The Wishing Thread

by Van Allen, Lisa

  Old Wouter Van Twiller gave a little speech, too—and it was quite a good speech. Passionate yet educated. Cerebral yet accessible. The problem was that Wouter, a member of the historical society who spent his retirement digitizing old books, smelled like hamburger and mothballs, and he had a habit of picking the dry skin off his face when he got nervous.

  Aubrey slumped in her chair.

  “We’re doomed,” Jeanette, who had snuck in late as usual, whispered beside her.

  Vic leaned in and sighed. “I would nominate myself. But I’ve got my sister living in the house. And it’s not a legal two-family. I can’t put myself up for scrutiny.”

  “Half of the people in this room are illegal one way or another,” Aubrey said.

  “I can’t do it either,” Jeanette said. “I don’t think a Tarrytown citizens’ group much wants a Sleepy Hollower leading the fight.”

  Aubrey twisted her hands in her lap. She knew that being a leader meant being a little singular and apart; one couldn’t lead a crowd forward from the middle of the pack. But how could Shawn Prior, who was banging on the podium and hollering about Moses dying within sight of the Promised Land, lead Tappan Square to any kind of victory? The wrong leader could do more harm than good. And the stakes were too high to make a bad choice. There was a little over two weeks before the vote that would determine the fate of Tappan Square.

  “Is there anyone else?” Dan Hatters asked. He gripped the podium. “Come on now, people. Anyone? Anyone at all?”

  The room was quiet except for the snap of raindrops on the window. Aubrey’s palms were sweating. She held her breath. Her heart in her chest was beating at her ribs like an angry mob. Her feet began to tingle. None of the candidates who had voiced their opinions so far had come close to Mariah’s energy, passion, eloquence, and chutzpah. Anyone would be an improvement—even Aubrey. Even her.

  Please, she thought. Somebody, please. She could not be the one.

  “Well then.” Dan looked out over the crowd. “I guess. I guess if there’s no one—if we’re sure—and there really isn’t anybody else who wants to run … anybody at all …”

  “Oh, hell,” Aubrey said.

  And she stood up.

  It was said that a great rush of wind blew into the Tappan Square firehouse, so strong that chairs were knocked over, flags were blown off their flagpoles, and hair was whipped into stinging eyes. In any case, just as Aubrey got to her feet—her guts rumbling around within her, her feet like blocks of ice—the doors to the firehouse flew open and if it wasn’t a wind that rushed in it was a man, Mason Boss, who seemed to be not at all caught off guard when everyone in the room turned to face him.

  “Hello, good people of Tappan Square,” he said.

  Chairs whined and creaked as people craned their necks for a better view. He wore pants that on another man would have been called gray but on him were definitely silver. He had on a black leather jacket over a white button-down shirt. He did not carry an umbrella, and yet it was as if the rain had politely refrained from falling on him because he did not appear even slightly wet. His beautiful face and gorgeous dark skin were bright with cold.

  “Sorry I’m late. What’d I miss?”

  Dan Hatters was not immune to Mason’s charm. He fluttered like a preening bird at the podium. “We were just going to vote on the new president.”

  “Then I’m right on time. Can I—” here, he paused to take off an invisible hat and then flick it like a Frisbee, “—throw my hat into the ring?”

  No one had noticed that Aubrey was half standing, with her knees still slightly bent and her mouth open and her butt sticking out over her chair. Slowly, so she didn’t attract any attention, she sank down. She was surprised to find that she was slightly disappointed. Relieved—and yet disappointed. Vic patted her leg. She was sure he meant to be reassuring. He kept his hand there.

  “We just heard the campaign speeches.” Dan Hatters’ voice was charged with new excitement. “If you have one ready, it’s not too late.”

