The Wishing Thread (13 page)

Bitty would climb on the edge of the monument and lean off it with one hand. “You guys be the militiamen and I’ll be John André.”

Sometimes, they’d play it straight: John André, smuggling Benedict Arnold’s papers in a stinky boot, assumes that because one of the bumpkins he meets is wearing a Hessian coat the man must be a loyalist—as opposed to a patriot in a stolen coat—and he spills his plans only to realize he’s just signed his own death warrant. Other times, they played it so John André gave chase through Tarrytown—leading the girls to run shrieking and crashing into people and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

But the John André game was the least of Tarrytown’s worries when it came to the Van Rippers. As children with magic at their fingertips, they raised a special kind of hell.

Although she was the youngest by far, Meggie was the troupe’s lead instigator. She wanted the baker to give them free pastries. She wanted Tommy Matsumoto to let them use his bike. She wanted Heather Noble to be knocked off her
high horse, and she thought that casting a spell to make Heather get a crush on Lance “Hot Pants” Weemly would do the trick.

With each new spell, Meggie made a sacrifice. And with each new spell, it seemed to get a little easier for her to do it: She gave up her favorite stuffed dinosaur, her book about poisonous snakes, her collection of river stones. Sometimes her sacrifices made for successful spells; other times, they were wasted. But failure had never stopped her from coming up with new ideas to put the Stitchery’s magic to good use.

Unfortunately, she had to rely on her older sisters to turn her ideas into spells; she was not a very good knitter of magic. She could not do it alone.
Aubrey
was the one whose spells turned out the best.
Aubrey
was the most reliable. But Aubrey was also the most scrupulous and serious of the three of them—
chickenshit
, Meggie said—and convincing her to knit a spell just for fun was always a terrible chore.

This, of course, was where Bitty came in. She was glib and smart. She was persistent, stubborn, and always the voice of reason, even when what she was arguing for was technically unreasonable. She liked getting people to do what she wanted. So when Meggie pitched an idea for a new spell, Bitty set about convincing Aubrey to knit it—if only because knitting spells was a good way of testing out the truth, and because she had nothing better to do with her time than antagonize the people of Tarrytown.

As for Aubrey, she tried to resist her sisters’ pleadings but almost always gave in. She knit old Mr. Piotrowski a set of wrist warmers, and for a whole year they played free rounds of the King Kong arcade game that he kept in the back of his pizza shop. She knit a lace headband for Sue Hormack’s mother, and from then on the girls had a standing invitation to come to dinner whenever they pleased—which was important
because Mariah was a terrible cook and Sue’s mother made amazing chicken potpie.

Eventually Mariah caught on. They were grounded for an entire summer, not even allowed to leave the Stitchery’s front yard. Magic was not a toy; it was a responsibility, and no sister felt Mariah’s disapproval and disappointment more keenly than Aubrey. She began to realize that her duty to the Stitchery made her different from her sisters. They could not keep going forward as they had been, as three parallel lines. The summer that Mariah had grounded them was the summer they began to go their separate ways.

Aubrey became increasingly awkward and withdrawn; she was a child of the Stitchery, and certain women did not say very nice things about her—she was that weird Van Ripper girl with the witchy eyes. As Meggie got older, she broke every rule she came across with a kind of good-natured detachment—smoking marijuana right in the middle of the park if it suited her, openly dating both boys and girls, and refusing to wear a bra—much to the consternation of every woman who walked with her husband into the air-conditioned movie theater where Meggie worked. Bitty, known as the angriest of the three sisters, was also bad: It was not the fact that she was “fast” that rankled matronly nerves—if anything, people half expected one if not all of the Van Ripper girls to end up pregnant by the time they were eighteen. The trouble was, Bitty’s fastness was directed at the wrong kind of boys; instead of motorcycle-riding drug dealers or sons of plumbers and cabinetmakers, she went after the quiet college-bound boys with soft hands who lived up on the hill. The old dames of Tarrytown trembled to hear a beloved son mention her name.

