The Wishing Thread (2 page)

As news of Mariah’s death reached its tentacles into her neighborhood, a handful of Tarrytown transplants who had come from all corners of the world began to gather before the Stitchery’s façade. The religious among the crowd crossed themselves and said their prayers, prayers that were not entirely altruistic, for Mariah’s soul to be scooped up and deposited quickly in its final landing place, so long as it wasn’t roaming the earth with the more well-mannered ghosts of Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown. Women who were friendly toward the Van Rippers set colorful candles in tall glasses on the sidewalk and fixed carnations to the Stitchery’s crooked gate. They did not need to speak a common language to share a common worry: What would happen to the Stitchery? And worse: With Mariah gone, what would happen to them all?

The Van Rippers were charlatans to some, saviors to others. Crooks or angels. Saints or thieves. But even if the gossip about the Stitchery was just and only that—if the strangeness of the Stitchery began and ended with the things that were said about it—uncertainty had never stopped many generations of Tarrytown women from dragging themselves in desperation to the Van Rippers’ doorway, begging for help.
Make me a sweater, make me mittens, make my baby healthy, make my husband love me again
.

The magic of the Van Ripper family, they said, was in the knitting.

If it was magic at all.

There were only a handful of places in the area of Tarrytown where Aubrey Van Ripper appeared with any regularity: the grocery store, the library, the pet store, the sushi house, and sometimes—when the evening was clear and cool—the park. And so when she made her appearance at the hospital on the day that Mariah died, locals looked on with curiosity, half fearful and half intrigued. She wore clunky white orthopedic shoes like an old lady—though she was only twenty-eight—a horrific polyester blouse dotted with tiny forget-me-nots, and thick black glasses with plastic frames. Her hair was a pretty blond that swept to her shoulders, but it was frizzy and kinked with knots.

As for Aubrey, she wasn’t nearly as interested in the hospital as it was in her. To her mind, the hospital should have been lively, frenetic, caught in the teeth-gnashing clench between death and life. Instead, it was dull. Bored administrative types chewed gum and watched the game show channel on the TV in the waiting room, which played a rerun of
Wheel of Fortune
. The lobby would have looked just like this—sterile and sleepy—whether or not her aunt had just died.

“Sign, please.” A woman behind the counter thrust a translucent purple clipboard toward her. “If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask—anyone else but me.”

Aubrey complied. There were so many words on every piece of paper, tiny words made of tiny letters, one running into the other. If she could unwind all the words out into a long, single thread, they would reach around the building and back again. She could knit them into a sweater. Or a heavy black shawl.

Out of the corner of her eye, Aubrey noticed a couple of the nurses standing together in a distant corner of the room, whispering softly with their heads bent low. They wore slouchy bright scrubs bedecked with cartoon flowers. One of them was Katrina Van der Donck, who liked to claim she was descended from the great seventeenth-century documentarian of Sleepy Hollow, Adriaen Van der Donck, who first recorded
Slapershaven
as name of the Hudson tributary that ran through the glen. The other woman was a stranger. They were trying not to glance Aubrey’s way but were unable to avoid the temptation.

Aubrey bore their scrutiny as long as she could. Their whispers scratched at her eardrums like a dog at a door. Finally, she could not stand it. She glanced up, and both women winced. Aubrey spoke as loud as she dared. “You do realize I know what you’re saying, right?”

“Oh my God. She’s a mind reader, too?” the stranger said, loudly enough for Aubrey to hear. “You didn’t say she was a mind reader.”

“She’s not a mind reader,” Aubrey said.

“Oh no?” Katrina smirked. “What am I thinking now?” She crossed her arms and glared.

Aubrey lowered her eyes back to her paperwork. Her face was burning red; she could feel it. Her armpits were prickly with sweat. She did not know precisely why Katrina Van der Donck had come to hate her, but she guessed it had to do with the magic and that perhaps Katrina had paid for an ineffective
spell. Aubrey hated confrontation more than she hated squishy white bread in long plastic bags, more than she hated laugh tracks in sitcoms, more than she hated Steve Halpern. Mariah would have known what to say.

