The Wishing Thread (22 page)

Aubrey laughed.

“Leaf fight!” Carson threw a fistful of leaves that did not fly very far. Aubrey held up her hands anyway and squealed. If she’d hesitated—if she’d paused at all—it was a pause that occupied no more time than it took for the sun to inch imperceptibly forward in the sky, or for the earth to turn its face hundreds of miles deeper into autumn. She dropped her rake and launched herself forward, into the little pile of leaves, into her nephew’s impish laughter, into whatever happiness the day was going to offer or not, without question.

Meggie stood in the yarn room, an afghan in a chevron pattern draped over her shoulders, her cup of coffee steaming white. The Stitchery’s ancient coal-burning furnace had been worked over to burn oil, and though it strove mightily, pipes clanging at their joints, radiators hissing with effort, the old heating system was no match for the chill of an autumn morning. Most winters, they hadn’t had enough money to heat more than one room at a time of the big, drafty house. Meggie could remember waking up in the morning, the house so cold she could nearly see her breath, the tip of her nose
frozen where it peeped from her half-a-dozen covers. She would throw her blankets off fast, merciless, and run as quickly as she could to the kitchen, where Mariah would be sitting at the table reading or knitting. Old cotton quilts hung over doorways and windows, making the room look like a child’s play fort. The four burners of the gas stove were four blue lotuses, each flame a petal of heat. And while her sisters went a little stir-crazy in such tight quarters, Meggie loved their enforced company, loved that if they wanted to be warm, they had to be together, talking, knitting, reading, passing time.

She hitched her afghan a little higher around her shoulders. She was slightly hung over. Bitty had made coffee, and Meggie probably should have stayed in the kitchen to keep her sister company while she cooked breakfast. But she’d needed to get out of earshot. The banging of pans, the clinking of silverware on porcelain … each sound slammed her skull like a mallet on a bell.

Last night, she and Tori had stayed out late, like they used to. They linked arms and walked down bright blocks in the East Village, they laughed with strangers and with each other, they drank until the concrete buckled and tipped under their feet. It was as if nothing had changed.

Now she held up her arm, the knitted afghan falling away from her skin. Tori’s cell phone number was scrawled on her wrist in bold, blue ink. When Tori had said good-bye, she’d said it as if they would never see each other again. She fanned her fingers along Meggie’s short, short hair, then she’d smiled sadly and left Meggie standing at the Stitchery door. She’d made Meggie swear to call her sometimes. Meggie had agreed; she could promise that much. But she didn’t know how much longer she would be in Tarrytown.

She moved across the cold yarn room to a lengthened rectangle
of light from the window. To stand in the yarn shop was to stand in a bubble where time had stopped. Yarns that had been piled in an old barrel ten years ago were still untouched. The rickety umbrella swift was still perched on the edge of the counter. The dust in the shop had grown thicker over the years, like a ring of an ancient tree.

Meggie picked up a skein of deep blue wool and a feeling of nostalgia, mournful as the call of a distant train on a rainy day, passed through her. Often she knit while she was traveling—not spells, but projects: gifts or items to sell online. She knit because knitting reminded her of her family, because it distracted her, because she didn’t know why. The urge to knit came like a monster—a deranged Mr. Hyde with needles and sock yarn—and she had no control. No matter what city she was in, she sometimes found herself scrambling for supplies, shoving her crumpled bills at the cashier—it didn’t even matter that the yarn felt like garden twine—and then she was hurrying to whatever place she was calling home at the time, where she did not feel relief until she was firing off stitches like shots of dopamine to her brain.

But then as quickly as the drive to knit had lurched into gear, it just as quickly puttered out. Weeks would slip by, and she had no more interest in her knitting needles than she had in filing her taxes. She could not conjure even the smallest amount of love for the craft.

The whiplash—indifference transmuted into love and back to indifference again—made her speculate if the power of the Stitchery over her was like the moon over the earth, tugging unevenly on the oceans, pulling unevenly on her, making her sometimes love knitting and sometimes hate it, making waves. Then, in the same breath, she wondered if the Stitchery was just a house like any other, and if it was her own temperament that was like the moon—waxing and waning
and shifting from one phase to the next, with the Stitchery never changing so much as counting on her to change.

