The Wishing Thread (43 page)

“This is the twenty-first century,” he said. “I think a guy should have a least a little say in it if he’s going to be a human sacrifice. I mean, we’re not barbarians anymore.”

She wondered if he was trying to make her laugh, but she couldn’t do it. She had no laughter in her. Each day that had passed since she’d last seen him, since she’d last felt the particular, nourishing energy that moved between them when they were alone, had been a low, long tolling. She wouldn’t claim she had nothing to live for anymore—there was her family, after all. But she had lost her faith in magic. She had lost the very meaning and purpose of her existence. She had lost
him
. She could not see a reason to laugh.

“I wanted you to be able to keep your house,” she said. “I know how much it meant to you. It was your dream.”

“It was a
house
,” he said, ice in his voice. “Don’t get me wrong. I loved that house. But it’s not my family. It’s what I love, but it’s not
who
I love.” He looked at her; his eyes were dark. “I would have torched that house and a thousand more like it, if I thought that would have stopped you from doing what you did.”

Her legs would no longer hold her; she lowered herself to the bottom stair. She put her face in her hands, then looked up again, careless of tears. “Why are you here?” she cried. “Why did you come here? To make me feel more terrible? To remind me of all the things that I lost when I walked out of your house that day? To make me wish for the ten thousandth time that I could take it all back and do it differently?”

He knelt before her, his hands bracing her forearms. She tried to pull away. “Why can’t you?” he demanded. “Why can’t you just take it back? At this point, what’s the harm?”

“I don’t
know
,” she said. Her tears were ugly and falling. “Everyone keeps asking me, but I don’t know. I have
no
answers. I have
nothing
to say.”

“Then maybe that
is
your answer,” Vic said. He took her hands, held them so hard it hurt. “Aubrey, these past months—without you—they sucked. I told myself that if I waited long enough, you’d come around. But I’m tired of waiting. The house I can deal with losing. It’s replaceable. But you—you’re not. I can’t lose Tappan Square
and
you. I won’t. Not over some stupid—”

She held her breath; if he said
spell
she didn’t know what she would do.

“Shopping mall,” he said.

She dropped her head; she didn’t want him to see her crying and yet she couldn’t stop. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I’ve thought of you a thousand times a day.”

He sat on the stair beside her and gathered her close. She didn’t resist; she pressed her face into the warm nook between his neck and coat. She held him like she was drowning, held on. She felt him kiss her hair. He told her: “I know you meant well.”

She sobbed into his coat.

“Let’s fix this,” he said. “We can. I know we can.”

“How?” She hiccuped. “The Stitchery’s rules are very clear. Once a thing is sacrificed, you can’t have it back.”

He went quiet. She felt him stiffen. His hands, which had been roaming her back, her shoulders, her hair, went still. He pulled away. “I can’t ask you to betray your principles for me. I
won’t
ask. But if there’s a way … if somehow—I don’t know. If you could—”

An impulse crested within her and she followed it, riding the wave. She leaned forward, and she kissed him. His hands
came around her back; she gripped the front of his leather jacket, still damp with cold and snow. She kissed him, and kissed him, and the bigness of it overwhelmed her.
This
, being with the man she loved, did not feel at all like it was a forfeit of her principles; instead, she felt it was a liberation—from all the confines and strictures and regulations about what magic was and was not, from theories about how magic worked or how it did not, from all the fumbling attempts at defining a thing that could not and would not be defined, from all the very small, very narrow, very human notions that had come to be called magic as the centuries had worn on. The Stitchery had made a thing very clear to her—a thing she did not see until now: Whatever the Van Ripper guardians had said magic was, was only a very small part of it, if it was part at all.

Vic ended their kiss abruptly. “I don’t want you to regret this later.”

“I won’t.”

“What about the rules?”

“The rules are what we make of them,” she said.

She took Vic’s hand, and with a feeling of triumph pulled him up the Stitchery’s stairs to her room. She shut the door and kissed him again, until the walls of the Stitchery seemed to turn to rubber, until the floor beneath them bucked. They made love surrounded by cardboard boxes, and tied-up garbage bags full of blankets, and stacks upon stacks of books about knitting. Everything that had gone wrong had somehow made room for this—this
rightness
, the rasp of her breath and his, the old boards creaking with their movements, and the snow, tapping against the window, falling gently on the rooftops of a neighborhood that—whether they liked it or not—would soon make way.

