The Wishing Thread (7 page)

Aubrey’s heart went out to her. She, too, knew the value and pain of tradition. Of a place in the community that trumped personal will.

“I suppose if there’s no other way …” Gingerly, Ruth set the pin down on the counter. A moment later Aubrey was counting out fifty-dollar bills.

“George would want me to do this,” Ruth said under her breath. “It’s a family tradition. Every family has its traditions.”

“We sure do,” Meggie said.

Aubrey jumped—shocked by the sense that she’d been caught doing something wrong. She looked up from the leafy stack of money. Her sister stood leaning one shoulder against the door frame, her short legs slung with bright teal pajama bottoms, her arms crossed and a shoulder raised. Aubrey had no idea how long Meggie had been watching.

“Oh how nice,” Ruth said blandly. “Margaret.
You’re
back.”

“Just like the good old days,” Meggie said.

Aubrey touched Ruth’s arm. She needed to guide Ruth’s focus away from Meggie, who had once, many years ago, pressed her naked butt against the window of a downtown café when Ruth and her husband were inside. “Mrs. Ten Eckye—” Aubrey said loudly. “I think what you need is a nice set of fingerless gloves. A gift for Mr. Scott to wear on chilly fall nights. I have just the thing.”

She walked over to an old flour barrel that had been filled with yarn. She plucked one ball off the top—a soft, blue-black skein of wool—and brushed off the dust. The color had bleached in the light over the years, turning a dull slate gray one on side. She held it up for Ruth to see.

“Do
I
have to make them?” Ruth asked. “Because I can, you know.”

“Drop by Wednesday morning. I’ll have the gloves done by then. And of course, you can’t tell anyone about this. If you do, it might break the spell.”

Ruth nodded, and Aubrey tried to invoke the same gravitas that Mariah had so often conjured when Aubrey and her sisters were being warned not to play with the things in the tower or pretend the clothes hamper was a snake charmer’s basket. She hoped she looked threatening.

“As if I would admit this to anyone,” Ruth said.

What Ruth did not know, what she couldn’t know, was that Mariah had completely fabricated the notion that telling someone about a spell would break it.
Crowd control
, she’d called it.
The people who are meant to find us will find us. The rest are on their own
.

Meggie spoke from the doorway. “Did you want to warn her about the other thing, too?”

“What other thing?”

“You know, the
other
thing?”

Aubrey blinked. She’d never been very good at dealing with people. She got flustered so easily. She’d thought she’d done an admirable job—until now, until her sister had gotten involved. “Oh, of course. I was getting to that.”

“Getting to what?” Ruth asked.

Aubrey cleared her throat. “The magic … it might not work.”

“Then what did I just pay you for?”

“Clients decide for themselves what they’d like to sacrifice—sometimes with a little, um, encouragement from me, of course. And if you set the price too low for yourself—well—nothing will happen.”

Ruth laughed. “So I could have walked in here and offered you nothing but a box of tiddlywinks and you still would have knit the blasted things?”

“I’ve knit for less,” Aubrey said, and she thought of those times that she had knit for trinkets—for a single plastic keychain, for a sun-faded photograph—and her heart had broken for how such great worth lived in small things.

Ruth scowled, a twist of her mouth that made Aubrey wonder if Ruth and her evil-grinning pumpkin pin shared some DNA. “I assume I get a refund if Todd doesn’t get the part.”

“You know what happens when you assume,” Meggie said.

Aubrey shushed her. “No. I’m sorry. No refunds. If you knew you were going to get your payment back, there wouldn’t be an emotional risk for you—and the risk is part of what makes a spell work. Magic’s about taking a leap of faith.”

“No leap, no magic,” Meggie said. And Aubrey caught her eye, because that was something Mariah used to say.

Ruth held up a gnarled finger, the point of it poking the air. “You’re creepy girls. The lot of you. It’s a wonder your whole
family hasn’t been run out of town.” She gathered the pinless lapels of her coat tighter to her neck, glared once more, and left. The Stitchery door whooshed open, letting in a gust of sweet fall air. Then Aubrey was alone with her sister. The room that had seemed small a moment ago now seemed even smaller.