The Stitchery—and the women in it—had always been touched by a vague darkness, a miasma of speculation. Aubrey’s ancestors trailed all the way back to the first settlers who lived in ditches in New Netherland earth, and the more distant the modern world became from those starved and lice-ridden adventurers, the more mysterious and alluring they began to appear, so that the effect of time on the progenitors of the Stitchery was like the effect of atmosphere on the stars.

Unfortunately for Aubrey, the gossips of Tarrytown didn’t think the village librarian’s assistant, who shopped for beets in the grocery store and who carried a picture of her pet hedgehog in her wallet, was especially captivating. The lore of the Stitchery was mysterious. Mariah had been its peculiar but venerable old maven. Aubrey—poor Aubrey—she was just weird.

Her appearance didn’t help her reputation. As the next in line to be the guardian of the Stitchery—the next in line after Mariah—she bore the Stitchery’s Mark. In Mariah, the Mark had manifested itself discreetly: Even with no perfume on, even when it was a hundred degrees in August, Mariah’s skin smelled strongly of flower petals. The scent glands that made other people stink like horses had literally made Mariah smell like a rose—granted, a cheap rose that sometimes put one in mind of an Old West hooker, but a rose nonetheless. The people of Tarrytown had assumed that Mariah was just another old lady who drowned her sorrows in drugstore perfume. And although there were always exceptions, people liked her as well as any Van Ripper could be liked.

But Aubrey’s Mark—the thing that had established early on that
she
would be the Stitchery’s next guardian—was not so inoffensive or so easily explained away. Her Mark made people uncomfortable. Her Mark couldn’t be disguised. Although Aubrey herself could not see what was wrong with her when she looked into the mirror, she’d been told often enough what other people saw: Her eyeballs, far too big for her face, were such a bright, bright blue that they were very nearly nauseating. They were blue as a spring robin’s egg, if that egg were dipped in blue food coloring, then rolled in metallic blue glitter. They were, in fact, aggressively blue, and a person could not stare at them for very long before he had to look away.

Now, Aubrey missed the act of eye-to-eye communication no more than an adult might miss a half-remembered imaginary friend—with one exception. His name was Vic; and once, just once, she wished she could look at him straight-on.

She felt a hand on her shoulder. And when she turned, Jeanette Judge was there, fresh off her shift at the library and still smelling vaguely of old books. Jeanette’s eyes, wet black eyes that never cared to hide a feeling, were wild with concern.

“I just heard. Are you okay?”

“I’m actually doing fine.”

“Don’t you lie to me, Aubrey Van Ripper,” Jeanette said. She wore a gray poncho that Aubrey had knit for her years ago, when Jeanette had been having some trouble getting a loan to buy a car, and the way she stood now, with her hands on her hips, her dark forearms poking out below gray woolen fringe, and her elbows jutting to the sides, it struck Aubrey that she looked a bit like a gray knight holding a diamond-shaped shield. “Come here.” Jeanette wrapped her up in strong arms, and Aubrey hugged her back, languishing in the
warm circle of her friend’s strength, half tempted to see if she might lift her feet off the ground.

“What happened exactly?” Jeanette asked when at last she pulled away.

“Her heart blew out.”

“Blew out? A heart isn’t a spare tire.”

Aubrey shrugged. She didn’t want to say
heart attack
. A heart was not a thing that should have an
attack
mode. She might have explained herself, but Jeanette was glaring over her shoulder with murder in her eyes.

“Whatchoo looking at, Katrina Van der Donck?”

Aubrey turned slightly, saw the glint of wary pleasure in Katrina’s eyes.

“Nothing much,” Katrina said.

