The Wishing Thread

by Van Allen, Lisa

  “Tell him it was a mistake,” Bitty said.

  “It wasn’t a mistake. I knew exactly what I was doing at the time.”

  Bitty spoke with a rasping irritation. “Don’t you think it might be a little egotistical to think that this”—she gestured with her hand toward the newspaper, a move that was perhaps supposed to mean the loss of the Stitchery and the subsequent dilemmas—“is all about you and only you?”

  “Of course it’s not about me,” Aubrey said, defensively.

  “What about Vic, then? Is it about him? Because it sure as hell doesn’t seem to be about him.”

  “It’s not about him or me. Or him and me. It’s about the Stitchery and its traditions.”

  “I think I get what Bitty’s trying to say,” Meggie said, her voice tight with forced patience. “What she means is, you’re operating as if losing the Stitchery is about you, about us, about Tappan Square. Like you know what it’s about. But at the end of the day, none of us knows what the big picture is.”

  Aubrey sat back in her chair. Until now, her only explanation for the failure of the yarn spell was her own bungling. Maybe she could have done things differently. Maybe having the group knit along with her had been a debilitating distraction. Maybe she should have given up more than Vic; maybe there was another sacrifice she might have made. Maybe she should have asked for bigger sacrifices from the women who had joined her that night. Her mind was full of maybes.

  But now her sisters suggested an alternative possibility as to why the magic failed: Perhaps the result of the spell wasn’t a failure but just a progression. A step in the life cycle. The next phase. Or—she took a bite of her gyro and angrily chewed—perhaps she was telling herself stories. She was trying to tease reason out of unreasonable things.

  She lifted the straw in her soda up and down until it squeaked against the plastic lid. A chill wind blew down the street. “I guess I’ll have to give it some thought,” she said.

  Christmas came and went, and the January freeze leached into Tarrytown’s old bones. The days were short and hard. The reservoir was frozen along its edges. On the morning that marked the beginning of her final week in the Stitchery, Aubrey woke to find a dusting of snow on the streets and rooftops of Tappan Square.

  She worked in her bedroom, packing the last of her boxes. Everything that she could live without—certain hairbrushes, certain sweaters, certain books—was sealed with packing tape in cardboard tombs. Her back ached, and she sat on her bed. Meggie, Bitty, and the kids had gone in the morning to the two-family house that Aubrey and her sisters had rented in Sleepy Hollow, cleaning it from top to bottom so it would be ready when they moved in. The new house was no Stitchery—just a vinyl-sided, nondescript Colonial with its gable end up against the sidewalk and its chimney little more than a tube like a straw in a glass. But the house would allow them to pool their resources and stay together while they each figured out what it was they were going to do.

  The doorbell gave its asthmatic buzz, and Aubrey got to her feet. She went downstairs, her hand running along the banister. She expected to find one of the town’s representatives at the door to bother her about whatever thing they wanted to bother her about this time. But when she tugged the old brass handle, and a smattering of dusty snowflakes blew in, it was Vic standing before her, rubbing his bare hands together in the cold.

  “Oh,” she said. “You!”

  He looked contrite, as if he might apologize for being at her doorway. “Can I come in?”

  She gripped the door handle. Her heart in her chest was pumping like a crazed steam engine. She wanted to shout at him No! You shouldn’t be here! because what she wanted to do was throw her arms around him and drag him with her to the entryway floor, because she wanted to cry against his chest and say how sorry she was for everything—and it made her feel all kinked up and bent, not to be able to do those things.

  “Please, do come in,” she said.

  He stepped past her, and she felt the chill coming off his jacket. She quickly shut the door. The snow had marked Vic’s shoulders in little melting droplets. He took off his hat—it hurt that Aubrey had not made it for him, that it was a store-bought hat with thin mechanical stitches and elastic stretch—and his dark hair was mussed in a way that made her want to smooth it with her hands.

  “It’s cold out there,” she said. She might also have said that it was daytime, or that it was snowing, or that her heart was a heap of rubble in her chest—or some other obvious thing.

