The Wishing Thread (39 page)

“Ah ha! I knew there was a catch. I knew you were just trying to get your hands on my money.”

“No. Mrs. Lippman, no—it’s not for me. It’s for Tappan Square.”

“Nonsense. You Van Rippers are nothing but schemers.”

Aubrey heard the soft click in her ear of Mrs. Lippman hanging up the phone. She stared at the receiver a moment. She’d never been hung up on before.

“That didn’t sound good,” Meggie said from the kitchen.

“I think I need a different script,” Aubrey said. She searched her heart. She’d never been comfortable with Tarrytown’s dislike of her—or at least, its misunderstanding of her—which was why she’d spent so much of her adult life secreted among library shelves or balls of yarn. A month ago, Mrs. Lippman’s disrespect might have made her want to slink away to her bedroom to unload her sorrows into a bowl of ice cream and a good book. But today, the woman’s disdain felt almost entirely inconsequential. On her skin, she still had the imprint of paths Vic’s hands had shaped. In her ears, she still had his words—
I love you
—like the long ringing of a bell in her mind. She would not give him up for nothing. She checked the next number on the list and dialed.

She was surprised when Bitty appeared at her side. “I can help with that.”

Aubrey just looked at her a moment, the phone ringing in her ear.

“I’m good at talking people into things,” she said. “I don’t know that I’ll be much good for anything else. Especially not the knitting. But I can make phone calls. And I can get people here, if that’s what you need.”

A woman on the other end of the phone picked up. “Hello?”

Aubrey didn’t answer. She was holding the phone slightly away from her ear. Bitty was holding out her hand.

“If you’re sure,” Aubrey said.

Bitty took the phone. When she spoke, she had such confidence and authority it was as if the person on the other end of the line had called
her
instead of the other way around. “Hello, who am I speaking with please? Oh—Mrs. Lambert. Hi. Yes, this is Elizabeth Van Ripper. I’m calling to ask for your help.”

As she spoke, Bitty winked in Aubrey’s direction. Aubrey thought of the old days. She handed Bitty the phone book and went to prepare the yarns.

The sun set behind the Palisades on the far side of the river, and the neighborhood of Tappan Square fell dark and quiet. The police continued to circle. Bitty and her sisters had spent most of the day planning and preparing. The phone calls had been made and the Stitchery was ready for visitors. Chairs had been set out, colorful veggies arranged on platters, plastic cups stacked beside bottles of warm soda that would have to do. Bitty was arranging her hair in the mirror that hung in the parlor. Meggie, her friend Tori, and Carson were somewhere in the house, conspiring. Nessa lounged on the couch. Aubrey stood at the door, looking out into the frosty dark. The sky was clear and hard, only a few stars poking through the haze of suburban lights.

“What if no one comes?” Aubrey said.

“They’ll come,” Bitty said. And though she was sure to make her voice sound perfectly confident, inside she was wavering. She did not believe Tappan Square could be saved with a yarn spell. But Aubrey believed it, fully and doubtlessly.
Aubrey believed it with such blind confidence that Bitty half wondered if the magnitude of Aubrey’s actions alone would be enough to make the council vote down the plan—magic or no.

For the first time in her life, Bitty was rooting for the Stitchery. She had just called half the women in town and told them the story that Mariah had always told her nieces, the story about the magic. She’d said:
Yeah, you could say we’re witches
. And she hadn’t felt even the slightest bit of shame. If the women of Tappan Square or the good ladies of Tarrytown didn’t like her family or her family’s magical lore, they could go scratch.

At the door, Aubrey sighed. She was wearing white jeans and a white sweater. A yoke of pale blue snowflakes ringed her shoulders. Bitty knew why her sister was worried: There was a very real possibility that no one in Tappan Square would heed their call to arms, that the town would turn its back—or worse, would turn against them.

“Even if they don’t come, it’ll be okay.” Aubrey’s voice was soft and flat. “I’ll knit the spell myself.”

“No you won’t,” Nessa said. “I’ll help.” She moved to stand beside Aubrey at the door. “Is that okay, Mom? When they start knitting, can I help, too?”

