The Wishing Thread (12 page)

“You do?”

“I’m not saying I know everything. But—yeah. The spells, all of that. Mariah told me.” He glanced down at her.

“And, what do you think of it? Did it freak you out?”

She felt his muscle tighten under her hand. “I guess I have to tell you a story,” he said, but he did not begin it right away. They walked a few more paces, and she looked up at him with the sense that something was caught in the balance—though what it was she couldn’t say. “When I was fifteen, my father was working illegally, you know, under the table, at a construction site. The crane operator apparently had too much whiskey in his coffee one morning, and the jib smacked into a neighboring building.” He paused, and Aubrey held his arm a little tighter. “They said my father didn’t even know what hit him. Stone and glass from the building fell four stories. Nobody but my father was hurt.”

“Hurt? As in … he recovered, right?”

“No.”

“Oh, Vic,” Aubrey said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago. I still miss him every day. But I’m not telling you this story to make you feel bad for me. I’m telling you because it has to do with the Stitchery.”

“How?”

Vic sighed, a full exhalation through his nostrils. “He was a quiet man, never the life of the party, but always the guy you’d want to talk to one-on-one. When you needed him, he was right there—but not really noticeable until you looked over your shoulder and realized he’d always had your back, but was letting you lead the way.”

“He sounds like an amazing person,” Aubrey said. “I would have liked to have known him.”

Vic looked down and smiled warmly. “Three days after he died, I was at the park. I didn’t have any friends with me; I’d gone by myself because I didn’t want to be in the house. I
felt—well—I felt like hell. I was sitting on top of this metal dome when I saw the jaguar.”

“Did you say—
jaguar
?”

Vic nodded solemnly.

“Like, the car?”

“Like the cat.”

“Was it … on a leash?” Aubrey said.

“It was lazing on the top of the slide. It must have been there for a while. It was all black, and it was blinking at me like it was sleepy. The weird thing was that I didn’t feel scared—well, not too scared. It didn’t seem like it wanted to eat me or anything. It was just … hanging out.”

Aubrey caught a glimpse of the river between the houses; it was bold today—blue and sparkling. “How does that connect to your father?”

“He collected jaguar pictures. He didn’t have a huge collection. But there were a few jaguar figurines and stuff around the house here and there, and I always knew they came from him. He felt, I don’t know, some kind of understanding with them.”

“You think your father appeared to you—as a jaguar?” she said, and though the question felt strange on her tongue, she’d hoped it came through without even a trace of judgment.

Vic sighed again. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it was anything that literal.”

“What did your family say?”

“I never told them. I knew they’d think I was crazy, that I was imagining things because of grief. But a few days later I found out that a jaguar had actually escaped from a man’s house—he was keeping it as a pet, if you can believe that.”

“I believe it,” she said. “You don’t live this close to New York City and not hear about those kinds of things.”

“So, there’s an explanation for me seeing the jaguar—I accept that. But there’s not an explanation for the
timing
. That’s what’s tricky. Think of the odds. Not only did I see a jaguar in Queens, which must be a million to one—but I saw it just after my father passed. When you beat those kinds of odds—” He shook his head, his eyes lowered in thought. “—I don’t know what it is, but I can’t think it’s coincidence.”

“I don’t either,” Aubrey said.

“That’s how I feel about your magic,” he said. “It’s more than coincidence. It’s something.”

Aubrey’s heart was flooded with warmth for him. And she thought of what a more-than-coincidence it was that she was standing here, and he was standing here, that they’d met each other, and were talking, and now their lives were, at least for this moment, intertwined. Even if she never got to know him any better than she did right now, she would think fondly of this moment for the rest of her life. “Thank you for telling me this story. I’m glad you did.”

He nodded, suddenly bashful, and he was charming and boyish all over again. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t Mariah just knit something for Steve Halpern? For everybody on the town council? It seems like that would have been the easy way out.”

“Oh. Well. She did. I mean, she knit for them. But Jackie Halpern’s family has been in Tarrytown a really long time. So she knows things about us—she thinks she does anyway. And she told everybody not to accept gifts from Mariah.”

“And they don’t?”

“They’re not really interested in hand-knit neck warmers. More like … Yankees tickets or nice watches.”

“Fair point.” He resumed walking. “Anyway, to go back to
the Stitchery, what I’m saying is, you shouldn’t give it up if you don’t want to. But it seems to me like your sisters mean well.”

“Yes. I guess they do.”

She fell into thought, lost. She’d hoped that her sisters’ return would mean a change: Maybe Meggie would come back and be her normal old self again. Maybe Bitty wouldn’t be so standoffish. But Mariah’s will—which was meant to tie them together—had them thrashing even harder than usual at their common bonds.

“You’ve had a hard week,” Vic said.

She looked up at him, his brown eyes that—to her amazement—never shied away from hers even though Meggie had once described them as “bug-zapper blue.”

In the overly warm sun, in her long black skirt and her unseasonable black turtleneck that was the only black shirt she owned, she must have looked awfully dire. Because after a moment Vic said, “Come here,” and he closed the distance between them and put his arms around her. She felt the hardness of his chest, the press of his cheek against her temple. He smelled of deodorant. His body was warm.

“Better?” he asked.

She pressed her nose into his chest and slid her arms around him. “Better,” she said. But she sniffled a little—then a little more—just in case he was thinking of letting her go.

A funny thing happens in the Hudson Valley in the autumn. At first the twilight seems peaceful, the electric blue of day fading and the heavens softening to a pinkish white. The garish red and orange trees mellow like a cat gentling beneath its owner’s hand. And yet the serenity is deceptive. The mood of a Hudson twilight is so uniformly peaceful—a blank canvas—that it routinely invites nightmares.

