The Wishing Thread (23 page)

At the time, Aubrey had taken great comfort in the words. She’d invested all her hope in the Stitchery, so that each brick and nail and floorboard was a hedge against the unthinkable. As long as she stayed in the Stitchery, her sisters would know where to find her. And at any moment, they might come back.

Of course that had been years ago. And her sisters hadn’t returned—not until Mariah had died. And they’d come back to say that they wanted Aubrey to sell the Stitchery as quickly as possible. Mariah had thought the Stitchery was their family’s star, a beacon to follow in the darkness. Aubrey saw now that her sisters did not think of the Stitchery as a place to call home, but possibly as the thing that kept them from making homes of their own. Not until the Stitchery was gone would they be able to truly move on.

She pressed her face into her pillow. Perhaps her sisters were right. There were too many memories here, each one just a spark away from conflagration. There were too many
unknowns. There was the question of their mother, who had disappeared from the Stitchery one day and never come back. There was the question of the Madness, the shame and doom of it, Madness that perched like a gargoyle on a steep gable, grotesque and watching, looking down. And of course, there was the question of the magic. Aubrey believed; she would go to her grave believing. But sometimes, even she had doubts.

Tears welled up and Aubrey did not fight them.

Once the Stitchery was gone from their lives, whether smashed by a wrecking ball or sold at a loss, her sisters could move on. And as long as Aubrey was the holdout, fighting to hang on to the Stitchery even as her sisters begged her to let it go, she was being selfish.

Wasn’t she?

She thought of everyone, all the people who were her neighbors, sitting in folding chairs in the firehouse last night and rallying around Tappan Square.

Aubrey screamed into her pillow.

She had wanted to spend the day celebrating with her sisters, fussing over what she would wear tonight, over where Vic might be taking her—indulging in silliness of the most meaningful variety. Instead, the Stitchery was between them: a wall, a trough, a mountain. Until the problem of the Stitchery, of Tappan Square, was resolved one way or another, there would be no girl talk, no intimacies exchanged with laughter and conspiring smiles. There was only the house. And the neighborhood. And the questions, leading ahead of them into the future, taking them toward the inevitable, a change that was unwelcome or more of the same.

When Bitty needed perspective, she jogged. She liked the phrase
pound the pavement
and she imagined the balls of her
feet were fists. In Tarrytown, she jogged out of Tappan Square, over to Patriot’s Park and through it, then up, and up, and up, until she was looking down on the slate rooftops of the historic houses on Grove Street, until she was veering along the curvy brown shoulder of the reservoir, until she’d gone full circle and the Hudson River was no longer at her back, but was cinematic and massive before her, blue-gray like the shimmer of fish scales against the triumphant oranges and reds of autumn.

She stopped. She breathed. She closed her eyes. And with them closed, she saw everything, the theater of her youth with the curtains open: the thick neck of a pond where she had learned to ice skate, the boutique that once displayed a red dress that she’d loved but couldn’t afford—God, she could still remember every stitch—the street corner where she’d punched Rod Doherty because he’d mocked Aubrey’s blue eyes, all of it, laid out before her with all its indifference to the passing of time and how much a person changed with the passing.

She’d been eighteen when she met Craig. He was older, studying engineering at Cornell and doing adult things like pledging a fraternity and tipping the maid who tidied his dorm. Bitty had weaseled her way into an exclusive frat party, and she’d met her husband when he was hulking over a cooler filled with ice and silver cans of beer.

She’d asked him:
Got one for me?

She had not hooked him right away. It had taken some careful plotting, some toying and teasing, before he began to chase her in earnest. She’d wanted him because he was handsome, because everyone else wanted him, because he was the type of guy she wasn’t supposed to have. She’d wanted him because she knew money mattered to him, and she’d damn well had enough of being poor. She’d wanted him because he
was the kind of man who seemed like he might control his own future with firm dexterity—and not accept anything less than what he intended to have. She’d wanted him because he was practically an atheist. Sure, he went to church when his mother dragged him on Easter and Christmas Eve. But he didn’t believe in anything that could not be measured—nothing but science, math, and his own inevitable ascendance.

