The Wishing Thread Read online

  For in the silence, the terrible and threatening silence, was the rest of the story—the parts that Mariah had alluded to only in passing over the years. The end of the story, the real end, was told only in little dribs and drabs, like spots of paint laid at random on a canvas until with squinting and head-angling the full picture began to come into view.

  With the money Helen’s husband had won at Stony Point, the Stitchery was built on the edge of a grassy square in Tarrytown. Helen’s husband became a trusted secretary to a lawyer who treated him less like an employee than a good friend. Her sons were born and raised, sent off into the world to marry, or sent off to sea or war. Her only daughter, who had a birthmark in the exact shape of a star on her cheek, was taught how to knit. One night when her children were grown and on their own, and Helen’s hair had grayed, and people were whispering of a war between the North and South, her husband drifted out of life quietly and with no warning, falling into sleep within sleep. Helen donned her widow’s weeds, sad but grateful for everything she’d had. She watched herself grow old in the family’s black-spotted mirror, which had come down to her from two generations past.

  With no husband and no children who needed her, she threw her life’s focus into her knitting, so that eventually the people of Tarrytown began to refer to her home as the Stitchery. Women came to her door, women who had dirt under their fingernails and women who had never washed so much as a teacup in their lives. They heard rumors; they heard she could help. She asked them: What are you willing to give up? and she hid their treasures away. She continued to thrive—until one chilly day in October, when the winds blew down from the north so hard that the candle she had placed on the windowsill was snuffed out.

  Helen’s daughter, who had been taught her mother’s secret of knitting, was in the kitchen boiling soup at their newfangled iron stove when she heard her mother shriek. The sound was unnatural. She hurried to the parlor. And she found Helen staring in mortal terror at nothing more than the wall. Her hands were motionless on her needles. Her eyes, milky with cataracts, were unseeing.

  What is it? her daughter asked. But Helen would not speak. There were devils in the wallpaper, in the bread box, under the doors. Sometimes they were soldiers; sometimes, babies. She cried out against them; she threw the furniture to keep them away. Her daughter gently coaxed her back into the world of the living with cups of strong black coffee. But day by day, Helen became increasingly confused, increasingly tormented, as if demons were reaching their claws up from hell itself to drag her soul down through the Stitchery floorboards. People began to whisper. Her daughter fought to keep her mother out of the madhouse and in her prayers asked the Lord for the mercy of a swift and quiet death.

  For the women of the Stitchery, this was the beginning of the end.

  Aubrey had not been expecting Vic Oliveira at her door on the morning of Mariah’s funeral, although it was not all that unusual for him to appear there. He and Mariah had become good friends since he’d first moved to Tarrytown a few months ago, and he’d fallen into the role of being the Stitchery’s go-to handyman. He often stopped by to caulk, nail, screw, grease, lift, wedge, and jury-rig as needed. When Aubrey saw him standing on the porch, in nice pants and a black dress shirt, gripping a handful of late-blooming sunflowers, a little fissure of longing opened along a seam in her heart.

  “How are you holding up?” Vic asked.

  “Great!” she said, so belligerently cheerful that it took them both aback. Then, because she realized that niceties weren’t called for at a time like this, she told him the truth: “Actually, you know how a piece of celery gets when it’s been in the fridge too long?”

  “Yes?”

  “I feel like that.”

  “I wish I could fix this for you,” Vic said. “But even duct tape has its limits.”

  He held out the flowers and she took them. Sunflowers were perfect for Mariah, who had always hated “funeral flowers” like carnations and lilies and roses that were too serious for their own good. Vic must have known.

  “I’ve been thinking of you,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do to help …”

  “That’s kind.” She risked a quick glance at his face; she knew her eyes were awful to look at—alien and strange. But she wanted to see him, just for a second, before she looked away.

  “I mean it,” he said. “Whatever you need.” Peals of laughter rang from inside the Stitchery, filling it up like sound caught in a bell. Vic glanced over Aubrey’s shoulder. “Am I interrupting?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “May I come in?”

