The Wishing Thread

by Van Allen, Lisa

  She was drunk on optimism, giddy and stupid, over such a small thing as a date. Expectation had left her sleepless, grinning into her pillow like a schoolgirl, her whole body taut and silly as Cupid’s bow. All night long, she grappled with her hope, trying to wrestle it into submission, to remind herself that her future was prescribed—a life of lonely but satisfying work within the Stitchery walls. And yet her hope could not be quashed.

  When the dim glow of day came through the blinds, she was glad for the excuse to finally get out of bed. She made coffee and watched the sunrise tease the sky into lightness out over the valley. Then, although all the inhabitants of the house were asleep, she pulled on a thick brown sweater with a yoke of Norwegian snowflakes. She girded herself in a hat, scarf, and gloves, and made her way into the backyard.

  The morning was nippy, the sun sparkling down on the valley as if through the hard clear glass of an icicle. The backyard—which was older and slightly bigger than many of the properties in Tappan Square—was slicked with maple leaves like a pelt of wet, ruddy animal fur, and the air smelled sweet with fermentation. The Hudson in the distance, below the prehistoric ridges of the opposite shore, was gray as slate.

  She wrestled a rake out of the old, sealed outhouse and got to work. Her breath was white. Patches of sunlight felt deliciously warm on her skin. She was sweating slightly, her scarf and hat removed and hanging from a gangly rhododendron, when Carson bolted through the back door and into the yard.

  “Oh!” he said. His little feet skidded on leaves, and he nearly fell.

  She smiled. “Good morning! Whatcha doing?”

  “Nothing.” His lip curled and he glanced behind him. “My sister’s a jerkwad.”

  “What happened?”

  “She took my 3DS, and didn’t charge the battery, and now I can’t play Spy Hunter until it charges again, and that’s going to take forever, and it’s not fair, and she can’t even say sorry.” He huffed, exhausted by the effort of his story.

  “That stinks,” Aubrey said.

  “You can say sucks.” He eyed her warily now, as if he’d first thought she was a compatriot but now was second-guessing. “Mom says it’s not a bad word.”

  “Is your mom awake?”

  “She’s in the shower.”

  “Aunt Meggie?”

  “Guess.”

  “Right. Sleeping.” She looked at him; he was still wearing his pajamas—sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She held up her rake like a marching band baton. “Do you want to help?”

  “Me?”

  “Of course you.”

  “I’m too little.”

  Aubrey laughed. “Who says?”

  “Well …” He shifted nervously. “What would I have to do?”

  “The sticks,” she said. She pointed here and there in the small yard. “If you could put them in a pile for me, that would be a huge help.”

  He made one last glance behind him, perhaps to see if he was being followed. Then he said, “Okay, but can I get my coat?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He hurried back into the house, and a moment later he was with her again, suited up in a puffy, evergreen-colored ski jacket and a blue fleece hat with a stitched-on New York Giants logo. He bent to pick up a naked, twisted branch on the grass, a remnant of the summer’s rolling storms. “Like this?”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  They worked for a while in silence, Carson picking up kinked branches and Aubrey stripping leaves from the lawn to reveal the dull green grass beneath. Carson seemed agitated, working a little too quickly, with a little more focus than a boy his age should have been able to muster for such a job.

  “Everything okay?” Aubrey asked.

  He shrugged.

  “Homesick?”

  He shrugged again.

  She dragged the rake along the grass; metal tines whinnied over the earth. A layer of dry, crisp leaves hid a layer of wet ones, clumping thick and damp like the skins of ripe fruits. Aubrey tugged them into a pile, the rake scraping along the grass in satisfying little roars.

  “Aunt Aubrey?”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s all the stuff in the tower?”

  Aubrey kept her pace with her rake. “Did you go in?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Not me. Nessa said she found all this stuff in the tower. Like a museum.”

  “That’s nothing,” she said, as lightly as she could. Nessa hadn’t said anything to her about finding the sacrifices. Her niece must have been snooping. “It’s just some old things.”

