The Wishing Thread (34 page)

* * *

By the time Bitty emerged from the thicket of shadow in the tower stairwell, Aubrey knew that something was wrong—something more than a child playing a prank. Bitty’s eyes were full of apology; her mouth was drawn.

“Let me guess,” Meggie said. “We’re locked in.”

“What? Why?” Aubrey scowled in worry. “Are the kids okay?”

“Oh, they’re fine,” Bitty said. “They’re perfect little angels.”

Meggie snorted.

“I don’t understand this,” Aubrey murmured.

“I’ll explain it,” Bitty said. “Our friend Meggie here decided that she would take off without telling anyone. And it ticked off my kids.”

“It’s not my fault you can’t control your monsters,” Meggie said. She was leaning against the Stitchery wall, her posture slumping, her arms crossed.

“And it’s not their fault or mine that
you
don’t give a thought to anyone but yourself!” Bitty said. “Those kids love you, Meggie. You can’t just take off out of the blue. I mean, what was I supposed to tell them when you were gone?”

Evening was falling, and a hard chill came through the Stitchery’s rattling boards. The air was freezing cold, as cold as if they were standing directly outside in the twilight without so much as a light jacket to warm them. Aubrey began to shiver. When she spoke, her breath was faintly white. “Let’s back up a sec,” she said. “Meggie—is that true? Were you going to leave today without telling us?”

Meggie glowered.

“Again,” Bitty said. “She’s leaving
again
.”

“Knock it off, Bit,” Meggie said. “Like you’re some kind of saint or something. Like you didn’t leave the Stitchery, too.”

“I at least had the decency to say good-bye. To say where I was going.”

“So you have better manners than me,” Meggie said. “Big deal. You deserve a medal, and I should go to hell.”

“Let’s give Meggie a little credit,” Aubrey said. “I’m sure if she was going to leave without telling us, she must have had a really good reason. Right, Meggie? I’m sure you had a reason.”

“Yeah—” Bitty said. “Just like you had a good reason for leaving the first time.”

“I do what I have to do,” Meggie said through clenched teeth.

Bitty laughed. “By screwing over your family? Sorry if I don’t think that’s high on the list of honorable intentions.”

“
Me
screwing over the family?”

“Stop it,” Aubrey said. “Just stop!”

She looked at her sisters, who—although they stood on opposite sides of the little room—seemed to be ready for a prizefight. Bitty was taut as a bow, practically on her toes, her hands clenched. Her muscles trembled faintly with cold. Meggie was deceptively still beneath the heavy hood of her sweatshirt, her eyes narrowed, her body bent into the dangerous slouch of a person about to explode.

“Everybody just calm down!” Aubrey said. She stood in the room between them. “Bitty—I’m sure Meggie didn’t realize the position she put you in with the children by leaving. And Meggie—I’m sure Bitty doesn’t mean to sound so … insensitive. Right, Bit?”

Bitty exhaled loudly. “I don’t need to accuse anybody of anything. Meggie knows what she did—and she knew damn well how much it was going to hurt my kids, how much it was going to hurt
us
, if she just took off again. This was flat-out punishment for something—her punishing us. The question, obviously, is
what
is she trying to punish us for?”

“Is that true?” Aubrey asked.

Meggie was hunched deep in her hoodie. “I think a better question is, How the hell are we going to get out of here? Apparently Bit’s kids don’t know the word
hypothermia
yet.”

“At least you have a sweatshirt,” Bitty said. Her nose was beginning to redden, and her eyes had glazed.

Aubrey glanced around. She opened a trunk and dug in it until she found a blanket. It was old and smelled like mothballs, but it was relatively un-dusty. “Here,” she told Bitty.

Bitty moved closer, and Aubrey draped the blanket around both of their shoulders. Together they sat down on the floor, draped in a quilt of fire trucks, and rubber duckies, and green dinosaurs.

“Are you coming?” Aubrey said.

Meggie just scowled.

“Suit yourself,” Bitty said. “You always do anyway.”

“Get over it,” Meggie said. And she walked herself to a corner and plopped down.

“Stop it, guys. This isn’t helping. Meggie—” Aubrey’s teeth chattered. “I don’t believe for one second that you would do something that might intentionally hurt Nessa and Carson. There must have been a reason you had to leave so abruptly. A very good reason. Whatever it is you’re not saying, I bet it will feel really good to get it out in the open, once and for all.”

