The Wishing Thread (37 page)

“Well, maybe Mason Boss has a plan,” Meggie assured her when Aubrey returned to the Stitchery with news of the rogue protesters. “Maybe he’s going to rally the flash mob for tomorrow, on Devil’s Night. I mean, wouldn’t that be poetic?”

“Maybe,” Aubrey said. But she was only half listening. She began to wonder how she might get in touch with Mason Boss to find out when he would activate the phone tree. She thought:
I’m the guardian of the Stitchery, aren’t I?
She’d been in Tarrytown a lot longer than Mason Boss ever had. She had a right to know what he planned.

She thought of Jeanette, who as far as Aubrey knew was still seeing the leader of the Tappan Watch and who might have insight into plans that Aubrey did not. Aubrey had seen neither hide nor hair of her friend in several days.

Jeanette lived in an old brick building above a Laundromat in Sleepy Hollow, and her apartment often smelled of fabric softener and french fries. One end of her street banked hard to the left, sloping down toward the river with breathtaking yet dime-a-dozen views of the river. The other end of the street was pegged by an old iron clock with elaborate black hands that pointed to Roman numerals. Pumpkins and hay bales and stalks of dried corn sat at the clock’s black base.

When Jeanette didn’t answer her cell phone, Aubrey showed up unannounced. She stood before the dingy wooden door, waiting for Jeanette to greet her. It occurred to her that perhaps Mason Boss might be visiting Jeanette right at this moment, that Aubrey might be interrupting, and that—awkward as it would be—the situation might work to her advantage. But when at last Jeanette worked open the multiple
locks of her apartment door and peered from behind it, she seemed to be alone.

“Where have you been?” Aubrey asked. “I haven’t heard from you in days.”

Jeanette’s face, usually so cheery, did not lighten. Aubrey realized that the glint in her friend’s eye was not happiness to have a visitor, but the slow gathering of tears.

“Jeanette …”

“Oh, Aub!” Jeanette dragged Aubrey with the fullness of all her muscle into the apartment. She closed the door behind them. Her face was a twist of agony. “Oh, Aub. I wanted to call you. Thank God you’re here.”

Aubrey escorted herself to the little dining area in Jeanette’s apartment. Outside the window were more windows that belonged to the people across the street. Aubrey sat down in one of the plastic dinette chairs, her usual spot. She and Jeanette had been through many breakups over the years, with Jeanette outraged or defeated or confused or celebrating, and Aubrey listening and nodding and acting as if she could offer some kind of sage relationship advice, even though she’d had no real romantic relationships of her own.

“Tell me what happened,” Aubrey said.

“The guy turned out to be a loser. A total loser.”

Aubrey nodded, her heart full of sympathy. Even though Jeanette went through breakups every other month, her pain was no less real.

“Did he have a girlfriend?” Aubrey asked. “A wife?”

“Worse.” Jeanette went to her sofa to get her laptop. She put it on the dinette table. The computer was old and slow, and they waited for it to load. “I found this when I Googled him. I wanted to scope him out, you know? See what I was getting into.”

“After you were into it,” Aubrey said.

“Naturally.” She turned the computer more fully toward Aubrey. “Here.”

Aubrey watched as the video began to play. A man was singing a song about lovebirds and he was tap dancing. He was holding a white-tipped cane.

“It’s silly,” Aubrey said. “But it’s not offensive.”

“It’s totally offensive,” Jeanette said. She muted the video. “Did you know Mason Boss isn’t his real name?”

“No?”

“It’s Richard Mumford. He’s an out-of-work actor.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“Aubrey.” Jeanette closed her laptop with a
thunk
. “You’re not listening to me. He’s an
actor
.”

“So?”

Jeanette sighed. Her eyes were tearing up again. She looked terrible. She wore a boxy gray sweatshirt that bore an image of a kitten and an unidentifiable stain. “I started to get suspicious when I realized he wasn’t telling me the truth about his name. Then we were at his apartment in Tappan Square—which isn’t even an apartment, by the way. It’s just a room in some guy’s house. There weren’t any clothes in his closet or pictures on the walls or anything. I asked him what the deal was, and he told me he traveled light.”

