The Wishing Thread Read online

  Now, Aubrey missed the act of eye-to-eye communication no more than an adult might miss a half-remembered imaginary friend—with one exception. His name was Vic; and once, just once, she wished she could look at him straight-on.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder. And when she turned, Jeanette Judge was there, fresh off her shift at the library and still smelling vaguely of old books. Jeanette’s eyes, wet black eyes that never cared to hide a feeling, were wild with concern.

  “I just heard. Are you okay?”

  “I’m actually doing fine.”

  “Don’t you lie to me, Aubrey Van Ripper,” Jeanette said. She wore a gray poncho that Aubrey had knit for her years ago, when Jeanette had been having some trouble getting a loan to buy a car, and the way she stood now, with her hands on her hips, her dark forearms poking out below gray woolen fringe, and her elbows jutting to the sides, it struck Aubrey that she looked a bit like a gray knight holding a diamond-shaped shield. “Come here.” Jeanette wrapped her up in strong arms, and Aubrey hugged her back, languishing in the warm circle of her friend’s strength, half tempted to see if she might lift her feet off the ground.

  “What happened exactly?” Jeanette asked when at last she pulled away.

  “Her heart blew out.”

  “Blew out? A heart isn’t a spare tire.”

  Aubrey shrugged. She didn’t want to say heart attack. A heart was not a thing that should have an attack mode. She might have explained herself, but Jeanette was glaring over her shoulder with murder in her eyes.

  “Whatchoo looking at, Katrina Van der Donck?”

  Aubrey turned slightly, saw the glint of wary pleasure in Katrina’s eyes.

  “Nothing much,” Katrina said.

  Jeanette’s nostrils flared. “You like a good piece of gossip, huh? Well, I got one. It’s about a certain person we both know who showed up on the Stitchery door looking for some of that Van Ripper voodoo.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” Katrina said.

  “I would, too,” Jeanette said. “Now, why don’t you go empty somebody’s bedpan.”

  Katrina’s upper lip lifted, showing her teeth. “Better than dealing with this crap.” She grabbed her friend by the cotton elbow of her scrubs, and they disappeared into the labyrinth of hospital halls.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Aubrey said.

  “Believe me. It’s my pleasure.”

  Aubrey felt a smile crimping her lips despite the day’s sorrow. “Van Ripper voodoo?”

  “Bitch better not mess with me,” Jeanette said.

  Aubrey laughed. “I love your diction when you’re angry.”

  “Just trying to do my college professors proud.”

  Behind the desk, the woman who had given Aubrey the purple clipboard cleared her throat. Aubrey turned back to the paperwork with a sigh. She wondered how many times she would have to be reminded that Mariah was dead before she stopped needing reminding and before she stopped feeling surprised.

  Years ago, Mariah had paid for her fortune to be told by a psychic—a chain-smoking single mother who had sworn that Mariah would be struck by lightning on her hundredth birthday. Instead—twenty years shy of a hundred—Mariah had dropped dead in the village hall on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Aubrey could imagine it: Mariah giving Steve Halpern a piece of her mind about the new shopping center that would replace Tappan Square, her fist raised dramatically in the air and her face as purple as an eggplant, when she’d collapsed on the floor never to get up again. If only there had been a curtain to drop, a crowd to throw roses and shout brava!—it would have been a more fitting ending.

  Aubrey signed her name by yet another X.

  “We’re sure there was no foul play here, right?” Jeanette said.

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m just saying. The guy might not have had a gun, but he killed her.”

  “Steve Halpern’s a scumbag, not a murderer.”

  “He’s a politician. And he killed her with stress.”

  “Well, he—”

  “He did. He killed her. Over a damn shopping center. For God’s sake, Mariah died fighting to keep him from demolishing her home!” Tears stained Jeanette’s ocher-dark cheeks in giant rolling globules, the white of her irises shot through with red. “I don’t understand how you’re even here, Aubrey. Why aren’t you home? Why aren’t you crying into a cup of peppermint tea? This is Mariah we’re talking about. The woman who brought you up. The only family you have left—”

  “My sisters—”

  “Don’t count. Come on, Aub. You’re telling me you don’t have one tear? Not one?”

  Aubrey thought for a moment. Sometimes, when people lost a loved one, they said they felt numb. They said things like It just hasn’t sunk in yet. Aubrey understood full well what it meant that her aunt had died; already, there was a kind of off-ness to everything she did and saw. She could look at a tree—like the gnarly little dogwood in front of the high school that she’d seen a thousand times—and even though it was the same tree it had always been, she could feel that something was different about it. Different, but not changed.

  Already the Stitchery was calling, pulling like a thousand little hooks under Aubrey’s skin. She’d known since she was thirteen and her eyes had transmogrified into medical-miracle blue that she would one day be married to the Stitchery, just like her Aunt Mariah had been, and just like her grandmother had been before that, and her great-grandmother before that, and her great-great-grandmother’s sister before that, and whoever else before that, going all the way back to Helen Praisegod Van Ripper who first had doomed them all. Aubrey was just the latest Van Ripper to be chosen by the Stitchery as the guardian of its secrets—her life no more or less important than the other guardians’. And she’d forced herself to reconcile with her fate at society’s fringes—even embrace it—years ago. She lived daily with the understanding that, eventually, someday, when she was ready, years and years from now, she would assume her aunt’s role in the Stitchery and the community. The women of Tarrytown would come to her and heap their secret woes and griefs and desires on her shoulders, and after a spell they would revile or revere Aubrey as they had reviled or revered Mariah, and Aubrey would grow old between the Stitchery’s walls like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

  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 bu
sy, 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.

  From the Great Book in the Hall: We must never knit when we’re feeling sad, or hopeless, or mean. Our stitches get filled up with our thoughts and emotions, and so we must be careful. Blessings are often made with trumpeting and pomp—our hearts cry out to God, to the Universe, and say “Blessed be!” Our blessings bless us because we feel so pleased to utter them.

  But curses do not always come from such places of drama, like King Lear rushing out into the storm, his fist raised to the heavens and damning words on his lips. No—curses can come easily. We mutter them every day: at drivers who cut us off, at long lines in the grocery store, at ourselves when we do something as frivolous as dropping a pen on the floor.

  Curses can be carried around in our hearts with no more fanfare than a cocklebur catching a hiker’s sock in the fall. They are as malevolent as a tiny new freckle, a contamination like a single black ant in the sugar jar. And so we must not knit if we feel negativity or sadness. Otherwise, a curse, even the smallest of bad wishes, may be passed on.

  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 fashionabl
e 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.