  “Do I have one ready?” At the back of the room, Mason Boss lifted his hands palms-up as if he was about to break out into song. He smiled, his eyes twinkling. “Of course I do.” He strode to the front of the room, taking the podium from Dan Hatters. He spoke with eloquence and passion and charisma. He made people think and made them laugh. He lifted his index finger to underscore good points and better ones. The people of Tarrytown were starstruck; only later would they consider that there were many questions they should have thought to ask. Only later would they wonder if Mason Boss had pulled the proverbial wool over their eyes.

  “In conclusion,” he said after a time, “I want to be the president of Tappan Watch. All in favor?”

  The people of the Watch began to clap their hands.

  Aubrey whispered to Vic. “I don’t think this follows Robert’s Rules of Order.”

  Vic nodded. “Maybe we need a little more disorder if we’re going to make this work.”

  “Maybe,” Aubrey said.

  After the Tappan Watch meeting disbanded—people flocking merrily into the streets as if they were celebrating a coronation—Vic insisted on driving Aubrey back to the Stitchery. Shadows shrank the wide-open valley down to the constricted scope of headlights. The rain flew like flecks of ice in the wind.

  In the dark of the pickup, Aubrey sat with her knitting bag on her lap. The small cab of the truck smelled like tools—metallic and dusty, but not entirely bad. As Vic steered, taking a roundabout route to avoid the plug of traffic near the firehouse, it occurred to Aubrey that despite the thick flux of feelings he stirred in her, she knew very little about him. They’d had so many issues and topics to discuss—Mariah’s death, the Watch, Mason Boss, the future of Tappan Square. Everything was so important, so dire—it was as if they’d skipped basic training and had instead thrown themselves directly into the foxhole. Except for a few friendly details gleaned from chats over the circ desk, Aubrey had not yet developed a clear picture of the way Vic lived when he wasn’t mucking through the imbroglio of her life.

  “So,” she said, aware of the nervousness in her voice but unable to make herself sound natural. “How long have you been in Tarrytown?”

  “I’ve been in the area about eighteen months. But only a few have been in Tappan Square.”

  “Why did you move up here from the city?”

  He laughed. “The truth?”

  “Why not?”

  “There was a girl. She’d lived up here and worked in Queens. I met her at a beer garden. One thing led to another, and next thing I know I’m living in Tarrytown. We had an apartment on the border with Sleepy Hollow.”

  Aubrey watched him drive, a slow maneuvering down two-way streets that were big enough only for one car. “Are you … is she …?”

  “It didn’t work out. I was too boring for her—that’s what she said. Boring.”

  “I don’t think you’re boring.”

  “No? How can you tell?”

  “You don’t check out boring books.”

  He laughed. “She thought all books were boring.”

  “Then she doesn’t know what she’s missing,” Aubrey said. She was glad for the darkness because it made her feel a little braver when she smiled at him. And because she wasn’t talking about books at all.

  He smiled back. He waited patiently while another car squeezed down a narrow block. “Anyway, she left Tarrytown. But I hung around. I realized I could work for myself because Tappan Square needed a handyman—somebody discreet, you know.”

  “You mean somebody who won’t snitch when three families are living in one house. Or when people pay for their new roofs entirely in cash.”

  “My family came to this country just before I was born, so—yeah—someone who gets it. I just bought my house in Tappan Square a few months ago.”

  “When you met Mariah at the library,” she said.

  “Yes. When she introduced me to you.” His fingers curled around the steering wheel as if
he might twist it like rope. “I can’t lose the house. Not when I’m finally starting to feel like it’s home.”

  “I know what you mean.” She leaned her spine hard into the seat. “I really wish Mason Boss hadn’t come to the meeting when he did. I don’t know why people can’t see through him. He really likes to hear himself talk—even when he’s not really saying anything. He’s obviously just doing it for the attention.”

  “You’re really annoyed,” he said, a bit of speculation in his voice. “Are you mad that he was elected president, or are you mad because you didn’t make a bid.”

  She glanced across the dark cab. The wipers squeaked. “I’m glad I didn’t have to run. I was just going to do it because there was nobody else.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, really.”

