The Wishing Thread (14 page)

Out of the murmuring crowds, someone called out:
Hey! The Halperns are here! It’s Steve Halpern!
Around the park, people began to boo, low and weird, and over the drone of booing, shouts and jeers began to burst like bottle rockets. Aubrey saw Steve Halpern put his hand on his wife’s back and begin to guide her toward the parking lot, away from the increasingly loud crowd.

But the young men at the park’s edge saw an opportunity and were not about to let their lawmakers leave without speaking their minds. All at once, on the heels of Mason Boss’s blood-rousing speech, it was as if Mariah’s death had come not on a hand-knotted rug on Steve Halpern’s floor, but at the end of a rope at Steve Halpern’s hand. The police, who had been at the edges of the park, began to tighten. A crowd—
thirty people? Fifty?—surged toward the Halperns, men and women chanting
Save Tappan Square! Save Tappan Square!
Aubrey felt her guts clench, partly with worry, partly with excitement. She was thrilled to see her neighbors taking such a passionate, political stand.

And then, fast as lightning, it all changed.

Another firework went off, this time in the middle of the crowd. People yelled and pushed and screamed to get away. Aubrey cried out, worried. Was anyone hurt? Near the Halperns, the chanting went on.
Save Tappan Square! Save Tappan Square!
Shouts of protest turned to shouts of fury and rage. Aubrey got to her feet. Everyone got to their feet. Chairs tipped. Parents snatched up their children. Dogs barked and strained at their leashes. The geese at the park’s edge lifted into the sky. Another firework exploded. A bottle shattered against a tree. Aubrey felt the great swell of danger.

She felt Vic pull her arm. “We should probably get out of here,” he said.

Ten minutes later, it was over. The Tappan Square riot, as it would go down in history among the locals, was, as far as riots went, not much to speak of. Compared with anticommunist violence in nearby Peekskill in 1949, the Tappan Square riot was the work of halfhearted amateurs. There were no rubber bullets, no clouds of tear gas, not even so much as a single car turned upside down. The police had easily cleared out the park; most people went willingly, not interested in being a part of a mob scene. And then there was only the quiet of the dark river, sucking at the thick bulkheads that kept the land from slipping down into the water, and the twinkle of lights like stars on the distant shore.

Only the lighthouse was left standing its ground, as it had
since 1883. It had seen the river filled with steamboats so thick it was said a person could walk from one side of the river to the other without getting wet. It had seen the dirigible
Hindenburg
make its gaseous, big-bellied salute to the people of Tarrytown. It had seen the eastern shoreline, once half a mile away, creep within a few feet of its casings when an automobile factory had dumped so much landfill that it changed the shape of the mighty Tappan Zee—and it felt rather resentful of the change. But it did not have much of an opinion on the riots of Tappan Square. Nor did it have special feelings for the Van Ripper sisters, who had crept from the safety of their old manse back to the park as soon as the coast was clear, and were now sneaking around the bushes with flashlights in hand.

“I think I left it around here,” Aubrey said.

It was well after midnight and the beams of their flashlights lit the grass in bright circles. Colorful leaves, paper plates, napkins, and bendy straws littered the ground.

“I don’t see anything,” Bitty said.

“It’s here,” Aubrey said, trying to sound confident. “Nobody would have taken it.”

Meggie sniggered. “Yeah. They probably think it’s cursed.”

“We’ll find it.” Aubrey squinted into the darkness. The river was glinting black and silver. During the mêlée—the mad rush and enforced evacuation from the park—Aubrey had left Mariah on the picnic blanket. Her knitting was still there, too. At least, she hoped it was.

“There it is!” Meggie shouted.

Bitty shushed her.

Aubrey hurried in the direction of Meggie’s beam. “Oh thank God.” She righted the urn and hugged it close. It was cosmic blue, swirled with purple and flecked with white clusters like musical notes or stars. Mariah had grown portly in
her later years. Now she weighed no more than a baby in Aubrey’s arms. “See? It’s fine. I told you it would be fine.”

Bitty started to walk away. “Great. Let’s get out of here.”

Aubrey stood.

Meggie was wandering off.

“Hey.” Bitty shined her flashlight between Meggie’s shoulder blades. She spoke as if she were whispering on stage. “Where you going?”

“It’s a nice night. I want to see the river.”

