Bitty did not turn from brushing her hair. And so Meggie recounted the stories she could remember: The girls had seen Elle Greenfeder offer a set of candlesticks in exchange for a hat that would help her son with his ADHD, and then the son rose to the top of his class. They’d seen a young woman sacrifice a signed copy of an old novel, and a week later the woman appeared in the Stitchery to say how joyful she was now that her brother had agreed to move back to Tarrytown. They’d seen Teddy Carpenter’s family offer up their heirloom jewelry to have the doctors pronounce with wonder that the blot they’d seen in her breast tissue was suddenly and miraculously gone.
“So there must be something,” Meggie said. “Even if we can’t quite control it. Even if we’re not getting it right.”
But Bitty was obstinate. “What I’ve seen is the power of suggestion at work. The placebo effect. What happens here isn’t magic. It’s just people talking themselves into things, and then—because they’re talked into them—the things start to happen, and everybody says Oh, it’s magic, when really it’s just the power of a person changing her mind.”
Aubrey was quiet. What could she say to defend herself against Bitty’s charges? There was nothing rational—no proof. Just a big, consuming Maybe that, for Aubrey, had always been in and of itself enough to get her through the low points. She gathered her courage. And then she spoke. “Regardless of what you think about the magic, it’s up to Nessa to make up her own mind.”
“I second that,” Meggie said. She sat up a little on the bed.
Aubrey dug a nail into her thumb.
Bitty put the hairbrush down on its pewter tray. Her gold heart necklace lifted on her chest with each inhalation. When she spoke, she did not look at herself in the mirror; her eyes were downcast. “Okay.”
“Okay?” Aubrey said.
“Whoa.” Meggie crossed her legs beneath her on the bed. “What just happened?”
Bitty looked up. “I’ll talk to Nessa. I’ll tell her the theory about the magic. You’re right that she’s old enough to know and make a decision of her own. And I’m perfectly confident that she’ll make the right decision.”
“That’s great,” Aubrey said, gratified for once in her life to have won a debate with her older sister. Maybe, she thought, things do change.
“She’s not a guardian,” Bitty said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Nobody said she was,” Meggie said.
Bitty seemed to be holding her breath, and she let it out in a long stream. She turned away from the mirror to look at Aubrey. “I should probably thank you.”
“For what?”
“For not telling Nessa about the Stitchery before I had a chance to. For giving me the opportunity to tell her in my own way.”
“Of course,” Aubrey said.
Bitty turned back to the mirror and picked up the hairbrush again. “So what are you wearing on this date tonight?” she said.
Aubrey’s sisters made a fuss over her after all—a lovely, gloriously indulgent fuss. Aubrey said the expected things: You don’t have to do this, and It’s okay. But the truth was, she loved the way her sisters tittered and clucked and made sure she had eaten a snack so she wouldn’t overeat at dinner. She liked that they deliberated about her clothes and hair, that they demanded to paint her toenails and would not let her wear her cotton granny panties even though they were much more comfortable than the one thong she owned. For the first time in a long time, they were a team. And Aubrey had milked her own romantic cluelessness for all it was worth, asking about shoes and coats and first-date rules until her face hurt from smiling, and until her sisters decided to give her a moment alone.
Now she regarded herself in her bedroom mirror. She wore dark leggings and a white sweater that slipped from one shoulder in an angelic halo of cashmere. It might have been the luckiest thrift-store purchase Aubrey had ever made. The earrings she’d borrowed from Meggie were slender silver threads that made her neck look pretty and long. There was only one problem with her appearance. The effect of mascara and eyeliner—Nessa’s doing—wasn’t quite enough to tamp the blue lightning of her irises. Aubrey could not see their awful blueness, which was one of the worst parts about them. But she knew they were shining like two blue flames set deep in her sockets. A horror show.
She sighed. Mariah had always said her eyes were something to be proud of: God doesn’t light a candle for you to hide it under a bowl. And yet what choice was there but to put on her dark glasses? Aubrey knew how people saw her. She wanted Vic to look at her without being appalled.