She put down the midnight-blue yarn and sipped her coffee.

Last night Tori had said, with the depth and profound meaning that can only come from drunkenness,
I don’t know what you’re running from. But running from something doesn’t make it go away
.

Now, with the morning light as thin and cold as the glass it streamed through, Meggie knew she should get moving. She was not running—not at all. She was searching, and the search had to go on. Sometimes, when she felt like her search had been futile, she reread her journal, the one she’d been using to record every little shred of a clue about her mother. It was full of Polaroids and jotted notes and pasted-on maps. Meggie had looked over her journal so many times that she’d nearly memorized it. Some of her notes, however, no longer meant anything to her, as she couldn’t remember why she’d written them.

Who is Lucy M in Piscataway?

Pleasant Acres, nursing home. Denver
.

She liked cashews. Saratoga Raceway—waitressed at pub and grill? Gambling?

The clues she’d found—sometimes nothing more than a note scrawled on a bathroom stall that said LVR WAS HERE—reminded her that there was every possibility that her mother wasn’t dead. Lila had been a wanderer; she might have simply wandered away. Perhaps she was on some world-conquering adventure. Or perhaps she’d simply forgotten who she was—if the Madness had taken hold—and needed someone to bring her home again.

Unfortunately, the trail had gone cold. On her way back up to the Stitchery, Meggie had hoped—as she watched the
miles go by and the autumn leaves become brighter and brighter—that coming home might give her some new ideas, some new leads to follow. Or at the very least, she hoped that she might
feel
her mother in some way, get a little closer to her by being in the Stitchery again.

But none of those things had happened. She assured herself: It wouldn’t be hard to leave Tarrytown. Her heart went where she went, always leaving a trail of bread crumbs, a path between one city and the next that she would never trace back.
Leaving
was something she was good at, something she could do. To remind herself, she only had to think of Tori, and the Stitchery, and every man she’d ever met who made her think, simultaneously,
Maybe
and
I should go
.

And yet, standing in the yarn room, her throat tight with memories, and the sound of Bitty in the kitchen talking to Nessa and cracking eggs on the counter’s edge, Meggie knew that if she left now, she would miss something—and she hated to be left out. She’d spent the first few years of her life being told she was “too little” to do the things that Aubrey and Bitty were allowed to do, and she had not liked the thought of being excluded then any more than she liked it now.

She supposed that as long as Bitty was at the Stitchery, there could be no harm in hanging around. The search for her mother still burned hot in her veins, but the trail seemed to be cooling. She would stay for a while longer—and she would knit. Something for Tori. A gift for her friend—possibly her only friend, when she was honest with herself—to remember her by. And then, when the sign came that she needed to return to her searching, she would be on her way.

Aubrey and Carson made their way into the kitchen, their cheeks tinged pink from morning air. The rest of the family
had already settled in for breakfast. Bitty stood at the stove, nudging pancakes in a frying pan with a silver spatula. Meggie slouched at the table, a blanket over her shoulders in chocolate brown, pumpkin, and cream.

“It smells amazing in here!” Aubrey said. The kitchen was warm and stuffy compared with the air outside. “Like I died and went to heaven and it’s made of pancakes instead of clouds.”

“Thanks,” Bitty said.

Aubrey shuffled Carson to the sink to wash his hands, then got him seated next to his sister at the table. She kissed Meggie on the top of the head as she passed by her chair.

“Aren’t we the little ingénue this morning,” Meggie said. “What’s got you so happy?”

“Oh, nothing,” Aubrey said, fairly singing. “Well, nothing much. It’s just that—” She felt pleasure tighten her belly; what a delicious thrill it was to have news, actual news, worth sharing. “I have a date tonight.”

“You do?” Bitty asked.

“With who?” Meggie asked at the same time.

“I do,” Aubrey said. “With Vic.”

“Shut the front door!” Meggie’s palm smacked the table. “I had no idea he was into you. I totally couldn’t tell!”

Aubrey glanced at her and slid into a chair.

“That’s great,” Bitty said, though her voice was flat. She set down a high stack of spongy pancakes that wobbled on the plate. The table was an instant flurry of children’s hands—fingers snatching this and that, scrabbling for syrup and butter and refills of milk. Bitty returned to the stove. “So who did they elect last night to take over the Tappan Watch?”