The darkening suspicion that had been growing in Aubrey’s mind began to take a definite shape. “Tell me.”

“I checked his cell phone when he was in the shower. Don’t look at me like that. If he didn’t want me to look at his phone he shouldn’t have left it out. And anyway, I saw a text. It was from Jackie Halpern.”

“What did it say?”

“She said she was just checking in and wanted to get the four-one-one. That’s what she said. The four-one-one. Aubrey—”

“Don’t,” she said. “I already know. I should have
always
known.”

She shook her head, furious with herself. Mason Boss—of course he was a Halpern plant. The signs had been there the whole time, signs that would have been obvious to her if she’d been thinking clearly, if she hadn’t been—she hated to admit it—more focused on Vic than on Tappan Square. How easy it had been, she thought, to see what she’d wanted to see, to give herself a reason to let someone else be in charge.

“When did you find this out?” she asked.

“Very late last night.”

“What did you tell Mason Boss?”

“Oh, I called his ass out. I asked him straight up if he was working for the Halperns. And he didn’t deny it. He just kept saying,
it’s complicated
.”

“So he knows you know.”

“Yes.”

“Then he probably knows that I know, too. That we all will, in a matter of time.”

“I’m pretty sure he skipped town,” Jeanette said.

Aubrey stood. She walked across the gray carpet to the other side of the room, then back again. Tomorrow was Devil’s Night. The next day was Halloween, when all of Tarrytown would be distracted and not thinking of politics. And the day after that, bright and early on Monday morning, the Halperns would be voting on Tappan Square.

Aubrey went to the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

She left Jeanette’s apartment, and because she did not know what else to do, she went to the lighthouse in Tarrytown to sit
by the water and think. She took a bit of knitting with her, and she parked herself on the bulkhead not far from Kidd’s Rock, a huge gray bunion of stone at the river’s edge where the old slave trader Frederick Philipse was rumored to have had illicit meetings with the Hudson’s most famous pirate. The air was light on her skin, the wind blowing gently, the water dancing. Behind her, children played on monkey bars and slides.

Since the day the Van Ripper family had first planted their heels on the Tarrytown earth that would become their property, the Stitchery had seen its share of hardship. In the early 1800s, the Stitchery had been attacked by an angry mob intent on running the Van Ripper “witches” out of town. In the 1920s, someone had tried to light the old manse on fire. By the time the Great Depression reached Tarrytown, the Van Ripper fortune had run out, and the family had nearly lost the property for an inability to pay their taxes. Aubrey was not the first guardian to have been charged with saving the Stitchery. But she was the first, as far as she knew, who had to save the Stitchery and all of Tappan Square.

She looked down at the project in her hands: She’d decided in a fit of hope and bravery two days ago to knit something for Vic—boyfriend curse be damned. She’d designed a brioche cap for him in taupe and deep brown; it was thick and sturdy and would look perfect with his eyes. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted something she made to be close to his body. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted to keep him warm on cold days. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted to tell him that she loved him, even though she worried it was too soon to say the words.

But try as she might to pick up the rhythm of the stitches, she could not bring herself to work. Her needles were still. Her fingers were still. The wind picked up a strand of hair and blew it across her eyes.

She didn’t know what to do. No one from Tappan Square yet knew what Aubrey knew: that they had been duped—or they had
allowed
themselves to be, which was not quite the same thing. The danger of losing Tappan Square had never been more real than it was right now. Someone had to step up and take charge.

But Aubrey could not be the one to lead a protest. She wouldn’t know how to cause a scene if she tried. And now that she was thinking more clearly, she was not entirely convinced that a protest alone would make the council vote down Horseman Woods Commons—not this late in the game. All over the country, cities and towns were seizing property for the common good. Front yards were sheared so roads could be widened. City blocks were knocked down. Tarrytown’s property dispute was not newsworthy. It was regular, everyday life. If the Tappan Watch did manage to get a protest together at such late notice, the demonstration would hardly merit regional coverage, let alone national. The Tappan Watch was a small group of social outcasts whose squeak of disapproval had come too little too late.