  Carson stooped then stood, another twig in his hand. “Is she gonna get in trouble for going in your room?”

  Aubrey tried not to laugh. Carson was gunning to get his big sister into trouble. She must have really ticked him off. “I’ll take care of it.”

  He frowned, disappointed. “She snoops all the time, you know. All the time.”

  “She does, huh?”

  “Yep,” he said, almost cheerful now. “She even goes into Mom’s room at home. That’s how she found out about the divorce.”

  Aubrey couldn’t help but go still, a quick hiccup in the pace of her raking, before she picked up the tempo again. Bitty had not said anything to her about a divorce. Bitty had not said much about her marriage at all. Aubrey guessed there were problems, but she hadn’t realized how serious they were.

  “You should tell,” he said. “You should tell my mom what Nessa did. She’s not supposed to go in Mom’s room. Or your room—right? She’s not supposed to go into your room.”

  “No, I suppose she’s not,” Aubrey said, and she stopped raking, leaned as much of her weight on the handle as it would bear, and looked out to the river. Nessa should not have been rummaging around, not if Bitty wanted to keep the secrets of the Stitchery away from her daughter. That would have to be stopped.

  But Nessa’s snooping was a minor problem—a passing shower on a bright day. Bitty’s divorce, if there was a divorce, was a storm. Unfortunately when it came to helping Bitty, questions could not be asked outright. There always had to be a kind of oblique approach, a gauche stumbling-into, or a falsely innocent, no-eye-contact advance like one might draw near a snarling dog. Bitty did not distinguish compassionate questioning from being forcibly and critically questioned.

  “Where should I put these?” Carson punctured her thinking. He held a bundle of sticks in his arms. She gestured to the side of the yard. He went in the direction she’d pointed and dropped his load.

  “There’s no more sticks,” he said. He stood on the glistening grass, foreshortened, asking for something that couldn’t be said. Aubrey heard the screen door swing open, and Bitty was there—awake, dressed, showered, and looking quite put-together and refreshed in dark jeans and a baby pink fleece. “You guys want breakfast?”

  “Pancakes!” Carson shouted. He ran to his mother and grabbed her two hands, tugging and jumping. “Pan-pan-pancakes!”

  “I’ll have what he’s having,” Aubrey said.

  “Give me ten minutes.” Bitty pulled Carson’s hat more firmly over his ears, then went inside.

  “Ten minutes?” Carson said. “We better hurry!”

  Aubrey must have glanced away for a moment—just a second split in half—because when she regained her focus, Carson was running and shouting “Geronimo!” And then next thing she knew, he was waist-deep in leaves. He grabbed big armfuls and tossed them into the air; some leaves floated gently, dry as bits of paper in the sun. Others lifted, flopped, and stuck flat and wet to Carson’s hat and coat.

  Aubrey laughed.

  “Leaf fight!” Carson threw a fistful of leaves that did not fly very far. Aubrey held up her hands anyway and squealed. If she’d hesitated—if she’d paused at all—it was a pause that occupied no more time than it took for the sun to inch imperceptibly forward in the sky, or for the earth to turn its face hundreds of miles deeper into autumn. She dropped her rake and launched herself forward, into the little pile of leaves, into her nephew’s imp
ish laughter, into whatever happiness the day was going to offer or not, without question.

  Meggie stood in the yarn room, an afghan in a chevron pattern draped over her shoulders, her cup of coffee steaming white. The Stitchery’s ancient coal-burning furnace had been worked over to burn oil, and though it strove mightily, pipes clanging at their joints, radiators hissing with effort, the old heating system was no match for the chill of an autumn morning. Most winters, they hadn’t had enough money to heat more than one room at a time of the big, drafty house. Meggie could remember waking up in the morning, the house so cold she could nearly see her breath, the tip of her nose frozen where it peeped from her half-a-dozen covers. She would throw her blankets off fast, merciless, and run as quickly as she could to the kitchen, where Mariah would be sitting at the table reading or knitting. Old cotton quilts hung over doorways and windows, making the room look like a child’s play fort. The four burners of the gas stove were four blue lotuses, each flame a petal of heat. And while her sisters went a little stir-crazy in such tight quarters, Meggie loved their enforced company, loved that if they wanted to be warm, they had to be together, talking, knitting, reading, passing time.

