The Wishing Thread

by Van Allen, Lisa

  His hands reappeared in front of him. He ran his palms down his thighs. “I’m not sure what this means. Are you … waiting for marriage?”

  “God no,” she said.

  “Then … why?”

  She shrugged.

  “And now you want to … with me?”

  She nodded again and hitched her dress higher on her chest. She knew asking Vic to be her first was not a small request—not at her age. There would be too much meaning attached to the thing. “It’s finally happened, hasn’t it?” She stood and crossed the room; she needed air. “You’ve finally realized the extent of just how weird I am and now you’re having second thoughts.”

  He got to his feet and went to her. His hands brushed down her back, which was bare where her dress had fallen open. Goose bumps rose under the pads of his fingers. Her legs were weak. “Text your sisters. Tell them you’re not coming home tonight.”

  She began to move away from him to get her purse, but he caught her wrist. “Not right now,” he managed. Her dress fell around her ankles to the floor.

  Later—which might have been minutes later or might have been days—Aubrey looked out into the cottony darkness of Vic’s bedroom, the simple writing desk limned in orange streetlight, the walls that smelled of fresh spackle, the dark rug in the center of the floor. Vic had wrapped his body around hers. His breath was quiet in her ear, his hand curled around her breast while he slept. She felt so light in both body and mind that if his arm hadn’t been thrown over her she might have floated straight up and out of the bed.

  Sometimes, Mariah had said, life will surprise you. The long expanse of it, of the expected and ordinary going along day in and day out, can be rocked by bursts of the unbelievable. Rainbows appear like massive girders across the sky—or like tiny pinpricks of color caught in a single drop of rain. In the evening dusk over the valley, the moon appears fearsomely monumental, but so small as to fit under a person’s thumb. And yet—Mariah said—all of that surprising beauty is just ordinary magic—like life that first formed from stardust, like the miracle of a baby drawing breath, like time that is space that sways and bends. The best kind of Mysteries, Mariah said, were sometimes not Mysteries at all.

  Aubrey felt Vic’s breathing, and with it, a thing passing between them, a nourishment, an exchange. She was glad she had waited. There was not another man on earth she would have wanted to give this particular moment to. It was Vic’s and it was hers. She knew that in the morning he would wake and make love to her again. But now, she slept, gently and dreamless and trusting, as the hours wore on.

  * * *

  At midnight the Old Baltus Family Restaurant, which everyone knew was just a diner with a fancy name, was nearly empty. Meggie sat in a red Naugahyde booth by the large windows, looking out to the shops of Broadway in Sleepy Hollow. She pulled a cheesy french fry off her plate and listened to the orchestral version of a show tune that she couldn’t quite remember.

  “Good news!” Tori slid into the booth across from her. Today she wore the mandatory white polo shirt that was her waitressing uniform, complete with an embroidered cartoon of a plump, jovial farmer near the shoulder. Her dreads were gathered up into a large, wild knot at the back of her head. “I talked to the other waitress; she says she doesn’t care if I leave a little early.”

  “Great,” Meggie said. “What’s it gonna cost you?”

  “A night of free babysitting for her two-year-old terror child. But that’s okay.”

  “Thanks,” Meggie said.

  “I just have a few more things to do, and then we can go,” Tori said.

  Meggie finished her disco fries as Tori went back to work. For some reason, her heart felt heavy. She’d thought that unburdening herself to her sisters should have lifted her spirits. But instead, she felt a vague, lingering sadness. She did not know why.

  Within ten minutes, she’d finished her fries and Tori had appeared by her side, her apron gone and her coat buttoned to her chin. “Ready?”

  Meggie reached for her wallet in her pocket.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Tori said.

  They went into the parking lot, and Tori unlocked the door for Meggie to climb inside. The car was old and rusted, but it had been Tori’s trusted chariot since high school and seemed to be in no hurry to pass over into its next automotive life. The windshield was dirty and the dashboard was covered with stickers of Tori’s favorite bands.

  “Where do you want to go?” Tori asked.

  “I don’t know,” Meggie said. “I really just wanted to talk.”