“Please tell me it was the hot black guy,” Meggie said.

Aubrey smiled, only slightly disappointed that the conversation had so quickly shifted away from Vic. “It was.”

Meggie wedged a hunk of pancake between her lips, then tucked it into her cheek and spoke. “Good. He’ll do a good job.”

“You … you’re
for
Tappan Square?” Aubrey asked, surprised. She’d presumed that since Meggie had hightailed it out of town the moment she could, and since she wanted to sell the Stitchery rather than hold on to it, she would also be glad to see Tappan Square reduced to lumber.

“Of course I’m for Tappan Square,” Meggie said, bristling. “Just because I think you—we—are better off selling the Stitchery doesn’t mean I hate Tappan Square.”

“Oh,” Aubrey said—and it was a dumb answer because she was dumbstruck. Her sister wanted to protect their neighborhood, but not their home. “What about you, Bit?” Aubrey asked, more quietly than she’d intended.

“Me? What do I think of the shopping mall?” Bitty ferried another great tower of pancakes across the kitchen. She sat down at the table but did not fill her plate. “I think that Tappan Square, in its current form, is bad for Tarrytown.”

“Oh, come on,” Meggie said.

Bitty brushed a blond highlight from her face with the back of her hand. “For the record, I’m not
for
the shopping mall. But I’m not for Tappan Square, either—not unless the village does something to revitalize. I mean … you have to admit that the neighborhood’s changed, Aub. It’s falling apart.”

“We’re in a recession,” Aubrey managed. “The whole country is falling apart.”

“This is different. Did you know that there’s gang graffiti on the side of Mr. Dooley’s garage? And I’m pretty sure there are no fewer than fifteen people—fifteen—living in the house across the street—that or they’re dealing something out of there. And do you know what I saw last night? A bunch of young guys in puffy jackets lighting garbage on fire. Tappan
Square is different now. It was a poor neighborhood when we were kids. But now it’s poor and dangerous. And while redevelopment might not be the gentler and kinder way of revitalizing, it’s the most efficient, the fastest, the safest, the most economical, and maybe the best.”

The table fell silent when Bitty was done. She’d always had a way of speaking, a brick-hard certainty that Aubrey had never known how to confute. Given that Aubrey could not even hold up her end of a casual debate during a pancake breakfast, she supposed it was a good thing that Mason Boss had swept into the firehouse last night at just the right moment—and that she had not made the mistake of putting herself forward as the leader of Tappan Square.

She glanced carefully at Bitty, who apparently had no fondness whatsoever for the Stitchery or Tappan Square. Her mind was riddled with rebuttals and attacks, airtight arguments of moral outrage that would take her sister down a peg. And yet the only reply she could manage was, “But … the Stitchery  …?”

“People need jobs more than they need a yarn shop,” Bitty said.

“It’s not just a yarn shop,” Aubrey said.

Meggie cut in, pointing the tines of her fork at Bitty. “People don’t need jobs more than they need a roof over their heads to protect them from the elements.”

“They’ll have better roofs if they have better jobs,” Bitty said. “Or don’t you remember those years of setting buckets in the hallway every time it rained?”

Aubrey pushed away from the table. She couldn’t speak. She felt like she’d swallowed a fist. She did not excuse herself, but she fled the kitchen, ignoring her sisters’ confusion and calls to wait, stalking down the hall, pounding up the stairs, feeling as if she were fifteen years old and throwing a temper
tantrum. But she could not stand to look at her sisters for another moment. In her bedroom, she locked the door behind her. She flung herself onto her bed, breathing hard, and pressed her fingers against her eyes.

This place is important
, Mariah had said, her voice a soft music in Aubrey’s memory. They had been sitting on the swing on the porch, drinking root beer floats. It had been two weeks since Meggie had gone, and they were just beginning to wonder if perhaps she would not be coming back. Mariah had known Aubrey was hurting; she’d known just what to say.
As long as the Stitchery is here, the three of you will always have a place you can come together. A place nobody needs to be invited to, where none of you will ever be a stranger. As long as it’s here—whether you’re all living inside it or in different parts of the world—the Stitchery will be your meeting point, your parachute, your home
.