The Wishing Thread Page 9

Vic sighed, a full exhalation through his nostrils. “He was a quiet man, never the life of the party, but always the guy you’d want to talk to one-on-one. When you needed him, he was right there—but not really noticeable until you looked over your shoulder and realized he’d always had your back, but was letting you lead the way.”

  “He sounds like an amazing person,” Aubrey said. “I would have liked to have known him.”

  Vic looked down and smiled warmly. “Three days after he died, I was at the park. I didn’t have any friends with me; I’d gone by myself because I didn’t want to be in the house. I felt—well—I felt like hell. I was sitting on top of this metal dome when I saw the jaguar.”

  “Did you say—jaguar?”

  Vic nodded solemnly.

  “Like, the car?”

  “Like the cat.”

  “Was it … on a leash?” Aubrey said.

  “It was lazing on the top of the slide. It must have been there for a while. It was all black, and it was blinking at me like it was sleepy. The weird thing was that I didn’t feel scared—well, not too scared. It didn’t seem like it wanted to eat me or anything. It was just … hanging out.”

  Aubrey caught a glimpse of the river between the houses; it was bold today—blue and sparkling. “How does that connect to your father?”

  “He collected jaguar pictures. He didn’t have a huge collection. But there were a few jaguar figurines and stuff around the house here and there, and I always knew they came from him. He felt, I don’t know, some kind of understanding with them.”

  “You think your father appeared to you—as a jaguar?” she said, and though the question felt strange on her tongue, she’d hoped it came through without even a trace of judgment.

  Vic sighed again. “I don’t know. I don’t know if it was anything that literal.”

  “What did your family say?”

  “I never told them. I knew they’d think I was crazy, that I was imagining things because of grief. But a few days later I found out that a jaguar had actually escaped from a man’s house—he was keeping it as a pet, if you can believe that.”

  “I believe it,” she said. “You don’t live this close to New York City and not hear about those kinds of things.”

  “So, there’s an explanation for me seeing the jaguar—I accept that. But there’s not an explanation for the timing. That’s what’s tricky. Think of the odds. Not only did I see a jaguar in Queens, which must be a million to one—but I saw it just after my father passed. When you beat those kinds of odds—” He shook his head, his eyes lowered in thought. “—I don’t know what it is, but I can’t think it’s coincidence.”

  “I don’t either,” Aubrey said.

  “That’s how I feel about your magic,” he said. “It’s more than coincidence. It’s something.”

  Aubrey’s heart was flooded with warmth for him. And she thought of what a more-than-coincidence it was that she was standing here, and he was standing here, that they’d met each other, and were talking, and now their lives were, at least for this moment, intertwined. Even if she never got to know him any better than she did right now, she would think fondly of this moment for the rest of her life. “Thank you for telling me this story. I’m glad you did.”

  He nodded, suddenly bashful, and he was charming and boyish all over again. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why didn’t Mariah just knit something for Steve Halpern? For everybody on the town council? It seems like that would have been the easy way out.”

  “Oh. Well. She did. I mean, she knit for them. But Jackie Halpern’s family has been in Tarrytown a really long time. So she knows things about us—she thinks she does anyway. And she told everybody not to accept gifts from Mariah.”

  “And they don’t?”

  “They’re not really interested in hand-knit neck warmers. More like … Yankees tickets or nice watches.”

  “Fair point.” He resumed walking. “Anyway, to go back to the Stitchery, what I’m saying is, you shouldn’t give it up if you don’t want to. But it seems to me like your sisters mean well.”

  “Yes. I guess they do.”

  She fell into thought, lost. She’d hoped that her sisters’ return would mean a change: Maybe Meggie would come back and be her normal old self again. Maybe Bitty wouldn’t be so standoffish. But Mariah’s will—which was meant to tie them together—had them thrashing even harder than usual at their common bonds.

  “You’ve had a hard week,” Vic said.

  She looked up at him, his brown eyes that—to her amazement—never shied away from hers even though Meggie had once described them as “bug-zapper blue.”

