Hanging by a Thread

by Sophie Littlefield

  Nana got most of her toys from garage sales. It drove Mom crazy because Nana had plenty of money and could afford to buy all new things, but she felt it was irresponsible to buy more possessions that would just end up cluttering landfills when other people were getting rid of perfectly good things. Mom had always been leery of other people’s germs and I remember she would make me scrub my hands the minute I got home from a playdate at Nana’s.

  But Nana had just laughed. “No, no junk, I promise.”

  She’d won that round. Later, when Mom was busy unpacking and setting up our apartment, I opened the box myself and discovered that Nana had given me her sewing machine. By the time Mom found me, I was pretending to sew the towels from the bathroom—Nana had wisely removed the needle and presser foot and anything else I could hurt myself on—and I was so engrossed in it that she let me keep it in my room, where it would end up staying for the next six years. Other things changed—my walls were painted a few times and my ruffled Pocahontas bedspread was replaced with a coverlet of my own design—but the sewing machine was always there.

  I reached the top of the hill and started down Nana’s street, wishing I’d told her how much that sewing machine meant to me. I supposed she probably knew, since I made every birthday and Christmas gift on it. I’d sent the last one on her birthday in March, a matching eyeglasses case and journal cover made from strips of colorful silk neckties, and she’d written me a gushing thank-you note in her looping handwriting on bright orange stationery.

  Still, my steps slowed as I got close to the house. I didn’t know where to start, how to apologize. I was struggling with my thoughts, taking my time propping up my bike against the trunk of a giant magnolia tree, when I heard her call my name.

  “Clare! Precious! Is that you?”

  She sounded so delighted that I felt my misgivings evaporate. I followed the sound of her voice, spotting her leaning out a second-story window.

  “Nana!”

  “Front door’s open, honey—I’ll race you!”

  The front door was not only open, but ajar, so anyone could have walked in and robbed her blind, as my mother would have said. A canvas bag full of fresh-cut flowers was lying on a rusting round table on the porch, along with a pair of pruners and a single flowered garden glove. Nana had no doubt forgotten them there, and I picked up the flowers so they wouldn’t wilt in the heat.

  Meeting me at the bottom of the stairs, Nana hugged me just as hard as always, and I breathed in her signature spicy perfume mixed with something salty and traces of sweat. Her T-shirt—“Save the Loggerheads!” printed on the front over a picture of a turtle—had rings of sweat under the arms, and when she finally pulled away from me she brushed dirt off the front. “Sorry, I must look like I crawled out of a barn. I’ve been in the garden. Peaches dug up a dead squirrel and lord, that was a mess.… Are you hungry?”

  She was talking as fast as ever, grinning from ear to ear, and it was hard to resist smiling back. For a moment I just looked at her, not worrying about what other people might think of her in her crazy shirt and flowing skirt that appeared to be some sort of sheer organza layered over a shiny fabric.

  “Oh!” she said. “Lester brought the most delicious muffin. I don’t think I ate it all yet.… Come on into the kitchen.”

  I followed her through the house, noting with relief that nothing looked very different. The furniture had been moved around, but that was nothing new—Nana was always deciding that the energies would be better if a sofa got the afternoon light or a game table was moved under a window to display photos. It was the same old mix of beautiful antiques from her second husband, and quirky pieces she picked up at tag sales. I could hear my mother tsking that there was way too much furniture in the rooms, and I had to agree—not just furniture, but knickknacks, paintings, photographs, books, and objects I couldn’t identify—but that was nothing new either.

  The kitchen was tidy, a flowered cloth draped on the old wooden table. Nana got a plate from the white marble counter and squinted at it. “I’m afraid I took a bite, but it still looks pretty good. Wanna try?”

  I was going to say no but the muffin looked amazing, crusted with sparkling sugar and studded with bright red raspberries, and I couldn’t resist. “Mmmm,” I said with my mouth full. “Lester can sure bake, whoever he is.”

  “Oh, he didn’t make these. He bought them at Plaisir,” Nana said, naming the fanciest bakery in town. “He’s trying to impress me and I’m taking advantage of it.”