  Tori turned up the heat, but the fans blew cold air. “I thought you might. I mean—what are you still doing here? Not that I’m not happy you came and rescued me from the rest of my shift. But you said you’d be gone by now.”

  Meggie leaned back against the wide bench seat. “I guess there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “About …?”

  “About where I’ve really been.”

  Tori turned toward her. “I knew you were hiding something. I totally knew. You’re a spy, right? Are you a spy?”

  “No,” Meggie said, and she laughed despite herself. “Not a spy.” She looked down at her mittens. And, amazingly, when she started to talk, saying the words that had been so hard to say to her sisters, she found it was not difficult to tell the truth at all. Once the story started coming, it came easily, pouring out. Tori listened without speaking. And when Meggie was done, Tori took her hand.

  “I’m sorry you had to do that, carry that burden all by yourself for all those years,” she said.

  “It’s okay. I don’t feel bad for myself or anything. It was a choice.” She adjusted the heat vent; the car was slowly beginning to warm up. “What I don’t get … what I can’t understand …” Somehow, she couldn’t finish. Her throat tightened around the words.

  “What?” Tori said gently.

  “What I don’t get—is—is why I don’t feel better?” She rubbed her face before her tears could fall. “I mean, I’m not carrying things by myself anymore. So why do I have this weight on my heart even more now than before?”

  “Do you have a lot of memories of your mother?” Tori asked.

  “Some,” Meggie said. But in fact, she recalled very little. She remembered Lila’s red lipstick that was always such a shock against her skin. She remembered her mother smoking cigarettes on the porch in her pajamas while Meggie played with a puzzle. But the memories were just fragments.

  “You must miss her,” Tori said.

  Meggie’s throat closed further. “I do. I do miss her. But how do you miss somebody you barely even knew?”

  “It doesn’t matter how,” Tori said. “You just do.” She slid across the bench seat of her old car and pulled Meggie to her.

  Meggie didn’t resist. She dropped her face into the puffy down of Tori’s coat and cried. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Don’t be,” Tori said.

  “It’s just … I was looking for her for so long, and now that I’m not looking anymore, I just—I just—”

  “You’ll have to let her go.”

  Meggie wasn’t normally a crier. She almost never cried. But now, she wept openly, pathetically, and she couldn’t not. She cried for her mother, for losing her again. She cried for the strange feeling of relief she felt at no longer having to search. She cried for her years spent in loneliness. And she cried with gratitude, to be back, to be here, to have come full circle again.

  The bells of the nearby Korean church struck one—a long, singular tone ringing out over the valley. When Meggie pulled away, she saw she’d left a wet splotch on Tori’s coat. “Sorry. I’ll pay for dry cleaning.”

  “A few tears are the least of what this coat’s been through,” Tori said. “It’s the least of what we’ve been through, I guess.” She fished in the glove box and found a handful of brown rumpled napkins. She handed them to Meggie.

  “Is this for me or the coat?” Meggie asked, laughing.

  “For yo
u, goofball,” Tori said.

  “Thanks,” Meggie said. And blew her nose.

  “So, what does this mean? Are you going to stick around for a while?”

  Outside, through the speckled windshield, the night was quiet. Meggie could follow the trail of streetlights down toward the hollow where Ichabod Crane and the Horseman had their legendary chase. She could see Aubrey’s favorite sushi place across the street, dim inside. Meggie had spent so many years looking for her mother. So many years of searching and not finding, searching and looking and scouring and scrutinizing and pushing on. She blotted her face. Maybe it was time to see if she could uncover what there was to uncover when she wasn’t looking for anything at all. “Yeah. Looks like I’m going to stay.”

  “Thank God,” Tori said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I already told the captain we’d have a new blocker,” Tori said.

  From the Great Book in the Hall: To take up knitting is to take up problems, and the business of solving them. There are knots to puzzle out. There is the difficulty of translation—of reading directions, of visualizing, of putting into effect.