  In the overly warm sun, in her long black skirt and her unseasonable black turtleneck that was the only black shirt she owned, she must have looked awfully dire. Because after a moment Vic said, “Come here,” and he closed the distance between them and put his arms around her. She felt the hardness of his chest, the press of his cheek against her temple. He smelled of deodorant. His body was warm.

  “Better?” he asked.

  She pressed her nose into his chest and slid her arms around him. “Better,” she said. But she sniffled a little—then a little more—just in case he was thinking of letting her go.

  A funny thing happens in the Hudson Valley in the autumn. At first the twilight seems peaceful, the electric blue of day fading and the heavens softening to a pinkish white. The garish red and orange trees mellow like a cat gentling beneath its owner’s hand. And yet the serenity is deceptive. The mood of a Hudson twilight is so uniformly peaceful—a blank canvas—that it routinely invites nightmares.

  Beneath the wide-open sky, Bitty could feel the dark possibilities of the coming evening. Because she didn’t want to answer questions about her absent husband, and because she wanted a moment to herself, she had taken her children to the park an hour before Mariah’s funeral picnic was set to begin. The riverbank was low and flat. Canada geese were snoozing like lumped gray stones at the water’s edge. Rocky hills shouldered the sky on all sides, and the metal girders of the Tappan Zee Bridge spanned the river. The old white lighthouse where Bitty and her husband used to meet in secret jutted beyond the trees.

  “Mom?”

  Nessa leaned her head on Bitty’s shoulder as they walked. Her skin was pale and freckled, her long cinnamon hair pulled into a high bun. Her scarf, the one she’d absolutely had to have last week or else she’d die on the spot, had been left behind.

  “Mom? I was thinking …”

  “Uh-oh. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  Nessa laughed. “No, seriously. I was thinking that we should maybe, like, stay here a little while. Not go back right away.”

  “How come?”

  “Aunt Aubrey needs us. No, really. I can tell. This is her time of need. And it’s not like Carson and I can’t afford to miss a few days of school. We both get good grades …”

  Bitty glanced down.

  “Fine. He gets good grades. But mine have been okay.”

  “We’re not staying,” Bitty said.

  “But … why?”

  She swung her arm around her daughter’s waist. Nessa hadn’t asked if her father would be coming to the funeral. Neither had Carson. “Because we just can’t.”

  “Why do you hate this place so much?”

  “I don’t hate it. I have a lot of good memories here.”

  “And a lot of bad ones?”

  “Some,” Bitty admitted. “Your aunt and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye.”

  “About what?”

  “Typical things,” Bitty said, though in fact their disagreement wasn’t typical at all. The issue—the chronic, divisive issue—was the magic. It always came down to the magic. At first, when she was too young to know better, Bitty had bought into the hype—just like she’d once believed that Saint Nicholas came down the chimney at Christmastime and left candies in her shoes. But as her capacity for logic grew, she realized that a man could not trave
l the world in a sled in the sky. And eventually, after years of prodding and poking her own doubt about magic as she prodded and poked the holes where she’d lost her baby teeth, she realized that people could not fix their problems with scarves and hats—no matter what Mariah or the Great Book in the Hall claimed. The magic of the Stitchery was no more than smoke and mirrors. If spells worked, it was only because the power of belief was so very persuasive, like a placebo that cures cancer or shortens colds.

  And while she didn’t claim to know much about science, she had an understanding that it only took one instance—one single deviation from the predicted outcome—to prove a theory to be fully and completely wrong. Magic was a way for people to try to control the uncontrollable; and if it had worked with regularity, Bitty would have been happy to believe it was real. She would have been the first person to say “Sign me up!” But in the end, magic was a false security, a grasping at power that humans didn’t have but desperately wished for, and Bitty found that there were better, more reliable ways to control her own destiny than knitting a sock.

