The Wishing Thread (4 page)

“That’s a great scarf,” she said to Nessa.

Nessa reached up and touched the slouchy knit hanging around her neck. The scarf was the color of toasted oats, flecked by bits of hunter green and brown. Cables twined like snakes around one another, and dozens of little bobbles nestled among the braids. Nessa unwound it from her neck. “Thanks.”

“Did you make it?”

“Mom got it for me.”

“May I?” She reached out to touch the scarf. But no sooner
had she brushed it with her fingertips than she pulled her hand away, her suspicions confirmed. “Acrylic.” She shot a glance at her sister. “You have her wearing
acrylic
?”

Bitty shrugged. “It was on sale.”

“I’ll knit her a new one while she’s here. Or better yet—I’ll teach her to make one herself.”

“You can teach me?” Nessa’s eyes lit up. “Really? You could, like,
make
this thing?”

In the space of a moment, Aubrey felt the room change, the air itself going lighter on her skin. When Aubrey was young, so young that she didn’t know words like
expectation
and
estrangement
, her aunt Mariah had sat her down on a small footstool, then she’d sat behind her and pulled the stool backward until Aubrey’s torso was nearly between her knees. A moment later, Mariah’s arms were around Aubrey’s shoulders and her hands were in front of Aubrey’s face. A knitter’s-eye view. To this day, Aubrey could think of no place that she’d felt safer, no place more loved. A thread of strong wool was wrapped around Mariah’s left hand, her pointer finger extended and yarn dangling from the tip like twine from a fishing pole. Aubrey had held her breath.

Now
, Mariah had said.
Watch this
.

Aubrey tightened Mariah’s fluffy pink robe around her middle. Outside, the wind blew harder and faster, rattling the sidelight windows like loosened teeth. Nessa lifted a little on her toes while she waited for an answer.

Aubrey smiled. “Of course, Nessa. I’d love to teach you to knit. I’d be honored.”

But Bitty put her arm around her daughter and tugged her close. “Sorry. No can do. We’re just staying for the funeral. And then we’re gone.”

* * *

The three Van Ripper sisters may not have always seen eye-to-eye, and in their younger years they could often be heard by the neighbors bickering over the most peculiar things—their collection of pet worms, whose turn it was to cut Aunt Mariah’s toenails, the right way to hold a frog. But there was one thing the Van Ripper girls had learned to do together without argument very early on, and that was knitting.

During the knitting hour, which usually took place after dinner and homework but just before bed, Aubrey and her sisters met with their aunt in what was once supposed to have been the Stitchery’s front parlor for receiving guests. In the shop, yarns were just yarns. But when Mariah knit, they were transformed into sweaters, scarves, hats, first kisses, passing grades, newborn babies, and any number of desperately wished-for things.

In her brightly patterned dresses of the most god-awful colors, and with her gray hair hanging like seaweed around her face, Mariah would light a candle, say a prayer. Then the knitting would begin, each sister alone with the sound of her own breathing, with the stitches that dropped like pebbles into a quiet pool.

The trick
, Aunt Mariah had said,
is to clear your mind
. To let your thoughts drain. At any given moment, a knitter was always knitting with at least two yarns: one that was the actual fiber, and another that was an invisible thread, the essence of the knitter, that accompanied every stitch. A wish held and sustained with clarity of mind while knitting would somehow wend its way into the fabric, and later when the fabric became a sweater or a hat, that wish would materialize. In this way, making magic was nothing more than intense, focused wishing. It all seemed very simple. It was not simple at all.

And so from a very young age, the girls learned to knit in
silence, to embrace the paradox of thinking of nothing as a mental preparation for the day when one of them, the chosen guardian, would actually knit spells.

Of all three Van Ripper sisters, Meggie, the youngest, had been the most restless each evening when Mariah had gathered them into the parlor for knitting hour. In kindergarten, other children were learning to tie their shoes, but Meggie was already an expert at both the knit and purl stitches—whether she liked it or not. She fidgeted and huffed, she curled her toes, she clamped her teeth. And it never failed that once she finally,
finally
began to give herself over to the knitting—to her, the rhythm sometimes felt like being lifted by ocean waves and set gently on her feet again—the session ended. The older she got, the more she understood: There was a beauty to be had by the simple working of her fingers, the stilling of her mind. But she’d never been able to do more than open the door to that peaceful place before it was shut again.

On some days she resented Aubrey, who seemed to knit so effortlessly, so
fast
. With her fingers working a pair of rosewood needles and a ball of soft gray yarn, Aubrey looked quite pretty, almost nun-ish, her eyelids drooping but her eyes glowing blue like the Chagall windows of Union Church on a dark night. Meggie, meanwhile, could not wrestle peace out of a brain that was always jammed up with other things: how her aunt had taken her out of school, how normal kids her age got to do plays in an actual auditorium as opposed to a living room, how normal kids had trophies from soccer, or ballet, or even math leagues, and how Meggie had only the knitting—the endless knitting—chains of stitch after stitch.