  When problems arise, there are options. There are always options. One can tweak the pattern to accommodate the problem and forge ahead (this is a dangerous path that can lead to more problems … or to brilliant innovations). One can go back and start over (the grueling, but safe, perfectionist’s way). One can fudge things a bit (accepting that lumps and bumps are inherent in a hand-knit). Or one can give up and put the project aside indefinitely—for an hour, a lifetime, a day. Problems are patient things; they are in no hurry and will always be right where you left them, as if you’d never gone away.

  Days passed, and Aubrey waited. Each morning she woke, sometimes in Vic’s bed, sometimes to the sounds of her family banging cabinets and doors, and she had the oddest sense that she should not move, should not so much as take a breath that lifted the blankets on her bed, lest she break whatever enchantment had taken hold. She lived like a person having a deeply happy, unbelievably satisfying dream that she did not want to wake up from.

  There was reason to be happy—blissfully, unexpectedly, indulgently happy. Bitty had talked to Craig, told him she was done. He was not going to make things easy for her—everyone knew that. But they knew it together, and they would tackle whatever was ahead together. Bitty was already looking through the newspaper for apartments in the vicinity of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow. Meggie, in the meantime, had hung up her red backpack on a hook in the hallway and she’d talked about letting her hair grow out again. In my natural color, she told them, though she hardly remembered what it might be.

  In the evenings, Aubrey and her family amused themselves. They went to see the thousands of pumpkins carved and illuminated at Van Cortlandt Manor, jack-o’-lanterns arranged into scarecrows, and dinosaurs, and a graveyard, and skeletons, and endlessly dazzling bright shapes against a pitch-dark night. They sipped hot cider and stood around a campfire at the old Philipse millhouse, where a tall man with long sandy hair told ghost stories in his waistcoat and ostrich-plumed hat. Aubrey had not participated in local Halloween activities in years—and to enjoy them now, with her family, made her feel like a kid again.

  And Vic, Vic, he was exquisite. To watch him get dressed and brush his teeth, to listen to him tell stories about his family, to see the spark in his eye when he talked about his plans to resurface floorboards and knock down walls—it was too much joy to stand. She felt as if she’d been starved of him for a lifetime, and now needed to make up for lost time by touching him whenever touching was possible. She loved to stand beside him as he cooked, looking down into the frying pan while her hand rested just above his sacrum. She loved the way he sought her out even at the library, to tug her into the dark corners of tall shelving and kiss her until her whole body was like a music note suspended in the air.

  Aubrey felt, for the first time, that her life was about as perfect as a person could expect a life to be. Each day, her heart was squeezed in disbelieving gratitude. Each night, she fell asleep as if carried on a sigh. Her spells had never worked more beautifully; three people had come to the Stitchery in the last week and Aubrey had knit for them: Alyssa Carter wanted to lose ten pounds and so Aubrey had knit her a sweatband for her forehead; Leena Helsinki needed to have her windows replaced but didn’t have the money, so Aubrey knit her a chunky green neck warmer with big bright buttons; Susan Bjorn, who was trying to build up her salon’s clientele, got socks—delicate violet socks with scalloped picot edging at the top, lace that trickled down to the toe. Amazingly, all of the spells worked—and in record time.

  And yet, despite her joy, Aubrey knew the foundation of her happiness was unsteady, that she had built her hopes on a fault line. Halloween was marching inevitably closer; and the day after Halloween would bring the vote on Tappan Square. If they lost, her sisters might scatter like the October leaves tossed on the wind. Vic, in all likelihood, would have to move out of the Sleepy Hollow area if he wanted to buy another house; affordable neighborhoods were few and far between. The Stitchery, and its long, long memory of centuries past, would gradually be forgotten and would gradually forget that it ever was.

  Aubrey had never considered herself an optimist or a pessimist, but rather a things-are-what-you-make-of-them-ist. And yet the great swell of optimism that had buoyed her up in recent weeks had made room for erratic, abysmal trenches of pessimism that left her shaken and fearful to go on.