Each generation had a story to tell about the Van Rippers—some stories friendlier than others. There were pockets in
which the sisters were welcome, mostly in Tappan Square. But even in their own neighborhood, certain people avoided them. For all their unabashed poverty and strangeness, the Van Rippers were to be feared.

There had been no witch hunt, no torches or battering rams, no inquisitions with fire irons, but two of the three Van Rippers had—by the insidious and awful pressure of observation, conjecture, and gossip—been driven out of town. It was a wonder that Aubrey, the shiest and most nervous of the three sisters, had found the strength to stay.

Aubrey had brought her knitting to Mariah’s funeral picnic. She sat with Bitty and Meggie on an old Navajo-style blanket, the urn that held Mariah’s ashes resting beside her. The evening had turned chilly. Aubrey had done little more than notify the local paper of Mariah’s passing and of their plans for a “funeral.” And now the people of Tappan Square—those who had good feelings toward Mariah and toward the Stitchery—had gathered to remember. Adults lined up their lawn chairs or spread out blankets. Children horsed around on a slide shaped like an oversized macaroni noodle. It was part picnic, part memorial, and Mariah would have loved it. She’d always thought that life was a thing to celebrate, and the ending of life was no less astonishing a transition than the beginning of it. Aubrey had cried, on and off, through the course of the evening. Her knitting was a twist of buttery yellow in her lap.

She shivered.

“You okay?” Meggie whispered.

She stopped knitting and glanced around. She felt like she was being watched. But she pulled her denim jacket more tightly around her neck and said, “I’m just chilly.”

“You should have brought a warmer jacket,” Meggie said.

Aubrey did not immediately resume knitting. She was certain that if she looked behind her she would catch someone’s eye. But whose?

One by one, Mariah’s friends climbed up onto the stump of an old oak to say a few words. Although no one spoke the word
magic
, the fact of it hung in the air like dew settling into the trees. Aubrey recognized most of the speakers as people who had come to the Stitchery at one time or another in their lives.

“Mariah had a big heart,” one woman said. “She helped me reconcile with my father whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. I’ll never be grateful enough for that.”

“Because of Mariah, I got over my fear of flying—and that allowed me one last trip out to Arizona to see my best friend before she died,” another woman said.

“Mariah taught us all to pass along goodness, to be a good listener, to be generous. Plus, she never turned down an opportunity to help somebody. I know there are people in this town who say unkind things about her, but that’s only because they never got to know her like we did,” another woman said.

Aubrey had known that Mariah had a good number of supporters, a few of whom were even friends, but she hadn’t quite understood until now just how many. The park was full of families, of men or women standing in groups or alone. And although Aubrey knew she shouldn’t, she found she was thinking of herself, of her own place in the community. Where Mariah was boisterous and outgoing, Aubrey was reticent and self-conscious. Where Mariah was larger-than-life, Aubrey willed herself to shrink. Where Mariah had stood up against the Halperns with all the gumption and balls and loudmouthed rabble-rousing that a single woman could muster,
Aubrey was withdrawing. Her heart felt heavy. She wished she could be more like Mariah—more like her without losing the fundamental things that made Aubrey
herself
.

“Mariah was irreplaceable,” a woman said.

Aubrey was wiping the tears from her cheeks when she saw Jeanette Judge crossing the park, jouncing heel over heel as she cut through the crowd. She was tall and beautiful, dark skin offset by a peacock-green scarf that Aubrey had made for her last year—not a spell, just a gift. As Jeanette hurried and tried not to look like she was hurrying, heads turned.

“Hey.” Jeanette sat down on the blanket beside Aubrey. Her breathing was shallow. There was panic in her eyes.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“I got stuck at the library. Some old guy fed spiral notebook paper into the printer. It made me late.”

Aubrey relaxed. “Don’t worry. It’s no big deal.”

“Oh, and the Halperns are here.”

“What?”

“They just climbed out of their town car.”

“Where?”

“There.”

Aubrey followed Jeanette’s gaze. The Halperns stood at the north end of the park behind the seated crowd. Steve Halpern was dressed in a black slash of a suit—far too severe for a picnic. Jackie was elegiac in a gray chiffon dress and dark furs. On a good day, the Halperns were disliked in Tappan Square. On a bad day, they were hated. Today—Mariah’s funeral—was a bad day.