  In the living room, which might have been a dining room for an earlier generation, Bitty had fired up her laptop because Mariah’s old TV set didn’t play DVDs. She had put on a movie for her children—something light and fun because they all knew it was going to be a difficult day. Meggie was holed up somewhere in the house by herself, doing whatever it was she did when she was alone. Aubrey looked at Vic—his long arms, his wide, high chest—and she felt suddenly, deeply selfish. She told him: “Let’s just sit on the porch swing awhile.”

  She closed the front door behind her. They sat together on the weathered gray wood of the swing, Aubrey with the sunflowers sideways across her black skirt, Vic with a manila folder ominously resting on his thighs. Aubrey’s palms were sweaty; her heart was fluttering—actually fluttering, beating itself against her rib cage like a bug flying into a window again and again. She took a deep breath to steady herself. Vic always did this to her, even though he was not actually doing anything at all.

  “I’m sorry to bring this up before the funeral,” Vic said. “I wish it could have waited.”

  “Bring what up?”

  “Your sisters are here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mariah said they might show up—you know—if something ever happened to her. I wanted to catch you while they’re around.”

  Aubrey nodded toward his folder. “What is that?”

  “Mariah’s Last Will and Testament.”

  “Oh. I have a copy, too, in my bedroom.”

  “No, you don’t.” She was surprised when he put an arm around her shoulders. “This is a new will. She asked me to hold on to it. Actually … she made me the executor.”

  “You?” Aubrey asked. She didn’t think Vic was lying to her—he didn’t seem the type who would lie—and yet, she couldn’t believe him. She was having trouble not thinking about the crook of his elbow, bare against the back of her neck. “Why you?”

  “It’s about the property. Mariah’s got some things in her will that are a little—I don’t know—a little Mariah.” He was looking at the house across the street, with its hemorrhaging old sofa and broken baby crib left out by the curb. When his gaze turned to Aubrey’s face, his look was grave. “We need to call your sisters together,” he said.

  Aubrey had first met Vic when she was on her lunch break at the library, listening to Jeanette chronicle the latest books that she’d mis-shelved, dooming them to literary purgatory because they were sexist or racist. Aubrey was mid-swallow when Mariah had marched unannounced into the privacy of the librarian break room with Vic on her arm and a grin the size of a half-moon on her face. Vic was a good foot taller than Mariah and half her width and age. She had her elbow linked with his as if he were in a tux and she, a ball gown.

  “Aubrey, I want you to meet our new neighbor,” she said. “He bought a house in Tappan Square. He’s Brazilian.”

  “Actually, I’m from Queens.”

  “But Brazil is in your blood! Oh, you must say your name for them, Victor. You pronounce it so much more beautifully than I. The way you say it is like a song.”

  With impressive showmanship, Vic complied. His full name was Victor José Carlos Oliveira. Aubrey put down her PB&J.

  “I found him on the library lawn just now,” Mariah said, her voice touched with giddiness. “He wants to pick out some children’s books to read with his niece. Isn’t that sweet? And I told h
im: Nobody could take better care of him than you, Aubrey. I’m sure of it.”

  Aubrey thought she may have blushed—not because of Mariah’s compliment, but because the message of her chronic singleness could not have been declared more clearly than if Mariah had trumpeted it through the speakers at the ball field.

  During her early twenties, when she’d still been making attempts at dating and romance, Aubrey had tried to cultivate her own brand of “library sexy.” After all, what man didn’t have a fantasy about a hot young librarian? In glossy magazines—the kind on the newsstands and the kind that came in opaque plastic sleeves—librarians were pure desire. Something about bare, glistening bodies clashing with the dusty sterility of old books. Something about erudite women spending cloistered hours in rigid lucubration—only to let down their hair and inadvertently pop a button between their breasts.