“Do you want to get arrested? The cops are
everywhere
,” Bitty said.

Meggie called over her shoulder. “Don’t be a chicken.”

“We have to get back to the kids,” Bitty said.

“They’ll be fine,” Meggie said, turning around to walk backward for a moment. “They’ve got a movie and enough popcorn to feed a small country.”

Bitty glanced at Aubrey.

Aubrey shrugged with Mariah in her arms.

Bitty’s shoulders sank with resignation. “Well, at least let’s turn off our flashlights. I don’t want to explain to my husband why he needs to come spring me out of jail.”

Aubrey laughed.

Together, they followed Meggie to the edge of the water, where the rocks were bunched and jutting. The lighthouse rose up before them, dark where a light should have been. The Tappan Zee Bridge was strung with pearly green lights on their chain.

Meggie kicked off her basketball sneakers.

“Ugh. What
now
?” Bitty asked.

“What’s it look like?” Meggie rolled up her pants, then sat and plunked her feet into the water. The moonlight brace-leted her calves. “Just for a sec. Nobody’s gonna bother us.”

Aubrey pulled off her socks and shoes—which required a
lot of unlacing, hopping, and prying—and then she sat beside her sister.

Reluctantly, Bitty joined them. “It’s cold.”

“Freezing,” Aubrey said.

“You get used to it,” Meggie said.

They sat together, and yet not together, in silence. Aubrey gritted her teeth against the icy water. The bones of her ankles were cold to the core, as if she could feel the marrow turning purple and blue. For two nights her sisters had been with her again, in the Stitchery. And except for that first night, when Meggie had appeared and they’d cried together with Mariah on their minds, Aubrey felt as if they were
together
in physical proximity only. Bitty busied herself with her children. Meggie holed away. They exchanged only as much information as one might exchange with a friendly stranger on a bus or plane. Now, sitting at the water’s edge on the night-cold rocks, this was the first time that the three of them had been alone without the walls of the Stitchery listening in on their conversation and without Bitty’s children nearby. The nighttime obscured Aubrey from her sisters just enough to give her a sense that she was free from them even as they sat close by.

Meggie must have shared some of Aubrey’s feeling. She broke the silence. “I just keep thinking Mariah would have loved this.”

“Yes, she always loved the lighthouse,” Aubrey said.

“No—I mean the riot. She would have loved it! God! If only she could have seen it. She
lived
to stir up trouble.”

“No, she didn’t,” Aubrey said, rankled. “She lived to put an end to trouble.”

“Same difference,” Meggie said.

“Hard to believe the Halperns showed up like that,” Bitty said. “I can’t imagine what they were thinking.”

“Maybe they meant well,” Aubrey said. “Maybe they were just trying to say that even if they disagreed with Mariah, they still respected her.”

“Um, that didn’t really transmit,” Meggie said.

“Just because they’re rich doesn’t mean they’re
bad
,” Bitty said. “I mean—look at it from their angle. They’re making tough decisions for the greater good.”

“Fine, fine,” Meggie said.

Bitty lifted her legs out of the river by straightening her knees. The water dripped off her feet in silver droplets. “Who was that guy? The one with the face. You know him?”

“Mason Boss,” Aubrey said. “I don’t know him.”

Bitty dropped her feet back in the river. The water softly adjusted to the move. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” she said. “But—given how crazy it was that Aunt Mari didn’t leave the Stitchery to Aubrey, do you think she was going mad?”

“No way,” Aubrey said.

“Still,” Bitty said. “She
was
starting to lose it.”

“No she wasn’t,” Aubrey said. “There’s no such thing as the Madness.”

Bitty laughed. “Seriously? Really, Aub?”

“What?”

“You believe that you can change somebody’s future with a fisherman’s rib pattern but you don’t believe that dementia runs in our family?”

The nerves of Aubrey’s spine prickled. “Mariah must have known what she was doing. She wasn’t going mad.”

Bitty leaned forward on her knees. “I’m not saying there was some magical thing that made her go crazy—the curse of Helen Van Ripper. I’m saying that there was something getting funny with her brain.”

“But at least she had you to take care of her.” Meggie
squeezed Aubrey’s shoulder. “It would have been much worse if she was alone.”