It took over a year after Craig had graduated college for him to find work. And when he did, Bitty packed up her things—a drawstring bag that Mariah had knit, a picture of her sisters, the teddy bear she’d carried since the second grade—and fled like a refugee with Craig to an apartment in Verplanck, without the blessing of her family or his. Craig had taken a job at a power plant to put his degree to good use until he got something better, though they should have known at the time he would never leave. Bitty worked two jobs: at a deli and a lingerie outlet. She signed up for college classes. She wanted to show Craig that she deserved him. She was hell-bent on hoisting herself up—exhausted by the fact of being both the person who is hoisting and the thing being raised. It didn’t occur to Bitty until years down the line that Craig might not have wanted her to deserve him—that the point, the whole point, of loving her was that he
could
, and that she owed him something for it.

A chilly updraft blew in from the valley floor and conjured goose bumps on Bitty’s skin. She wondered what her husband was doing with himself while she was standing here, thinking of him. In recent years, and intermittently for more years than she could count, she had been fantasizing about leaving him. The allure of separation was nearly erotic, charged with desire like the rush of sex coming from a last, final breaking from it. But here she was. Still married. Still stuck. And the wind was getting colder, and the sky was getting more wintry
by the day, and somewhere in Tappan Square, Aubrey was embarking on her own foray in love.

Bitty thought:
I’ll have to make this one up to her
. She should have been friendlier this morning. She should have asked more questions about Aubrey’s date. She wanted her sister to be happy; Aubrey’s quality of life was one of the key tenets in her argument to sell the Stitchery. And yet, instead of offering optimism and encouragement, Bitty had felt the terrible, violent urge to take her sister by the shoulders and say
Save yourself while you can
. She supposed that wasn’t fair.

She shivered. Clouds cast amorphous shadows on the river, the hills. Bitty had not thought of Tappan Square as home for a very long time; and yet standing here, alone, she could not think of the house where she lived with her husband as home, either.

She took a deep breath and headed with heavy heels back down the once sleepy mountainside into town.

Aubrey stared at the sinister dimness that was her small, cramped closet, mutely pondering how the door to it could be wide open and yet somehow no light ever got in. If she stepped foot into the abyss she might never be seen again.

She was considering what Vic would say if she showed up naked, when Bitty knocked and let herself into the room. Bitty’s hair was wet and her face was scrubbed. Diamonds flashed at her ears and neck, and her rings were as much a part of her physiology as the fingers they were on. “Am I interrupting?”

“No,” Aubrey said, because politeness got the better of her. “Good run?”

“Yes. Killer hills in this town.”

Bitty sat on Aubrey’s bed and toweled off her wet hair.
Aubrey glanced at her. She tried not to ask the question that was on the tip of her tongue, which was,
Do you want something?
Her sister was sitting across the room, but she was miles away.

“Listen,” Bitty said.

But Aubrey had started to speak at the same time.

“Oh.” Bitty’s gaze slanted to the side. “You go ahead.”

Aubrey did. She was feeling peevish and irked by her sisters’ joint declaration that they no longer had any attachment to the Stitchery. And so rather than politely edging around a topic until the central shape of it became clear, which was her usual way of taking on a difficult conversation, Aubrey just blurted: “Nessa found the sacrifices.” And the ramifications of the statement resounded in the room like a big, satisfying
gong
.

Bitty was quiet.

“But that’s not all.” Aubrey stood before Bitty at the foot of the bed. “She asked me to teach her to knit.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.” Aubrey said, lifting her chin. “I did. Because she deserves to know.”

“She deserves to know what? Knitting? Or spells?”

“Both,” Aubrey said.

Bitty glowered. And Aubrey’s nerve, her momentary flirtation with antagonism, began to fade. She leaned against the closet frame. “Look. I know you’re going through a lot right now. The knitting … I didn’t mean anything by it. I just thought it might offer Nessa some comfort. So yes—I helped her get started. She would have made Mariah very proud.”

Bitty wrung her hair inside the towel. “As long as she doesn’t know about the spells, I suppose it’s fine.”

“I didn’t expect you to be so open-minded.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Because we both know that in our family, knitting isn’t just a craft.”