Aubrey felt a shift in the air, and she wasn’t surprised when Vic bent down beside her. He’d been sitting with his sister on a blanket about ten feet away, the closest available patch of grass that had been open when he’d arrived. Now his starched
shirt whispered and popped as he rested his elbows on his knees where he crouched.

“You saw them, too?” she said.

He nodded. “I’ll ask them to leave for you.”

“Leave?”

“Believe me, nothing would make me happier than to go over there and send them on their way.”

She laughed, though nothing was funny.

“I’m serious. Do you want me to tell them to go?”

“I … I just don’t know.”

She looked out over the park. The sky was darkening. One police officer leaned against a tree, cross-armed and scowling. Another picked her way among the picnic tables, hands behind her back. The police had been sent by the village to “keep the peace” among the uncontrollable heathens of Tappan Square. And now that Aubrey was paying attention, she noticed that the peacefulness of evening was starting to fray. Tribes of young men who had not been there earlier in the evening had coalesced in deepening shadows. They laughed loudly and took long swigs from what looked like bottles of iced tea but could have been anything. They eyed the cops, who eyed them back. Somewhere a firework went off—rude and wailing. The air buzzed like a snapped rubber band.

Vic touched her arm. “Aubrey?”

From across the park, the Halperns were looking at her. No doubt there were some people in Tappan Square who would blame the Halperns for Mariah’s passing. The Halperns stood for everything Mariah did not—the marginalization of the poor, tax breaks for the wealthy, legislation favoring the 1 percent. It had been the Halperns who first put forward the proposal to demolish Tappan Square. And now, everyone was waiting for Aubrey to decide if the Halperns should be
allowed to stay among them, all her neighbors, all the volatile young men sitting on the hoods of their cars and loitering near the park’s periphery, all the police who walked heel–toe, heel–toe, and scanned the crowds.

She rubbed her forehead. She looked down at the stitches in her lap. “I guess they can stay. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen?”

“Famous last words,” Meggie said.

“You doing okay?” Vic shifted his weight.

Aubrey nodded. She loved the warm concern in Vic’s eyes.

“Can I join you for a minute?”

“Of course,” Aubrey said, and she scooted over to make room. She could not focus on her stitches, could not focus on the speeches being given about Mariah, could not focus on the Halperns. She felt terrible for being so distracted by the nearness of Vic’s person, his hand that was so close she might reach out and cover it with her own. But Mariah’s voice was there in her mind at once to chastise her for her unnecessary guilt complex:
Are you kidding me? I
want
you to be distracted
, Mariah said.

They watched as another speaker climbed onto the stump in front of the lighthouse to talk about Mariah. He was a tall, lean young man with a face like an actor—all eyes and mouth—and he introduced himself as Mason Boss. He had neat, espresso-dark hair, brown skin, and leather shoes that were so shiny a person could pick broccoli out of her teeth if she happened to be standing near him and she looked down.

“Does anybody know this guy?” Aubrey whispered.

Jeanette didn’t look away from him. He was standing solidly on the old tree trunk, speaking more softly than the other eulogizers, so that people who wanted to hear him—and everyone did—shushed their children and leaned in.

“No,” Jeanette said. “Not yet.”

“Is it just me, or does he sound … what is that? A little bit British?”

“How could you be a little bit British?”

“He sounds really
proper
,” Aubrey said.

“He has good diction,” Jeanette said.

His soft, shy words gradually became louder. Aubrey was sure she’d never met him. He said he was new to Tappan Square. But he spoke of Mariah. Her morality. Her guts. He talked about how she saw beauty in Tappan Square’s diversity and its grit—even if lawmakers couldn’t. It wasn’t fair, he said, that any one person or group of persons should have the right to take away the property or properties of any other persons. Wasn’t it John Locke who said that people had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and
prop-er-ty
? Wasn’t that the
point
of the
Constitution
? The people needed to rise up and remind Tarrytown that a government by the people was by the
whole
people—not by a privileged few.

Aubrey had goose bumps. She hadn’t realized that she’d stopped knitting.