“Oh, look who’s here!” Ruth said. “Well, hello there, Victor.”
“Mrs. Ten Eckye,” Vic said. His mouth turned up at the corners. The crowd thinned enough to let them stop walking. “You’re looking well this evening. Did you enjoy the game?”
“I don’t care for football,” Ruth said. “But my grandson was in the halftime show. He’s got an important part in the reading this year.”
“Great,” Vic said. And he smiled again.
Aubrey stood still. She noticed, quite suddenly, that Vic had let go of her hand, that he had let go of it some time ago, though she could not say when it had happened. She lifted a mitten—a purple-and-white Latvian-style mitten decorated with owls sitting in a tree—and pretended to scrutinize the design.
“How’s that new screen door treating you?” Vic asked.
“Like royalty,” Ruth said. “I understand you did some work for my friend Gladys.”
“Her window seat,” Vic said. “Thanks for the referral.”
“Oh, it was my pleasure,” Ruth said.
They talked for minutes that might have been hours, and Aubrey listened in silence. She began to feel more and more outside—of herself, of Vic, of everything and everyone around them. The crowd that had been like a plush spring creek dwindled into a trickle, and Aubrey realized that without the heat of all those bodies the night had grown brittle with cold. She shivered beneath the layers of her sweater and coat. She hadn’t expected Ruth to address her, and she tried to keep the surprise off her face when the old woman turned.
“Aubrey, dear,” Ruth said. Aubrey knew she’d taken a risk: Ruth could be seen talking to Vic but not to Aubrey—not if she wanted to avoid becoming an object of speculation among her friends. “Vic’s been doing such wonderful work on my house. I do hope he’ll be able to continue.”
“Of course I’ll be happy to,” Vic said, laughing.
He did not hear what Aubrey heard: the veiled threat. The unspoken warning. Vic had been working for months to build up his business one client at a time. A venomous word from Ruth, carefully dropped before one or two of Tarrytown’s nice families, would ruin Vic’s chances of establishing himself with well-paying clientele.
Aubrey didn’t reply, but her silence didn’t seem to matter one way or another. Vic and Ruth said their pleasant good-byes, and once Ruth was gone, Vic started in the direction of the truck. He chatted pleasantly enough but did not take her hand again.
By the time Vic had parked in front of the Stitchery, with the engine idling and the hazard lights on, Aubrey had fallen into a deep silence, mired in the pit of her thoughts and searching for a way out of them. She looked out the window at the Stitchery and it struck her that while other people were decorating their houses with crooked shutters and cobwebs, the Stitchery already had them.
“Are you okay?” Vic asked.
“Oh—yes,” she said.
“What’s wrong?”
She sighed. The worrywart in her wondered: Had Vic let go of her hand because he realized that being with her in public could perhaps be a threat to his business—a consequence that Aubrey should have foreseen? Or had the withdrawal been nothing more than the need to scratch an itch or make some other use of the previously occupied fingers?
She leaned her head back on the seat. She didn’t want friction between them, not so soon. She’d relished every moment with him: she’d never been courted before, never wooed. She felt as if he’d been leading her down a long, narrow hallway, pointing out beautiful things, tempting, rare, and desirable things, showing her what was his, and she had a sense that if she continued along with him, deeper and down, the narrow passageway would eventually open up into a wondrous and cavernous palace, whole and wholly dazzling, all for the two of them. But there was a chance, she saw now, a very real chance, that they might never finish that journey. And in fact, it might be a better choice for both of them to turn back now.
“Sometimes I just …”
“What?” he asked.
“I wish things were different,” she said.
“You didn’t have a good time?”
“Oh yes, I did. It was perfect. I was talking about the Stitchery. I wish things were different with the Stitchery.”
“I’m sorry, Aubrey,” Vic said, his voice slightly stiff. “I’m not following.”