She pulled the frames from her dresser, slipped their thick plastic arms on her ears.
“Okay,” she coached herself aloud. “No need to be pessimistic. Vic already knows you’re weird, and he likes you anyway. So, relax.” She shook her arms and legs, wiggling them like a boxer warming up for a fight. She was not like other twenty-eight-year-olds. Her life was complicated. And Vic would have expectations, specific expectations of a romantic nature that she might not be able to meet. She half wondered if she should warn him.
“Relax,” she said.
The doorbell rang; it warbled like a sick wren.
“Aubrey!” Nessa sang up the stairs. “Your love-uh is here!”
For a moment, Aubrey did not move. She looked at herself, thought, This isn’t my life. She had the strangest sense that for things to be so wonderful, so right, something in the fabric of the universe must have gone wrong.
But—there was the rumble of Vic’s laughter at the foot of the hall stairs. There was the cotillion of female voices, Carson’s tinkling little laugh. There was the Stitchery, so filled up with possibility it seemed to be a different place entirely from the unchanging building she and Mariah and dozens of other guardians had called home.
This is the end of something, the Stitchery seemed to whisper.
She heard Nessa call her name.
“Coming!” she said. And she headed downstairs.
Nessa had fallen in love with the Stitchery. Her mother’s house was much more beautiful, with every wall exactly perpendicular to every floor, and with every countertop glinting black granite, and with every room connected with intercoms so that they could talk to one another even when they were apart. But the Stitchery … it was everything her house was not. It was a house that had secrets to tell. And it was telling them, Nessa realized, to her.
She was knitting in her bedroom, Carson across from her on his identical bed playing a video game, when her mother came in quickly and without warning. Or there might have been warning, but knitting did something in Nessa’s brain, something that made it feel like water must feel when it turns into steam, and so she did not hear her mother come in. Too late she looked up from her scarf, which was trailing down off the bed like a purple waterfall.
“Sh—oot,” Nessa said, choking off a curse word. She scrambled a little to hide her work, realized there was no use, then set her foggy brain into gear. “I was just looking at this scarf Aunt Aubrey was making. I just wanted to see if—”
“Save it,” her mother said. “I already know.”
Nessa scowled at her brother, who was watching her now from across the room. “You little rodent!” she yelled at him. His eyes went wide in feigned innocence.
“It wasn’t your brother,” Bitty said. “Aubrey told me. And she told me you went into the tower, too.”
Nessa’s anger came up swiftly, as it sometimes did, hot and gusty like a strong, sudden wind. Her eyes pricked with instant tears. Her heart knocked into overdrive. She threw the scarf down on the floor. The silver needles clanged against the wood and the last little ball of yarn rolled away. “You always do this! You always take away everything that makes me happy!”
She got to her feet, but her mother was there in a moment. She took Nessa’s shoulders. Nessa would have wrenched away, but she saw that the look on her mother’s face was not exactly angry so much as scared.
“Nessa,” she said. And she held Nessa’s hands.
&
nbsp; Nessa quieted. Her mother’s grip annoyed her. She pulled away.
“Sit down.”
Nessa did. She watched as her mother bent and gathered the scarf, yarn ball, and needles. She stood with Nessa’s handiwork, looking down at it with only the smallest wrinkle between her brows. Nessa was more nervous than if the yarn had been a report card.
“Pretty good,” her mother said. “Your stitches are really even.”
“But they’re not perfect,” Nessa said with caution. She wasn’t sure if this was a test. “Some are looser or tighter.”
“When you’re all done, we’ll block it. That will help even things out.”
“Did you say block it?”
“Yes. Your great-aunt Mariah always said that blocking was how you got the stitches to share with each other. We wet it down, give the fabric a few careful tugs, and pin it into the shape we want it to be.”
“And it stays like that?”
“If we do it right,” Bitty said.
“So … does this mean, like, you’re not mad?”
“Mad at what?” Bitty said.
