The Wishing Thread (5 page)

“Not
outside
exploring. Inside.”

Carson paused a moment—no doubt weighing the option of exploring against the lure of his comic book, with its wide-shouldered hero who was about to be tortured for information by his archenemy. But in the end, he did what he always did when Nessa wanted something. He got to his feet.

They went. The hallway of the second floor was long and straight as a hollow bone. A window at the far end let in weepy blue-ish light. Carson tapped his knuckles on the wall.

“Shhh,” Nessa said.

He made a face but dropped his hand.

It was a game, of course, the idea that they were adventuring through the old house—as if they might find a room of spun gold or an enchanted rose or perhaps even a doorway through time. One by one they opened the many bedroom doors all along the long hall, and they found each room to be relatively the same. A dresser, a closet, a bed. Lace curtains. Sometimes a writing desk. No enchanted spinning wheels. No ghosts.

Carson sighed. “This is boring. I’m going back to my graphic novel.”

“You mean your picture book.”

“
Comic
book.”

“Whatever.” Nessa closed a door behind her. “What about the tower? Don’t you want to find it?”

Carson shrugged.

“What? Are you a wimp?”

Carson frowned. “No.”

“Dork? Are you a little dork?”

“I just don’t care about a stupid tower.”

Nessa gave as grand a huff as her slight shoulders would allow. Her mother had told her that the tower was part of an addition that had been put on the house sometime in the late 1800s. The base of the addition expanded the room they called the parlor, which apparently nobody used. But Nessa had no idea what might be in the upstairs rooms of the addition. From what she could tell there was no easy way of accessing the top of the tower, with its three gothic-arched windows and violently pointed roof. But she probably wouldn’t have been interested in getting into the tower to begin with if someone had opened the door and said
Right this way
.

“Fine. I’ll go without you,” she said.

“Nice knowing you, Monster,” Carson said.

“What did I tell you about calling me that?”

“Loch Ness Monster. Dumb-Ness. Ness-o-thelioma.”

“Shut up!” She turned, not tiptoeing anymore, to show she didn’t care. She got to the end of the hall, to the room that belonged to her aunt, to the shining cut-glass handle of the door.

Aubrey’s room.

She turned the knob. Aubrey’s bedroom was slightly bigger than the others, but it too was spare, neat, simple. There were signs of life: a book opened on the pillows, a few house-plants, a pretty goldfish in a glass bowl, some kind of hamster cage—she couldn’t see the hamster—and even a small TV. But no Xbox. No hair dryer. No makeup. No perfume. (Her aunt obviously didn’t have a boyfriend.) And no tower stairs.

Nessa thought of turning back. She thought of it. And yet, somehow, she couldn’t go. Her brain was puppeting her body like a marionette, walking her across Aubrey’s bedroom, shepherding her along. She wasn’t afraid. She felt electric.
And so very
sure
. The feeling told her to open the creaky door at the back of Aubrey’s room that looked like it was for a closet but was apparently not. It told her to climb into the musty, narrow staircase that folded in on itself sharply, all corners and right angles, told her to climb upward even though she felt like she was climbing down, deeper into darkness, deeper until the darkness began to dissipate like morning mist, and then,
then
, she’d found it. The top of the tower. Her breath was in her throat. She was standing in the middle of a fairy tale, gold here, silver there, a glinting and gleaming treasure trove that had been waiting for her to discover it, waiting, somehow, for
her
.

She only stayed a moment, but she stayed long enough. And when her brother asked her if she’d found the tower, she told him no, not because she was lying, but because she didn’t quite understand what she’d found.

It wasn’t until much later, after her mother had tucked them into their room for the night, when the darkness made her feel like the thing she wanted to say was slightly less crazy sounding, that she told Carson the truth. She tried to describe what she’d seen:
Like a cave in a pirate movie. A treasure trove
. In the top of the tower, which had three small windows in an alcove and a ceiling like the inside of a cone, she’d found a set of ivory combs and a ginormous gilt Bible, not in English. She found a bottle of wine dated 1887, the print so faded it was as blurry as a weather-worn headstone on a grave. There were oil paintings, porcelain figurines, crystal glasses, jewels spilling from jewel-encrusted boxes, a typewriter, a candelabra, more than she could take in.