* * *

Little by little, the winter forfeited its territory and the landscape softened and blushed. Purple crocuses clawed up between garden stones, and then daffodils assembled like a line of soldiers in front of Christ Episcopal, and then the forsythia bushes throughout Sleepy Hollow effused like a bottle of champagne. Tappan Square stood empty, and the work to clear the land began. The Stitchery did not go easily; it stood curmudgeonly and stalwart, so that the wrecking crew cursed its unusually stubborn porch spindles and its chimney that did not want to budge one inch off its foundation. But eventually, modern technology prevailed, and it was crunched into splinters by backhoes and bulldozers; some members of the crew said that as the dust rose up from the rubble, the shapes of human faces could be seen, hollow eyes and long, open mouths being stretched toward heaven. But others said that was ridiculous.

In Sleepy Hollow, the Van Ripper family settled into their new, albeit temporary, home. Although they had lost the Stitchery, they took pieces of it with them—Meggie had filched the doorknob of her bedroom, Bitty had loosened one of the foundation’s stones, and Aubrey had preserved—with dexterity and care—the graffiti that some ancestor had scrawled on the tower’s inside wall. They sold what relics were theirs to sell—the ugly brass guard lions on the mantel, the ancient rugs on the floor—and found that they had enough money to outfit their new house with new furniture. Some of what had been in the Stitchery stayed in the Stitchery until it was pulled down.

Aubrey was largely happy. Her heart was filled up: There were many people near her to love and who loved her in return. Vic traveled to her new house often from Nyack, and as the months had slipped by into spring, her love for him—
which had once felt like a butterfly dancing on a warm wind—became deeper, more muscled and strong, less like a flighty swallowtail and more like one of the hawks that surfed the high currents along the Palisades. In the early mornings after long nights, before her family began to rise, she dreaded to leave him or have him leave; but the longing was sweet, and she relished it, every pang, looking with anticipation toward the day when they would sleep the whole night together, side by side.

Since she was no longer running the Stitchery between her shifts at the library, Aubrey had time. She knew that eventually she would need to attempt a job search—it was hard to imagine an ad that said “Wanted: Spell-knitting witch/librarian/hedgehog owner for administrative work”—but for the moment, she was dedicated to enjoying as much of her sisters’ company as possible, and to returning the sacrifices that had been stored in the Stitchery, one at a time. On any given day, she and Nessa would wander across town to the storage unit that she and her family paid a small fortune to rent—if it weren’t for the lack of running water, she could have lived in the thing—and then she would pluck one random sacrifice out of the many and sit with the Great Book in the Hall until she found its owner. Sometimes, the process of locating an object’s owner was long and convoluted, full of dusty estate proceedings and afternoons at the county surrogate’s office or genealogical society. Sometimes it was swift as the current that flowed to her computer down fiber-optic lines.

It was a clear and gusty day in April when Ruth Ten Eckye’s silvery jack-o’-lantern pin fell out of some hidden emplacement and landed on the concrete floor of the storage unit. Aubrey ran her thumb over its smug sneer, a pang of nervousness shooting through her.
Ruth
. Although she no longer felt as confident about magic as she once had, she did feel
that there might have been some cosmic reason and order in how certain objects caught her eye and begged to be returned on a given day, while others seemed content to languish awhile more.

“That’s a weird little thing,” Nessa said, looking at the pin. “Do you know whose it is?”

Aubrey shook off her hesitation. There was no reason to be worried about going to see Ruth Ten Eckye. Ruth seemed, Aubrey thought, to have let go of some small piece of her resentment toward the Van Rippers, even to show some grudging support; she’d come to the Stitchery on Devil’s Night after all. And even if Ruth did have some animosity toward her, there was nothing the old dame could do to hurt Aubrey—not now.

“I know who it belongs to,” Aubrey said. “This will be an easy one today. We won’t even need to look it up in the Great Book.”

Nessa, who seemed to enjoy sleuthing and tracking people down, and who thrived on seeing the joy or bewilderment in people’s faces when they had cherished or unknown old treasures thrust back into their hands, looked a little disappointed.