  But alas, Aubrey was shy, awkward, and practical to a fault. Her hair was a non-event, and her eyes were a natural disaster. Her feet hurt her from standing so she wore orthopedic shoes because they were more comfortable. She shopped at the thrift store because she saw no reason to pay full price for things and because, to a certain extent, she didn’t mind when people looked through her. In the library break room, with Vic standing there so tall and built, she’d never felt more librarian-y in her life—as sexy as a set of recently outdated encyclopedias.

  But Jeanette apparently shared none of her misgivings.

  “I saw him first,” she said.

  From that day forward, Vic had started showing up regularly. Sometimes, Aubrey arrived for her afternoon shift to find him sitting on a bright beanbag chair in the children’s section, his knees up to his ears and books splayed at his feet. With her hip bones pressing against the circulation desk and Vic standing on the other side, they talked about what books his niece might like, what books he might like—he preferred biographies and memoirs—and to her surprise, he even asked what books she liked.

  “Oh, I read all kinds of books,” she’d told him. “But I guess I like the soft kind the best. The ones that, when you close them, leave your heart feeling like your stomach if you just ate a big meal.” And then she’d felt embarrassed, because Vic looked at her as if she’d sprouted a third eye, because good readers were supposed to like much different kinds of books, and because she could never say or do anything right when it came to men, especially ones who weren’t afraid of looking at her face when she spoke and who were tall and narrow like a Popsicle on a hot day.

  Still, despite her heightened awkwardness and self-consciousness when Vic appeared, she anticipated his visits—to the library or the house. Sometimes, she lived for them. Once, she broke the clothes bar in the hall closet just so Mariah would call him to come fix it. But inevitably, when he got to the Stitchery, his tool belt slung around his hips, Aubrey said the wrong thing, did the wrong thing, and rather than embarrass herself by hanging around him like a lovesick puppy, she usually just excused herself to her bedroom once his work began.

  She had considered knitting for him. It would be so easy. She would use a hand-painted alpaca yarn, something variegated with colors that shifted subtly and smoothly, and she would knit him a scarf, horizontally, in linen stitch. It would be a project that would take a good amount of time, one that she could saturate and stuff full of all her most wicked fantasies. Then, I thought you could use this, she might say.

  But she knew better than to try it. The repercussions of her hand-knit on Vic’s body—whether the spell worked or whether it didn’t—were too complicated to bear. Plus, Mariah had always discouraged her from knitting spells that were solely for her own benefit; such spells were notoriously unreliable, clogged up by personal baggage. There was an unwritten rule that guardians did not knit for themselves.

  Now Aubrey was leading Vic into the Stitchery to hear whatever it was he needed to say. She’d always known that Mariah had a certain fondness for Vic and that she’d never given up her stubborn hope that someday he and Aubrey might, well, might. But Aubrey was shocked to learn that Vic had been given some kind of instructions in the event of Mariah’s death. Mariah had never mentioned a change to her will.

  At her back, Aubrey could sense Vic’s tallness, his slimness, the different way that he and she each moved through space. Meggie was tromping down the long stairs in the hallway, still in her pajamas, and her fairy’s face lit with curiosity.

  “Oh, hello. I didn’t know we were expecting company,” Meggie said.

  Aubrey told Meggie to follow her and for once Meggie did not offer even the slightest back talk or smart-ass reply. Meggie gestured for Vic to go before her, and he did—with some awkwardness—so that Aubrey worried about whether or not Meggie was checking out his butt. She trailed them into the living room, where the computer speakers were blaring cartoon mayhem and Bitty was busy trying to keep her son and daughter from bickering by joining in the bickering herself.

  “Guys?” Aubrey said. She set the flowers on the table. “Hello? Guys?” Her family quieted, not because of her call for their attention but because the Stitchery was not historically known for visitations from young, handsome men. “This is Vic. He lives a few blocks over. Vic—” She began to point. “This is Meggie, Bitty, and her kids, Nessa and Carson.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Vic said. “Mariah talked about you all so much.”

  Bitty told Carson to turn down the speakers. Then she stood up from the couch and gracefully held out her hand. Her rings flashed white and gold. From the way she smiled—so smoothly, with just a touch of exquisite mourning—Aubrey half wondered if she didn’t expect Vic to kiss her hand. “You were close with Mariah?”