  “Know what I think?” He eased the truck onto the Stitchery’s street. He drove slowly though there were no cars in front of them. “I think you really love Tappan Square. Maybe more than anybody in that room tonight.”

  “But that doesn’t mean I want to be president. Or—that I’d be good at it.”

  “You’d feel more comfortable speaking in public if you did it a few times.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was on the debate team in high school,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Why do you seem so surprised?”

  Aubrey floundered. “Because you’re, well, you’re so cool.”

  He laughed. “Cool? Oh no. I was debate team captain. Two years of sax before I quit because I didn’t like the marching band hats. And my comic book collection is still stashed in my mom’s attic—even though she tries every year to get me to throw it away.”

  Aubrey narrowed her eyes. “Magic: The Gathering?”

  “Every Monday until I was twenty,” he said.

  “Star Wars collectibles?”

  “They were my only hope.”

  She relaxed into her seat, laughing a little, and she saw that he was laughing, too. He pulled up in front of the Stitchery. In the headlights, the rain fell like a million little meteors streaking toward earth, flashing yellow-gold against the darkness.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she said.

  “Any time.”

  She tried the door handle but it was locked. She fumbled to find the switch in the dark. “I’m sorry—I seem to be …” She laughed nervously. Her hands fluttered. Where was the lock? “Um, oh gosh, a little help?”

  “Aubrey.” She stopped fussing and turned to him. His fingers were wrapped tight around the wheel. He scowled hard at the dashboard. “I’d like to take you out.”

  She heard the raindrops falling. “Like … on a date?”

  “I would have asked you weeks ago, but I had this feeling that you were avoiding me. I’m hoping I was wrong.”

  “Oh. Of course not,” she mumbled.

  He gave a shrug, a glance, and a wobbly smile. “Well, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”

  “No—I mean, of course I wasn’t avoiding you. Sorry.”

  “Oh.” He looked at her now. The glow from the streetlight was coming through the windshield, painting his skin with golden undertones, and his cheeks were freckled with shadows of raindrops. His eyes held a kind of wary hopefulness. “Well? Do you want to go out with me?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I would like that. Thank you.”

  “Tomorrow? At six thirty?”

  “Sure. What should I … how should I dress? Is it, um, formal?”

  “I don’t know. Nice-ish?”

  “Where are we going?”

  He grinned. “It’s a surprise.”

  “So we’re going to wing it?”

  He laughed. “I’m not really a wing-it type of guy when it comes to things that are important. I already bought tickets.”

  “What would you have done if I’d said no?”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t,” he said.

  He unlocked the doors; the click in the muffled dark nearly startled her. She glanced at him with a sense that something was incomplete between them. But what was left to do? A friendly hug? A handshake? A kiss on the cheek, or—she could hardly think it—the mouth? She knew what this was: She was stalling. She wanted one more second alone with him in the car, one more minute with the rain tinkling on the roof, and the wipers skidding their rubbery arms over the windshield, and the air growing warm and moist from two bodies in such close proximity to each other. She wanted one more minute here, in the safety and privacy of his car, before she made her way back into the field of land mines that was the Stitchery. She did not move, did not breathe—she would have stopped her heart from beating if she’d had the power. He was looking at her. He felt it, too. One more minute to see how far one more minute could go.

  But—it was time. She opened the door, shifted to plant a shoe firmly on the pavement.

  “Aubrey?”

  She stopped. “What?”

  “I would have voted for you.”

  She looked at him—his long and narrow face, his heavy brow bone, and his eyes that glinted under the streetlight like pennies in a well.

  She smiled. And she stepped into the rain.

  “Tarrytown is not scary,” Bitty told her children. She tucked them snugly into their beds. She got Nessa an extra blanket because the shivery old windows of the Stitchery let in every cold gust, and she got Carson a glass of water because he was always thirsty in the middle of the night. She sat on his bed. “Tarrytown’s a regular old town like any other.”

  Carson shook his head. “It’s different here. It is scary. Even the sunset is scary.”

