The Wishing Thread

by Van Allen, Lisa

  But tonight, something wasn’t right. A noise, a thump. Aubrey woke and didn’t move. She strained to listen. What is that? Nessa getting a glass of water? Carson losing his way? The noises—a small shuffling, irregular thuds—were too self-conscious to be innocent: the sounds of someone trying not to make sounds.

  For a moment, she thought: This isn’t real. And yet she knew better.

  The neighborhood of Tappan Square was full of good people—working parents, mothers who pushed their groceries home in shopping carts, men who sprawled in lawn chairs on the sidewalk, smoking cigars. But along with all the good people, there were people to be afraid of. Somebody’s son gone haywire. Somebody who needed the money. Somebody’s friend’s friends.

  The Stitchery had always been a hot mark for hopeful thieves; the rumors of treasure were a temptation to crooks big-time and small. But the same gossip that lured curious delinquents to the Stitchery also acted as a force field to turn them away. The last time the Stitchery had been robbed was in the early seventies, when a few stoned hippies snuck into the empty house and took only what they could carry in their macramé sacks. Shortly after the theft, which had left Mariah shaken but not cowed, the thieves had been found outside of Jersey City, floating on a powerboat-turned-ghost-ship down the Hudson, naked, blue, and dead, with their haul from the Stitchery spread out around them. Officially, the police said they’d overdosed. Unofficially, Tarrytown believed the devil had driven them mad. The rumors had been enough to keep most of Tarrytown’s crooks at bay.

  But now the neighborhood was changing, more each day. New people from all over the world flowed in and out like a tide, and they had increasingly little patience for the superstitions of old Tappan Square. Aubrey had talked about getting an alarm system installed, but Mariah had scoffed: Whatever for? She believed firmly that the Stitchery protected itself. Of course, she also believed that three starlings on the grass meant good luck and that there was no vegetable that couldn’t be improved by a good long pickling. Now, with the shuffling and thumping getting louder, Aubrey wished she’d been more insistent about the alarm system. If the Stitchery was robbed tonight, her sister and children would never return.

  She threw off the covers. She had no weapon, so she grabbed a metal knitting needle from her bedside, a size eight—just big enough to be firm, thin enough to be sharpish.

  At the door at the end of the hall, she could hear noises. Someone was definitely inside. Shuffling. Knocking into things. She stood in the darkness, petrified.

  She’d just begun to retreat, to rouse her sister and make a call to the cops, when the door flew open—a gust of inward-sucking air. Aubrey held up her needle and screamed.

  “Wait! Wait!” The intruder grabbed her wrist. They were both screaming. “Wait!”

  Aubrey twisted out of the figure’s shadowed grip, insensible with fear.

  “Aubrey. Stop. It’s me!”

  Aubrey stilled.

  “Hey. It’s me.”

  She drew back. “Meggie?”

  Meggie flipped the switch on the wall, then squinted violently at the shock of light. When she’d left the Stitchery, her hair had been a warm brown-blond, falling to her waist in gentle waves. She’d loved wearing flowered dresses that skimmed the floor and going around Tarrytown with no shoes or bra.

  Now her hair was short and raven black—moppish across her brows. Her face was fuller, more mature, though she still had the small features of a pixie. She wore skinny jeans and Converse sneakers, a silver-studded belt slung low around her hips.

  Meggie had left the Stitchery four years ago. Four short years. Now Aubrey hardly recognized her. A lifetime might have passed since then.

  “Well,” Aubrey said.

  Meggie held out her hands. “I can explain …”

  The last time Aubrey saw her little sister, she’d been watching Meggie stuff jeans and shirts into an old suitcase without bothering to fold them. Her newly earned high school diploma—which had come in the mail only the day before—was open on the bed.

  I saved up enough to go to Miami, Meggie had said with a grin. To celebrate. After eleven years of homeschooling I think I earned a weekend off, don’t you?

  Aubrey had sat on Meggie’s bed, tying a braid of rainbow yarn to her sister’s red backpack to repel pickpockets, mosquitoes, exchange-rate cons, transportation delays, and—just for the hell of it—untrustworthy men. Aubrey had wanted to say, Can I come, too? But she could not picture herself sipping sweet cocktails by a pool on an island, dancing all night in hot clubs and sleeping until noon. She could not even see herself getting on a plane. Meggie was free to go anywhere she pleased, to not only follow her whims but chase them down and tackle them in a headlock. Aubrey on the other hand was tethered by her belief in and her obligation to the Stitchery’s crumbling walls.