Beneath the wide-open sky, Bitty could feel the dark possibilities of the coming evening. Because she didn’t want to answer questions about her absent husband, and because she wanted a moment to herself, she had taken her children to the park an hour before Mariah’s funeral picnic was set to begin. The riverbank was low and flat. Canada geese were snoozing like lumped gray stones at the water’s edge. Rocky hills shouldered the sky on all sides, and the metal girders of the Tappan Zee Bridge spanned the river. The old white lighthouse where Bitty and her husband used to meet in secret jutted beyond the trees.

“Mom?”

Nessa leaned her head on Bitty’s shoulder as they walked. Her skin was pale and freckled, her long cinnamon hair pulled into a high bun. Her scarf, the one she’d absolutely had to
have last week or else she’d die on the spot, had been left behind.

“Mom? I was thinking …”

“Uh-oh. Don’t hurt yourself.”

Nessa laughed. “No, seriously. I was thinking that we should maybe, like, stay here a little while. Not go back right away.”

“How come?”

“Aunt Aubrey needs us. No, really. I can tell. This is her
time of need
. And it’s not like Carson and I can’t afford to miss a few days of school. We both get good grades …”

Bitty glanced down.

“Fine.
He
gets good grades. But mine have been okay.”

“We’re not staying,” Bitty said.

“But … why?”

She swung her arm around her daughter’s waist. Nessa hadn’t asked if her father would be coming to the funeral. Neither had Carson. “Because we just can’t.”

“Why do you hate this place so much?”

“I don’t hate it. I have a lot of good memories here.”

“And a lot of bad ones?”

“Some,” Bitty admitted. “Your aunt and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye.”

“About what?”

“Typical things,” Bitty said, though in fact their disagreement wasn’t typical at all. The issue—the chronic, divisive issue—was the magic. It
always
came down to the magic. At first, when she was too young to know better, Bitty had bought into the hype—just like she’d once believed that Saint Nicholas came down the chimney at Christmastime and left candies in her shoes. But as her capacity for logic grew, she realized that a man could not travel the world in a sled in the sky. And eventually, after years of prodding and poking her
own doubt about magic as she prodded and poked the holes where she’d lost her baby teeth, she realized that people could not fix their problems with scarves and hats—no matter what Mariah or the Great Book in the Hall claimed. The magic of the Stitchery was no more than smoke and mirrors. If spells worked, it was only because the power of belief was so very persuasive, like a placebo that cures cancer or shortens colds.

And while she didn’t claim to know much about science, she had an understanding that it only took one instance—one single deviation from the predicted outcome—to prove a theory to be fully and completely wrong. Magic was a way for people to try to control the uncontrollable; and if it had worked with regularity, Bitty would have been happy to believe it was real. She would have been the first person to say “Sign me up!” But in the end, magic was a false security, a grasping at power that humans didn’t have but desperately wished for, and Bitty found that there were better, more reliable ways to control her own destiny than knitting a sock.

The Stitchery had been the Great Embarrassment of her youth—and even now as an adult, she still caught the faint whiff of it lingering about her like a smell that would not wash out. And when Bitty was in a dark mood, she conceded that it was not just the Stitchery that embarrassed her, but
Mariah
—a woman who had made herself a laughingstock in her clichéd broomstick “witch skirts” and her corset-tops and her moon-and-stars jewelry. A woman who believed the un-provable and the unbelievable—and who couldn’t understand why Bitty didn’t do the same.

“Are you okay?” Nessa asked.

“Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“It looks like you’re chewing on your teeth,” Nessa said.

Bitty looked off into the distance. At the south end of the park, Carson was calling and waving his arms over his head.
He wanted them to come see the lighthouse. It was just beyond the trees, white metal pocked by bolts and smeared by rust. Just like always.

Bitty gave her daughter’s bottom a little whack.

“Ma!”

“Go ahead. I’m right behind you.”

Nessa ran. Bitty kept walking. She had been back in Tarrytown for only a few nights. And as she stood under the wide sky, a longing that she could not quite put a name to was growing within her. Perhaps it was nostalgia, coming up through her bones like a cold draft through floorboards. Or perhaps it was a longing for the new life she’d built for herself—or at least, for the life that she’d tried to build but that still seemed to elude her. Whatever the cause, she felt she was growing heavyhearted, more with each minute she stayed in Tarrytown. She was sleeping under the same roof as her sisters, and yet she missed them. They had chatted a little, made the necessary conversations, but they had yet to talk, to
really
talk—except to argue about selling the Stitchery. They tiptoed around one another, didn’t ask questions, gave a wide berth. Bitty thought she would have appreciated the effort. But she didn’t.

Before her, the lighthouse reared up, unlit and rugged in the quiet sky.

For a few shared years, the Van Ripper girls were said to have been inseparable, an isolated little unit that never let an outsider in. At playgrounds and basketball courts, delis and pet-store windows, the three girls appeared to the better families of Tarrytown to be street rabble left over from another century—one with newsboys and orphanages and men who lit lamps. Even before Mariah had taken them out of public
school, the girls had been derelicts. They wore clothes that didn’t quite fit, smeared with grass and ketchup, and their hair was stringy and wild. Bitty was a knobby young teen fighting her way into womanhood; Meggie was a child, jelly-smeared and dirty and always wanting to hold one of her big sisters’ hands; and Aubrey was bookish and distracted and a little bit flakey, but always by her siblings’ sides.

In the afternoons, when good children were at home doing their schoolwork, the Van Ripper girls could be found in the park between Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow. It was there that Benedict Arnold’s traitorous plot against George Washington, the plot that might have changed the outcome of the Revolutionary War, had been discovered when his sidekick and scapegoat John André was captured.