  Mom didn’t like to talk about Nana’s gentleman callers, as she referred to them. I used to worry that they were after her money, and maybe Nana did too, because they never lasted long, but she did seem to enjoy their attention.

  “So …,” she said, staring at me intensely. “What’s up?”

  “Um … I kind of have a problem.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” She waited, her eyes bright and crafty, giving me an encouraging smile. I heard Peaches somewhere far off in the gardens, probably barking at a bird or a rabbit.

  “With, you know, the gift. I saw something.”

  Now the mirth disappeared from Nana’s eyes and she was suddenly very serious. “All right. Tell me.”

  “You know how you told me I could stop, if I wanted? That if I never did anything about the visions, never tried to make anything right, they’d go away?”

  “Yes …”

  “I wish I had.” I felt the start of tears, hot and stinging. If only I’d let it die away, I wouldn’t have gotten sucked into things that were over my head, that had nothing to do with me. I could be working on my tan and spending my time on my business and my social life, rather than trying to solve a mystery that kept getting more and more complicated.

  “Oh, honey. I wish I knew what to tell you.”

  “Do you ever wish you hadn’t let the gift go?”

  “No,” Nana answered sharply. And then a minute later, in a much softer tone, “And sometimes yes. You know, when you first told me you had the gift, I was so proud. Can you believe that? Something that bound you to me, my most precious grandchild …”

  I automatically thought, Your only grandchild, as I had when I was little. She always called me her favorite, and I’d remind her I was her only one. Of course I liked it that way, liked knowing I got all of her attention.

  “I never understood how it skipped my sisters, skipped your mother … I thought it had died out. I knew Alma’s death caused her descendants to inherit this strange gift somehow, but after two generations, I figured that would be it. Then when you used to grab your grandpa Quinn’s old coat and tell me you wanted to ride in the blue car … Well, that was when I suspected you had it.”

  I didn’t remember a coat, didn’t remember a blue car. And I had never known either of my grandfathers, not Quinn—the love of Nana’s life, who died in Vietnam—or Doyle, the rich one who’d conveniently died after they’d been married thirteen years, leaving her the Raley mansion and the fortune that went with it.

  Nana must have noticed my puzzlement. “Quinn had a Bel Air convertible he just loved … used to drive it along Highway One. Quinn drank too much and drove too fast and one Friday night he hit a man who was walking home along the side of the road, a laborer. There wasn’t anything for it, and Quinn was devastated. I always thought that would be what killed him, not the war—I sold that car to the first person who made an offer after he died, and was glad to be rid of it. But the jacket—lambskin, soft as butter—I couldn’t bear to throw it out. Used to hang it by the back door, wear it if I needed to go out in the fog.… Anyway.” Nana shook her head as though shaking away cobwebs of memory. “You and the blue car. That was when I knew.”

  “Nana. It isn’t normal. I mean, did it ever occur to you to see someone? A …” Psychiatrist? Doctor? Researcher? I realized how ridiculous it sounded. After all, I’d never told anyone besides her and Mom.

  “And become a curiosity? Someone to be studied, like those poor twin baby girls joined at the head, or
someone who can memorize a whole book word for word? No thank you, Clare,” Nana said with conviction. “I never wished that for myself and certainly not for you. That’s why when you stopped telling me about it, I thought maybe it was for the best.”

  “I stopped telling you because Mom made me,” I blurted out, angry tears threatening to spill from my eyes.

  Nana looked stricken. “Oh, honey … When was that?”

  “When I was in grade school.” I bit my lip, remembering.

  “Tell me what happened. Please.”

  “I liked my teacher a lot. Ms. Applethorn—she was young and fun. She used to let me borrow her orange vest to help with recess supervision. One day I put on the vest and I felt how happy she was and I saw her kissing Mr. Clay, the principal. I was so excited because I thought they would get married and—anyway, I came home from school and told Mom.”

  “And?”

  “And …” I sighed, remembering. “Turns out Mr. Clay was married already and his wife was pregnant with their second child. Not that I knew it at the time. All I knew was that Mom freaked. She made me swear that I would not tell anyone what I knew. Not Ms. Applethorn, and especially not Mr. Clay, none of my friends … not you or Dad either. No one. She was really angry.”