The older Meggie got, the more restless she became. When Meggie was twelve, Bitty, who had been out of high school for
about eighteen months, ran away with the man who would become her husband. The evenings of knitting continued just like they always had, except without Bitty. Meggie wasn’t surprised that her sister had flown the coop: Bitty had been skipping the knitting hour on and off for many of her later teen years, wiggling herself out of the Stitchery even as Meggie was wiggling out the last of her baby teeth, so that by the time Bitty’s separation was complete, Meggie was prepared to bear it. She, like Bitty, was destined to leave the Stitchery. But she would not travel in her oldest sister’s footsteps: She would cut and mow and bushwhack a path of her own. Aubrey and Mariah—they were the ones who would stay.

One day when Meggie was almost eighteen, Mariah found the old red backpack that Meggie had hidden in her closet in case of an emergency, stuffed with all the things she needed to run away.
You might go
, Mariah had said,
but you’ll never really go. The Stitchery will call you back, and when it does, you’ll need to drop everything. Whatever you’re doing. And come home
.

It wasn’t until Meggie was twenty-two, four years away from the stuffy strictures of the Stitchery, that she realized Mariah’s warning had not been entirely metaphorical. She and her newest guy-friend were lying in his bed, pleasantly exhausted and sticky with sweat. They’d been at his place in Savannah for all of ten minutes. Meggie’s shirt had landed on Phil’s guitar case. Phil’s boxers hung from a huge black amp.

Meggie plucked up a thread that had dislodged from the frayed black edge of her T-shirt, and she traced the loose end over the tattoos on Phil’s chest—a dragon, a music note, a small black bat. He’d been talking for the last week about getting her name inked over his heart, but she warned him:
Don’t
.

“What do you feel like for dinner?” he asked her.

“I don’t know.”

“Chinese? Italian?”

“Whatever,” she said. “I’m not really that hungry.” Conversations about food, especially ones that went on and on, were bad omens. Already, the heady rush she’d felt after she met Phil, the feeling of having held her breath for too long, was fading. She knew herself. She knew that once she got her feet under her again she usually started walking.

She sighed and traced the thread around his small pink nipple. She plucked up a few more threads and thought,
It’s time to throw that shirt away
. She lifted the threads over his chest and then let them fall one by one. Slowly, they curled against Phil’s sternum, forming loops and swags.

She lifted up on her elbow.

“What is it?” he asked.

She grasped all the threads at once, in one fist, raised them, and let them fall again. Still, the threads fell slowly, and slowly formed improbable scrolls. Her head felt simultaneously heavy and light.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Don’t you see it?”

He ducked his head, his chin disappearing into his chest, to scowl at the threads that had settled on his breastbone. “See what?”

“Nothing,” she said.

By midnight, she was on a bus north, the soft Georgia Low Country trailing like half a dream behind her, and a vision of the Palisades—five hundred feet of craggy Triassic diabase—before her like a battlement in her mind’s eye. The man in the seat next to her was snoring and drooling on his suit.

Did it freak you out when you were a kid?
the people she
met sometimes wanted to know when they found out she was from Tarrytown.
Growing up with all those stories about the Headless Horseman? Were you afraid?

Meggie leaned her head against the bus’s window.

Was I?
she told them.
I still am
.

The message in the threads had been simple:

Nessa’s thumbs worked fast:
Pls tell the cops I’ve been kidnapped by a woman who looks exactly like my mom and has sent me back in time to the 1700s
.

The reply from her friend Jayden Miller came swiftly:
Haha
.

Srsly
, she texted him.
Save me. Pls!

She watched her cell to see if he would text her again. She watched. And when he did not, she sighed and snapped her phone shut.

On a matching bed across the room, her brother—whom she sometimes called her “bother,” since the only difference between a brother and a bother was a measly little
“arrgh!”—
was flopped on his stomach. While Carson got to lose himself in his graphic novels, she had nothing. Nothing but her bottomless, aching loneliness that never went away.

“Come on.” She threw a pillow across the room; it missed him by a mile. “Get up.”

“No.”

“I said, get up.”

“Why should I?”

“Because
—hello
. We’re going somewhere?”

“Where?” he said.

“I don’t know. Exploring?”

Carson looked at her. His face was round as a pumpkin, his hair blond and straight and to his chin. He should have been born in some California beach town instead of White Plains. “Mom said we’re not allowed to go out alone because there’s drug dealers.”