The Wishing Thread (36 page)

Aubrey felt Vic’s breathing, and with it, a thing passing between them, a nourishment, an exchange. She was glad she had waited. There was not another man on earth she would have wanted to give this particular moment to. It was Vic’s and it was hers. She knew that in the morning he would wake and make love to her again. But now, she slept, gently and dreamless and trusting, as the hours wore on.

* * *

At midnight the Old Baltus Family Restaurant, which everyone knew was just a diner with a fancy name, was nearly empty. Meggie sat in a red Naugahyde booth by the large windows, looking out to the shops of Broadway in Sleepy Hollow. She pulled a cheesy french fry off her plate and listened to the orchestral version of a show tune that she couldn’t quite remember.

“Good news!” Tori slid into the booth across from her. Today she wore the mandatory white polo shirt that was her waitressing uniform, complete with an embroidered cartoon of a plump, jovial farmer near the shoulder. Her dreads were gathered up into a large, wild knot at the back of her head. “I talked to the other waitress; she says she doesn’t care if I leave a little early.”

“Great,” Meggie said. “What’s it gonna cost you?”

“A night of free babysitting for her two-year-old terror child. But that’s okay.”

“Thanks,” Meggie said.

“I just have a few more things to do, and then we can go,” Tori said.

Meggie finished her disco fries as Tori went back to work. For some reason, her heart felt heavy. She’d thought that unburdening herself to her sisters should have lifted her spirits. But instead, she felt a vague, lingering sadness. She did not know why.

Within ten minutes, she’d finished her fries and Tori had appeared by her side, her apron gone and her coat buttoned to her chin. “Ready?”

Meggie reached for her wallet in her pocket.

“Don’t worry about that,” Tori said.

They went into the parking lot, and Tori unlocked the door for Meggie to climb inside. The car was old and rusted, but it
had been Tori’s trusted chariot since high school and seemed to be in no hurry to pass over into its next automotive life. The windshield was dirty and the dashboard was covered with stickers of Tori’s favorite bands.

“Where do you want to go?” Tori asked.

“I don’t know,” Meggie said. “I really just wanted to talk.”

Tori turned up the heat, but the fans blew cold air. “I thought you might. I mean—what are you still doing here? Not that I’m not happy you came and rescued me from the rest of my shift. But you said you’d be gone by now.”

Meggie leaned back against the wide bench seat. “I guess there’s something I have to tell you.”

“About  …?”

“About where I’ve really been.”

Tori turned toward her. “I knew you were hiding something. I totally knew. You’re a spy, right? Are you a spy?”

“No,” Meggie said, and she laughed despite herself. “Not a spy.” She looked down at her mittens. And, amazingly, when she started to talk, saying the words that had been so hard to say to her sisters, she found it was not difficult to tell the truth at all. Once the story started coming, it came easily, pouring out. Tori listened without speaking. And when Meggie was done, Tori took her hand.

“I’m sorry you had to do that, carry that burden all by yourself for all those years,” she said.

“It’s okay. I don’t feel bad for myself or anything. It was a choice.” She adjusted the heat vent; the car was slowly beginning to warm up. “What I don’t get … what I can’t understand …” Somehow, she couldn’t finish. Her throat tightened around the words.

“What?” Tori said gently.

“What I don’t get—is—is why I don’t feel
better
?” She rubbed her face before her tears could fall. “I mean, I’m
not
carrying things by myself anymore. So why do I have this weight on my heart even more now than before?”

“Do you have a lot of memories of your mother?” Tori asked.

“Some,” Meggie said. But in fact, she recalled very little. She remembered Lila’s red lipstick that was always such a shock against her skin. She remembered her mother smoking cigarettes on the porch in her pajamas while Meggie played with a puzzle. But the memories were just fragments.

“You must miss her,” Tori said.

Meggie’s throat closed further. “I do. I do miss her. But how do you miss somebody you barely even knew?”

“It doesn’t matter how,” Tori said. “You just do.” She slid across the bench seat of her old car and pulled Meggie to her.

Meggie didn’t resist. She dropped her face into the puffy down of Tori’s coat and cried. “Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” Tori said.

“It’s just … I was looking for her for so long, and now that I’m not looking anymore, I just—I just—”

“You’ll have to let her go.”

Meggie wasn’t normally a crier. She almost never cried. But now, she wept openly, pathetically, and she couldn’t not. She cried for her mother, for losing her again. She cried for the strange feeling of relief she felt at no longer having to search. She cried for her years spent in loneliness. And she cried with gratitude, to be back, to be here, to have come full circle again.

The bells of the nearby Korean church struck one—a long, singular tone ringing out over the valley. When Meggie pulled away, she saw she’d left a wet splotch on Tori’s coat. “Sorry. I’ll pay for dry cleaning.”

“A few tears are the least of what this coat’s been through,” Tori said. “It’s the least of what we’ve been through, I guess.”
She fished in the glove box and found a handful of brown rumpled napkins. She handed them to Meggie.

“Is this for me or the coat?” Meggie asked, laughing.

“For you, goofball,” Tori said.

“Thanks,” Meggie said. And blew her nose.

“So, what does this mean? Are you going to stick around for a while?”

