse than a lot.”

  I was stunned. Had he really done some Joel-version of selling his soul to the Devil so he could get a big hand at Carnegie Hall? You just looked at Joel and you could see he was worth
more than that, with music or without it! God, didn’t he know anything about himself?

  I hit him again, harder. He muttered, “Quit that,” and tucked his legs further back, away from me.

  “I don’t believe that’s the whole reason you took such a totally crazy chance!” I said. “Come on, Joel, talk to me!”

  “Valentine, you have only to ask. I have no secrets from you.” He sat back and stared straight at me. “I was hoping for power, if you want to know. Not just music but magic, the real thing—the power to change things and make them better. I wanted to heal up the world a little, turn people’s minds around so we can maybe make some kind of future for ourselves on this beat-up planet. So I tried to use Paavo’s magic. I had to try. I’d even give up music, regular music, to be able to do that.”

  He held out his hands, flexing his fingers, “Maybe I gave it up for nothing at all. I played this instrument and what happened? My hands quit. I don’t even dare try to use this fiddle to help you with your witch-girl from outer space, because who knows what the damn thing might do to me this time? Or to you? So I didn’t make anything better. I made it all worse.”

  In daylight he would never have said that, and maybe it wouldn’t have gotten to me if he had. But it wasn’t daylight, and I could tell that he was at the end of his rope.

  I hugged him. We ended up huddled together against the cold marble plinth.

  “It made sounds,” he said into my neck. “I played it out on Boston Common at dawn, and I heard these strange noises—weird yawps and squeals—it was awful. People stared, the few of them there at that hour. There was a guy with his dog, this Great Dane that started barking like mortar fire. A girl actually bolted out of the park holding her head with both hands, it was that bad.

  “I remember thinking, it’s my bow, I need a magic bow, too. But I knew it wasn’t that. So I put the fiddle back in the case and I slunk back to my aunt’s place with it, and I haven’t played it since. I look at the thing every day, but I’m afraid of it. And I can’t play anything else because my hands won’t let me.”

  “You jerk,” I said, snuffling into his ear. He smelled of soap and smoke. “Joel, you incredible moron!”

  He groaned. “Am I doomed, Val, or what?”

  “Probably,” I said, backing off a little to wipe my nose. “God, when you want something you really want it, don’t you? When I think of you fishing around barehanded in that dirty water over there, feeling for bits and pieces of Paavo’s violin —”

  “I wanted to make a difference,” he said in a desolate voice.

  I said, “So? That’s what everybody wants.”

  “Shh. Listen.” The bushes rustled like rain. Joel craned his neck and said sharply, “Who’s there?”

  No answer.

  A branch lay where it had dropped from the trees overhead. Joel grabbed up the stick and flung it into the bushes.

  Two figures crashed out and raced away from us, careering madly along the steep south bank of the lake and pounding and over the ridge out of sight.

  Joel stared after them. “Two deer?”

  “Peter,” I said, “and Mimi, of course!” I couldn’t help it, I laughed. Well, I cackled like a looney, actually.

  Joel was here, Mimi was tearing through the park with Peter, but we had no Tamsin. I felt like an incompetent sheepdog, rounding up two but losing a third member of my wandering flock. But if Lennie could just get hold of his sister and I could reach Barb, we might still have a chance.

  I said, “What are you doing out here by the lake in the middle of the night, anyway?”

  What I wanted to hear was that he’d come to try to help us however he could. But when I heard the words out of my own mouth, I thought, Oh no, the lake—not that it would be easy to drown yourself in a few feet of dirty water. But this was Joel, remember; Joel in extremis.

  He didn’t answer right away. I swear I could feel him considering letting me think that he had come to the park to end it all—Joel of the poetic profile and sensitive feelings, oh, what a dreadful pity, etc., etc.

  To his credit (though just barely) he decided against self-dramatization and said instead, rather humbly in fact, “Well, my parents aren’t home and I was lonesome, and this is a special place, isn’t it?”

  It was, and it had done some kind of magic for us again. “Come on,” I said, “you’re coming home with me.”

  14

  Power Lines

  MOM WAS HAVING A DRINK in the living room with Manley when Joel and I got home.

  She said, “Hello, darling—oh, hello there.”

  “Did Lennie call?” I asked.

  Mom said he hadn’t. “This is Joel, isn’t it? I don’t think we’ve ever actually met, have we? Manley, this is Joel Wechsler, a friend of Val’s.”

  Manley shook hands with Joel, who went into his aloof mode. “And what’s your métier, young man?” said Manley. He asked this question of a boy standing in front of him holding a violin case.

