The Wishing Thread Read online

  “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.<
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  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:

  From the Great Book in the Hall: There is, of course, always a question—a question of the difference between what is real and what is true. A thing can be true without being real. You may not grasp this entirely, but don’t worry. This is the nature of faith, of magic, of art, of a good life’s work: If you ever understand perfectly what you’re doing, you should stop right away.

  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.”

  “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.