She rubbed her cheek with her mitten, taking comfort in the rough scratch of the wool. Mariah had told her that the only way to say a hard thing was to say it, and think about it later on. “Ruth Ten Eckye might not give you any more referrals or jobs.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Vic asked. His brow was furrowed. “She likes the work I do. And I give her a bargain.”
“She won’t let you into her circle if you keep showing up in public with me.”
Vic was quiet. He looked out the front windshield; Aubrey could tell that something she’d said clicked—that if he hadn’t already been thinking consciously of what it meant to run into Ruth with Aubrey at his side, he was now. “What do my feelings for you have anything to do with installing a door on Ruth’s back balcony?”
Feelings for you, she heard. Feelings for you.
She wrapped her arms around her middle. “I can’t really go into the specifics; it wouldn’t be right. All I can tell you is that the women of Tarrytown have been handing over their secrets to us Van Rippers since the Stitchery began. We know a lot about people, more than we should know. So we’re kept out of the inner workings of Tarrytown—at least on the surface. They don’t really want us around.”
“I doubt you’re missing anything,” Vic said.
“No—Vic. I want to be sure you understand. If you hang around with me, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be kept out, too.”
“Hmm,” Vic said.
Aubrey felt tears in her eyes, but she blinked them back. “Plus, there’s the Madness.”
“What?”
She couldn’t look at him. She stared out the window. “My family … something happens, sometimes. My sister Bitty says it’s just run-of-the-mill dementia, the kind of thing that could happen to anybody, you know? And she says that being alone in the Stitchery for a whole lifetime just makes it worse. But Mariah and the other guardians always said it was the curse of Helen Van Ripper. There’s no telling who’ll get it or who won’t. But some of us Van Rippers lose our minds.”
Vic looked at her for a long moment. “Aubrey … What are you really trying to tell me?”
She wished he would touch her again, touch her in that easy, familiar new way, an arm around her shoulders, a pressing and promising heat. But he only sat with his palms flat on his jeans and did not reach for her.
“I worry that this isn’t a good idea,” she said. She felt oddly disconnected from the words, probably because she did not fully believe them. “You and me—I mean.”
He looked out the driver’s-side window and exhaled hard enough to fog it. She could say no more. She trusted him to put the other pieces together: to understand that it was not merely his business that he put at risk by being with her, but his place in the community, and his future children’s place, and his life’s happiness as a person who wanted to be a part of the core, beating heart of Tarrytown. He deserved to be happy, long into his old age.
“Are you saying you want to call it off?” he asked at last.
No! she cried in her mind. I’m saying I’ve never felt like this with anyone before, and that I don’t know if I’ll ever feel this way again, and I’d pitch my knitting needles into the river tomorrow if I wasn’t already promised to Tarrytown, and if I thought it would mean you could be with me without risking the life you want for yourself.
Her throat knotted, the words she couldn’t speak choking her. Did she want to call it off? Of course not. But she said: “Maybe that’s what’s best.”
He was silent.
“This has been really … fun,” she said. Her voice cracked on the lie. Fun was not what this was. Trampolines were fun. Ball p
its were fun. This feeling of her heart being ripped out of her chest every time Vic looked at her—this was not fun.
She knew what was happening: She was falling in love. And a falling heart was no different from any falling object, so that the more time it spent plummeting, the faster it went, faster and faster, speed doubling, quadrupling, building on itself. And she knew that perhaps it was best to put a stop to this—the gravity-defying sensation that comes with falling—because the longer she waited, the harder and faster she would tumble, and the greater the impact when at last, inevitably, she—and he—hit ground.
“I’ll always want you in my life,” she said, doing her best to keep from crying. When she closed her eyes, she saw his future: his kids, his wife, all of them happy, at a football game in the autumn, all their many friends and neighbors gathering around. Her throat ached. “But maybe it’s better if we just be friends. We’ve got really different futures ahead of us, you know? We’re headed different ways.”