  “Mental illness,” Joel said politely,

  Mom slopped some kir on her knee.

  Manley wasn’t really brain damaged, just tied up inside his own head most of the time, which seemed to interfere with observation of the outside world. To give credit where it’s due, he laughed and said, “Well, I guess somebody’s got to do it.”

  I explained to Mom that Joel was more or less in the clear now that he’d liberated himself from the Minuteman Center. She, changing the subject with awesome adroitness, talked with Joel about music—flirting with him, if you can believe that! My incurable mom. For once I was grateful for the existence of old Manley.

  Mom said she had played the piano when she was a girl. “I was never much good,” she admitted. “I hated to practice.”

  “You didn’t have the right parents,” Joel said, gallantly managing not to appear bored. “It takes complete tyrants.”

  “At the risk of seeming like one of those myself,” Mom said, looking at her watch, “I’d like to point out that it’s getting awfully late.”

  I said, “Joel and I have some stuff to talk about, Mom. It’s important.”

  We escaped into my room and shut the door.

  “Where’d your mom find the Ernest Hemingway clone?” Joel said.

  “Hey, the pickings are pretty slim out there,” I said. “Anyway, Manley’s a lot less awful than some, believe me.”

  Joel yawned. “I believe you, I believe you.” He flopped down on my bed, hugging the violin case, and promptly fell asleep.

  I called Lennie’s number. Tamsin answered.

  “You’re back!” I said, feeling my brain clank into some kind of manic high gear.

  “Who is this?” Tamsin said.

  “It’s Val.”

  “Oh,” she said, as in, “Drop dead.”

  “Tamsin,” I said, “I don’t know why you changed your mind about running out on us—”

  “The dance recital was canceled,” she interrupted icily. “And I was planning on coming back tomorrow, anyway.”

  “Fine, great,” I said, “I kiss your toe shoes in apology, okay? This is great! Is Lennie there?”

  “No, he’s swimming or something. You want to talk to me, or not?” She knew how to throw down the tutu, all right.

  “Yes,” I said. “Did Lennie have a chance to fill you in on things?”

  “He told me some wild story about your wicked witchlet getting all upset with you today, yes. She beat up on a chair?”

  “More or less.” I wasn’t going to explain; let her figure it out for herself, since she was so smart. “When he comes back, you can fill him in: Mimi’s okay, she’s in the park with Peter.”

  “Not Mimi but Bambi?” Tamsin giggled in spite of herself.

  “You got it. And Joel broke out of the Boston bin. He’s with me.”

  “Oh, really?” she said, distinctly interested.

  I looked over at Joel, sprawled out on my quilted bedspread with his bare ankles gleaming palely between his sneakers and
his jeans. I couldn’t resist adding, “Well, almost with me. He’s conked out.”

  Tamsin sighed. “I think men look so romantic when they’re asleep. Vulnerable, you know? How old is he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “I thought he was older,” Tamsin said, “but of course artistic people are always more mature.”

  In a pig’s armpit. Who the heck did she think she was, talking about “artistic people,” her with her lumpy feet and her dippy “attitudes”? She certainly didn’t know one single thing about Joel. Except of course that he could be incredibly rude, which some girls find attractive. I’ve never heard bad manners called “mature” before.

  Probably she believed all that crap about how talented people are not only allowed to behave worse than chimpanzees, but are required to behave that way to prove their talent. One good thing, though: She wasn’t likely to take off again. She’d stick around if only to see Joel.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said, amazed at the sparks of hope and excitement going off in my exhausted head. “We’re all available now, assuming Bosanka can bring the two deer and assuming Barb will come. Bosanka says she’ll send for us when she’s ready. Well, now we’re ready for her! We’ll make a comet that will scorch her socks off.”

  Tamsin said, “Lennie told me your new plan. I think it stinks. It’s negative, like black magic, which is always bad, bad news for everybody involved.”

  “Maybe you haven’t noticed,” I said, “but Bosanka is a witch. We’re fighting fire with fire, that’s all.”

  “My spiritual teacher told me,” she said, “before the immigration people harassed him out of the country, that black magic turns back against you.”

  “Great,” I said. Who did Tamsin think she was, my Gran? “If you can find your teacher, bring him along tomorrow and he can fix things with Bosanka.”

  “Don’t do a trip on me, Valentine.”

  “There’s no time for a trip,” I said. “I’ve got to call Barbara Wilson. She’s on the committee now, too.”

  “Poor her,” she said.

  We both hung up.

  Joel, the faker, hiked up on one elbow and smiled. “Yes, I’m almost eighteen and I would like to kiss you,” he said. “I mean really, not like on New Year’s Eve.”