  Perhaps if she hadn’t been thinking so much of herself, of her own lot in life, she would have noticed that the breadth of clothing Meggie was shoving into her suitcase was much more than was needed for a long weekend. Perhaps if she’d been paying closer attention, she would have pocketed her sister’s plane ticket and demanded answers about where she really planned to go. But she hadn’t been thinking—not of Meggie, anyway. And so when she dropped her sister off at JFK airport she had actually rushed Meggie out of the car with only the briefest hug because she hadn’t wanted to hold up the taxis and rental vans behind her. She’d had no idea at the time that it would take Mariah’s death, so many years later, to bring her younger sister home.

  Aubrey felt dizzy. She pushed past Meggie and into the old bedroom. When Bitty rushed in she brought with her a wash of cold night air. Her eyes were puffy with sleep, and her highlights were disarrayed.

  “Aubrey? Are you okay? What happen—?” Bitty stopped. Her gaze landed on Meggie. And then she straightened, surprised. “Oh. When did you get here?”

  “Just now.”

  “Aubrey called you?” Bitty asked. “She knew where you were?”

  Meggie’s chin was tucked into her chest. “Um, no.”

  “Then … how did you find out?”

  “How did I find out what?” Meggie asked.

  Bitty blinked, confused. “How did you find out about Mariah …?”

  “What about Mariah?”

  “Oh God.” Aubrey’s stomach bent into a sickening kink, and she clutched her middle as if she could stop the turning with her hands.

  “Are you okay?” Bitty asked.

  “I’m sorry. I have to sit.” With her sisters watching, she put out a hand to steady herself, her fingertips sliding along Meggie’s old collection of movie posters—Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Abominable Snowman, The Blob. Their jagged lines and bold colors made Aubrey want to keel over. She’d never felt so strange before in her life, but she recognized what this was: the prelude to fainting. It was too much, it was all too much, for one day.

  “I’m sorry, Aub,” Meggie said, her voice overly loud, her palms facing the ceiling. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to scare anybody. It’s just that I got this message in some threads, you know? A totally new thing—never happened before. I thought I imagined it. And anyway I just knew that I had to get here ASAP but I didn’t want to wake you up, so I thought I’d see if I could still sneak in, you know, like I used to, up between the walls in the alley …”

  Aubrey leaned on the edge of the mustard-yellow love seat that Meggie had lugged up to the room when she was a teenager. Slowly, she sat down.

  “What is it?” Bitty asked.

  She held up her index finger because she could not speak. She closed her eyes. Once again, the Stitchery had returned to its usual quiet. The danger was gone. Now she trembled deeply—not a superficial shaking of her fingers or limbs, but a quivering so deep that it made her guts rock within her. When she opened her eyes, Nessa and Carson were there beside their mother, and Bitty had draped her arms over both their shoulders. Meggie stood near the doorway, her forearms folded and the promontory of her hip t
hrust to the side.

  “Aubrey?” Meggie said.

  Everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to make some pronouncement. All these people—her family—here—finally—but no Mariah among them.

  She tried to speak, to say something that would fix things or at least put everyone at ease. But when she opened her mouth, it wasn’t a word that came out. It was a gasp—and then an awful, primal lowing. She couldn’t even apologize for the sound.

  “Oh,” Bitty said. “Oh, Aubrey.”

  The tears that had been dammed up since Mariah had died now fell grossly and heavily, until Aubrey’s whole body was bent double with sobs. She felt her sisters sit down beside her, their hands on her—her shoulders, her back—the weight of their bodies pushing the old cushions down.

  Meggie’s voice was soft. “Is Mariah … is Mariah gone?”

  Bitty must have nodded. Because then, all at once, Aubrey was no longer crying alone. Her sisters were crying with her, holding her even as she cinched bits of their clothes in her fists, even as their elbows and hip bones pressed into her sides.

  Outside in the east, the first light—barely a light at all—blistered on the horizon.