She heard him sigh. The sound was a gentle letting down.
“You can think about it. You don’t have to decide right now,” she said.
“How generous that I don’t have a deadline,” he said.
She waited. The moment drew out long. It occurred to her that optimism could be a kind of self-inflicted torture, because what she’d wanted was for him to say There’s no decision to make or I don’t need to think about it, and then kiss her so hard and deep that they both would forget this whole awkward conversation ever happened.
But instead he said, “Maybe we both need to think.”
She nodded and blinked back tears. She tried to flash him a friendly smile; she suspected it failed. With a deep breath, she threw open the door and launched herself from the truck. Vic didn’t wait to see her safely inside. The engine roared as he drove away, and then there was only the cold, the smell of charcoal and frost, and the Stitchery, rising like a dark and craggy mountain at her back while she watched Vic’s brake lights burn.
Aubrey wiped the tears from her cheeks with her mittens. She looked up at the Stitchery. She gave it her best wet-eyed, acid-blue glare.
“I hope you’re happy,” she tried to say. But the words broke up like ice on the river, and then there was nothing left to do but drag herself inside.
In the late evening, just as the sun had been going down, Meggie had climbed up to the roof of the Stitchery to lounge as she had not done in many years. She’d heaved open the window of the room that used to be her mother’s, then scrambled carefully up the steep, gritty slopes. She lay back on her elbows and crossed her ankles and looked out over the wide sweep of the river, shining and black. In the distance to the south, she could make out the jutting skyline of Manhattan, glittering and bright under the sky.
She used to come up here with her sisters. They would sit and talk and watch the sun go down—and then inevitably get in trouble with Mariah when they were caught. But now it was Tori who was by Meggie’s side, drinking a black cherry wine cooler. A variegated, Möbius scarf was draped around her neck. Tori did not yet realize that Meggie had made it for her as a parting gift. A Möbius, a shape that had only one single edge, one line that curved infinitely around itself, seemed like the right gesture: Meggie was leaving, but she wanted their friendship to always go on.
“I was thinking,” Tori said. “Maybe when you leave, I should go with you.”
Meggie turned her head; the wind blew softly behind her ear. “Why would you want to do that?”
Tori shrugged. “Same reason as you. To see the world. To get out of Tarrytown. There’s only so many reenactments of colonial America that a person can take.”
“I hear you. You can’t go into a convenience store this time of year without getting in line behind somebody in pinafore and petticoats.”
“Or a semi-retired guy wearing breeches who’s texting on his iPhone and smells like barn,” Tori said.
“Or zombies banging on the windows of your car in the parking lot of Dunkin’ Donuts at seven A.M. before you had your coffee, waving around fliers to promote a haunted house.”
“Okay, you win,” Tori said.
Meggie laughed.
“Seriously,” Tori said. “Let me go with you. We’ll have fun.”
Meggie felt a warm glow rise behind her breastbone. She thought of what it would be like to have Tori with her, with her for all the sleepy no-name towns, with her for all the long car rides, with her for all the adventures in sleazy city neighborhoods. But Tori had a romantic idea of life on the open road, and Meggie knew the truth: that it was dirty and difficult and so lonely a person could go nuts. And if Tori agreed to follow Meggie from town to town, state to state, it would only be a matter of time before they had a fight—and Meggie would rather Tori was here in Tarrytown having good thoughts about her than by her side and hating her guts for dragging her from Coxsackie to Kalamazoo.
Plus, she didn’t know how she could tell Tori about her mother. She didn’t know how to tell anyone.
“I don’t think it would work,” Meggie said.
“Why not?”
“I just don’t.”
“Such a damn rebel.” She turned away and tipped back her glass bottle. It caught the streetlight gleam. “You should have been born a cowboy. Or maybe a peddler. Or a—what are those people who join the circus called? A carney.”
“I didn’t like working the circus,” Meggie said. “Those monkeys look cute but they’re nasty sons of bitches.”