“You know she’s going to tell everyone you’re a witch,” Meggie said.

“Nothing they haven’t heard before.”

“Come on.” Meggie smiled and canted her shoulders toward the kitchen. “Even witches need breakfast.”

Aubrey didn’t point out that it was lunchtime. She just went.

The evening fell and Nessa was restless. Carson had abandoned her in favor of looking through his bug book: He was attempting to memorize it in a bid to impress his dorky
friends, and so far he was up to
Latrodectus mactans
—and why he couldn’t just say
black widow
like everybody else was beyond Nessa. Aubrey had disappeared into her room to knit. Meggie had gone outside, and when Nessa had peeked through the parlor window, she saw her aunt—her aunt who looked like she could have been hanging out with high schoolers—talking to some random guy. Her mother had a chat with her father on the phone in the downstairs hallway, and Nessa had heard enough of it to know that she would be in as good a mood as a hungry alligator for the rest of the night. It had sounded like this:
Of course I wanted you to come to the funeral. Why wouldn’t I have wanted you to come to the funeral? Fine then—fine. Don’t come
.

And so Nessa was alone. She felt a little like a princess trapped in a castle, except that no one seemed to notice or care what she did, and if she broke out of her confinement tomorrow it would take three days to sound the alarm that she was gone. She lay on Mariah’s bed, her heart as heavy as a stone at the bottom of a cold lake. This was what it was like to lie on the bed of a dead woman.

She looked at the picture she’d found on Mariah’s dresser, the gold frame gnarled with fruit and garlands and gaudy swags. The photograph within it was taken a long time ago; Nessa could tell by the hilarious 1990s shoulder pads that her mother was wearing. The three girls were standing with Mariah on some giant flat rocks in front of the river, which was so wide that it seemed more like a bay or lake. The picture had gone a little hazy because of the bright sun, faces shining out with unnatural brilliance. Everyone seemed happy enough: Aubrey’s smile was cluttered with metal braces, her arms around her sisters, her shoulders so scrawny that her chest seemed concave. Meggie was just a little kid in a confection of pink frills, her head tipped, her grin verging on the
ridiculous. Bitty, in her middle teens, was the only one who seemed like she was thinking about posing, about smiling prettily, looking happy instead of just being happy. And Mariah—this had to have been Mariah—was a heavyset woman with a wide, friendly face, wearing a floppy hat and holding some kind of tangle of yarns in her hands.

Nessa put the picture down, frustrated because there were no answers. There
never
were. Why had her mother and her sisters avoided one another for so long? As far as Nessa could tell, a person either belonged to her family, or she didn’t.
Halfway
belonging to a family was just faking, which made things even worse for everyone. Her father had only halfway belonged to her mother for years.

She stood and made a lap around the room. At school, her friends—the friends that she’d played tree house with and that she’d chased up the slide—were starting to act different. Her friend Rachelle had smoked a cigarette last week. Her friends Eric and Tammy had made out and let everyone watch. She didn’t hang out with Marcus McKerrick, but she heard that he got in trouble for stealing a magazine.

Nessa, on the other hand, was a good kid—maybe not as good as her brother, but still, she was good. She got okayish grades. She didn’t talk back to her teachers unless they deserved it. If her mother said she wasn’t allowed to watch a movie, she watched it anyway but covered her eyes at the parts with violence or sex. She longed, sometimes, to do something really terrible—even though she had no idea what terrible things she might do and even though she knew in her heart she would never actually do them. All the time, with her mother or alone, she felt like she was wearing a strait-jacket, cinched up and tied.

But Mariah’s room made her feel better for a little while. It was so
weird:
half bedroom, half museum. On her bookshelf
Mariah had everything from poetry collections, to giant books filled with paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, to yellowed romance novels. She ran her hands over the old, odd books, wishing she could have known Mariah better.