  “She was a good friend,” Vic said.

  Meggie laughed and dropped into an armchair. “Something tells me you weren’t a member of her Red Hat Ladies or whatever.”

  “I have to draw the line somewhere.”

  “Shame. I bet you look delicious in red,” Meggie said.

  “So, when did you and Mariah first become good friends?” Bitty said.

  “Hey—” Aubrey choked on her spit. Vic made a little noise of surprise and patted her back. She could feel her face turning bright with embarrassment, partly from the saliva, and partly because she knew what her sisters were thinking. It was far more reasonable that Vic hung around the Stitchery because he was interested in Mariah than because of Aubrey. Even though Mariah was older and a bit overweight, nobody would have been surprised if she had nabbed herself a younger man.

  “Vic’s been helping us out with repairs. He’s been great to Mariah. And me. He’s also been great to—um—me.”

  Vic gave a nervous noise like a laugh.

  “So you’re coming to the funeral picnic this afternoon?” Meggie asked.

  “Wouldn’t miss it.”

  Aubrey stepped forward for no reason except that she thought she should. She was sure Vic was counting the moments before he could get out of the Stitchery, and she wanted to rescue him. “Mariah made Vic his executor. He has a copy of the will he wants to show us.”

  “He can show it to us if he wants to,” Bitty said. “But we already know everything goes to Aubrey. That’s been obvious ever since—” She stopped herself.

  “Since we were kids,” Meggie said.

  Aubrey could feel Vic looking at her, and so she looked away. When she was thirteen, adolescence had brought pimples, blood, breasts, and the deepening and sharpening of her eyes until they were a freakish, pricking blue. And now, with Vic beside her and her sisters scrutinizing her for clues, she felt thirteen again.

  “I should probably read this,” Vic said, and from the folder he drew a purple envelope that had been sealed with a fat red blot of old-fashioned wax. “Aloud. So you can all hear it at once.”

  “Of course,” Aubrey said. “Go ahead.”

  He turned to her more fully now, and she couldn’t help but look back for as long as she dared. She loved his face—his olive skin, the two little bumps of his cheekbones,
his long nose, his thick brow bone that crossed between his temples like an old summer beam, and his eyes, the color of an almond’s papery skin. He put his hand on her shoulder, gave a small squeeze. “I think it would be best if you sat down.”

  Dear Girls,

  I don’t really believe I’m seventy-nine. I thought being seventy-nine would have a seventy-nine-ish feeling—like old age would settle into my bones and make me feel as different as I look, what with all these new sags and folds and lumps that I didn’t have twenty years ago. But even though I’m not feeling seventy-nine, it turns out I am.

  Of course, if you’re reading this, there’s been a death in the family (mine) and I’m sorry for your loss. I can only hope I went out like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July—that death was fast and not very long and drawn out. I always did like the idea of death by lightning—Beam me up, God!

  But if it dragged out, if it inconvenienced you much, I’m sorry. I shudder to think of the things I might say, the things I might do, if the Madness took hold.

  I’ve spoken to Vic—there’s a formal version of all this—legal and notarized and not worth the fortune it cost me to have it drawn up. But I thought you all deserved an explanation about the changes I’ve made—instead of hearing it from some old pinhead lawyer. Better it comes from the Old Mare’s mouth (and yes, Meggie, I did know you called me that—hilarious, really, I didn’t mind).

  Here’s what it is:

  I’m not leaving the Stitchery to Aubrey. (Quick! Everyone gasp!)

  Nope. I’m not leaving it to her. I’m leaving it to all of you, share and share alike. But there are conditions.

  Your interest in the property, the house, and all my goods and chattel (isn’t that a funny word?) is nontransferable within the family. You can’t sell or transfer your individual shares to each other or to anyone else. If you want to sell this property, you must all agree to sell it to a third party. If one of you holds out, no sale.