  “Yeah. It’s snowing,” he said.

  “So … How are you?”

  “Hanging in. You?”

  “The same.” She risked a glance at his face, then gave a laugh that meant nothing. She tried not to think of the last time she’d seen him, when his eyes had been so open and fathomless, and when he’d said he loved her, and when she’d kissed him and his lips were dead cold. “Did you, um, did you deed the house over yet?”

  He fidgeted with his hat. “Almost. I have to be out next month.”

  “This is my last week,” she offered. “My sisters and I are renting a place together over in Sleepy Hollow.”

  “That’s great,” he said. His eyes roamed the entryway, as if he wasn’t quite sure what to look at and could not look at her.

  “Where are you headed?” she asked.

  “Now?”

  “No, I mean, after—you know. After Tappan Square.”

  “Oh, right. My sister moved back in with my mom. And I rented a place across the river in Nyack.”

  Aubrey knew she should be thrilled. Vic might have said he was moving to the other side of the country; instead, he was moving only to the other side of the Tappan Zee. And yet, the idea that they would be separated from each other by the river—the great, wide reaches of the river—made her feel like she was in danger of breaking out in tears. She composed herself before she spoke.

  “I’m sorry you have to move,” she said. She pushed her hands down deeper into her pockets.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’m sorry about the Stitchery, too.”

  “We’ll get by,” she said.

  “Aubrey …” He looked at her for the first time since he’d arrived. Purple shadows had settled under his eyes; his mouth was drawn in pain. “I know what you did. I know about the Devil’s Night spell. That I was your sacrifice.”

  “How?”

  “Bitty came to the house and told me this morning.”

  “Of course,” she said. She planted her feet on the Stitchery’s boards and did not allow herself to move near him. “I didn’t know how to tell you. If there had been any other thing I could think of—any other way … You know I would have taken it.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Would you?”

  She pulled herself up a little straighter. His doubt hurt her more than his absence had. He was the love of her life, her first and last and only. But she couldn’t explain that to him. Not now.

  “This is the twenty-first century,” he said. “I think a guy should have a least a little say in it if he’s going to be a human sacrifice. I mean, we’re not barbarians anymore.”

  She wondered if he was trying to make her laugh, but she couldn’t do it. She had no laughter in her. Each day that had passed since she’d last seen him, since she’d last felt the particular, nourishing energy that moved between them when they were alone, had been a low, long tolling. She wouldn’t claim she had nothing to live for anymore—there was her family, after all. But she had lost her faith in magic. She had lost the very meaning and purpose of her existence. She had lost him. She could not see a reason to laugh.

  “I wanted you to be able to keep your house,” she said. “I know how much it meant to you. It was your dream.”

  “It was a house,” he said, ice in his voice. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved that house. But it’s not my family. It’s what I love, but it’s not who I love.” He looked at her; his eyes were dark. “I would have torched that house and a thousand more like it, if I thought th
at would have stopped you from doing what you did.”

  Her legs would no longer hold her; she lowered herself to the bottom stair. She put her face in her hands, then looked up again, careless of tears. “Why are you here?” she cried. “Why did you come here? To make me feel more terrible? To remind me of all the things that I lost when I walked out of your house that day? To make me wish for the ten thousandth time that I could take it all back and do it differently?”

  He knelt before her, his hands bracing her forearms. She tried to pull away. “Why can’t you?” he demanded. “Why can’t you just take it back? At this point, what’s the harm?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her tears were ugly and falling. “Everyone keeps asking me, but I don’t know. I have no answers. I have nothing to say.”

  “Then maybe that is your answer,” Vic said. He took her hands, held them so hard it hurt. “Aubrey, these past months—without you—they sucked. I told myself that if I waited long enough, you’d come around. But I’m tired of waiting. The house I can deal with losing. It’s replaceable. But you—you’re not. I can’t lose Tappan Square and you. I won’t. Not over some stupid—”

  She held her breath; if he said spell she didn’t know what she would do.

