“It’s silly,” Aubrey said. “But it’s not offensive.”
“It’s totally offensive,” Jeanette said. She muted the video. “Did you know Mason Boss isn’t his real name?”
“No?”
“It’s Richard Mumford. He’s an out-of-work actor.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Aubrey.” Jeanette closed her laptop with a thunk. “You’re not listening to me. He’s an actor.”
“So?”
Jeanette sighed. Her eyes were tearing up again. She looked terrible. She wore a boxy gray sweatshirt that bore an image of a kitten and an unidentifiable stain. “I started to get suspicious when I realized he wasn’t telling me the truth about his name. Then we were at his apartment in Tappan Square—which isn’t even an apartment, by the way. It’s just a room in some guy’s house. There weren’t any clothes in his closet or pictures on the walls or anything. I asked him what the deal was, and he told me he traveled light.”
The darkening suspicion that had been growing in Aubrey’s mind began to take a definite shape. “Tell me.”
“I checked his cell phone when he was in the shower. Don’t look at me like that. If he didn’t want me to look at his phone he shouldn’t have left it out. And anyway, I saw a text. It was from Jackie Halpern.”
“What did it say?”
“She said she was just checking in and wanted to get the four-one-one. That’s what she said. The four-one-one. Aubrey—”
“Don’t,” she said. “I already know. I should have always known.”
She shook her head, furious with herself. Mason Boss—of course he was a Halpern plant. The signs had been there the whole time, signs that would have been obvious to her if she’d been thinking clearly, if she hadn’t been—she hated to admit it—more focused on Vic than on Tappan Square. How easy it had been, she thought, to see what she’d wanted to see, to give herself a reason to let someone else be in charge.
“When did you find this out?” she asked.
“Very late last night.”
“What did you tell Mason Boss?”
“Oh, I called his ass out. I asked him straight up if he was working for the Halperns. And he didn’t deny it. He just kept saying, it’s complicated.”
“So he knows you know.”
“Yes.”
“Then he probably knows that I know, too. That we all will, in a matter of time.”
“I’m pretty sure he skipped town,” Jeanette said.
Aubrey stood. She walked across the gray carpet to the other side of the room, then back again. Tomorrow was Devil’s Night. The next day was Halloween, when all of Tarrytown would be distracted and not thinking of politics. And the day after that, bright and early on Monday morning, the Halperns would be voting on Tappan Square.
Aubrey went to the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
She left Jeanette’s apartment, and because she did not know what else to do, she went to the lighthouse in Tarrytown to sit by the water and think. She took a bit of knitting with her, and she parked herself on the bulkhead not far from Kidd’s Rock, a huge gray bunion of stone at the river’s edge where the old slave trader Frederick Philipse was rumored to have had illicit meetings with the Hudson’s most famous pirate. The air was light on her skin, the wind blowing gently, the water dancing. Behind her, children played on monkey bars and slides.
Since the day the Van Ripper family had first planted their heels on the Tarrytown earth that would become their property, the Stitchery had seen its share of hardship. In the early 1800s, the Stitchery had been attacked by an angry mob intent on running the Van Ripper “witches” out of town. In the 1920s, someone had tried to light the old manse on fire. By the time the Great Depression reached Tarrytown, the Van Ripper fortune had run out, and the family had nearly lost the property for an inability to pay their taxes. Aubrey was not the first guardian to have been charged with saving the Stitchery. But she was the first, as far as she knew, who had to save the Stitchery and all of Tappan Square.
She looked down at the project in her hands: She’d decided in a fit of hope and bravery two days ago to knit something for Vic—boyfriend curse be damned. She’d designed a brioche cap for him in taupe and deep brown; it was thick and sturdy and would look perfect with his eyes. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted something she made to be close to his body. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted to keep him warm on cold days. She wanted to knit for him because she wanted to tell him that she loved him, even though she worried it was too soon to say the words.
But try as she might to pick up the rhythm of the stitches, she could not bring herself to work. Her needles were still. Her fingers were still. The wind picked up a strand of hair and blew it across her eyes.
She didn’t know what to do. No one from Tappan Square yet knew what Aubrey knew: that they had been duped—or they had allowed themselves to be, which was not quite the same thing. The danger of losing Tappan Square had never been more real than it was right now. Someone had to step up and take charge.
But Aubrey could not be the one to lead a protest. She wouldn’t know how to cause a scene if she tried. And now that she was thinking more clearly, she was not entirely convinced that a protest alone would make the council vote down Horseman Woods Commons—not this late in the game. All over the country, cities and towns were seizing property for the common good. Front yards were sheared so roads could be widened. City blocks were knocked down. Tarrytown’s property dispute was not newsworthy. It was regular, everyday life. If the Tappan Watch did manage to get a protest together at such late notice, the demonstration would hardly merit regional coverage, let alone national. The Tappan Watch was a small group of social outcasts whose squeak of disapproval had come too little too late.
