The Wishing Thread (42 page)

By mid-November, the beauty of a vibrant autumn in the lower Hudson had worn off. The leaves had become as brittle as mummified pharaohs. The first snow fell—unexpectedly violent—and Tarrytown was encapsulated in slick ice while the electric company struggled to restore power and the plows were rushed into the streets.

Aubrey moved about the Stitchery like a ghost of herself, oblivious to the ice tapping the windows, the whistle of a steaming kettle, the snowslides avalanching off the eaves. She did not pick up her needles. She did not even read. She went to her shift at the library, she played with Icky and cleaned his cage, she ordered her spicy dragon rolls, and all of it felt as if she were moving underwater. Sometimes, she cracked open the Great Book in the Hall, but rather than read it—the names of all the guardians, the lists of sacrifices, the notes and gentle guidance of the women who had gone before—she simply stared. Her heart in her chest was so heavy with guilt that it pulled her shoulders down. She had reached the fullest capacity of what she could handle; she could not withstand shouldering even one more particle of despair. She did not allow herself to think of Vic—of what he was doing or feeling at any given moment, of where he was while Aubrey was staring
at the ceiling or standing in the shower until the water went cold. If she thought of him, his glinting eyes, his broad smile, it would shut her down.

Vic had been her only chance. It was Vic or it was no one.

It was no one.

The only bright spot in her future was her sisters. Meggie had made herself at home in the Stitchery, and she’d found a job at a travel agency in Manhattan. On first glance she seemed to be dressing more conservatively—wearing pencil skirts and jackets. But her blouse was usually dotted with sequins, and under her skirt she wore a hot pink garter. In the evenings, she strapped on her roller skates and resumed her place among the Flying Dutchesses.

Bitty, too, remained in the Stitchery. Her children had transferred to Tarrytown’s schools, and she’d begun to research going back to school herself. She was looking for an apartment but was in no rush to cut short her family’s last weeks in the Stitchery. She made frequent trips to see her lawyer but found that she was even better at negotiating her divorce than he was.

As the winter wore on, Bitty and Meggie—even the children—were tightly strung, treating Aubrey with diligent gentleness and caution like women of ages past drying their wool on tenterhooks. Aubrey loved them for their efforts, even as she tried to shore herself up, to boost her own spirits, and to put on a better show.

They did not talk about the loss of the Stitchery, and what felt to Aubrey like the loss of magic. Each day, Aubrey discovered a flicker of irresistible hope that perhaps something would happen, someone would swoop in for an eleventh-hour rescue, and the Stitchery would be saved. And each day, she had to quash that hope for happiness. Because even if the
Stitchery was miraculously but belatedly saved, she still would never get back Vic.

Aubrey had stood in front of the people of Tappan Square and had staked her good word on the Stitchery. Yes, she’d warned them that the magic might fail. But in her heart she didn’t believe failure was possible, and her actions told the true story of her feelings loud and clear, told it with more authority than the contradictory words she spoke. The women of Tappan Square dismissed her initial warning like boilerplate legalese and instead clutched on to the core truth that Aubrey was offering them: that if they tried hard enough, the magic would not fail them. How horrible it was—Aubrey thought to herself at times—to have proclaimed her naked confidence before everyone, only to have it desert her. She did not know if she was a martyr or a fool. She did not know if there was a difference.

Every day, the council’s plans to bulldoze Tappan Square moved forward. Properties were being sold one by one to the village, families were trickling out of neighborhoods, windows were boarded, doors nailed shut, houses condemned. The Stitchery’s neighbors across the street, who had never been friendly toward the Van Rippers, had packed up their belongings, including the blue-and-white concentric
nazar
that hung on their front door. Old Mr. Hussein had always insisted that he would refuse to sell, that he would throw his body in front of the bulldozers if they ever came to knock down his home; but instead he’d taken the money the village offered and bought a trailer in Florida. Family by family, the neighborhood was being dismantled.

“It’s just not fair,” Aubrey muttered to her sisters on an unusually warm day in early December. They had gone out for gyros. As usual there were no open tables in the restaurant
and so they shivered in the afternoon chill on cold metal chairs set on the sidewalk outside. Aubrey’s hair was greasy. Her eyes, her dull normal eyes, were shadowed in blue. The real estate section of the newspaper was on the table, weighted down by a cell phone and luffing like a sail in the wind.

“I wish you would just go to talk to him,” Bitty said. “Explain things. Give the man some credit. I’m sure he’d understand.”

“I wasn’t thinking about Vic,” Aubrey said.

“But maybe you should,” Bitty said.

Aubrey sighed. They’d been over this before. Bitty and Meggie wanted her to seek out Vic, to make things right with him. But even though the Stitchery had turned its back on Aubrey, she could not bring herself to turn her back on it. Rules were rules: Sacrifices could not, under any circumstances, be returned—even if a spell failed. If Mariah hadn’t been cremated, she would have rolled over in her grave to know that Aubrey was entertaining the possibility of throwing herself at Vic’s feet and begging for mercy. Because in fact Aubrey had thought, many times, of doing just that. She wanted Vic back. She wanted to go to his house and prostrate herself on his walkway. She wanted to see him look at her again like she was a living, breathing miracle—and not a woman who had stabbed him in the back. She wanted to wear his ring, and hold his hand at circuses, and scary movies, and funerals, and when they got old, she wanted to push his wheelchair down the sidewalks of Tappan Square.

No one could stop her from going to him. The Stitchery had abandoned her—why shouldn’t she reciprocate? And yet, for as often as she’d been tormented by the idea of reclaiming her sacrifice, she knew she could not do it. She was too well trained. Too loyal to Mariah’s teachings. But she wasn’t certain of anything anymore.

“Tell him it was a mistake,” Bitty said.