Aubrey knew what her sister was getting at, and she moved her shoulder just slightly, so that Meggie’s hand fell away. Aubrey tried to picture herself as an old woman—shuffling through the halls of the Stitchery, yarn twisted around her fingers, and the big, empty house around her like a force field, keeping the world out. The thought depressed her. And yet it was an image of herself that she’d grown accustomed to. Her particular future had been going forward before her like a shadow since the day she was born.

“Do
you
believe in the Madness?” Aubrey asked Meggie.

She shrugged. “I never know what to believe.”

Aubrey traced her fingers along the surface of the cold water. That Mariah was quirky had never been in question. She was known to pick the flowers in other people’s gardens—at midday—and arrange them on the counter in the yarn room (
because it’s not stealing if they’ll grow back
). At village meetings she never raised her hand or waited for permission to speak—she just launched into whatever new tirade struck her fancy. Sometimes they were logical tirades (
We must have a traffic light at the end of the road; it’s impossible to make a left!
), but sometimes her tirades verged on nutty (
People should be allowed to enter their dogs in the Halloween parade, dammit! If there’s not enough parking at the diner, why not park the cars on the roof?
). In the quiet of her mind, Aubrey was beginning to wonder if Mariah wasn’t starting to push the boundaries of quirkiness. And that scared her. Because if the Madness was real, then the sacrifice of being a guardian of the Stitchery was a bigger, scarier thing than any single sacrifice made in the name of a single spell.

“Let’s not talk about madness.” Aubrey dipped her hands into the water; it was cool and slicked with moonlight. “That’s
not what Mariah wanted. She wanted us to remember her in a happy way.”

Meggie chuckled to herself. “Remember how Mariah used to feed all the cats in the neighborhood in the backyard?”

“Yeah—until she saw that
Batman
movie about Cat-woman,” Bitty said.

Aubrey laughed.

“Oh, Meggie.” Bitty leaned forward now, taking up the momentum. “Remember that time when you and Mari snuck out to the Horsemen’s practice field—”

“And turned the stallion into a unicorn,” Aubrey said, laughing. “I remember.”

Meggie grinned. “You can’t prove anything.”

“You would have had to go to summer school for that,” Aubrey said.

“Yeah, except the vice principal really
loved
those argyle socks Mariah made him.”

They laughed together, and the sound traveled out over the water.

“We really were a bunch of street urchins, weren’t we?” Bitty said.

Meggie huffed. “Maybe we still are.” She picked up Mariah and turned the urn in her hands. “I think we should leave her here.”

Aubrey flinched. “What? No.”

“She doesn’t want to sit on the mantel in the knitting room. Let’s just … let’s just cut her loose. Right now.”

“That’s illegal,” Bitty said, though the tone of her voice suggested she wasn’t entirely against it.

“Everything’s illegal,” Meggie said.

“I don’t know about this.” Aubrey rubbed the back of her neck. “Mariah didn’t ask for a burial at sea—or at … river. Wouldn’t she have asked for that if it was what she wanted?”

“Maybe she didn’t care what happened to her body,” Bitty said. “Maybe she wanted to leave it up to you.”

“Right.” Meggie circled her ankle on the water’s surface. “Maybe she figured we need her body more than she does at this point.”

“I guess.”

Aubrey held out her hands for the urn. Meggie handed it over. When she and her sisters had been young, the Stitchery had been the thread that held them together. Everything that was good about it and everything that was bad was their common point of reference, the center of their world. But as they got older, the thing that should have bound them together in unity drove them apart. Bitty became embarrassed by the Stitchery, by magic, and she’d fled Tarrytown with the first rich guy who had offered her a ticket out. Meggie seemed ambivalent about magic but she, too, had left, bent on playing by her own rules and probably even breaking them just to prove she could. No one in the family had any idea what Meggie had actually been doing with herself for the past four years.

Aubrey shored up her courage, took in a deep breath of the cold river air. Her sisters were correct about one thing at least. Mariah did not want to spend the rest of eternity as a bibelot on the Stitchery mantel. “Okay,” Aubrey said. “You’re right.”

“I am?” Meggie said.

“Mariah wouldn’t like the idea of being a human tchotchke.”

“But she always loved the river,” Bitty said.

Aubrey pulled her feet from the water and stood on a smooth boulder. If she had to let Mariah go, she would at least do it with her sisters by her side. She walked carefully, stone by stone, as far as the rocky shoreline would take her. Her sisters followed.