Jeanette’s nostrils flared. “You like a good piece of gossip, huh? Well, I got one. It’s about a certain person we both know who showed up on the Stitchery door looking for some of that Van Ripper voodoo.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Katrina said.

“I would, too,” Jeanette said. “Now, why don’t you go empty somebody’s bedpan.”

Katrina’s upper lip lifted, showing her teeth. “Better than dealing with this crap.” She grabbed her friend by the cotton elbow of her scrubs, and they disappeared into the labyrinth of hospital halls.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Aubrey said.

“Believe me. It’s my pleasure.”

Aubrey felt a smile crimping her lips despite the day’s sorrow.
“Van Ripper voodoo?”

“Bitch better not mess with me,” Jeanette said.

Aubrey laughed. “I love your diction when you’re angry.”

“Just trying to do my college professors proud.”

Behind the desk, the woman who had given Aubrey the
purple clipboard cleared her throat. Aubrey turned back to the paperwork with a sigh. She wondered how many times she would have to be reminded that Mariah was dead before she stopped needing reminding and before she stopped feeling surprised.

Years ago, Mariah had paid for her fortune to be told by a psychic—a chain-smoking single mother who had sworn that Mariah would be struck by lightning on her hundredth birthday. Instead—twenty years shy of a hundred—Mariah had dropped dead in the village hall on a day when there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Aubrey could imagine it: Mariah giving Steve Halpern a piece of her mind about the new shopping center that would replace Tappan Square, her fist raised dramatically in the air and her face as purple as an eggplant, when she’d collapsed on the floor never to get up again. If only there had been a curtain to drop, a crowd to throw roses and shout
brava!
—it would have been a more fitting ending.

Aubrey signed her name by yet another X.

“We’re sure there was no foul play here, right?” Jeanette said.

“Of course not.”

“I’m just saying. The guy might not have had a gun, but he killed her.”

“Steve Halpern’s a scumbag, not a murderer.”

“He’s a politician. And he killed her with stress.”

“Well, he—”

“He did. He killed her. Over a damn shopping center. For God’s sake, Mariah
died
fighting to keep him from demolishing her home!” Tears stained Jeanette’s ocher-dark cheeks in giant rolling globules, the white of her irises shot through with red. “I don’t understand how you’re even here, Aubrey. Why aren’t you home? Why aren’t you crying into a cup of
peppermint tea? This is
Mariah
we’re talking about. The woman who brought you up. The only family you have left—”

“My sisters—”

“Don’t count. Come on, Aub. You’re telling me you don’t have one tear? Not one?”

Aubrey thought for a moment. Sometimes, when people lost a loved one, they said they felt numb. They said things like
It just hasn’t sunk in yet
. Aubrey understood full well what it meant that her aunt had died; already, there was a kind of off-ness to everything she did and saw. She could look at a tree—like the gnarly little dogwood in front of the high school that she’d seen a thousand times—and even though it was the same tree it had always been, she could feel that something was different about it. Different, but not changed.

Already the Stitchery was calling, pulling like a thousand little hooks under Aubrey’s skin. She’d known since she was thirteen and her eyes had transmogrified into medical-miracle blue that she would one day be married to the Stitchery, just like her Aunt Mariah had been, and just like her grandmother had been before that, and her great-grandmother before that, and her great-great-grandmother’s sister before that, and whoever else before that, going all the way back to Helen Praisegod Van Ripper who first had doomed them all. Aubrey was just the latest Van Ripper to be chosen by the Stitchery as the guardian of its secrets—her life no more or less important than the other guardians’. And she’d forced herself to reconcile with her fate at society’s fringes—even embrace it—years ago. She lived daily with the understanding that, eventually, someday, when she was ready, years and years from now, she would assume her aunt’s role in the Stitchery and the community. The women of Tarrytown would come to her and heap their secret woes and griefs and desires on her shoulders,
and after a spell they would revile or revere Aubrey as they had reviled or revered Mariah, and Aubrey would grow old between the Stitchery’s walls like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.