  The Stitchery had been the Great Embarrassment of her youth—and even now as an adult, she still caught the faint whiff of it lingering about her like a smell that would not wash out. And when Bitty was in a dark mood, she conceded that it was not just the Stitchery that embarrassed her, but Mariah—a woman who had made herself a laughingstock in her clichéd broomstick “witch skirts” and her corset-tops and her moon-and-stars jewelry. A woman who believed the un-provable and the unbelievable—and who couldn’t understand why Bitty didn’t do the same.

  “Are you okay?” Nessa asked.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “It looks like you’re chewing on your teeth,” Nessa said.

  Bitty looked off into the distance. At the south end of the park, Carson was calling and waving his arms over his head. He wanted them to come see the lighthouse. It was just beyond the trees, white metal pocked by bolts and smeared by rust. Just like always.

  Bitty gave her daughter’s bottom a little whack.

  “Ma!”

  “Go ahead. I’m right behind you.”

  Nessa ran. Bitty kept walking. She had been back in Tarrytown for only a few nights. And as she stood under the wide sky, a longing that she could not quite put a name to was growing within her. Perhaps it was nostalgia, coming up through her bones like a cold draft through floorboards. Or perhaps it was a longing for the new life she’d built for herself—or at least, for the life that she’d tried to build but that still seemed to elude her. Whatever the cause, she felt she was growing heavyhearted, more with each minute she stayed in Tarrytown. She was sleeping under the same roof as her sisters, and yet she missed them. They had chatted a little, made the necessary conversations, but they had yet to talk, to really talk—except to argue about selling the Stitchery. They tiptoed around one another, didn’t ask questions, gave a wide berth. Bitty thought she would have appreciated the effort. But she didn’t.

  Before her, the lighthouse reared up, unlit and rugged in the quiet sky.

  For a few shared years, the Van Ripper girls were said to have been inseparable, an isolated little unit that never let an outsider in. At playgrounds and basketball courts, delis and pet-store windows, the three girls appeared to the better families of Tarrytown to be street rabble left over from another century—one with newsboys and orphanages and men who lit lamps. Even before Mariah had taken them out of public school, the girls had been derelicts. They wore clothes that didn’t quite fit, smeared with grass and ketchup, and their hair was stringy and wild. Bitty was a knobby young teen fighting her way into womanhood; Meggie was a child, jelly-smeared and dirty and always wanting to hold one of her big sisters’ hands; and Aubrey was bookish and distracted and a little bit flakey, but always by her siblings’ sides.

  In the afternoons, when good children were at home doing their schoolwork, the Van Ripper girls could be found in the park between Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow. It was there that Benedict Arnold’s traitorous plot against George Washington, the plot that might have changed the outcome of the Revolutionary War, had been discovered when his sidekick and scapegoat John André was captured.

  Bitty would climb on the edge of the monument and lean off it with one hand. “You guys be the militiamen and I’ll be John André.”

  Sometimes, they’d play it straight: John André, smuggling Benedict Arnold’s papers in a stinky boot, assumes that because one of the bumpkins he meets is wearing a Hessian coat the man must be a loyalist—as opposed to a patriot in a stolen coat—and he spills his plans only to realize he’s just signed his own death warrant. Other times, they played it so John André gave chase through Tarrytown—leading the girls to run shrieking and crashing into people and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

  But the John André game was the least of Tarrytown’s worries when it came to the Van Rippers. As children with magic at their fingertips, they raised a special kind of hell.

  Although she was the youngest by far, Meggie was the troupe’s lead instigator. She wanted the baker to give them free pastries. She wanted Tommy Matsumoto to let them use his bike. She wanted Heather Noble to be knocked off her high horse, and she thought that casting a spell to make Heather get a crush on Lance “Hot Pants” Weemly would do the trick.

  With each new spell, Meggie made a sacrifice. And with each new spell, it seemed to get a little easier for her to do it: She gave up her favorite stuffed dinosaur, her book about poisonous snakes, her collection of river stones. Sometimes her sacrifices made for successful spells; other times, they were wasted. But failure had never stopped her from coming up with new ideas to put the Stitchery’s magic to good use.