  The problem, as Ruth Ten Eckye put it to her knitting and reading club at the library and to anyone else who would listen, was that Mr. Scott—the new director of this year’s Headless Horseman Extravaganza, who had been brought in from a college theater in Nyack—had no respect for tradition. In the dramatized reading of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” a Ten Eckye man had always, since as far back as anyone could remember, played the part of Brom Bones.

  But this year, the upstart director had the audacity to give the part of Brom to Tony Pignatelli, who—even though he was “a burly, roaring, roystering blade” with a fair amount of “waggish good humor”—would never be able to pull off a convincing Brom. A Ten Eckye boy needed to be the hero of the country round. Not a Pignatelli. Who ever heard of a Dutch Pignatelli?

  “My poor Todd deserves that part—and Tarrytown deserves for him to have it,” Ruth explained to Aubrey on Saturday morning as they stood together in the yarn shop. The rain from yesterday had cleared and the sun was pumping out the last gold dredges of an Indian summer, but Aubrey’s mood was gray. Although she’d been knitting in the Stitchery since before she could tie her shoes, she’d rarely had to deal directly with the clients. She sighed.

  Ruth leaned an elbow on the counter and narrowed her eyes. “We Ten Eckyes have been in this town long enough to know what you Van Rippers are up to.”

  “All right,” Aubrey said. “So what is it that you’d like?”

  “What would I like?” Ruth said. She shook her head in annoyance. “What I would like is for you to knit something that will help my poor Todd!”

  Aubrey crossed her arms, considering. Ruth Ten Eckye was the wife and partner of the late Charles Ten Eckye, of the Ten Eckye Center for Culture and Art. The Ten Eckyes owned buildings all over Tarrytown—mostly commercial properties and apartments that the family paid a management company to handle so they would not need to dirty their hands with a task as undignified as collecting rent.

  Ruth was viciously judgmental—politically, socially, ecumenically. Ensuring that a Ten Eckye had the corner on Brom Bones probably meant something sacred to her; or at the very least, it bolstered the dominance and visibility of her old patroon bloodline. She had good friends where it mattered and enemies where it suited her. Aubrey had seen Ruth snap at the handicapped boy who bagged her groceries, and she knew that Ruth called the animal shelter the instant, the very instant, she spotted a cat that did not have a collar within fifteen feet of her garage.

  And yet Aubrey could find things to like about her. Mariah had told her: It’s wrong to knit for a person you dislike. Sure, Ruth had been on the board that forced the library to remove all vampire young adult novels from the shelves, but she’d also chaired the committee that kept wreaths on veterans’ graves. She practically owned the community food pantry: Tarrytown’s homeless ate like royals. She had backbone—and that was something. She cared about her family like a mother wolverine. Ruth, like anyone, had her strong points and weak points—and that, to Aubrey’s mind, made her a good enough candidate for a spell.

  “Have you talked to Mr. Scott, to tell him how you feel?” Aubrey asked.

  “Obviously I tried that,” Ruth said.

  “What about someone at the school?”

  “I talked to everyone. There is simply no other way. Believe me, Aubrey Van Ripper. The Stitchery is my last resort. My very, very last.”

  It always is, Aubrey thought.

  Most people who came to the Stitchery arrived because they’d been following the faint scent of a rumor, the tail end of a last chance. Normally, clients approached timidly and with shy questions that weren’t technically questions except for the tone they were spoken in: Someone told me that these are, um, unique yarns? I heard that you offer a knitting service? I’ve been having this problem and I was told to see you?

  People came to the Stitchery for help because they had no choice left but to shuck their common sense and dignity to try something completely unbelievable. Aubrey imagined the feeling must have been similar, in terms of desperation, to an adult putting a tooth under her pillow in an effort to help pay her bills.

  She pulled her cardigan tighter around her midsection. Light slanted through the window muntins, beams of squared silver bent to the wood floor. The furniture—two wooden stools, the counter, a low wicker coffee table—was dusty gray, the finest film covering all the bulbs of yarn in baskets and the thick hanks of yarn that hung from pegs on the walls. The look on Ruth’s face gave the impression that she was counting the minutes until she could leave the Stitchery to go shower off, as if it might somehow contaminate or infect. Certainly Aubrey had every right to turn her out, to say—perhaps with a dose of Ruth’s imperiousness thrown in for good measure—How dare you come into this house while we mourn? Mariah had not yet been dead for three whole days. The obituary had been published just this morning—probably Ruth would have been horrified to think of herself as intruding if she’d known Mariah had died. It would only take a word to send her away.