Meggie shook her head. Maybe she wanted to yell. Maybe she wanted to cry. Instead she sat there with her knees drawn to her chest, her lips pressed tight, and her face turning hot red under her translucent spikes.

“Aubrey’s right,” Bitty said. “What’s going on? Why didn’t you clue us in?”

“Because. I’ve been looking for someone,” she said, each word carefully measured out and dispensed.

“Who?” Bitty asked.

Meggie was silent.

“They’re not going to let us out of here until we know the whole story,” Bitty said.

“Well—who do you
think
I was looking for?” Meggie said. “Hello?
Mom
.”

“Our mom?” Aubrey said.

Meggie rolled her eyes.

“I don’t understand,” Bitty said. “Mom’s been dead for a long time.”

Meggie shook her head. “I don’t believe that. That’s a story that Mariah made up and that everybody else started to believe because it was convenient.”

“Why do you think she’s not dead?” Aubrey asked. “Do you know something we don’t?”

“I know a lot of things you don’t. You might have known Mom better than me, but I know things, too. Things I found out about her when I was out there.”

“What things?” Bitty asked.

“She’s alive?” Aubrey said.

“I found hints. Proof of her. In places she’d been.”

Her sisters looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

“People don’t just go missing. Not these days.” Meggie crossed her legs in front of her, sitting upright despite the damp, raw cold. “I’ve been everywhere. A hundred cities you can think of and a thousand towns you can’t.”

“How did you know where to look?” Bitty asked.

“When I first started, I had leads to track down. But these days, I mostly just have to follow my heart,” Meggie said. “It’s a shot in the dark, but once in a while something turns up.”

“Why didn’t you tell us what you were doing?” Aubrey asked.

“Because I knew you would try to stop me. And I
thought—I thought you’d make fun of me. Or tell me I was wasting my time.”

“I would never do that,” Aubrey said. “Your heart was in the right place. And Mom would have been honored, and proud of you.”

“Would have been?” Meggie scoffed. “Would have? She
will
be proud—when I find her. For all we know, she forgot who she is or where she comes from, and she needs us to bring her back.”

Aubrey glanced up at Bitty—a look that made Meggie feel horribly, miserably left out. She rubbed at her nose with her knuckles; the tip was cold. “It’s not that I didn’t
want
to tell you. It’s not that I didn’t
want
to come back. A thousand times a day I thought, maybe I’ll just go to the Stitchery for a visit. Maybe I’ll just stop by. But I knew that if I stayed for a second, it would be really, really hard to leave again.”

“But you were going to leave today,” Bitty pointed out.

“Not because it was going to be easy.”

“Then why?” Aubrey asked.

“There was no choice. Somebody’s got to be out there looking for her. Somebody owes her that.”

Aubrey stared at the spot on the floor. She adjusted the quilt around her shoulders. “I wish I knew this before. I would have tried to help.”

“You couldn’t,” Meggie said. “You had to stay here, right? That’s your thing. To hide out like a nun in the Stitchery for your whole life?”

Aubrey didn’t answer.

Bitty let out a long breath. “Meggie, you were really young when Lila vanished. You might not remember everything. Maybe, in your head, you made Lila out to be some kind of better mother than she actually was.”

“I know what she was,” Meggie said. “For the most part.”

“But do you remember how she was in the end? Do you remember the time she threw away every left shoe in the house—every one she could find? Do you remember the time she got arrested trying to carry a lawn chair out of a store without bothering to pay for it? Not something she could fit in her pocket, but a lawn chair?”

“Why would she do those things?”

“My theory is that she was a meth-head,” Bitty said.

“If that’s true, you guys should have told me years ago.”

“It hurt too much to talk about,” Bitty said. “We all loved her, you know. Not just you.”

“Then why weren’t you out there looking for her, too?”

“Because she’s
gone
, Meggie,” Bitty said. “Gone as in dead.”

“How do you know? They never proved it.”

“There’s things you don’t know,” Bitty said, irritation in her voice.

“Oh yeah? What?”

“Things …” Bitty looked like she might throw up.

“Bullshit,” Meggie said.

Aubrey spoke, words rushed as fast as the air would carry them. “Mariah said Lila jumped off the bridge.”

“I know. But I don’t accept that,” Meggie said.

