A Spool of Blue Thread

While she was gathering herself together — hunting her purse on the floor and bending for her plant — he came around and opened the door for her. She looked surprised, but she passed Redcliffe to him, and then she stepped down from the truck. “Come on, kids,” Junior said, setting Redcliffe on the ground. “Let’s make our grand entrance.” And the four of them started up the walk.

Under the shelter of the trees the front of the house didn’t get the morning sun, but that just made the deep, shady porch seem homier. And the honey-gold of the swing, visible now through the balustrade, gladdened Junior’s heart. He had to stop himself from saying to Li

When his eyes caught a flash of something blue, he blamed it on the power of suggestion — a crazy kind of aftereffect of all that had happened before.

Then he looked again, and he froze.

A trail of blue paint traveled down the flagstones — a scattered explosion of blue starting directly in front of the steps and then collecting itself to proceed in a wide band down the walk, narrowing to a trickle as it approached his shoes. It was so thick that it almost seemed he could peel it up with his fingers; it was so shiny that he instinctively drew back his nearest foot, although on closer inspection he saw that it had dried. And anyone — or was it only Junior? — could tell from the briefest glance that it had been flung in anger.

Li

It would take his men days to remove this. It would take abrasives and chemicals — offhand, he wasn’t even sure what kind — and scrubbing and scraping and grinding; and still, traces of blue would remain. Really the blue would never come off, not completely. There would be microscopic dots of blue in the mortar forever after, perhaps u

And meanwhile Li

Why had he worried for one second about abandoning her at the train station? She would have done just fine without him! She would do just fine anywhere.

She had set out to snag him and succeeded without half trying. She had weathered five years of public scorn entirely on her own. She’d ridden who knows how many trains on who knows how many branch lines and tracked him down without a hitch. He saw her craning her neck by the pickup lane; he saw her ringing strange ladies’ doorbells with her suitcase and her hobo bundle; he saw her laughing in the kitchen with Cora Lee. He saw her yanking his whole life around the way she would yank a damp sweater that she had pulled out of the washtub to block and reshape.

He supposed he should be glad of that last part.

Redcliffe stumbled but righted himself. Merrick was ru

PART FOUR. A Spool of Blue Thread

14

YEARS AGO, when the children were small, Abby had started a tradition of hanging a row of ghosts down the length of the front porch every October. There were six of them. Their heads were made of white rubber balls tied up in gauzy white cheesecloth, which trailed nearly to the floor and wafted in the slightest breeze. The whole front of the house took on a misty, floating look. On Halloween the trick-or-treaters would have to bat their way through diaphanous veils, the older ones laughing but the younger ones on the edge of panic, particularly if the night was windy and the cheesecloth was lifting and writhing and wrapping itself around them.

Stem’s three little boys clamored to have the ghosts put up this year the same as always, but Nora said it couldn’t be done. “Halloween isn’t till Wednesday,” she told them. “We’ll be gone by then.” They were vacating the house on Sunday — the earliest date that Red was allowed into his apartment. The plan was for all of them to be resettled by the start of the work week.

But Red overheard, and he said, “Oh, let them have their ghosts, why don’t you? It’ll be their last chance. Then our men can haul them down for us when they come in on Monday morning.”

“Yes!” the little boys shouted, and Nora laughed and flung out her hands in defeat.

So the ghosts were brought forth from their paper-towel carton in the attic, and Stem climbed up on a ladder to hang them from the row of brass hooks screwed into the porch ceiling. Up close, the ghosts looked bedraggled. They were due for one of their periodic costume renewals, but nobody had the time for that with everything else that was going on.

Jea

“Or just, maybe, one of you keep it,” he said. And that was how it was left, for the moment.

There were still a few things in the attic, still a few things in the basement — most of them to be discarded. The rest of the house was so empty it echoed. One couch and one armchair stood on the bare floor in the living room, waiting to go to Red’s apartment. The dining-room table had been sent to a consignment shop and the kitchen table stood in its place, ridiculously small and homely, also to go with Red. The larger pieces of furniture had had to be carried out through the front door, because maneuvering them through the kitchen was too difficult; and each time that happened, someone had to scoop up the long trains of the two center ghosts on the porch and anchor them to either side with bungee cords. Even so, Stem and De

The whole family had been commenting on how helpful De

“Yeah, I feel bad about that,” De

“And Stem in the afternoon!”

“What can I do, though?” De

His family looked puzzled. (The hurricane was all over the news, but it was predicted to strike just north of them.) Jea