“It wasn’t a mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing at the time.”

Bitty spoke with a rasping irritation. “Don’t you think it might be a little egotistical to think that this”—she gestured with her hand toward the newspaper, a move that was perhaps supposed to mean the loss of the Stitchery and the subsequent dilemmas—“is all about you and only you?”

“Of course it’s not about me,” Aubrey said, defensively.

“What about Vic, then? Is it about him? Because it sure as hell doesn’t seem to be about
him
.”

“It’s not about him or me. Or him and me. It’s about the Stitchery and its traditions.”

“I think I get what Bitty’s trying to say,” Meggie said, her voice tight with forced patience. “What she means is, you’re operating as if losing the Stitchery is about you, about us, about Tappan Square. Like you know what it’s about. But at the end of the day, none of us knows what the big picture is.”

Aubrey sat back in her chair. Until now, her only explanation for the failure of the yarn spell was her own bungling. Maybe she could have done things differently. Maybe having the group knit along with her had been a debilitating distraction. Maybe she should have given up more than Vic; maybe there was another sacrifice she might have made. Maybe she should have asked for bigger sacrifices from the women who had joined her that night. Her mind was full of maybes.

But now her sisters suggested an alternative possibility as to why the magic failed: Perhaps the result of the spell wasn’t a failure but just a progression. A step in the life cycle. The next phase. Or—she took a bite of her gyro and angrily chewed—perhaps she was telling herself stories. She was trying to tease reason out of unreasonable things.

She lifted the straw in her soda up and down until it squeaked against the plastic lid. A chill wind blew down the street. “I guess I’ll have to give it some thought,” she said.

Christmas came and went, and the January freeze leached into Tarrytown’s old bones. The days were short and hard. The reservoir was frozen along its edges. On the morning that marked the beginning of her final week in the Stitchery, Aubrey woke to find a dusting of snow on the streets and rooftops of Tappan Square.

She worked in her bedroom, packing the last of her boxes. Everything that she could live without—certain hairbrushes, certain sweaters, certain books—was sealed with packing tape in cardboard tombs. Her back ached, and she sat on her bed. Meggie, Bitty, and the kids had gone in the morning to the two-family house that Aubrey and her sisters had rented in Sleepy Hollow, cleaning it from top to bottom so it would be ready when they moved in. The new house was no Stitchery—just a vinyl-sided, nondescript Colonial with its gable end up against the sidewalk and its chimney little more than a tube like a straw in a glass. But the house would allow them to pool their resources and stay together while they each figured out what it was they were going to do.

The doorbell gave its asthmatic buzz, and Aubrey got to her feet. She went downstairs, her hand running along the banister. She expected to find one of the town’s representatives at the door to bother her about whatever thing they wanted to bother her about this time. But when she tugged the old brass handle, and a smattering of dusty snowflakes blew in, it was Vic standing before her, rubbing his bare hands together in the cold.

“Oh,” she said. “You!”

He looked contrite, as if he might apologize for being at her doorway. “Can I come in?”

She gripped the door handle. Her heart in her chest was pumping like a crazed steam engine. She wanted to shout at him
No! You shouldn’t be here!
because what she wanted to do was throw her arms around him and drag him with her to the entryway floor, because she wanted to cry against his chest and say how sorry she was for everything—and it made her feel all kinked up and bent, not to be able to do those things.

“Please, do come in,” she said.

He stepped past her, and she felt the chill coming off his jacket. She quickly shut the door. The snow had marked Vic’s shoulders in little melting droplets. He took off his hat—it hurt that Aubrey had not made it for him, that it was a store-bought hat with thin mechanical stitches and elastic stretch—and his dark hair was mussed in a way that made her want to smooth it with her hands.

“It’s cold out there,” she said. She might also have said that it was daytime, or that it was snowing, or that her heart was a heap of rubble in her chest—or some other obvious thing.

“Yeah. It’s snowing,” he said.

“So … How are you?”

“Hanging in. You?”

“The same.” She risked a glance at his face, then gave a laugh that meant nothing. She tried not to think of the last time she’d seen him, when his eyes had been so open and fathomless, and when he’d said he loved her, and when she’d kissed him and his lips were dead cold. “Did you, um, did you deed the house over yet?”

He fidgeted with his hat. “Almost. I have to be out next month.”

“This is my last week,” she offered. “My sisters and I are renting a place together over in Sleepy Hollow.”

“That’s great,” he said. His eyes roamed the entryway, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to look at and could not look at her.

“Where are you headed?” she asked.

“Now?”

“No, I mean,
after
—you know. After Tappan Square.”

“Oh, right. My sister moved back in with my mom. And I rented a place across the river in Nyack.”

Aubrey knew she should be thrilled. Vic might have said he was moving to the other side of the country; instead, he was moving only to the other side of the Tappan Zee. And yet, the idea that they would be separated from each other by the river—the great, wide reaches of the river—made her feel like she was in danger of breaking out in tears. She composed herself before she spoke.

“I’m sorry you have to move,” she said. She pushed her hands down deeper into her pockets.

“Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry about the Stitchery, too.”

“We’ll get by,” she said.

“Aubrey …” He looked at her for the first time since he’d arrived. Purple shadows had settled under his eyes; his mouth was drawn in pain. “I know what you did. I know about the Devil’s Night spell. That
I
was your sacrifice.”

“How?”

“Bitty came to the house and told me this morning.”

“Of course,” she said. She planted her feet on the Stitchery’s boards and did not allow herself to move near him. “I didn’t know how to tell you. If there had been any other thing I could think of—any other way … You
know
I would have taken it.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Would you?”

She pulled herself up a little straighter. His doubt hurt her more than his absence had. He was the love of her life, her
first and last and only. But she couldn’t explain that to him. Not now.