  “Shopping mall,” he said.

  She dropped her head; she didn’t want him to see her crying and yet she couldn’t stop. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I’ve thought of you a thousand times a day.”

  He sat on the stair beside her and gathered her close. She didn’t resist; she pressed her face into the warm nook between his neck and coat. She held him like she was drowning, held on. She felt him kiss her hair. He told her: “I know you meant well.”

  She sobbed into his coat.

  “Let’s fix this,” he said. “We can. I know we can.”

  “How?” She hiccuped. “The Stitchery’s rules are very clear. Once a thing is sacrificed, you can’t have it back.”

  He went quiet. She felt him stiffen. His hands, which had been roaming her back, her shoulders, her hair, went still. He pulled away. “I can’t ask you to betray your principles for me. I won’t ask. But if there’s a way … if somehow—I don’t know. If you could—”

  An impulse crested within her and she followed it, riding the wave. She leaned forward, and she kissed him. His hands came around her back; she gripped the front of his leather jacket, still damp with cold and snow. She kissed him, and kissed him, and the bigness of it overwhelmed her. This, being with the man she loved, did not feel at all like it was a forfeit of her principles; instead, she felt it was a liberation—from all the confines and strictures and regulations about what magic was and was not, from theories about how magic worked or how it did not, from all the fumbling attempts at defining a thing that could not and would not be defined, from all the very small, very narrow, very human notions that had come to be called magic as the centuries had worn on. The Stitchery had made a thing very clear to her—a thing she did not see until now: Whatever the Van Ripper guardians had said magic was, was only a very small part of it, if it was part at all.

  Vic ended their kiss abruptly. “I don’t want you to regret this later.”

  “I won’t.”

  “What about the rules?”

  “The rules are what we make of them,” she said.

  She took Vic’s hand, and with a feeling of triumph pulled him up the Stitchery’s stairs to her room. She shut the door and kissed him again, until the walls of the Stitchery seemed to turn to rubber, until the floor beneath them bucked. They made love surrounded by cardboard boxes, and tied-up garbage bags full of blankets, and stacks upon stacks of books about knitting. Everything that had gone wrong had somehow made room for this—this rightness, the rasp of her breath and his, the old boards creaking with their movements, and the snow, tapping against the window, falling gently on the rooftops of a neighborhood that—whether they liked it or not—would soon make way.

  * * *

  Little by little, the winter forfeited its territory and the landscape softened and blushed. Purple crocuses clawed up between garden stones, and then daffodils assembled like a line of soldiers in front of Christ Episcopal, and then the forsythia bushes throughout Sleepy Hollow effused like a bottle of champagne. Tappan Square stood empty, and the work to clear the land began. The Stitchery did not go easily; it stood curmudgeonly and stalwart, so that the wrecking crew cursed its unusually stubborn porch spindles and its chimney that did not want to budge one inch off its foundation. But eventually, modern technology prevailed, and it was crunched into splinters by backhoes and bulldozers; some members of the crew said that as the dust rose up from the rubble, the shapes of human faces could be seen, hollow eyes and long, open mouths being stretched toward heaven. But others said that was ridiculous.

  In Sleepy Hollow, the Van Ripper family settled into their new, albeit temporary, home. Although they had lost the Stitchery, they took pieces of it with them—Meggie had filched the doorknob of her bedroom, Bitty had loosened one of the foundation’s stones, and Aubrey had preserved—with dexterity and care—the graffiti that some ancestor had scrawled on the tower’s inside wall. They sold what relics were theirs to sell—the ugly brass guard lions on the mantel, the ancient rugs on the floor—and found that they had enough money to outfit their new house with new furniture. Some of what had been in the Stitchery stayed in the Stitchery until it was pulled down.

  Aubrey was largely happy. Her heart was filled up: There were many people near her to love and who loved her in return. Vic traveled to her new house often from Nyack, and as the months had slipped by into spring, her love for him—which had once felt like a butterfly dancing on a warm wind—became deeper, more muscled and strong, less like a flighty swallowtail and more like one of the hawks that surfed the high currents along the Palisades. In the early mornings after long nights, before her family began to rise, she dreaded to leave him or have him leave; but the longing was sweet, and she relished it, every pang, looking with anticipation toward the day when they would sleep the whole night together, side by side.