  Unfortunately, she had to rely on her older sisters to turn her ideas into spells; she was not a very good knitter of magic. She could not do it alone. Aubrey was the one whose spells turned out the best. Aubrey was the most reliable. But Aubrey was also the most scrupulous and serious of the three of them—chickenshit, Meggie said—and convincing her to knit a spell just for fun was always a terrible chore.

  This, of course, was where Bitty came in. She was glib and smart. She was persistent, stubborn, and always the voice of reason, even when what she was arguing for was technically unreasonable. She liked getting people to do what she wanted. So when Meggie pitched an idea for a new spell, Bitty set about convincing Aubrey to knit it—if only because knitting spells was a good way of testing out the truth, and because she had nothing better to do with her time than antagonize the people of Tarrytown.

  As for Aubrey, she tried to resist her sisters’ pleadings but almost always gave in. She knit old Mr. Piotrowski a set of wrist warmers, and for a whole year they played free rounds of the King Kong arcade game that he kept in the back of his pizza shop. She knit a lace headband for Sue Hormack’s mother, and from then on the girls had a standing invitation to come to dinner whenever they pleased—which was important because Mariah was a terrible cook and Sue’s mother made amazing chicken potpie.

  Eventually Mariah caught on. They were grounded for an entire summer, not even allowed to leave the Stitchery’s front yard. Magic was not a toy; it was a responsibility, and no sister felt Mariah’s disapproval and disappointment more keenly than Aubrey. She began to realize that her duty to the Stitchery made her different from her sisters. They could not keep going forward as they had been, as three parallel lines. The summer that Mariah had grounded them was the summer they began to go their separate ways.

  Aubrey became increasingly awkward and withdrawn; she was a child of the Stitchery, and certain women did not say very nice things about her—she was that weird Van Ripper girl with the witchy eyes. As Meggie got older, she broke every rule she came across with a kind of good-natured detachment—smoking marijuana right in the middle of the park if it suited her, openly dating both boys and girls, and refusing to wear a bra—much to the consternation of every woman who walked with her husband into the air-conditioned movie th
eater where Meggie worked. Bitty, known as the angriest of the three sisters, was also bad: It was not the fact that she was “fast” that rankled matronly nerves—if anything, people half expected one if not all of the Van Ripper girls to end up pregnant by the time they were eighteen. The trouble was, Bitty’s fastness was directed at the wrong kind of boys; instead of motorcycle-riding drug dealers or sons of plumbers and cabinetmakers, she went after the quiet college-bound boys with soft hands who lived up on the hill. The old dames of Tarrytown trembled to hear a beloved son mention her name.

  Each generation had a story to tell about the Van Rippers—some stories friendlier than others. There were pockets in which the sisters were welcome, mostly in Tappan Square. But even in their own neighborhood, certain people avoided them. For all their unabashed poverty and strangeness, the Van Rippers were to be feared.

  There had been no witch hunt, no torches or battering rams, no inquisitions with fire irons, but two of the three Van Rippers had—by the insidious and awful pressure of observation, conjecture, and gossip—been driven out of town. It was a wonder that Aubrey, the shiest and most nervous of the three sisters, had found the strength to stay.

  Aubrey had brought her knitting to Mariah’s funeral picnic. She sat with Bitty and Meggie on an old Navajo-style blanket, the urn that held Mariah’s ashes resting beside her. The evening had turned chilly. Aubrey had done little more than notify the local paper of Mariah’s passing and of their plans for a “funeral.” And now the people of Tappan Square—those who had good feelings toward Mariah and toward the Stitchery—had gathered to remember. Adults lined up their lawn chairs or spread out blankets. Children horsed around on a slide shaped like an oversized macaroni noodle. It was part picnic, part memorial, and Mariah would have loved it. She’d always thought that life was a thing to celebrate, and the ending of life was no less astonishing a transition than the beginning of it. Aubrey had cried, on and off, through the course of the evening. Her knitting was a twist of buttery yellow in her lap.