Nessa was confused. She’d always assumed there was something off limits about yarn and knitting, about anything having to do with the Stitchery, since the fact was that her mother came from a house of professional knitters but had never so much as picked up a skein of yarn in Walmart just to see how it felt in her hands. Nessa could not shake the sense that she was being tricked.
“May I?” Bitty asked, and she gestured to Nessa’s bed to ask permission to sit. This, too, was new.
“I don’t care,” Nessa said.
Her mother sat. Old springs wheezed with the weight. “You know, I guess I haven’t really told you guys much about the Stitchery.”
Understatement of the year, Nessa thought.
“What’s all the stuff hidden in the tower?” Carson asked. He came to the bed and sat down with them, snuggling babyishly against his mom.
“Oh that,” Bitty said. “Well, you see …”
And then she began to hint at the thing that Nessa had been waiting for, the thing that she’d been fully expecting and counting on her mother to say, even if she had not known the words for it but had felt it glowing inside her. And there was some rambling, some excusing and eye rolling about the things people say, about how certain people got certain ideas in their heads, and how everybody had their own ideas but nobody knew for sure, and how it was just old wives’ tales, family traditions, the stories that every family had, until the whole darn speech was going in circles, circles that her mother was trying to draw with her eyes closed, circles that opened into spirals, and Nessa was clenching her teeth and shouting in her mind, Please please please just say it already!
And then, her mother did say it. And no amount of hedging or couching or not-quite-apologizing could change the way it landed in the room like a fat black cannonball crashing through the ceiling and wedging in the floor. Because it was magic.
Nessa could have sworn she heard the Stitchery creak in reply.
Later that evening, after Bitty had said that she and Nessa would be going out to do a little shopping, Meggie did not need it clarified that she would be staying home with Carson. She was happy to see Bitty and her daughter getting along, and she liked Carson. She thought that of everyone who was in the Stitchery, it was Carson she understood best—maybe because they were both the youngest.
“Do you want to go out and do something?” she asked him. The Stitchery felt empty and oppressive without her sisters in it.
“Do we? Of course we do,” Carson said, and Meggie laughed. Earlier in the day she’d found herself telling Carson about the royal we—she didn’t know how it had come up—and he’d thought it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. He’d been referring to himself, with charming pint-sized kingliness, as we ever since. “But how shall we go anywhere if you don’t have a car?”
“Oh please. You’ve been stuck in suburbia for ten years too long,” Meggie said. “Did you bring your Halloween costume with you?”
“I dunno.” His little lip sprung out.
“What are you going to be?”
“A dalmatian. It’s Mom’s idea.”
Meggie frowned in sympathy. “Yeah. That’s kinda lame. Did she say you have to be a dalmatian?”
“Well—” He struggled, working out details. “Well, no. But I can’t make the costume; she has to make it. So I have to be what she says.”
“Let’s see what we can do about that.”
She gathered the far-flung pieces of his outerwear, then stuffed, buttoned, and zipped until he was toasty. Then they were off into the streets of Tappan Square. Meggie was not nervous about walking around her neighborhood, but by force of habit, her eyes made quick assessments of passersby, watched shadowy alleyways, and took unconscious note of houses that had their lights on. It was not yet late, but the sun was going down earlier by the day and the sky was graying into darkness. As they walked toward the center of town, she held Carson’s hand in hers and they talked over their options for Carson’s costume for Halloween in Tarrytown.
Meggie was, she liked to brag, kind of an expert at Halloween. The awesomeness of Halloween was like the awesomeness of all the other holidays all rolled into one, except without the stress and drama. No matter what city she was in, she always found something to do and people to be with on Halloween. Her costumes were epic—no slutty vampire dresses or Renaissance princess corsets for her. A good Halloween costume was bigger than one person alone; it was zeitgeist. One year, when she was just a little kid, she was a Chia Pet. Another year, she was the gorilla from Donkey Kong. She’d once found herself a pretty empire-waist gown, which she’d embellished with enough blood and gore to tell people that she was Jane Austen’s zombie, and she was sure that the rash of funny zombie books that followed were because some writer must have seen her in a bar. And—okay—once she was a slutty vampire. It seemed to be the thing to do at the time.
