The Wishing Thread (3 page)

But all of that was supposed to have happened in the distant future—not the present, not while Aubrey was still so young. Mariah, who had shouldered Tarrytown’s secrets with formidable resilience, was no longer around to help her. And her sisters, once as close to her as seeds in the heart of an apple, were gone.

“You want me to come home with you?” Jeanette asked, rubbing her back. “We’ll order some pizza and stay up watching movies in our PJs?”

“It’s okay,” Aubrey said.

“I just don’t think you should be alone right now.”

“Thank you. But I want to,” Aubrey said.

After she’d finished making arrangements for Mariah’s body, and after she’d hugged Jeanette one last time, she dragged herself back to the Stitchery. She opened the door and realized she’d forgotten to lock it behind her when she’d left all those hours ago. She stood in the entryway. She stood still. The hallway stretched before her as it always had, with its brown shadows of water stains, its ghost lines where paintings once hung, its mottled blue wallpaper curling up along the seams. To her right was the parlor that no one used anymore. To her left, the knitting room, with its baskets and barrels, its profuse hanks and skeins and cakes of yarn. The house settled around her shoulders like a dusty pall.

She decided it was best not to think. She made an elaborate tofu sushi dinner—just for herself—then found she had no appetite. She took a long shower. She polished old silverware. She cleaned and cleaned. She gave her pet hedgehog,
Ichabod Van Ripper, a rinse in the bathroom sink, brushing his brown-flecked little quills with an old toothbrush as he snuffed in indignation. She attempted to read. But try as she might to keep her hands busy, she still felt her fingers moving of their own accord, stitching the air.

She wandered down the hall, her slippers shuffling because they felt too heavy to lift. Mariah had said,
I won’t be gone long
, and her bedroom seemed to be expecting her any moment now. The splashy dahlia wallpaper. The vintage postcards tucked into the mirror’s thick frame. Death had not come as some sinister shadow, some ponderous and brooding thing. It had taken Mariah as lightly and as absentmindedly as if the Grim Reaper himself had done no more than lift his hand to swat a gnat in the air.

Aubrey sat on Mariah’s bed, her shoulders bent with sorrow but her eyes dry. On the bedside table, Mariah’s last project, a Fair Isle beret, lay just as Mariah had left it when she’d had every intention of coming back to it again. The stitches were tiny and even, the pattern of burnt orange, navy, and buttermilk just starting to emerge. The beret was not a spell, Aubrey knew. Just a way to pass the hours. Aubrey picked up the unfinished project, which was more like a floppy Frisbee with a missing middle than a hat, and drew it onto her lap. How many times in her life had she heard her aunt say to no one in particular, “Where did my scissors go?” How many times had she seen her aunt tucking in loose threads from finished projects, hiding beginnings and ends?

Without Mariah, without her sisters, Aubrey’s future in the Stitchery stretched out long and bleak as a winter shadow.

She thought:
Mari … I’m not ready
.

If there really were Fates, those ancient sisters who measured men’s lives in yards of yarn or twine, Aubrey knew
them intimately, knew them with a knowledge that ran as deep as her own DNA: women dyeing and spinning, women pulling fibers through their fingertips with educated scrutiny, women considering and cutting, talking things over, putting down their scissors, and then forgetting—just for a moment—where.

The second Friday of October brought rain to Tarrytown: The sky was gray, the Hudson River had hardened into pewter, the iron girders of the Tappan Zee Bridge were made melancholy by the clinging of raindrops, the trees were grisaille sketches of charcoal and lead.

It was pouring when Bitty woke her son and daughter. They were sleeping in the backseat of the minivan, Carson with his cheek flattened against the window, his breath making white flames dance on rain-flecked glass, and Nessa with her jacket bunched like a pillow, her bright red hair hanging around her shoulders. Neither child looked comfortable.

“Come on, guys,” Bitty said. “Wake up. Grab your things.”

She did not wait to see them come sleepily back to life. She flung open her door, a cold, heavy rain soaking her jeans even before her foot made contact with the ground. Water ran in little rivulets down the street, miniature rivers dragging sticks and fallen leaves. She looked through the telescoping alleyway between the Stitchery and the neighbor’s house, but she couldn’t see the Hudson River. Too much fog.

She lifted open the back hatch and stuck her head inside. “Guys. I said come on.”

“God, Mom.” Nessa’s voice was tired and young. Bitty
could barely hear it over the pounding rain. “It’s … what … like, seven o’clock in the morning?”

“Please just help me,” Bitty said.

She grabbed all the bags she could—the duffels and backpacks, a grocery-store bag stuffed with Carson’s sneakers, her brown leather luggage that she’d never used before. Her kids climbed out of the car.

Nessa complained. “I’m getting wet.”

“We all are, stupid,” Carson said.

Bitty shut the hatch. “Hurry! Come on.”

She ran—galumphing along with all that she could carry—to the safety of the porch. For a second, she was transported. She was racing her sisters to the top of the stairs. She was running, breathless, from the bullying kids who sometimes chased her home before she learned to stand up to them. She was standing on the stoop in the darkness, secretly kissing the man who swore to love her forever.