A cat’s-paw wind kicked up and tickled the surface of the water. Aubrey could not remember a time she had felt so hopeless. If Aubrey had stepped into Mariah’s position right away, if she hadn’t been so afraid of being the center of attention, and afraid of everything that being a decision maker entailed, the Halperns might not have hired Mason Boss. If Aubrey had swallowed her pride—because coarse, crude pride and a great fear of embarrassing herself had always been at the root of her public reticence—perhaps the Tappan Watch might have come up with a petition, a march, a website, a movement. They would have had
something
by now.

Instead, Aubrey had been as complacent as anyone, always happy to let someone else stand at the front lines. And now
they had nothing. A figurehead leader who had sabotaged them. Just over sixty hours before a group of strangers decided their homes were worth less than a new shopping mall.

The sun was slanting through grayish clouds over the wide Tappan Zee. She admitted to herself:
This is my fault
. And yet, the thought didn’t make her miserable. Instead, it gave her clarity. The kind of clarity that was so absolute, so purposeful and peaceful, that a person feels such precise and singular resolve only a handful of times in the long haze of a life.

They would lose Tappan Square. That was certain—unless Aubrey did something about it. Something dramatic. Something that would turn all of Tarrytown on its head. In recent weeks, the Stitchery had been teaching her new things about her own power. Yes, there was the knitting: Her capacity for strong, swift spells had taken her breath away on the night Craig had showed up at the Stitchery door—even if the spell’s success had come with a terrible physical price. She had opened a thing in herself that was enormous; her idea of magic was limited only by the boundaries that she herself set.

She knew what she was capable of. Spells that were bigger than the ordinary wishes of a single person’s life. Spells that could change a town, a world. She felt a strong white light shining within her, so bright she wondered if the families at the playground behind her could see the glowing beneath her coat and her sweater and her skin.

And yet …

And yet …

She put her hands over her eyes. Logistically, how could a person go about knitting a spell not just for a single person, but for an entire town?

And—more—what
thing
could she possibly give up that would be a sufficient sacrifice to make the magic work? What
thing would hurt to lose as much as if she lost the Stitchery, as if she lost her neighbors, her life’s work, her family’s long history in Tarrytown? Was there anything she loved and wanted for herself as much as she wanted those things?

Her heart in her chest, which had been pumping so vigorously, sputtered.

Oh God
, she thought.

She lowered her hands. And the future, which had stretched before her like a sunlit path only one day ago, was drowned in shadow.

She stood at Vic’s door, trembling. She had not expected him to be home. She had not
wanted
him to be home. But she heard a loud noise, a harsh mechanical keen coming from his tiny backyard. And when she walked down the alleyway that took her into the cluttered little space behind his house, she saw he was there. His jeans were worn white in patches, his sleeves were rolled, and he wore clear safety glasses. He was severing a long two-by-four with a loud circular saw, chips flying at his feet. There was no sense in calling to him because he could not hear her, so she waited for him to finish, too aware of the set of his shoulders, his confident movements and intense focus on his work.

She wished he was not so handsome. Or so passionate. Or so kind. She wished they’d gone their separate ways weeks ago, after the incident at the football game, because then maybe her heart wouldn’t feel so swollen in her chest, and then maybe she wouldn’t feel like such an awful person for trying to do the right thing.

She felt tears in her eyes and called up her deepest resolve. But her brain played tricks on her, an imaginary devil whispering in her ear:
You don’t have to do this. There’s got to be
another way. You can give up something else. You can try to fix it without a spell. You can wait and see what happens if you don’t interfere, because it might turn out fine. You can just say
Forget it
and let everybody else in Tappan Square worry about it without you. Why should you have to give up your own happiness for a neighborhood where half the people don’t even like you and will never appreciate what you’ve done?

She willed the voices in her head to shut up. There were other possibilities for saving Tappan Square—that was true. But only the magic of the Stitchery was close to a guarantee. And she knew her spell to save the neighborhood would succeed. It had to. A sacrifice as big as the one she was about to make couldn’t
not
end in magic.