She took Carson to the bus stop, where they boarded a bus that took them to a shopping plaza. Meggie hoped for inspiration, maybe one of those Halloween stores that popped up in September and vanished six weeks later. But all she got was a drugstore, brightly lit and crawling with equally well-lit frat kids looking for energy drinks. She held Carson close to her as they found the Halloween aisle.
“What do you think?” she asked. “Let’s get you some gear!”
He looked with professorial scrutiny over the rows of cheap polyester tunics made to look like superhero chests, flattened wigs in plastic pouches, and uncomfortable-looking rubber masks. She watched his optimism fade to dismay.
“Okay—so—” She tried to sound cheery; she wanted so badly for him to be happy. Not only later when they found his costume, but right now. “So here’s an idea. What if you pick out my costume for Halloween?”
“Really?”
“Sure. Anything you pick, I’ll wear it.”
“Swear it, declare it?”
“Swear it, declare it,” she said. And she ignored the completely juvenile little frisson of worry that Carson might pick out a costume that was beneath her standards. Carson made another, closer survey of the Halloween junk—because it was junk—that lined the store shelves. He touched a French maid costume and Meggie had to bite her tongue to keep from suggesting that she should be allowed one veto. “Keep an eye out for a getup for you, too,” she suggested hopefully. “In case you see something you like.”
Carson took an extraordinary amount of time. He went up the aisle, then down, then up again. He teased her: “What about this one for you?” and pointed to a girl in footie pajamas with pigtails and a pacifier. Meggie gave a histrionic groan. “Oh, I know,” he said. “This!” And Meggie shrieked in true horror when he gripped the corner of a package to show her an old-lady costume, complete with muumuu and gray wig.
She didn’t speak again until they were done laughing. “Look, it doesn’t have to be a costume from this store. I mean, we could … l
ike … think of something. And make it. I’ve made my own costumes plenty of times before. And I could make yours, too.”
He came to stand beside her again. And though he’d been cheerful a moment ago, now his face was full of somber intention. “Aunt Meg? Maybe this year you could be yourself for Halloween. Because that would be the best costume of all.”
Meggie was speechless. She would have sworn on her life that the floor tipped. Be yourself … She saw the long parade of her Halloweens past, costumed versions of herself walking down the street and waving. And more: There was her hippie phase, her punk-rock phase, her goth phase, her nerdy girl-in-pink-cardigan phase, her glam phase, and her current phase, which was an amalgamation of eighties chic and things she happened to have lying around. If she’d had a gun to her head and had to answer the question Which are you? she wouldn’t have been able to say. She was all. She was none. She’d had more Halloweens than she had years. And here was Carson, who had taken her hand and was looking at her with his soulful, beatific eyes, telling her she was perfect just how she was.
“Are you serious?” she managed.
And to her further shock, Carson laughed—a big bellyful of laughing. Reluctantly, Meggie joined him, though she didn’t yet see the joke.
“Fake out!” he cried. “You totally got had!” And he laughed for a while more, then gave her a stinging high five.
Gradually, Meggie got her feet back underneath her. She didn’t know what to think, so she thought nothing. “Seriously, though. Do you see anything here that will work?”
His cheeks were bright from cold and laughing. But he sobered before he spoke. “I think we shall end up being ourselves for Halloween.”
“Is that … the royal we?”
He nodded.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, Your Majesty. We’ll find something for you better than a dalmatian. We’ll make something. We still have time.”
Vic had not brought flowers. Instead, he’d brought exactly three paper roses, folded neatly from pages of a novel that he’d picked up at a thrift store. Aubrey had been incredulous. Lines of black text crisscrossed delicate paper petals. She brought them to her nose: they smelled like old books and rose oil.
The Wishing Thread Page 18