A cat’s-paw wind kicked up and tickled the surface of the water. Aubrey could not remember a time she had felt so hopeless. If Aubrey had stepped into Mariah’s position right away, if she hadn’t been so afraid of being the center of attention, and afraid of everything that being a decision maker entailed, the Halperns might not have hired Mason Boss. If Aubrey had swallowed her pride—because coarse, crude pride and a great fear of embarrassing herself had always been at the root of her public reticence—perhaps the Tappan Watch might have come up with a petition, a march, a website, a movement. They would have had something by now.
Instead, Aubrey had been as complacent as anyone, always happy to let someone else stand at the front lines. And now they had nothing. A figurehead leader who had sabotaged them. Just over sixty hours before a group of strangers decided their homes were worth less than a new shopping mall.
The sun was slanting through grayish clouds over the wide Tappan Zee. She admitted to herself: This is my fault. And yet, the thought didn’t make her miserable. Instead, it gave her clarity. The kind of clarity that was so absolute, so purposeful and peaceful, that a person feels such precise and singular resolve only a handful of times in the long haze of a life.
They would lose Tappan Square. That was certain—unless Aubrey did something about it. Something dramatic. Something that would turn all of Tarrytown on its head. In recent weeks, the Stitchery had been teaching her new things about her own power. Yes, there was the knitting: Her capacity for strong, swift spells had taken her breath away on the night Craig had showed up at the Stitchery door—even if the spell’s success had come with a terrible physical price. She had opened a thing in herself that was enormous; her idea of magic was limited only by the boundaries that she herself set.
She knew what she was capable of. Spells that were bigger than the ordinary wishes of a single person’s life. Spells that could change a town, a world. She felt a strong white light shining within her, so bright she wondered if the families at the playground behind her could see the glowing beneath her coat and her sweater and her skin.
And yet …
And yet …
; She put her hands over her eyes. Logistically, how could a person go about knitting a spell not just for a single person, but for an entire town?
And—more—what thing could she possibly give up that would be a sufficient sacrifice to make the magic work? What thing would hurt to lose as much as if she lost the Stitchery, as if she lost her neighbors, her life’s work, her family’s long history in Tarrytown? Was there anything she loved and wanted for herself as much as she wanted those things?
Her heart in her chest, which had been pumping so vigorously, sputtered.
Oh God, she thought.
She lowered her hands. And the future, which had stretched before her like a sunlit path only one day ago, was drowned in shadow.
She stood at Vic’s door, trembling. She had not expected him to be home. She had not wanted him to be home. But she heard a loud noise, a harsh mechanical keen coming from his tiny backyard. And when she walked down the alleyway that took her into the cluttered little space behind his house, she saw he was there. His jeans were worn white in patches, his sleeves were rolled, and he wore clear safety glasses. He was severing a long two-by-four with a loud circular saw, chips flying at his feet. There was no sense in calling to him because he could not hear her, so she waited for him to finish, too aware of the set of his shoulders, his confident movements and intense focus on his work.
She wished he was not so handsome. Or so passionate. Or so kind. She wished they’d gone their separate ways weeks ago, after the incident at the football game, because then maybe her heart wouldn’t feel so swollen in her chest, and then maybe she wouldn’t feel like such an awful person for trying to do the right thing.
She felt tears in her eyes and called up her deepest resolve. But her brain played tricks on her, an imaginary devil whispering in her ear: You don’t have to do this. There’s got to be another way. You can give up something else. You can try to fix it without a spell. You can wait and see what happens if you don’t interfere, because it might turn out fine. You can just say Forget it and let everybody else in Tappan Square worry about it without you. Why should you have to give up your own happiness for a neighborhood where half the people don’t even like you and will never appreciate what you’ve done?
She willed the voices in her head to shut up. There were other possibilities for saving Tappan Square—that was true. But only the magic of the Stitchery was close to a guarantee. And she knew her spell to save the neighborhood would succeed. It had to. A sacrifice as big as the one she was about to make couldn’t not end in magic.
She watched Vic turn off his saw, lift his safety glasses onto his head. Her belly ached and she worried she might be sick. How would she ever get through this?
“Hey! Look who it is!” He brushed off his jeans and walked toward her. Her heart sank. His eyes lit up, and his mouth, his mouth that had become such a revelation to her over the last week, pulled into a smile. If anyone else was about to hurt him like she was about to hurt him, she would have called out Run!
“What are you doing here?” he asked. But he did not wait for her to answer. He stepped forward and kissed her right out in the open where any of his neighbors might see. She held his face when he tried to pull away. She kissed him long and hard. She wound her arms around his neck and clutched. She pressed her body as close to his as was possible, felt his vital response. Vic did not pull away until his palm came against her cheek; he must have felt tears there. He drew back and peered into her eyes. “Hey. What’s this? What’s going on?”
She leaned her forehead against his collarbone for a moment, then painfully pulled away. “Can we go inside?” she heard herself say.
“What is it? Aubrey, is everything okay?”
“Let’s—let’s just go inside where it’s more private.”
He nodded solemnly, then they walked the few steps that led into his kitchen. He did not offer her a drink or a chair. “What’s wrong?”