  During the last week of October, Aubrey waited expectantly for some news of the impending flash mob that would save Tappan Square, but the leaves of the phone tree remained unstirred. Tarrytown made its final preparations for the parade on Halloween morning: Pickup trucks were hitched with floats for the high school senior class. The marching band’s trumpeters lubed up their instruments with valve oil and the woodwind players polished their descants to a high shine. Companies of young dancers donned their ghostly white robes and their ballet flats. The veterans polished and buffed their shoes, and the Masons ironed their white aprons, and the firemen gave their big red trucks a hardy wet-down and shine. Halloween edged closer. But still, the Tappan Watch waited. And still, no instructions for the flash mob arrived.

  On Friday morning, two days before Halloween, Aubrey had been on her way to the pet store to pick up some worms for Icky when she saw that a few of the Tappan Watch members had gotten tired of waiting for the signal. Half a dozen people were walking in a slow circle in Patriot’s Park with poster boards hoisted like slack sails. They looked—even Aubrey had to admit it—kind of sad.

  “Well, maybe Mason Boss has a plan,” Meggie assured her when Aubrey returned to the Stitchery with news of the rogue protesters. “Maybe he’s going to rally the flash mob for tomorrow, on Devil’s Night. I mean, wouldn’t that be poetic?”

  “Maybe,” Aubrey said. But she was only half listening. She began to wonder how she might get in touch with Mason Boss to find out when he would activate the phone tree. She thought: I’m the guardian of the Stitchery, aren’t I? She’d been in Tarrytown a lot longer than Mason Boss ever had. She had a right to know what he planned.

  She thought of Jeanette, who as far as Aubrey knew was still seeing the leader of the Tappan Watch and who might have insight into plans that Aubrey did not. Aubrey had seen neither hide nor hair of her friend in several days.

  Jeanette lived in an old brick building above a Laundromat in Sleepy Hollow, and her apartment often smelled of fabric softener and french fries. One end of her street banked hard to the left, sloping down toward the river with breathtaking yet dime-a-dozen views of the river. The other end of the street was pegged by an old iron clock with elaborate black hands that pointed to Roman numerals. Pumpkins and hay bales and stalks of dried corn sat at the clock’s black base.

  When Jeanette didn’t answer her cell phone, Aubrey showed up unannounced. She stood before the dingy wooden door, waiting for Jeanette to greet her. It occurred to her that perhaps Mason Bos
s might be visiting Jeanette right at this moment, that Aubrey might be interrupting, and that—awkward as it would be—the situation might work to her advantage. But when at last Jeanette worked open the multiple locks of her apartment door and peered from behind it, she seemed to be alone.

  “Where have you been?” Aubrey asked. “I haven’t heard from you in days.”

  Jeanette’s face, usually so cheery, did not lighten. Aubrey realized that the glint in her friend’s eye was not happiness to have a visitor, but the slow gathering of tears.

  “Jeanette …”

  “Oh, Aub!” Jeanette dragged Aubrey with the fullness of all her muscle into the apartment. She closed the door behind them. Her face was a twist of agony. “Oh, Aub. I wanted to call you. Thank God you’re here.”

  Aubrey escorted herself to the little dining area in Jeanette’s apartment. Outside the window were more windows that belonged to the people across the street. Aubrey sat down in one of the plastic dinette chairs, her usual spot. She and Jeanette had been through many breakups over the years, with Jeanette outraged or defeated or confused or celebrating, and Aubrey listening and nodding and acting as if she could offer some kind of sage relationship advice, even though she’d had no real romantic relationships of her own.

  “Tell me what happened,” Aubrey said.

  “The guy turned out to be a loser. A total loser.”

  Aubrey nodded, her heart full of sympathy. Even though Jeanette went through breakups every other month, her pain was no less real.

  “Did he have a girlfriend?” Aubrey asked. “A wife?”

  “Worse.” Jeanette went to her sofa to get her laptop. She put it on the dinette table. The computer was old and slow, and they waited for it to load. “I found this when I Googled him. I wanted to scope him out, you know? See what I was getting into.”

  “After you were into it,” Aubrey said.

  “Naturally.” She turned the computer more fully toward Aubrey. “Here.”

  Aubrey watched as the video began to play. A man was singing a song about lovebirds and he was tap dancing. He was holding a white-tipped cane.