“And the strange thing,” Nessa said, “is that I got this—I don’t know—feeling. Like I just
knew
how to get into the tower. Even though I’d never been there before.”

“Well, you know why, don’t you?”

“Why?”

“Brain damage. You got dropped on your head when you were a baby.”

“Shut up, I did not,” she said. She didn’t have the will to fight with him, even though sometimes fighting made her feel better. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

Carson’s voice was heavy with sleep. “Maybe Aunt Aubrey sells antiques.”

Nessa told him: “No.”

Along with all the old tchotchkes that frothed and gathered and spilled into every crevice of the tower room, there were new things, too. Modern things. A Mickey Mouse lunch box. A wedding dress—slipping from its hanger. A bouquet of roses that had dried and darkened to reddish black. She saw a few books, a baby’s car seat, a half-dressed Barbie, a pair of kitty-cat bookends, a red wagon, light-up sneakers, a crucifix, a vase …

Carson fell back to sleep listening to the catalog. But Nessa remained awake, staring at the ceiling. Her house in White Plains was on a quiet cul-de-sac, where the only noise she heard was the occasional bark of the golden retriever next door. But here in the Stitchery, the night seemed full of sound and menace. She heard the jungle of the streets—cars blaring heavy bass, people shouting to one another down cramped alleys, a baby crying, crying, left to cry. And she heard the house itself creaking, rumbling like the belly of a great beast with her trapped inside.

“Carson?” she whispered. “Are you still awake?”

He didn’t answer. She knew he wouldn’t.

There was something about the Stitchery that she did not trust. It seemed redundant in the darkness of the bedroom to close her eyes.

* * *

That night, hours later, Aubrey was startled out of a deep sleep, which was unusual. Thumps in the night never woke her. The hedgehog liked to rearrange his cage or run on his wheel at all hours, but she’d stopped hearing him years ago. Words spoken by strangers came in so clear and crisp that the speaker might have been sitting on the dimpled brown chaise in her bedroom instead of chatting on the sidewalk below.
You’d sleep through an earthquake
, Mariah had said with a glint of admiration in her eye.

But tonight, something wasn’t right. A noise, a thump. Aubrey woke and didn’t move. She strained to listen.
What is that?
Nessa getting a glass of water? Carson losing his way? The noises—a small shuffling, irregular thuds—were too self-conscious to be innocent: the sounds of someone trying not to make sounds.

For a moment, she thought:
This isn’t real
. And yet she knew better.

The neighborhood of Tappan Square was full of good people—working parents, mothers who pushed their groceries home in shopping carts, men who sprawled in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, smoking cigars. But along with all the good people, there were people to be afraid of. Somebody’s son gone haywire. Somebody who needed the money. Somebody’s friend’s friends.

The Stitchery had always been a hot mark for hopeful thieves; the rumors of treasure were a temptation to crooks big-time and small. But the same gossip that lured curious delinquents to the Stitchery also acted as a force field to turn them away. The last time the Stitchery had been robbed was in the early seventies, when a few stoned hippies snuck into the empty house and took only what they could carry in their
macramé sacks. Shortly after the theft, which had left Mariah shaken but not cowed, the thieves had been found outside of Jersey City, floating on a powerboat-turned-ghost-ship down the Hudson, naked, blue, and dead, with their haul from the Stitchery spread out around them. Officially, the police said they’d overdosed. Unofficially, Tarrytown believed the devil had driven them mad. The rumors had been enough to keep most of Tarrytown’s crooks at bay.

But now the neighborhood was changing, more each day. New people from all over the world flowed in and out like a tide, and they had increasingly little patience for the superstitions of old Tappan Square. Aubrey had talked about getting an alarm system installed, but Mariah had scoffed:
Whatever for?
She believed firmly that the Stitchery protected itself. Of course, she also believed that three starlings on the grass meant good luck and that there was no vegetable that couldn’t be improved by a good long pickling. Now, with the shuffling and thumping getting louder, Aubrey wished she’d been more insistent about the alarm system. If the Stitchery was robbed tonight, her sister and children would never return.

She threw off the covers. She had no weapon, so she grabbed a metal knitting needle from her bedside, a size eight—just big enough to be firm, thin enough to be sharpish.