Meggie pulled her frozen fingers into the sleeves of her oversized hoodie. The bridge—the Tappan Zee—she knew it well. As a little girl, she could press her face against her bedroom window at a certain angle and see the beautiful, graceful suspension of the Tap’s east end, and the miles of flat roadway supported by beams going off to the west. There had always been something so dangerous in all that beauty, like the allure of a poisonous snake. Every year, people went to the Tappan Zee to jump to their deaths. Meggie would have been an idiot if she hadn’t at least considered the possibility
that her mother had jumped. But try as she might, she could not imagine her vibrant, passionate, insatiable mother on the bridge, hefting one leg over the rail, then the other, and making the decision to let go.

Aubrey spoke softly. “You were really young when it happened. Five years old. There were things Mariah didn’t want to tell you.”

“Like what?”

“Mariah told me that on the night before Mom died, she confessed that she worried she was going crazy. That the Stitchery was making her crazy. She said she would rather be dead than watch the Madness take over. Mariah thinks …”

“What?” Meggie prodded.

Aubrey pulled her knees closer to her chest. “There was a Jane Doe. The police found her a few weeks after Mom disappeared. The body was caught under a dock or something in Bayonne.”

“Was it Mom?” Meggie asked.

“We don’t know,” Aubrey said.

“Why not?”

Bitty jumped in. “Would
you
have wanted to identify the body?”

Meggie considered if she would have done as much.
The body
. Such an awful thing to say. She remembered a man from Canada who had told her a story about human feet in sneakers regularly washing up on the beaches near his house. The man had been in the RCMP, and he’d said they’d believed for a time that they were chasing a serial killer because the pattern of feet in sneakers was so very specific. But after a time a new theory emerged: Fish and sharks and tides could do a number on a human body—but they didn’t know how to untie shoes. The bodies of Vancouver bridge jumpers did not wash up on shores. But their feet in their sneakers did.

Meggie steered her brain away from visions of her mother’s body floating all the way downriver to Bayonne. She did not let herself wonder whether her mother had taken off her shoes before she jumped. If Meggie hadn’t been so young when her mother vanished, she would have been the only person in the family with the backbone to march down to the morgue and say
Show me Jane Doe
. Now it was too late. Mariah could have saved their family a lot of heartache; instead she’d been a coward. Meggie was pissed. She threw back her hood to rough her hair; the gelled spikes were brittle, and they crackled under her fingers. “Wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to have gone and identified the body? So we wouldn’t have had to wait so long for Mariah to adopt us? So we would have
known
?
”

Aubrey’s breathing was visible. “I can’t blame Mariah for not wanting to do it. She thought there would be a different way to prove she was gone.”

“I suspect that by the time she realized there was no better way, they’d already disposed of the body,” Bitty said.

“I would have done it.” Meggie lifted her chin. “I would have done it for
you guys
and for me and for Mom.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Bitty said. And Meggie felt a spike of pride and gladness that she didn’t quite know what to do with, so she pushed it away.

“Meggie—what did you mean when you said, you know things we don’t?” Aubrey asked.

Meggie hesitated. It had been so long since she shared her secrets, she didn’t know how to share them now. But she forced herself. “I have a notebook. It’s full of clues, hints. Some of the places I went—I think Mom had been there. At some point, anyway.”

“How do you know?” Bitty asked.

Meggie told them about the picture that she’d carried of
her mother all over the States. Lila had often disappeared when they were young, sometimes for days, sometimes weeks or months. No one knew where she went. Meggie knew she must have gone
somewhere
. She’d started by looking for clues in Lila’s bedroom, and she’d found them. Crushed plane tickets in old coat pockets, receipts wadded like dirty tissues, torn maps, phone numbers with area codes, business cards, a flyer that had probably been shoved under a windshield wiper at one point in its life.

There had been traces of Lila in Albany—a bartender near the State Museum had seen Lila decades ago. He’d told Meggie a story that Lila had told him, about the time she rode a mechanical bull for eight minutes straight. Meggie had jotted the story in her notebook. She also wrote down what her mother had been wearing (a belly shirt and cutoffs, to the bartender’s recollection) and what she liked to drink (Bud Light). In a Queens dive bar, Meggie discovered that Lila once had a boyfriend named Clutch, and he’d told her that Lila had talked about going to California because she wanted to stand at the corner of Haight and Ashbury to see if anything from its golden age was left. When Meggie arrived in San Francisco, she found a ragged, cabled merino band wrapped around a lamppost in the neighborhood—and she was sure, sure with a full, complete, intense knowing, that her mother had been there. After a tip led her to Washington, DC, she found her mother’s initials—they had to have been hers—carved into a tree near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The story had been that Lila had made the trip to the capital to give an earful to a senator about an oil pipeline.