Tori looked at her.
“I’m kidding,” Meggie said.
Tori offered a halfhearted laugh.
“The monkeys are very nice,” Meggie said contritely.
Tori rolled her eyes.
Somewhere above the jutting shins of the Palisades, a militia of Canada geese drove hard down the dark sky. Meggie couldn’t see the birds, but she could hear them—the strident honking alarm. Mariah, who would buy anything from anybody when it came to things like smudge sticks and sacred stones, said that if you saw a Canada goose, it meant that you had come full circle—that you were at a new beginning in an old cycle. Meggie had never been quite as gullible as Mariah, nor quite as ready to believe without question. But Meggie did believe in signs—not the dregs of tea leaves in porcelain cups, not pennies that landed heads up, or the fortune-telling properties of dandelions. But she believed in signs as focal points, manifestations that were noticed only because an already existing desire caused them to be noticed. A person might encounter a million telling moments a day; the mind would choose the ones that would be signs.
Now, as the sound of the geese disappeared, her heart felt the slow sad drift that meant it was time for her to start moving on.
“Oh no you don’t,” Tori said.
“What?”
Tori sat up and crossed her legs beneath her. “Dammit, Meggie. Sometimes a bird is just a bird and a tree is just a tree—because whether you like it or not, God isn’t reconfiguring the whole universe just so you get on the road again.”
Meggie sighed. The geese had forced Meggie to give a name to the feeling that was in her heart—the feeling that it was time to go. And that seemed to her to be the very point and character of a sign. “I don’t want to argue with you,” Meggie said.
“And I don’t want you to leave.”
Meggie tipped her wine cooler upside down and watched the last purple droplet run down to the lip and land on the roof.
“Did something happen?” Tori asked. “Did you have a fight with the sisters?”
She thought of Bitty’s letter. She would have to leave tomorrow; she could not stand another day. “No. We didn’t have a fight.”
“Then what?”
“It’s just time for me to get moving again,” she said. And to her misery, she felt her throat fill with tears. She was tired of traveling, exhausted down to her bones. She was weary of having to learn new neighborhoods and new streets every few weeks or months. She was tired of waking up and not remembering which direc
tion to head in to find the bathroom in the darkness. On voyages and trips in the movies, people found themselves. But she sometimes felt she was nothing more than one giant question mark, a placeholder for the person that she might someday, with any luck, become.
But it didn’t matter. What mattered was finding her mother, if there was even the slightest possibility that her mother could be found.
“I’m sorry,” she told Tori. “But I’ll make you a promise. This time, when I go, I’ll call you more. I’ll come back again. Often. To see you. I won’t lose touch with you again.”
Tori downed the last of her wine cooler. “Whatever you say.”
* * *
Bitty stood outside her children’s room in the Stitchery, at war with herself. Nessa and Carson were connected to their father by the speakers of Bitty’s cell. They were wishing him good night, as they had almost every night since they’d arrived in Tarrytown. She did not feel comfortable eavesdropping, and yet she wanted to know what Craig was saying about her, if he was saying anything at all. She worried that he would try to turn the kids against her. Through the door she could make out a word here or there, nothing more. She paced the long corridor with its night-blackened window at the far end. She dragged her fingertips along the wall that was the color of sun-bleached sand.
Do you love him? Aubrey had asked her those many years ago when they’d still lived together under the same roof and the idea of a wedding was half a dream.
Oh yes, she’d said.
From the bedroom, her children laughed.
This morning, she’d written out her confession and she knew it had been read. She hadn’t been able to talk with her sisters about it—because Aubrey was at work and then at her meeting, and because Meggie had been in a standoffish mood. But nevertheless, she felt unburdened. The weight she’d been carrying was suddenly put down. And for the first time in a long time, her head felt clear and she could think. She flattened her hands above her tailbone and leaned on the wall beside the children’s door.
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