At the door at the end of the hall, she could hear noises. Someone was definitely inside. Shuffling. Knocking into things. She stood in the darkness, petrified.

She’d just begun to retreat, to rouse her sister and make a call to the cops, when the door flew open—a gust of inward-sucking air. Aubrey held up her needle and screamed.

“Wait! Wait!” The intruder grabbed her wrist. They were both screaming. “Wait!”

Aubrey twisted out of the figure’s shadowed grip, insensible with fear.

“Aubrey. Stop. It’s me!”

Aubrey stilled.

“Hey. It’s
me
.”

She drew back. “Meggie?”

Meggie flipped the switch on the wall, then squinted violently at the shock of light. When she’d left the Stitchery, her hair had been a warm brown-blond, falling to her waist in gentle waves. She’d loved wearing flowered dresses that skimmed the floor and going around Tarrytown with no shoes or bra.

Now her hair was short and raven black—moppish across her brows. Her face was fuller, more mature, though she still had the small features of a pixie. She wore skinny jeans and Converse sneakers, a silver-studded belt slung low around her hips.

Meggie had left the Stitchery four years ago. Four short years. Now Aubrey hardly recognized her. A lifetime might have passed since then.

“Well,” Aubrey said.

Meggie held out her hands. “I can explain …”

The last time Aubrey saw her little sister, she’d been watching Meggie stuff jeans and shirts into an old suitcase without bothering to fold them. Her newly earned high school diploma—which had come in the mail only the day before—was open on the bed.

I saved up enough to go to Miami
, Meggie had said with a grin.
To celebrate. After eleven years of homeschooling I think I earned a weekend off, don’t you?

Aubrey had sat on Meggie’s bed, tying a braid of rainbow yarn to her sister’s red backpack to repel pickpockets, mosquitoes, exchange-rate cons, transportation delays, and—just for the hell of it—untrustworthy men. Aubrey had wanted to say,
Can I come, too?
But she could not picture herself sipping
sweet cocktails by a pool on an island, dancing all night in hot clubs and sleeping until noon. She could not even see herself getting on a plane. Meggie was free to go anywhere she pleased, to not only follow her whims but chase them down and tackle them in a headlock. Aubrey on the other hand was tethered by her belief in and her obligation to the Stitchery’s crumbling walls.

Perhaps if she hadn’t been thinking so much of herself, of her own lot in life, she would have noticed that the breadth of clothing Meggie was shoving into her suitcase was much more than was needed for a long weekend. Perhaps if she’d been paying closer attention, she would have pocketed her sister’s plane ticket and demanded answers about where she really planned to go. But she hadn’t been thinking—not of Meggie, anyway. And so when she dropped her sister off at JFK airport she had actually rushed Meggie out of the car with only the briefest hug because she hadn’t wanted to hold up the taxis and rental vans behind her. She’d had no idea at the time that it would take Mariah’s death, so many years later, to bring her younger sister home.

Aubrey felt dizzy. She pushed past Meggie and into the old bedroom. When Bitty rushed in she brought with her a wash of cold night air. Her eyes were puffy with sleep, and her highlights were disarrayed.

“Aubrey? Are you okay? What happen—?” Bitty stopped. Her gaze landed on Meggie. And then she straightened, surprised. “Oh. When did you get here?”

“Just now.”

“Aubrey called you?” Bitty asked. “She knew where you were?”

Meggie’s chin was tucked into her chest. “Um, no.”

“Then … how did you find out?”

“How did I find out what?” Meggie asked.

Bitty blinked, confused. “How did you find out about Mariah  …?”

“What about Mariah?”

“Oh God.” Aubrey’s stomach bent into a sickening kink, and she clutched her middle as if she could stop the turning with her hands.

“Are you okay?” Bitty asked.

“I’m sorry. I have to sit.” With her sisters watching, she put out a hand to steady herself, her fingertips sliding along Meggie’s old collection of movie posters—
Creature from the Black Lagoon
,
The Abominable Snowman
,
The Blob
. Their jagged lines and bold colors made Aubrey want to keel over. She’d never felt so strange before in her life, but she recognized what this was: the prelude to fainting. It was too much, it was all too much, for one day.