She looked up at the ceiling. Where to start? Should she tell him that the Stitchery was the reason she was giving him up, because she saw an opportunity to help Tarrytown in a way that was bigger and more important than the two of them? Or would the truth—knowing that she’d chosen him to be her sacrifice—only make it worse?
“Here.” Vic pulled out a chair at the little kitchen table. “Sit down.”
She did. She folded her hands in her lap. If she told him that she was giving him up for a greater good, it might make his heart ache less to know she was not rejecting him. But she also knew she was dangerously close to wavering. If she told him the truth, he would try to reason with her, convince her of another path. And in her weakness and her love she might decide to agree with him. No—she could not tell him everything. When she spoke at last, her voice cracked. “I don’t—I don’t know how to say this.”
“When I can’t figure out how to say something, I just try to spit it out.”
She looked down at her lap. “Oh, God, Vic. I never meant for this to happen. I don’t want to hurt you. I just … I don’t see another way.”
Even without looking up at him, she could feel the change in his demeanor, the tension in his body that readied him for pain, for a fight. “What are you talking about?”
She began to cry; she couldn’t help it. She could see his future and hers splitting off: Hers was full of the loneliness of life as a guardian. His was full of love—a wife, children, friends. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she said, her head bowed. “It’s wrong. It’s not going to work out between us. And we’re just kidding ourselves to think it will.”
He did not go to her, but his voice was soft. “Aubrey … It’s already working out between us. Everything’s been fine.”
“No.” She grabbed a paper napkin from the holder on the table, blew her nose. “It seems fine. But the Stitchery—I swear I hate it sometimes. It always finds a way to ruin things, to rope me back in.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Vic said.
“I’m not allowed to have anything but the Stitchery in my life. It’s the same with all the guardians. The Stitchery just … finds a way to always take away anything that might distract us from doing our jobs.”
“You’re breaking up with me … because of the Stitchery?”
She looked up at him. His mouth was slack with shock, his eyebrows high. “I guess so.”
He gave a little laugh, then turned away and ran his hands through his hair. “This is ridiculous.”
“Don’t say that,” she said. “It was probably inevitable.”
“You really believe that?”
“I’m sorry.”
“No. No, I don’t accept this. The Stitchery is not a real reason to break up with someone. Something else is going on. Tell me what.”
She shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to say any more. She didn’t want to give Vic up: She wanted to marry him, and bring him bread and broth when he got sick, and rock his babies to sleep. Aubrey would have cursed the Stitchery with everything in her, would have burned it to the ground, if it wasn’t going to be the salvation of Tappan Square.
She had to focus on what was important. Not her, not him: Tarrytown.
She got to her feet. Vic was there in a moment, standing in front of her and blocking her way to the back door. “Last night you were in my bed. Right upstairs. And I didn’t get the sense that you were unhappy in the least.”
She couldn’t reply.
“Tell me,” he said. He took her shoulders. “What happened between last night and today? What changed?”
Her eyes brimmed over.
“You still want me. I can see it. Aubrey—tell me what’s going on.”
She dropped her head on his shoulder and cried. She couldn’t lie to him. She owed him that much, at least. She wished she had never known what it was like to rest her cheek against his chest and listen to the rumble of his laughter, or to watch while he sang into the end of a spatula while making dinner. She wished she’d never known the wondrous feeling that filled h
er up when he gripped her hips, and pressed her hard, and, finally, collapsed his weight against her. Because if she hadn’t known those things, or if she’d fallen in love with him a year from now instead of right at this moment when Tappan Square needed her most, her future would have looked a lot less desolate and barren.
He cradled her chin and looked into her eyes. “Don’t do this.”
“Vic—”
“You’re not alone here. We’re a team. If there’s a problem, we’ll work it out together. Aubrey …”
“Please stop. Please don’t,” she said.
“But—I love you,” he said.
She felt the words like a deep thud in her heart, the firing of a cannon or the explosion of an underwater mine. The noise and pressure of it was so forceful, she swore it boomed out over Tarrytown, over the rolling hills and down to the mirror-flat river, which must have rippled a little with the sound. He loved her. Vic loved her. She wanted to crumple to the floor.
She pulled away from him. She knew her face was red and blotchy. Tears fell.
She wanted to say more, but she did not trust herself. Vic, she realized, had done something for her that no other person—not her mother, not her sisters, not Mariah, and not any other man—had been able to do. Because of him, she’d started to think of herself as more than just a guardian of the Stitchery. She was a woman, complete with a women’s talents and interests, a women’s needs, a woman’s quirks—Stitchery aside. She was just beginning to see glimmers of the person she might have been if she hadn’t been chained to the Stitchery from birth. She wished there was some way she could thank Vic for that—that gift—even while he stood looking at her, his eyes wet because she’d just broken his heart.
She leaned her body against his and put her arms around him. She felt the heartbreaking rightness of being in his arms. She pressed her nose against him and breathed in smells of sawdust and skin.
The temptation to scrap the idea of using magic returned, stronger now than before. Maybe … maybe there was a different way. Maybe she could give up something else, anything else. Maybe she could find a way to save Tappan Square without using magic at all. “Oh, Vic. I …”
The Wishing Thread Page 28