The Wishing Thread (24 page)

“But you’ve seen magic work, too,” Meggie said. “Remember? You’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

Bitty did not turn from brushing her hair. And so Meggie recounted the stories she could remember: The girls had seen Elle Greenfeder offer a set of candlesticks in exchange for a hat that would help her son with his ADHD, and then the son rose to the top of his class. They’d seen a young woman sacrifice a signed copy of an old novel, and a week later the woman appeared in the Stitchery to say how joyful she was now that her brother had agreed to move back to Tarrytown.
They’d seen Teddy Carpenter’s family offer up their heirloom jewelry to have the doctors pronounce with wonder that the blot they’d seen in her breast tissue was suddenly and miraculously gone.

“So there must be
something
,” Meggie said. “Even if we can’t quite control it. Even if we’re not getting it right.”

But Bitty was obstinate. “What I’ve seen is the power of suggestion at work. The placebo effect. What happens here isn’t magic. It’s just people talking themselves into things, and then—because they’re talked into them—the things start to happen, and everybody says
Oh, it’s magic
, when really it’s just the power of a person changing her mind.”

Aubrey was quiet. What could she say to defend herself against Bitty’s charges? There was nothing rational—no proof. Just a big, consuming
Maybe
that, for Aubrey, had always been in and of itself enough to get her through the low points. She gathered her courage. And then she spoke. “Regardless of what you think about the magic, it’s up to Nessa to make up her own mind.”

“I second that,” Meggie said. She sat up a little on the bed.

Aubrey dug a nail into her thumb.

Bitty put the hairbrush down on its pewter tray. Her gold heart necklace lifted on her chest with each inhalation. When she spoke, she did not look at herself in the mirror; her eyes were downcast. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Aubrey said.

“Whoa.” Meggie crossed her legs beneath her on the bed. “What just happened?”

Bitty looked up. “I’ll talk to Nessa. I’ll tell her the theory about the magic. You’re right that she’s old enough to know and make a decision of her own. And I’m perfectly confident that she’ll make the right decision.”

“That’s great,” Aubrey said, gratified for once in her life to have won a debate with her older sister.
Maybe
, she thought,
things do change
.

“She’s not a guardian,” Bitty said. “I’m sure of it.”

“Nobody said she was,” Meggie said.

Bitty seemed to be holding her breath, and she let it out in a long stream. She turned away from the mirror to look at Aubrey. “I should probably thank you.”

“For what?”

“For not telling Nessa about the Stitchery before I had a chance to. For giving me the opportunity to tell her in my own way.”

“Of course,” Aubrey said.

Bitty turned back to the mirror and picked up the hairbrush again. “So what are you wearing on this date tonight?” she said.

Aubrey’s sisters made a fuss over her after all—a lovely, gloriously indulgent fuss. Aubrey said the expected things:
You don’t have to do this
, and
It’s okay
. But the truth was, she loved the way her sisters tittered and clucked and made sure she had eaten a snack so she wouldn’t overeat at dinner. She liked that they deliberated about her clothes and hair, that they demanded to paint her toenails and would not let her wear her cotton granny panties even though they were much more comfortable than the one thong she owned. For the first time in a long time, they were a team. And Aubrey had milked her own romantic cluelessness for all it was worth, asking about shoes and coats and first-date rules until her face hurt from smiling, and until her sisters decided to give her a moment alone.

Now she regarded herself in her bedroom mirror. She wore dark leggings and a white sweater that slipped from one shoulder in an angelic halo of cashmere. It might have been the luckiest thrift-store purchase Aubrey had ever made. The earrings she’d borrowed from Meggie were slender silver threads that made her neck look pretty and long. There was only one problem with her appearance. The effect of mascara and eyeliner—Nessa’s doing—wasn’t quite enough to tamp the blue lightning of her irises. Aubrey could not see their
awful blueness, which was one of the worst parts about them. But she knew they were shining like two blue flames set deep in her sockets. A horror show.

She sighed. Mariah had always said her eyes were something to be proud of:
God doesn’t light a candle for you to hide it under a bowl
. And yet what choice was there but to put on her dark glasses? Aubrey knew how people saw her. She wanted Vic to look at her without being appalled.

She pulled the frames from her dresser, slipped their thick plastic arms on her ears.

“Okay,” she coached herself aloud. “No need to be pessimistic. Vic already knows you’re weird, and he likes you anyway. So,
relax
.” She shook her arms and legs, wiggling them like a boxer warming up for a fight. She was not like other twenty-eight-year-olds. Her life was complicated. And Vic would have expectations, specific expectations of a romantic nature that she might not be able to meet. She half wondered if she should warn him.

“Relax,”
she said.

The doorbell rang; it warbled like a sick wren.

“Aubrey!” Nessa sang up the stairs. “Your
love-uh
is here!”

For a moment, Aubrey did not move. She looked at herself, thought,
This isn’t my life
. She had the strangest sense that for things to be so wonderful, so right, something in the fabric of the universe must have gone wrong.

But—there was the rumble of Vic’s laughter at the foot of the hall stairs. There was the cotillion of female voices, Carson’s tinkling little laugh. There was the Stitchery, so filled up with possibility it seemed to be a different place entirely from the unchanging building she and Mariah and dozens of other guardians had called home.

This is the end of something
, the Stitchery seemed to whisper.

She heard Nessa call her name.

“Coming!” she said. And she headed downstairs.

Nessa had fallen in love with the Stitchery. Her mother’s house was much more beautiful, with every wall exactly perpendicular to every floor, and with every countertop glinting black granite, and with every room connected with intercoms so that they could talk to one another even when they were apart. But the Stitchery … it was everything her house was not. It was a house that had secrets to tell. And it was telling them, Nessa realized, to her.