She sighed, grew bored and restless again, and closed Mariah’s bedroom door behind her. She stood looking out the hall window into the darkness, which seemed like it should have been some pastoral, moonlit hillside and distant river but was instead the close, tight-curtained face of the house next door. She was trying to imagine what she looked like standing at the window—a young maiden imprisoned behind castle walls?—when a sound caught her ear. An odd sound. An unearthly sound, hissy and poppy, a steady steaming. It was so faint she could barely hear it, but it was definitely
there
.

Her mind reached for explanations: Someone had left a TV on, and the cable had gone out, and all that was left was a static hissing. Or someone had forgotten a pot on the stove, the tinny and tinkling noise of a rolling boil with not much water there. The sound was distant and strange—a cross between a demonic whispering and the snap, crackle, and pop of a bowl of cereal. No earthly thing made that sound. No human thing.

Her heart turned to ice. The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. She was paralyzed with fear. Whatever it was, it was downstairs. And Nessa had to make a decision: Which way would she go? Toward the sound? Or away?

She swallowed. Her hands itched. Slowly, as slowly as she could bear, she put her foot on the first step of the long stairway. She leaned her weight forward little by little to muffle the stair’s creak. If there was a ghost, she did not want to scare it off. She really wanted to get a picture of it on her cell phone to show her friends. Step by step, she made her way down the stairs. The night air was strange—oddly humid for autumn.
The darkness outside was falling; she could see it through the square windows around the paneled door. A mist had settled, so thick and awful that it seemed to be pressing its face against the front windows and looking in.

Her foot found the ground floor. The sound was coming from the yarn room. The whispering was louder now, the crackle of a soft fire. She lifted her cell phone in its pink rhinestone case, set it to record video. Then, with the same rush of bravery that had helped her jump off the high dive for the first time last summer, she stepped forward until she could peek into the yarn room. It was thick with darkness and whispers. Terrible whispers. The whispers of the dead. She could not focus into the darkness until she had stepped across the doorjamb. It took a moment for her eyes to see, and a moment longer for her brain to understand.

There was fog, the barest tracery of it,
in
the house. Mist clung to the yarns—the buckets and barrels and crates—like a demon guarding its hoard with sinewy arms. And the whispering—the yarn seemed to be whispering. Little consonants, T’s, K’s, P’s, making soft pops. Nessa reached out a hand to grip the door frame, found it was not where she’d expected it to be, and nearly fell.

A voice behind her made her scream.

“What are you doing?” her mother said.

“Holy cheeses!” Nessa skittered around. Her mother was in the hallway, bathed in the yellow light from the bulbs in the ceiling. Her tracksuit was black with two parallel white lines that ran uninterrupted from ankle to armpit. “Mom! Mom! Listen!” Her whisper was hysterical.

Bitty stepped into the yarn room.

“Can you hear it?” Nessa asked. Her blood felt cold. The mist breathed around them.

Bitty put her hands on her hips, taking in the crackling yarns, the mist, with no more fear than a surveyor might exhibit looking over his terrain for the day. Nessa was struck by a bolt of annoyance that her mother could be so nonchalant. But then a deeper worry set in. What if her mother couldn’t hear the yarns crackling or see the awful mist? What if only Nessa could? What if she was like one of those innocent kids in movies who gets targeted by the ghosts of angry murder victims?

Then her mother spoke. “Yeah. It’s disturbing, right?”

And the whole awful wonderful terrible amazing spell was broken.

“It’s a weird thing that happens,” her mother said. She might have been talking about algebra or something she saw on TV. “If the atmosphere is just right. The temperature and the humidity and all of that. The fog condenses in the yarns.”

“But what about the sounds?” Nessa asked.

“I’m not sure exactly. All the wool is a natural fiber. And it kind of holds moisture, like the ground. Or something. And the fibers flex or stretch and it makes that little noise. I’m not getting this right. Anyway, it’s a scientific thing.”