Bitty’s stomach gave a twinge. Her daughter was asking her for permission to knit a spell. This—
this
moment—was the reason Bitty had kept her daughter, her family, away from the Stitchery for all of these years. This was what she’d been afraid of: her daughter making the painful, doomed choice to try to control her circumstances through wishes, daydreams, and hocus-pocus. She wanted to cry out:
No!
Didn’t her daughter see how heartbreaking it was to put faith in a thing that would—sometimes and inevitably—fail you?

But then, when she crawled out of the deep well of her
own thoughts on the matter, Nessa came into focus once again: her girl’s body that was beginning to change, her big eyes that looked like her father’s, pleading but hopeful. Impulsively, Bitty held out her arms, and Nessa walked into them, all awkward, skinny angles. Soon, Nessa would be taller than she was, and what a strange and dizzying day that would be. She held tighter. Her daughter, and her son, were going to grow up; she could not stop it from happening. She could not make all of their choices for them, and she could not protect them forever. But she supposed that her efforts to protect them from magic over the years might have been a bit of an overreaction. The world might fail her children in a thousand ways a day—or it might not. Nothing, she supposed, magic or otherwise, was a sure thing.

Bitty kissed her hair and let her go. “It’s your choice.”

“Really?”

“Don’t give me the opportunity to change my mind.”

Nessa laughed, and her eyes were sparkling. Bitty hadn’t seen her daughter light up in quite that way in some time, and it made her glad. “Oh thanks, Mom!”

“What are you going to give up?” Bitty asked.

“I was thinking about that.” Nessa reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell phone. Bitty recognized it as what it was: Nessa’s tie to her school, her friends, her life back at home.

“Are you sure?” Bitty said. “You do realize that if you want a replacement, you’re going to have to buy it with your allowance money.”

“Don’t give me the opportunity to change my mind,” Nessa said. And she dropped her cell into her mother’s hand. “Aunt Aub, I’m ready when you are.”

Aubrey looked at her family, gave them a sad smile, then turned once more toward the door. Bitty followed her gaze,
hoping to see someone—anyone—there, some friendly neighbor with a ball of yarn and her needles wagging from a handbag at her side. But there was no one, only the wooden door open on its hinges, and the night wind scented with sweet burning coal, and the darkness made uneven by the streetlights outside.

“Well, I guess let’s get started,” Aubrey said.

What Aubrey did not know, what she could not know, was that all over Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, women were on the hunt. They were looking for the knitting needles that had been stashed in attic trunks, shoved under beds, lost beneath couch cushions. They were scouring their rooms for remnant balls of yarn and for a fitting sacrifice—a little offering that they might be willing to part with.

And after the sun had set, they told their husbands and sons not to wait up, locked their doors behind them, and off they went—a marching, emerging, makeshift army, needles jutting like musket barrels, market bags loaded with ammunition that spilled over and trailed ribbons behind them in the streets. As they made their way through Tappan Square, converging on the Stitchery, cops in their cop cars did little more than nod. Because what could a bunch of women walking down the sidewalk on Devil’s Night mean except that someone was having a Jane Austen moviethon, or that somebody was hosting a knitting club? How much harm could a motley group of women knitters do?

One by one neighbors clomped up the Stitchery’s stairs, and Aubrey bumbled her way through greetings both uneasy and grateful. Women she knew and women she did not pushed things into her hands: bookends and cross-stitch samplers, favorite sweaters and music boxes and porcelain figurines. They
made themselves at home, chattering and gossiping and asking questions about the Stitchery that would have been rude if they weren’t so ridiculous.

Is this place out of a TV show or what? Is there a monster living under the stairs? Isn’t it nice that you don’t have to decorate for Halloween—oh I’m sorry, did you?

Blanca, who had thrown Mariah’s scarf in Aubrey’s face not many days ago, arrived with hot-pink needles and finger-thick roving. Aubrey overheard her telling Nessa that she would soon be taking night classes at the local community college, and Aubrey wondered in her heart whether Blanca had felt the touch of the Stitchery’s magic or if, in its absence, she was making magic of her own.

Ruth Ten Eckye followed on the heels of her good friend Gladys Carlyle. “Oh, Ruth!” Aubrey didn’t mean to sound so surprised—but she was. She did her best to recover. “It’s—I’m glad to see you.”

Ruth gave a smile that was nearly a sneer. “I’m sure you are.”