She was knitting in her bedroom, Carson across from her on his identical bed playing a video game, when her mother came in quickly and without warning. Or there might have been warning, but knitting did something in Nessa’s brain, something that made it feel like water must feel when it turns into steam, and so she did not hear her mother come in. Too late she looked up from her scarf, which was trailing down off the bed like a purple waterfall.

“Sh
—oot
,” Nessa said, choking off a curse word. She scrambled a little to hide her work, realized there was no use, then set her foggy brain into gear. “I was just looking at this scarf Aunt Aubrey was making. I just wanted to see if—”

“Save it,” her mother said. “I already know.”

Nessa scowled at her brother, who was watching her now from across the room. “You little rodent!” she yelled at him. His eyes went wide in feigned innocence.

“It wasn’t your brother,” Bitty said. “Aubrey told me. And she told me you went into the tower, too.”

Nessa’s anger came up swiftly, as it sometimes did, hot and gusty like a strong, sudden wind. Her eyes pricked with instant tears. Her heart knocked into overdrive. She threw the
scarf down on the floor. The silver needles clanged against the wood and the last little ball of yarn rolled away. “You always do this! You always take away everything that makes me happy!”

She got to her feet, but her mother was there in a moment. She took Nessa’s shoulders. Nessa would have wrenched away, but she saw that the look on her mother’s face was not exactly angry so much as
scared
.

“Nessa,” she said. And she held Nessa’s hands.

Nessa quieted. Her mother’s grip annoyed her. She pulled away.

“Sit down.”

Nessa did. She watched as her mother bent and gathered the scarf, yarn ball, and needles. She stood with Nessa’s handiwork, looking down at it with only the smallest wrinkle between her brows. Nessa was more nervous than if the yarn had been a report card.

“Pretty good,” her mother said. “Your stitches are really even.”

“But they’re not perfect,” Nessa said with caution. She wasn’t sure if this was a test. “Some are looser or tighter.”

“When you’re all done, we’ll block it. That will help even things out.”

“Did you say
block it
?”

“Yes. Your great-aunt Mariah always said that blocking was how you got the stitches to share with each other. We wet it down, give the fabric a few careful tugs, and pin it into the shape we want it to be.”

“And it stays like that?”

“If we do it right,” Bitty said.

“So … does this mean, like, you’re not mad?”

“Mad at what?” Bitty said.

Nessa was confused. She’d always assumed there was
something off limits about yarn and knitting, about anything having to do with the Stitchery, since the fact was that her mother came from a house of professional knitters but had never so much as picked up a skein of yarn in Walmart just to see how it felt in her hands. Nessa could not shake the sense that she was being tricked.

“May I?” Bitty asked, and she gestured to Nessa’s bed to ask permission to sit. This, too, was new.

“I don’t care,” Nessa said.

Her mother sat. Old springs wheezed with the weight. “You know, I guess I haven’t really told you guys much about the Stitchery.”

Understatement of the year
, Nessa thought.

“What’s all the stuff hidden in the tower?” Carson asked. He came to the bed and sat down with them, snuggling babyishly against his mom.

“Oh that,” Bitty said. “Well, you see …”

And then she began to hint at the thing that Nessa had been waiting for, the thing that she’d been fully expecting and counting on her mother to say, even if she had not known the words for it but had felt it glowing inside her. And there was some rambling, some excusing and eye rolling about the things people say, about how certain people got certain ideas in their heads, and how everybody had their own ideas but nobody knew for sure, and how it was just old wives’ tales, family traditions, the stories that every family had, until the whole darn speech was going in circles, circles that her mother was trying to draw with her eyes closed, circles that opened into spirals, and Nessa was clenching her teeth and shouting in her mind,
Please please please just say it already!

And then, her mother did say it. And no amount of hedging or couching or not-quite-apologizing could change the way it landed in the room like a fat black cannonball crashing
through the ceiling and wedging in the floor. Because
it
was
magic
.

Nessa could have sworn she heard the Stitchery creak in reply.

Later that evening, after Bitty had said that she and Nessa would be going out to do a little shopping, Meggie did not need it clarified that she would be staying home with Carson. She was happy to see Bitty and her daughter getting along, and she liked Carson. She thought that of everyone who was in the Stitchery, it was Carson she understood best—maybe because they were both the youngest.

“Do you want to go out and do something?” she asked him. The Stitchery felt empty and oppressive without her sisters in it.

“Do we? Of course we do,” Carson said, and Meggie laughed. Earlier in the day she’d found herself telling Carson about
the royal we
—she didn’t know how it had come up—and he’d thought it was the most hilarious thing he’d ever heard. He’d been referring to himself, with charming pint-sized kingliness, as
we
ever since. “But how shall we go anywhere if you don’t have a car?”

“Oh please. You’ve been stuck in suburbia for ten years too long,” Meggie said. “Did you bring your Halloween costume with you?”

“I dunno.” His little lip sprung out.

“What are you going to be?”

“A dalmatian. It’s Mom’s idea.”

Meggie frowned in sympathy. “Yeah. That’s kinda lame. Did she say you
have
to be a dalmatian?”

“Well—” He struggled, working out details. “Well, no. But
I can’t make the costume; she has to make it. So I have to be what she says.”

“Let’s see what we can do about that.”

She gathered the far-flung pieces of his outerwear, then stuffed, buttoned, and zipped until he was toasty. Then they were off into the streets of Tappan Square. Meggie was not nervous about walking around her neighborhood, but by force of habit, her eyes made quick assessments of passersby, watched shadowy alleyways, and took unconscious note of houses that had their lights on. It was not yet late, but the sun was going down earlier by the day and the sky was graying into darkness. As they walked toward the center of town, she held Carson’s hand in hers and they talked over their options for Carson’s costume for Halloween in Tarrytown.