She flashed back to the design she had seen in Galderkhaan, the swirls and crescents that left the center isolated, mysterious. She gave him a big hug and kiss and sent him to her bag to get her keys. She let him work on putting the keys on the new ring while she quietly apologized to her mother.
“Look, I didn’t mean to come down so hard on you,” Caitlin began.
Nancy hushed her. “I’m going to give you some advice from your grandmother, a miner’s daughter. She once warned me that if you go too deep into something, you can lose your way or get buried. I resented the metaphor. Life wasn’t a coal mine. But you know something? She was right. A person should have—a person needs—a full and diverse life. So,” she continued, “when I hear your father say that he can’t even start a conversation with you about your choice to go to Iran, it occurs to me that you need a piece of advice: if no one can even tell you no, if you can’t even consider it, you’re in a very dangerous place.”
Caitlin thought a long time before answering, twisting ribbons of chocolate icing onto her fork. Finally, she said, “What did Great-Grandpa do each morning when the coal cart came to him, big and dark and very, very insistent?”
Nancy smiled. “He got in. But—and this is important, dear—not blindly and not alone. That’s why he became a labor organizer, and maybe you’ve got his rebellious blood.” Nancy’s smile warmed. “How about a compromise?” she said. “Find yourself someone who you will trust now and then. Someone who can tell you the truth if you need to hear it, in a way you can take it.”
“I’ve got this one.” Caitlin thumbed at Jacob, grinning.
He held up the key chain, jangling the keys like bells and pursing his lips as if he were blowing a trumpet.
“I’m serious,” Nancy said as she cleared the plates.
“I know,” Caitlin replied, “and thank you. I will consider it. I promise.” Then she immersed herself in another hug from Jacob and a comment about his wizardly key-chain ways.
It was soon time for Jacob to get ready for school and Nancy announced she would take him today; her birthday present to Caitlin was time for a long, hot bubble bath. They hugged warmly as they said good-bye.
And then Caitlin was alone in the apartment. She sat down again at the dining table, gazing at the cat and thinking about her mother. People didn’t have to be the same. They didn’t have to agree with each other. But they didn’t have to judge each other either, simply support each other’s choices.
Arfa twitched, stretched, and jumped down from the couch. He ambled to the table, rubbed his muzzle across her ankles, then sat back on his haunches with his eyes mostly closed, purring. Caitlin regarded him and realized that the tips of his whiskers were moving. Although it was hard to see, she was sure that all the fur on his face was blowing backward as if he were facing into a breeze.
She looked toward the window, which was shut against the fall chill. There was no breeze, no vent, no fan—nothing. Then Arfa stood up, walked around behind her, arched his back, and rubbed his side against empty space, as if it were someone’s leg.
In the still, airless room Caitlin felt a sudden cooling in the small of her back, as if icy breath had been blown down her spine and pooled there. Simultaneously the cat turned to her, hissed silently, and hurried away.
Caitlin didn’t blame her.
Something was here.
Something that didn’t belong.
CHAPTER 2
At noon, the C train was mostly empty. Caitlin shared her car with only a few transit workers at the far end and a young Hispanic couple somehow cuddling around their backpacks.
Smelling of bubblegum—the only flavor of bath bubbles she could find in the apartment—Caitlin headed toward the Brooklyn International School, which offered eighth to twelfth grade for English language learners. A large number of students were not just immigrants but refugees, many of them suffering from a wide range of traumas. Caitlin usually visited the school one afternoon a week to conduct individual therapy sessions but with all her recent trips, she hadn’t been able to find any free afternoons. Earlier in the week she’d received an e-mail asking her to please come on an off day. One student in particular was proving especially difficult to reach.
Caitlin leaned her head back on the glass window of the train and stared at ads for a ministorage chain. Ordinarily, she’d have been rereading the e-mail from the school and thinking about the student, but she couldn’t keep her mind off of Arfa and the presence they had both felt in the room. Most of the time his behavior could be passed off as random feline weirdness but the inexplicably rippling fur gnawed at her. The experience had blindsided her and filled her with a thought that stubbornly refused to go away:
Did I bring something back with me from Galderkhaan? Or, like an animal, has something sniffed me out?
Or was it neither of the above? Reason argued against those. But reason had too many enemies now.
Reality was suddenly very, very difficult to know and impossible to quantify. Souls from an ancient civilization had been stretching through time, trying to bond with souls in the modern day to complete a ritual. Caitlin had interceded, used a self-induced trance to place herself between then and now, breaking the connection. But it wasn’t like an electric circuit where the lines were cut and the energy died. This was different. It had been like walking through a graveyard where the ghosts were visible, aggressive, and unhappy. Not even the great universities had literature to help her understand that. Caitlin was sure; she had checked.
Caitlin sat up straight and forced herself to focus on the present, on what she knew was real. She dug deep into her pocket for her phone and scrolled through e-mails until she found the one from the school. The boy in trouble was an eighth grader, originally a child soldier in the Central African Republic. Deserting one night, Odilon had managed to walk a hundred miles to the capital from his rebel camp without being picked up by any other militia. At Bangui, he hid in a hospital for a week until he passed out from hunger. Doctors Without Borders got him out of the country and now, through a generous line of supporters, he was living in a hastily converted meeting space in the basement of a synagogue in Brooklyn. He had seemed responsive during the summer school that guided the refugees through assimilation into American life. Now, in late October, he was beginning to isolate and was refusing to speak in class or out of it. The school’s counselors suspected he was experiencing flashbacks but they couldn’t confirm.
Caitlin looked up from her phone. A couple of college students had joined the car, both wired into music. She glimpsed several boisterous younger kids in an adjacent car, clearly skipping school. The rocking of the two cars made her aware of the reflections playing off the windows. Images collided with each other as the cars shifted or turned along gentle curves, layering the faces of passengers one upon the other. Her eyes traced the windows and their metal frames, the silvery poles and overhead handlebars, the yellow and orange plastic seats. The passengers and their reflections seemed to dance around the fixed structures as though they were figures around a maypole in some primitive ritual, complete with the transparent souls of the departed. She thought about the dead of Galderkhaan, the Priests trying to bond their souls together and ascend to a higher spiritual plane through the rite of cazh. The poles in the cars were like the columns of the Technologists, planted in earth, extending to the sky, connecting them both.