  Bitty brushed back his fine blond hair. When the sun had set tonight as Aubrey left for her meeting, its colors were violent and awful—a hue like a fresh-squeezed blood orange as rain clouds rolled in. The trees blackened to grotesque silhouettes, as if they had been frozen in terrible agony, reaching skyward even as they were being dragged into hell. Bitty was sure that at least some of the local lore had been inspired by an overabundance of sunsets, time, and sky.

  “Nothing can hurt you here,” she told her son.

  “But what if it does?”

  “I won’t let it.”

  “But what about the Horseman?”

  Bitty tried to cover her moment of pause. “There is no Horseman.”

  “Yes there is.”

  “No—”

  “Then why are there all those movies about him killing people and stuff?”

  “They’re just stories. Sometimes people like to sit around and scare themselves for fun.”

  “Like we do at Scouts?” Carson adjusted his pillow. “When we’re camping?”

  “Right,” Bitty said.

  “But the stories have to come from somewhere,” Nessa said from her bed across the room.

  Bitty shot her a silent warning. “When a whole bunch of people start talking about a thing, they get themselves all worked up about it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. Remember that story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’?”

  “Sort of,” Nessa said.

  “Well, it’s like if all the people who were watching the naked emperor parade down the street didn’t just pretend they saw him strutting about in his fine clothes. It’s like if they really believed he was. The same thing happens with ghost stories.”

  She could see that her son wasn’t convinced. And she, too, could remember what it was like to be scared of the Horseman.

  Bitty glanced at her watch. She dragged her palms along her thighs as she stood. “There is no Headless Horseman. And I’ll prove it. Just give me a minute.”

  She left and went down the hallway to Mariah’s room, then scanned the bookcase. When she returned to her children, she had the story of Irving’s Headless Horseman in her hands. She had planned to summarize a bit and skip to the ending, but to her surprise, her children wanted to hear the whole thing.

  “It’s a long story,” she warned them. “Not exactly short-attention-span reading.”
r />   “As if there’s anything better going on,” Nessa said.

  “Please?” Carson said. “Come on, Mom. Please?”

  “Okay,” Bitty said. And she propped herself up in Carson’s bed with her kids on either side. She could not remember the last time they had read a story together; it must have been years ago.

  Little by little, they made their way through the old tale—which felt both familiar and somehow new. She read to them about Ichabod Crane, poor, pitiable Ichabod with his gangly arms and legs, his quivering and overactive imagination, his legendary vibrato. She read about Katrina Van Tassel, the pretty, ankle-flashing coquette whose family table was always heaped with apple, plum, or pigeon pie, sweet corn, ginger cakes, olykoeks, and crullers. She read about the braggart Brom Bones and his surreptitious war against Ichabod for Katrina’s affection. And eventually, she read about the Headless Horseman—the ghoulish chase down through the haunted hollow and over the infamous wooden bridge, ending with the monster’s wicked aim with a pumpkin. She paused as she read, talking her children through the landmarks in the story, some of which were still visible or at least commemorated in Tarrytown.

  Over the years, especially during the last few decades, the charming, coy little folktale of love and mischief in Tarrytown had somehow morphed into full-fledged horror. In recent movies and retellings, the Horseman had taken on a life of his own, completely separate and apart from the Horseman of Irving’s imagination. He was a monster, a serial killer, what Jack the Ripper would have been if he were a headless ghost on a stallion of apocalyptic proportions.

  But in Irving’s tale, the Horseman was something else entirely. When the story was over, Bitty asked her children: “Now, who do we think is the real Headless Horseman?”

  And though it took a while for them to figure it out, it was Carson whose round face lit up like a bulb as he said “Brom Bones!”

  “You see?” she said as she bent to tighten the covers around her son’s shoulders. “There is no Headless Horseman. It was just a trick played on poor Ichabod to scare him away from Katrina. And there’s nothing scary about Tarrytown.”