  Since she was no longer running the Stitchery between her shifts at the library, Aubrey had time. She knew that eventually she would need to attempt a job search—it was hard to imagine an ad that said “Wanted: Spell-knitting witch/librarian/hedgehog owner for administrative work”—but for the moment, she was dedicated to enjoying as much of her sisters’ company as possible, and to returning the sacrifices that had been stored in the Stitchery, one at a time. On any given day, she and Nessa would wander across town to the storage unit that she and her family paid a small fortune to rent—if it weren’t for the lack of running water, she could have lived in the thing—and then she would pluck one random sacrifice out of the many and sit with the Great Book in the Hall until she found its owner. Sometimes, the process of locating an object’s owner was long and convoluted, full of dusty estate proceedings and afternoons at the county surrogate’s office or genealogical society. Sometimes it was swift as the current that flowed to her computer down fiber-optic lines.

  It was a clear and gusty day in April when Ruth Ten Eckye’s silvery jack-o’-lantern pin fell out of some hidden emplacement and landed on the concrete floor of the storage unit. Aubrey ran her thumb over its smug sneer, a pang of nervousness shooting through her. Ruth. Although she no longer felt as confident about magic as she once had, she did feel that there might have been some cosmic reason and order in how certain objects caught her eye and begged to be returned on a given day, while others seemed content to languish awhile more.

  “That’s a weird little thing,” Nessa said, looking at the pin. “Do you know whose it is?”

  Aubrey shook off her hesitation. There was no reason to be worried about going to see Ruth Ten Eckye. Ruth seemed, Aubrey thought, to have let go of some small piece of her resentment toward the Van Rippers, even to show some grudging support; she’d come to the Stitchery on Devil’s Night after all. And even if Ruth did have s
ome animosity toward her, there was nothing the old dame could do to hurt Aubrey—not now.

  “I know who it belongs to,” Aubrey said. “This will be an easy one today. We won’t even need to look it up in the Great Book.”

  Nessa, who seemed to enjoy sleuthing and tracking people down, and who thrived on seeing the joy or bewilderment in people’s faces when they had cherished or unknown old treasures thrust back into their hands, looked a little disappointed.

  They drove from Sleepy Hollow and crossed into Tarrytown, the transition from one place to another demarcated only by the Hollow’s orange-and-black street signs. Ruth Ten Eckye’s house was high on the ridge; it was large, white, and impressive, with flat eaves and corbels that scrolled like elegant snails. Aubrey sat a moment in the car, gathering her courage. Ruth was going to give her an earful, a condescending and indignant earful, when Aubrey walked in holding the pumpkin pin. Also, there was the matter of the money; Ruth Ten Eckye had paid two hundred dollars for her spell. Aubrey didn’t have two hundred dollars at the moment, and it would be a while before she could repay. Luckily, few people who had darkened the Stitchery’s door ever sacrificed money.

  Aubrey crossed the perfectly flat, round stones that led to the Ten Eckye family seat. The front door offered no doorbell; only a brass lion with a ring in its mouth. Aubrey knocked timidly at first, then more loudly. She stood for what seemed to be a long time before the door creaked open.

  “You!” Ruth said, with surprising vigor. “You—it’s about time. Come in!”

  “I’m sorry—” Aubrey said. “Were you expecting us?”

  “Yes, yes,” Ruth said, waving her hand to dismiss the question. “But it doesn’t matter that it took you so long. The important thing is that you’re here.”

  They stepped into a central, clover-shaped hall; tiny white tiles covered the floor, and the ceiling was graced by a brass chandelier. Aubrey got a good look at Ruth in the light: She seemed tired and thin. Her beige dress hung slack from her shoulders. Her hair, normally in neat curls, was flat against her head.