  But then, Aubrey heard Bitty in the kitchen, rattling around in the cabinets to scrounge up lunch for her kids, asking what kind of house didn’t even have ketchup, and she knew it wouldn’t hurt if there was a little extra money on hand.

  “I’ll do it,” Aubrey said. “What have you got for me?”

  “What have I got?”

  “What can you give me in exchange for the spell?”

  Ruth laughed. “You mean there’s not some pricing chart you can pull up?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “What’s customary for something like this?” Ruth asked.

  “It’s customary for you to make an offer.”

  “You do make this difficult, don’t you?” Ruth adjusted her purse on her arm. “Two hundred. Cash.”

  Aubrey laughed. “You’re better off trying to bribe Mr. Scott.”

  Ruth bit her lips, chagrined, and Aubrey resisted the feeling of guilt that flooded her. She’d never liked this part—the bargaining. The push and pull. For as much as Aubrey excelled at the knitting, she’d never been good at playing the role of negotiator. It was a hard role that cast her in a bad light. A little pushiness was always necessary for the success of a spell, and Aubrey had never been good at “pushy.” Not like Mariah had been.

  “Two hundred dollars,” Aubrey said. “If you like. What else?”

  “Two hundred dollars is a lot of money.”

  “Forgive me, but I suspect it’s not a lot of money to you,” Aubrey said, because she knew Ruth Ten Eckye had been squirreling away her family’s fortune since the day she was born into it. “What else?”

  Ruth blanched. “Five hundred?”

  Yes please, Aubrey thought. With five hundred dollars, she could take everyone to dinner at the Tarrytown House. She could pay for the kids to take
iPad-guided tours of the Old Dutch churchyard. She could restock the liquor cabinet. But for two hundred or even five hundred bucks, what she couldn’t do was guarantee that Todd Ten Eckye would be strutting around Sleepy Hollow come this Halloween in knickers and a tricorn hat. She would need something more important than Ruth’s money to ensure the spell would work.

  People need to give up something they really and truly care about, Mariah liked to say. They won’t think magic is worth anything if they don’t suffer a little for it. And if they don’t think it’s worth anything, they won’t believe, and if they don’t believe, the magic will just fester away.

  Aubrey looked over her client—Ruth’s beauty-parlor curls, her gold glasses chain, her tiny pearl earrings—all very expensive and yet dated, as if she’d stepped out of 1952. On her long coat was a tin brooch in the shape of a jack-o’-lantern with a twisted grin. Aubrey pointed. “What’s that?”

  Ruth touched it. “What? This silly thing?”

  Aubrey leaned forward. The pin was cheap, a stark contrast with Ruth’s expensive pearls and pavé diamond rings. Ruth wouldn’t wear such a tawdry thing unless it had some personal meaning. “Where did you get it?”

  Ruth’s gaze softened, the drooping white skin of her eyelids drooping farther still. “It was a gift from my late husband. He bought it for me at a street fair the week before he died. A year ago on All Saints’ Eve.” Ruth’s eyes clouded over, and for a moment she was no longer in the yarn shop—Aubrey could tell. She was standing on a warm sidewalk in October, her husband still with her, still alive, handing his dollars to the man behind the card table, smiling, fastening a pin on Ruth’s lapel.

  The rules about sacrifices, about what could be sacrificed and what could not, were a bit perplexing in some ways. Keepsakes had emotional value, and it was generally accepted that meaningful objects were real sacrifices; they would stay in the Stitchery tower for as long as the Stitchery was around. Money, however, was a different story. Money was not, except in the rarest cases, considered a meaningful sacrifice; it could always be replaced. A guardian could never suggest to a client that he or she pay for a spell with money, but she could accept money if it was offered to her as a personal—non-magical—gift. This Render unto Caesar way of looking at sacrifices had first appeared in the Great Book back in the 1930s, when apparently the guardians needed a little green on hand for personal expenses, and they found that keeping their clients’ Jacksons and Lincolns didn’t damage their spells—as long as some real sacrifice had also been made.