Bitty continued to squeeze the droplets from her hair. Aubrey could almost hear what her sister was thinking:
Whatever you say
.

“I’m really not trying to tell you what to do, so please don’t think I am—but you need to tell Nessa about the magic. No, wait. Hear me out. It’s her heritage. It’s our tradition. And besides, it’s better that she hears it from you rather than letting her stumble into it by herself.”

“Please,” Bitty said. “I’d rather get through eight more renditions of the birds-and-bees talk with Nessa than try to explain the Stitchery.”

“What about birds-and-bees?” Meggie had come through the door. She’d changed out of her pajamas and into a gray-and-black sweater and faded pink jeans.

“Nessa found the tower,” Aubrey said.

Bitty smirked and shook her head. “She knows how to knit, too, apparently.”

“But Bitty doesn’t want her knowing about the spells,” Aubrey said.

Meggie flopped on Aubrey’s bed and lay back against the pillows. “What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is that I don’t want my kids having false hope. I don’t want them growing up thinking that if they want to change something, all they have to do is wish upon a star. God—that’s a cruel thing to do to children. I won’t do it to mine.”

Aubrey could not miss the bitterness in her sister’s voice. And she wondered what had happened that made Bitty so certain the lore of the Stitchery was false. She ventured: “When did you stop believing in the magic?”

Bitty snuffed. She got up from the edge of Aubrey’s bed
and went to the vanity. Aubrey’s hairbrush was there—an old thing with a pewter handle and white bristles. Bitty regarded herself in the mirror as she tugged it through her water-dark hair. “There was no
one
spell that convinced me. More like … a gradual questioning. Mr. Elazar was the final straw.”

Aubrey remembered Joel Elazar—Mr. Elazar at the time. For years he had showed up in her dreams, with his thick silver hair and his houndstooth cabbie’s hat, and his round, haunted eyes. Mr. Elazar had sought out Mariah because of his thirty-year-old daughter. She had been given only a few months to live. He came to the Stitchery with a heavy, cut-glass bowl that had been prized in the family since the Depression. His parents had stood in New York breadlines and begged for work; they ran a household that reused bathwater in age order, that rationed bread. But they’d always managed to hold on to the bowl, that one semi-luxurious item. Sacrificing the bowl for their daughter had been his wife’s idea, and Mr. Elazar had pretended to concur. But he had ideas of his own. He was prepared to give up anything so that his daughter would live; he was prepared to give up his life. Once he commissioned the spell, he’d had every intention of jumping off the Tappan Zee Bridge.

Mariah had talked him down. She’d said the spell wouldn’t work unless the person who requested it was alive—whether or not Mariah had been making this up, Aubrey had never known. And so the cut-glass bowl was relegated to the Stitchery tower, and Mr. Elazar eventually returned to pick up a blanket of black wool thickened by holding doubled strands. He’d brought the girls lollipops and made them laugh by pulling quarters from their ears, and when he left, his face had born the soft, tremulous look of a man who’d had a great weight taken from his shoulders, weight lifted gently by a swell of hope.

Two months later, the girls had signed their names to a card of condolences. Mr. Elazar had never returned to the Stitchery.

It was the first time Aubrey had seriously and fundamentally
doubted
, a niggling fear that she hadn’t dared voice to her sisters. What if there was no magic, and they were just fooling themselves and everyone else in Tarrytown? What if the Van Rippers really were the swindlers people said they were—swindlers who had gotten so good at their game that they’d even swindled themselves? Worry was not like a pit in Aubrey’s stomach; it was a trapdoor in the bottom of a pit, and it opened unknown into unknown. Because if there truly was magic in the world, then it
should
have worked for Mr. Elazar, who would have given his life for his daughter if Mariah had let him. Aubrey had no way to explain to herself or to anyone why the spell had failed. And Mariah didn’t seem to have any answers, either. She’d sat with her arm around Aubrey, her face full of regret, and she’d said,
Sometimes, it isn’t about the answers. Sometimes, it’s about the questions—the questions are the answers
. But her advice hadn’t helped. Aubrey’s confidence in the Stitchery had been shaken; Bitty’s had been smashed to smithereens.