They drove from Sleepy Hollow and crossed into Tarrytown, the transition from one place to another demarcated only by the Hollow’s orange-and-black street signs. Ruth Ten Eckye’s house was high on the ridge; it was large, white, and impressive, with flat eaves and corbels that scrolled like elegant snails. Aubrey sat a moment in the car, gathering her courage. Ruth was going to give her an earful, a condescending and indignant earful, when Aubrey walked in holding the pumpkin pin. Also, there was the matter of the money; Ruth Ten Eckye had paid two hundred dollars for her spell. Aubrey didn’t have two hundred dollars at the moment, and it would
be a while before she could repay. Luckily, few people who had darkened the Stitchery’s door ever sacrificed money.

Aubrey crossed the perfectly flat, round stones that led to the Ten Eckye family seat. The front door offered no doorbell; only a brass lion with a ring in its mouth. Aubrey knocked timidly at first, then more loudly. She stood for what seemed to be a long time before the door creaked open.

“You!” Ruth said, with surprising vigor. “You—it’s about time. Come in!”

“I’m sorry—” Aubrey said. “Were you expecting us?”

“Yes, yes,” Ruth said, waving her hand to dismiss the question. “But it doesn’t matter that it took you so long. The important thing is that you’re
here
.”

They stepped into a central, clover-shaped hall; tiny white tiles covered the floor, and the ceiling was graced by a brass chandelier. Aubrey got a good look at Ruth in the light: She seemed tired and thin. Her beige dress hung slack from her shoulders. Her hair, normally in neat curls, was flat against her head.

“Wow.” Nessa’s eyes rolled as she took in the entryway’s elaborate swags and festoons of heavy, carved wood. “Nice crib.”

“I beg your pardon? And who are you?”

“You remember my niece,” Aubrey said. “Ness—”

“I’m Vanessa,” she said. “And your house is beautiful.”

“Thank you—”

“In a mausoleum sort of way,” Nessa said.

“Yes, well,” Ruth said. “Come sit down.”

Aubrey followed Ruth into a large overstuffed living room, which probably had some kind of fancy moniker like
sitting room
, or
entertaining room
, or
front parlor
. Certainly it was not a
rec room
or a den. She sat stiffly on a couch that felt like a hardened dish sponge. Any anxiety she’d felt about returning
Ruth’s pin had vanished when she’d seen the war between expectation and exhaustion in Ruth’s eyes. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked.

“Do I look okay?” Ruth said, laughing indignantly. “Of course I don’t. I have cancer.”

“Oh,” Aubrey said. “I’m so sorry.”

Ruth shrugged. “Might as well put my kids out of their misery. They’ve been waiting for years to divide up my estate.”

“I’m sure they’re not doing that,” Aubrey said, but in truth, she knew they probably were. “I have something for you. I hope it will—I don’t know—help.” She reached into her large bag and rummaged until she found Ruth’s pin. Then she held it faceup in the middle of her palm, her hand extended. Its liquid silver grin was all mischief and menace, and it seemed out of place among the softly blooming flowers of a Hudson spring.

“What’s this about?” Ruth said.

“We’re returning all the sacrifices,” Nessa said brightly. “We don’t need them anymore. Apparently returning them has no effect at all.”

Aubrey watched the older woman, looking for Ruth’s agitation, her disapproval and annoyance. Instead, Ruth sat perfectly still.

“It’s okay,” Aubrey said. “You can take it.”

“No,” Ruth said, the word a croak more than a whisper. “No, I can’t.”

Aubrey drew her arm back—it was getting tired—but she did not close her fist around the pin. “We’re planning to return the money, too, as soon as we can. But it might be a while.”

Ruth looked on the pin with a mix of longing and sorrow.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t matter much now.” She got to her feet. She walked around the chair, her back turned. Her normally square shoulders had stooped in a shaft of dusty sunlight. “I’ve made a provision in my will,” Ruth said. “I have a building on Broadway. There’s a tobacco shop in it, owned by a man I never liked. It’s zoned for commercial business. When I pass away, that building will go to you to do with as you please. But my hope is that you and your family will reopen the Stitchery.”