When she turned around, she saw that her children hadn’t followed. They were staring up at her from the ground, grassy brown puddles of mud rippling around them. The Stitchery lorded over its patch of soggy yard, its Depression-era porch drooping in a disapproving frown.

“Guys … come on. It’s okay.”

She saw them trade a glance—her two children who had already started to look to each other for comfort in the way that children did when they came from troubled homes—and then Carson hitched up his backpack and led the way. Nessa walked slowly, twelve years old and too cool to bother with a thing as trifling as rain.

“This place is a shit-hole,” Nessa said.

“Language—”

“She meant to say
poop
-hole,” Carson said.

Bitty looked around, thinking of some encouraging and motherly thing to say, like
It’s not that bad
. But the house was crumbling, the yard was overgrown, and the neighborhood was on the brink. “Fine. It’s a poop-hole,” she said.

Aubrey had not yet dressed for the day when Bitty and her children arrived. She’d spent the entire night in Mariah’s room. She’d picked up
Northanger Abbey
where it had been open at the foot of Mariah’s bed, and she’d started reading where her aunt had left off. Sometime in the night she’d pulled on Mariah’s fuzzy pink bathrobe for warmth against the autumn chill. And in the morning, she did not throw off the covers. She stayed in bed, fighting to stay asleep. She dreamed she was knitting a sweater for a tree and she couldn’t figure out the proportions. When she heard her older sister calling up the stairs—
hello? hello?
—she wasn’t startled. She’d called her sister and had been expecting Bitty to arrive. She tied Mariah’s robe tighter around her middle and walked downstairs.

The last time Aubrey had seen her sister, Carson had been a toothless preemie, so small he might have fit in a shoe box, crying and wriggling in Aubrey’s arms. And Nessa had been just two years old, dressed in pink and put out by all the attention that her new brother got just for being born.

In the weeks before Carson’s birth, Aubrey had made a sweater—a simple top-down hand-knit in a cream-and-blue stockinette. As she knit, she’d cast her wish for him: She envisioned him discovering things that would brighten his childhood—books and bugs and mushrooms and games of tag among friends. She pictured him being handed a diploma, being offered his dream job. She imagined for him a partner, a perfect complementary heart, and she wished for him all
the nerves and joy and anticipation of having children of his own. She knit all these visions as vividly as possible into the sweater she made for him, all these and more, and when it finally came time to bind off, she prayed that he one day would be received into heaven with perfect peace and ease, his great-grandchildren beside him, his cup running over for all he had lived, seen, and done.

The sweater had been beautiful—tiny stitches on size three needles, a neckline that opened with a birch button at the shoulder, nearly invisible seams. But when Bitty opened the brown paper package at the baby shower and took the sweater out right there in front of everyone—wealthy in-laws and fashionable playdate moms—her face fell.

“Oh, thanks,” she’d said. And she’d gone on to the next gift as awkwardly as if Aubrey had given her some raunchy little nightie, or a subscription to a weight-loss magazine, or some other publicly embarrassing thing.

That day, Aubrey had no choice but to notice what she otherwise would have denied: Bitty had rejected the ways of their childhood, the ways of the Stitchery, once and for all. Soon her sister’s trips home became phone calls, and her phone calls became greeting cards, and her cards became emails, her emails grew few and far between, until somehow all the long elisions of the years clouded over with fog, obscuring and isolating them one from the other—and the woman who stood in the Stitchery entryway, calling
Hello? Anyone home?
was no longer the same sister who used to braid Aubrey’s hair, and tuck the covers around Aubrey’s legs so she could feel like a mermaid, and make Aubrey peanut butter milk shakes when she scraped her elbow and cried.

Aubrey paused—a bit dramatically, as Mariah might have done—with her hand on the newel post. She looked at her sister standing in the front hall. “You’re here.”

“Yes,” Bitty said. Water dripped from her hair into her coat collar. She had set down her bags—so many, many bags—but her children gripped theirs in clenched hands. “I got your voice mail. And I came as soon as I could.” Bitty smiled tightly. “We tried to get a hotel but there’s some kind of convention in town.”

“The Descendants of Dutch Boerers Society,” Aubrey said. “What about your husband. Is he  …?”

“We left a note for Craig. We didn’t want to wake him.” Bitty cleared her throat then turned to her children. “Anyway, guys, don’t be rude. Say hello to your aunt Aubrey.”

“Hello to your aunt Aubrey,” Carson said.

Aubrey laughed.

Nessa murmured a hello.

“Nice to mee
—see
—you,” Aubrey said.

She gripped the round ball atop the newel post. She was glad to see her niece and nephew; some of the emptiness in her heart eased. And yet there was some other feeling sloshing around inside her, too—one she couldn’t perfectly name. Here were Nessa and Carson—Nessa with her lion’s mane of red hair, Carson still boyish but becoming handsome—and already she loved them with all she had in her. But she hardly knew them at all.