  She hitched her afghan a little higher around her shoulders. She was slightly hung over. Bitty had made coffee, and Meggie probably should have stayed in the kitchen to keep her sister company while she cooked breakfast. But she’d needed to get out of earshot. The banging of pans, the clinking of silverware on porcelain … each sound slammed her skull like a mallet on a bell.

  Last night, she and Tori had stayed out late, like they used to. They linked arms and walked down bright blocks in the East Village, they laughed with strangers and with each other, they drank until the concrete buckled and tipped under their feet. It was as if nothing had changed.

  Now she held up her arm, the knitted afghan falling away from her skin. Tori’s cell phone number was scrawled on her wrist in bold, blue ink. When Tori had said good-bye, she’d said it as if they would never see each other again. She fanned her fingers along Meggie’s short, short hair, then she’d smiled sadly and left Meggie standing at the Stitchery door. She’d made Meggie swear to call her sometimes. Meggie had agreed; she could promise that much. But she didn’t know how much longer she would be in Tarrytown.

  She moved across the cold yarn room to a lengthened rectangle of light from the window. To stand in the yarn shop was to stand in a bubble where time had stopped. Yarns that had been piled in an old barrel ten years ago were still untouched. The rickety umbrella swift was still perched on the edge of the counter. The dust in the shop had grown thicker over the years, like a ring of an ancient tree.

  Meggie picked up a skein of deep blue wool and a feeling of nostalgia, mournful as the call of a distant train on a rainy day, passed through her. Often she knit while she was traveling—not spells, but projects: gifts or items to sell online. She knit because knitting reminded her of her family, because it distracted her, because she didn’t know why. The urge to knit came like a monster—a deranged Mr. Hyde with needles and sock yarn—and she had no control. No matter what city she was in, she sometimes found herself scrambling for supplies, shoving her crumpled bills at the cashier—it didn’t even matter that the yarn felt like garden twine—and then she was hurrying to whatever place she was calling home at the time, where she did not feel relief until she was firing off stitches like shots of dopamine to her brain.

  But then as quickly as the drive to knit had lurched into gear, it just as quickly puttered out. Weeks would slip by, and she had no more interest in her knitting needles than she had in filing her taxes. She could not conjure even the smallest amount of love for the craft.

  The whiplash—indifference transmuted into love and back to indifference again—made her speculate if the power of the Stitchery over her was like the moon over the earth, tugging unevenly on the oceans, pulling unevenly on her, making her sometimes love knitting and sometimes hate it, making waves. Then, in the same breath, she wondered if the Stitchery was just a house like any other, and if it was her own temperament that was like the moon—waxing and waning and shifting from one phase to the next, with the Stitchery never changing so much as counting on her to change.

  She put down the midnight-blue yarn and sipped her coffee.

  Last night Tori had said, with the depth and profound meaning that can only come from drunkenness, I don’t know what you’re running from. But running from something doesn’t make it go away.

  Now, with the morning light as thin and cold as the glass it streamed through, Meggie knew she should get moving. She was not running—not at all. She was searching, and the search had to go on. Sometimes, when she felt like her search had been futile, she reread her journal, the one she’d been using to record every little shred of a clue about her mother. It was full of Polaroids and jotted notes and pasted-on maps. Meggie had looked over her journal so many times that she’d nearly memorized it. Some of her notes, however, no longer meant anything to her, as she couldn’t remember why she’d written them.

  Who is Lucy M in Piscataway?

  Pleasant Acres, nursing home. Denver.

  She liked cashews. Saratoga Raceway—waitressed at pub and grill? Gambling?