Outside, through the speckled windshield, the night was quiet. Meggie could follow the trail of streetlights down toward the hollow where Ichabod Crane and the Horseman had their legendary chase. She could see Aubrey’s favorite sushi place across the street, dim inside. Meggie had spent so many years looking for her mother. So many years of searching and not finding, searching and looking and scouring and scrutinizing and pushing on. She blotted her face. Maybe it was time to see if she could uncover what there was to uncover when she wasn’t looking for anything at all. “Yeah. Looks like I’m going to stay.”

“Thank God,” Tori said.

“Why’s that?”

“I already told the captain we’d have a new blocker,” Tori said.

Days passed, and Aubrey waited. Each morning she woke, sometimes in Vic’s bed, sometimes to the sounds of her family banging cabinets and doors, and she had the oddest sense that she should not move, should not so much as take a breath that lifted the blankets on her bed, lest she break whatever enchantment had taken hold. She lived like a person having a deeply happy, unbelievably satisfying dream that she did not want to wake up from.

There was reason to be happy—blissfully, unexpectedly, indulgently happy. Bitty had talked to Craig, told him she was done. He was not going to make things easy for her—everyone knew that. But they knew it
together
, and they would tackle whatever was ahead together. Bitty was already looking through the newspaper for apartments in the vicinity of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow. Meggie, in the meantime, had hung up her red backpack on a hook in the hallway and she’d talked about letting her hair grow out again.
In my natural color
, she told them, though she hardly remembered what it might be.

In the evenings, Aubrey and her family amused themselves. They went to see the thousands of pumpkins carved and illuminated at Van Cortlandt Manor, jack-o’-lanterns arranged into scarecrows, and dinosaurs, and a graveyard, and skeletons, and endlessly dazzling bright shapes against a
pitch-dark night. They sipped hot cider and stood around a campfire at the old Philipse millhouse, where a tall man with long sandy hair told ghost stories in his waistcoat and ostrich-plumed hat. Aubrey had not participated in local Halloween activities in years—and to enjoy them now, with her family, made her feel like a kid again.

And Vic,
Vic
, he was exquisite. To watch him get dressed and brush his teeth, to listen to him tell stories about his family, to see the spark in his eye when he talked about his plans to resurface floorboards and knock down walls—it was too much joy to stand. She felt as if she’d been starved of him for a lifetime, and now needed to make up for lost time by touching him whenever touching was possible. She loved to stand beside him as he cooked, looking down into the frying pan while her hand rested just above his sacrum. She loved the way he sought her out even at the library, to tug her into the dark corners of tall shelving and kiss her until her whole body was like a music note suspended in the air.

Aubrey felt, for the first time, that her life was about as perfect as a person could expect a life to be. Each day, her heart was squeezed in disbelieving gratitude. Each night, she fell asleep as if carried on a sigh. Her spells had never worked more beautifully; three people had come to the Stitchery in the last week and Aubrey had knit for them: Alyssa Carter wanted to lose ten pounds and so Aubrey had knit her a sweatband for her forehead; Leena Helsinki needed to have her windows replaced but didn’t have the money, so Aubrey knit her a chunky green neck warmer with big bright buttons; Susan Bjorn, who was trying to build up her salon’s clientele, got socks—delicate violet socks with scalloped picot edging at the top, lace that trickled down to the toe. Amazingly, all of the spells worked—and in record time.

And yet, despite her joy, Aubrey knew the foundation of
her happiness was unsteady, that she had built her hopes on a fault line. Halloween was marching inevitably closer; and the day after Halloween would bring the vote on Tappan Square. If they lost, her sisters might scatter like the October leaves tossed on the wind. Vic, in all likelihood, would have to move out of the Sleepy Hollow area if he wanted to buy another house; affordable neighborhoods were few and far between. The Stitchery, and its long, long memory of centuries past, would gradually be forgotten and would gradually forget that it ever was.

Aubrey had never considered herself an optimist or a pessimist, but rather a things-are-what-you-make-of-them-ist. And yet the great swell of optimism that had buoyed her up in recent weeks had made room for erratic, abysmal trenches of pessimism that left her shaken and fearful to go on.

During the last week of October, Aubrey waited expectantly for some news of the impending flash mob that would save Tappan Square, but the leaves of the phone tree remained unstirred. Tarrytown made its final preparations for the parade on Halloween morning: Pickup trucks were hitched with floats for the high school senior class. The marching band’s trumpeters lubed up their instruments with valve oil and the woodwind players polished their descants to a high shine. Companies of young dancers donned their ghostly white robes and their ballet flats. The veterans polished and buffed their shoes, and the Masons ironed their white aprons, and the firemen gave their big red trucks a hardy wet-down and shine. Halloween edged closer. But still, the Tappan Watch waited. And still, no instructions for the flash mob arrived.

On Friday morning, two days before Halloween, Aubrey had been on her way to the pet store to pick up some worms for Icky when she saw that a few of the Tappan Watch members had gotten tired of waiting for the signal. Half a dozen
people were walking in a slow circle in Patriot’s Park with poster boards hoisted like slack sails. They looked—even Aubrey had to admit it—kind of sad.