“We’re setting up in the parlor,” Aubrey said, gesturing to what Ruth could obviously see for herself.

Ruth frowned. “You should know that I don’t give a fig about saving Tappan Square. The only reason I’m participating in this … whatever this is … is because it would be very inconvenient for me if the Stitchery were to disappear. And also, I happen to be exceptionally good at crochet.”

“Thank you,” Aubrey said.

“I’m not doing it for you,” Ruth said. She took Gladys by the arm and led her into the Stitchery’s busy front room.

Aubrey looked around her in amazement. Extra chairs were brought out, then filled. Knitting projects were produced and compared. People discovered one another, surprised to find themselves together in—of all places—the Van
Rippers’ front parlor. Meggie’s friend Tori had been particularly supportive, excited to finally be taught the secret of knitting spells and seriously devoted to the task even before the others had arrived. Aubrey knew that not everyone had come to the Stitchery to save it; some came out of curiosity, some were toted along with a friend, some came because they did not want to be left out. But they were there, that was the important thing. And maybe Tappan Square had a chance.

Bitty nudged Aubrey’s ribs. “I think they’re waiting for you.”

Aubrey felt her feet begin to tingle. Her throat was suddenly dry.

She took a step forward. “Excuse me,” she said. Then, a little louder, “Excuse me, please.”

“Hey, yo! Everybody!” Nessa yelled at the top of her lungs with surprising force. Aubrey was impressed. A dozen women looked up with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Go ahead,” Nessa told Aubrey.

Aubrey’s toes had gone as numb as if they’d been soaked in ice water.

“Go on,” Meggie whispered.

“Okay, I’m going,” Aubrey whispered back—as if everyone in the room weren’t looking at her and couldn’t hear. But still she could not speak. She closed her eyes and thought,
What is it people say about public speaking? Imagine the audience naked?
She did not know how she was going to get through it—the explanations, the confession, and all with the awful glare of her distracting blue eyes.

There was only one way she could do this: She thought of Mariah. She imagined Mariah was standing in the back of the room, her lavender cotton skirts hitched up in a faux polonaise, her gauzy Indian cotton shirt with its wide sleeves belled like angel wings, her gray hair waving down her shoulders,
and her smile—her good, kind, complete, generous smile that had always said to Aubrey so absolutely:
I love you, you’re perfect, just as you are
. And when Aubrey opened her eyes again to speak to the crowd that had gathered in the Stitchery, she swore she saw Mariah standing there, in the back of the room, nodding encouragingly as she had so many times before, and she thought,
I
am
okay
, before she opened her mouth and spoke to more people than she’d ever spoken to at once in her life.

“Some of you may wonder why we’ve called you all here this evening. You know the old saying about desperate times? Well, for tonight I’m going to ask you to put aside everything that you’ve heard about the Stitchery and everything you think about how the world works, and just—for now—consider everything that I’m going to say on its own terms. Tomorrow you can worry about what’s what. But for just this once, suspend disbelief. Try to. And maybe we can make something unbelievable happen.”

Little by little, Aubrey’s nerves began to quiet. She realized that she could actually feel her feet, her two feet that were holding her up, solid as tree trunks. She talked about the spells, about how Mariah had taught her to knit them. She gave instructions for new knitters to pair with veterans, but she also told them that it did not matter what they knit or if they knit at all. Tying knots, braiding, crocheting—anything would work, Aubrey said. The important thing was the essence of the spell, the vision or energy or imagination that was soaked up by the thing being made.

Of course, she was improvising. Nothing like this—no spell this large and complex—had been attempted since her ancestral guardians had first started keeping records in the Great Book in the Hall. But magic seemed to have certain principles—the sacrifice, the balance, the vision sustained—
and she guessed that as long as she basically adhered to those principles, any spell would work regardless of the size. As she spoke, she realized what a simple thing magic was when you got down to it. She wondered in the privacy of her thoughts for a moment if perhaps they’d been doing it all wrong, if they’d made it too complicated, too exclusive, by limiting spell-casting to the Stitchery’s guardians, by giving magic such a ponderous lore. She looked into the back of the room, hoping to see Mariah’s face again just for the joy of it, but her aunt seemed to have served her purpose, and now she was gone.