  The clues she’d found—sometimes nothing more than a note scrawled on a bathroom stall that said LVR WAS HERE—reminded her that there was every possibility that her mother wasn’t dead. Lila had been a wanderer; she might have simply wandered away. Perhaps she was on some world-conquering adventure. Or perhaps she’d simply forgotten who she was—if the Madness had taken hold—and needed someone to bring her home again.

  Unfortunately, the trail had gone cold. On her way back up to the Stitchery, Meggie had hoped—as she watched the miles go by and the autumn leaves become brighter and brighter—that coming home might give her some new ideas, some new leads to follow. Or at the very least, she hoped that she might feel her mother in some way, get a little closer to her by being in the Stitchery again.

  But none of those things had happened. She assured herself: It wouldn’t be hard to leave Tarrytown. Her heart went where she went, always leaving a trail of bread crumbs, a path between one city and the next that she would never trace back. Leaving was something she was good at, something she could do. To remind herself, she only had to think of Tori, and the Stitchery, and every man she’d ever met who made her think, simultaneously, Maybe and I should go.

  And yet, standing in the yarn room, her throat tight with memories, and the sound of Bitty in the kitchen talking to Nessa and cracking eggs on the counter’s edge, Meggie knew that if she left now, she would miss something—and she hated to be left out. She’d spent the first few years of her life being told she was “too little” to do the things that Aubrey and Bitty were allowed to do, and she had not liked the thought of being excluded then any more than she liked it now.

  She supposed that as long as Bitty was at the Stitchery, there could be no harm in hanging around. The search for her mother still burned hot in her veins, but the trail seemed to be cooling. She would stay for a while longer—and she would knit. Something for Tori. A gift for her friend—possibly her only friend, when she was honest with herself—to remember her by. And then, when the sign came that she needed to return to her searching, she would be on her way.

  Aubrey and Carson made their way into the kitchen, their cheeks tinged pink from morning air. The rest of the family had already settled in for breakfast. Bitty stood at the stove, nudging pancakes in a frying pan with a silver spatula. Meggie slouched at the table, a blanket over her shoulders in chocolate brown, pumpkin, and cream.

  “It smells amazing in here!” Aubrey said. The kitchen was warm and stuffy compared with the air outside. “Like I died and went to heaven and it’s made of pancakes instead of clouds.”

  “Thanks,” Bitty said.

  Aubrey shuffled Carson to the sink to wash his hands, then got him seated next to his sister at the table. She kissed Meggie on the top of the head
as she passed by her chair.

  “Aren’t we the little ingénue this morning,” Meggie said. “What’s got you so happy?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Aubrey said, fairly singing. “Well, nothing much. It’s just that—” She felt pleasure tighten her belly; what a delicious thrill it was to have news, actual news, worth sharing. “I have a date tonight.”

  “You do?” Bitty asked.

  “With who?” Meggie asked at the same time.

  “I do,” Aubrey said. “With Vic.”

  “Shut the front door!” Meggie’s palm smacked the table. “I had no idea he was into you. I totally couldn’t tell!”

  Aubrey glanced at her and slid into a chair.

  “That’s great,” Bitty said, though her voice was flat. She set down a high stack of spongy pancakes that wobbled on the plate. The table was an instant flurry of children’s hands—fingers snatching this and that, scrabbling for syrup and butter and refills of milk. Bitty returned to the stove. “So who did they elect last night to take over the Tappan Watch?”

  “Please tell me it was the hot black guy,” Meggie said.

  Aubrey smiled, only slightly disappointed that the conversation had so quickly shifted away from Vic. “It was.”

  Meggie wedged a hunk of pancake between her lips, then tucked it into her cheek and spoke. “Good. He’ll do a good job.”

  “You … you’re for Tappan Square?” Aubrey asked, surprised. She’d presumed that since Meggie had hightailed it out of town the moment she could, and since she wanted to sell the Stitchery rather than hold on to it, she would also be glad to see Tappan Square reduced to lumber.