  “Oh … honey.” Nana’s expression sagged.

  “And then she told me I had to stop reading the stories in people’s clothes. I told her I didn’t think I could, and she … She took both my hands and squeezed them hard, hard enough that I started to cry, and she got really, really close to me so I couldn’t look away and she said yes you can. She repeated it like three times and then she made me promise again. I was afraid if I didn’t, she would … punish me and get mad all over again.”

  But that wasn’t the truth. The thing I worried about when Mom talked to me that day, her face inches away from mine and her voice deadly serious, was that she would stop loving me if I didn’t do what she asked. I’d never seen her so upset about anything. I had almost wished she’d punish me, spank me, ground me—but she had just stared at me for the longest time until she finally seemed satisfied that I meant my promise, and let go.

  “Clare … Clare, I am so sorry. So sorry that you had to make that promise and so sorry that … You know, when I was younger I used to think it was a blessing, something that made me special. I wasn’t particularly careful with it. I used it to know things about other people, their secrets … I thought it was a good thing, a way to get close to people.”

  She pushed a few strands of gray hair out of her face and they promptly fell right back down again.

  “Your grandpa Quinn—he knew what I could do. In fact, it was what brought us together. I caught him cheating at cards, you see. He took me out and stole a kiss, and I touched his jacket and suddenly understood why he always had a pocket full of money, but I couldn’t resist. I’ve always loved the bad boys.”

  “Nana!”

  “Well, I can’t help it, darlin’.”

  I had never thought about what it was like for Nana trying to raise a child on her own, having lost her husband. Of course she’d tried to protect my mom—it was just the two of them, at least until Nana remarried.

  “And then one day I made a mistake,” she continued, subdued. “I told your mother something about her best friend. I don’t even remember what it was anymore, nothing terrible, some little thing girls did. You see, I never made a secret of it with your mama, what I could do. And she got so angry with me. She must have been about your age, and … Well, I hadn’t noticed that she’d practically grown up on me. Doyle was gone by then, and I was learning to live alone, and here your poor mama just wanted to be like all the other girls. And it was hard, with us living up here in this big old house.… Anyway, she barely spoke to me for a week. Told me if I didn’t stop prying—because that was how she saw it, you see, touching other people’s clothing and prying into things that weren’t my business—then she was going to run away, and I’d never see her again.”

  Nana’s eyes were red and watery. She grabbed a dishcloth that was folded over the back of a chair, dabbed her eyes, and cleared her throat. I tried to picture my mother at my age, but I could barely imagine Mom young. I could certainly imagine her being angry at Nana, since she seemed to have been furious with her forever.

  “I was so scared,” Nana whispered. “I’d buried two husbands and I couldn’t stand the thought that I might lose my daughter too.”

  She’d given up the gift. She had once been like me, able to read clothes, the fabric that she held in her hands, and she had stopped. All because my mother had asked her to.

  And that meant I should be able to stop, too. Put this behind me and pretend I’d never been different, never been this way, be a completely normal girl. It might be hard for a while, since what I loved most was working with vintage clothing—but I could switch to using only new materials, fabric and trims off the bolt. There was no reason I had to come in contact with other people’s castoffs. I could start fresh, sell the rest of my creations dirt cheap next Saturday and use some of my earnings to buy supplies. I’d taken a pattern-making class; I had a portfolio of designs all ready, and ideas for thousands more.

  There were a dozen different reasons for me to put an end to my gift, and only one—well, two—why I shouldn’t. First, I truly loved working specifically with vintage things, thinking about the history of a garment as I sewed. And second …

  Second was wrapped in a plastic bag and jammed in my backpack. I’d taken it with me when I left Mrs. Stavros in an attempt to save her from painful memories. But I also knew that the denim jacket—and the terrible story that went with it—was not ready to let me go.

  “Nana,” I said haltingly, “I—I can’t. I just can’t stop yet. There’s this … Something happened.”

  And then suddenly I was telling her everything. Finding the box at the flea market, the clothes tumbling to the floor, the denim jacket seeming to draw me closer. The terrible sensations when I touched the fabric the second time, the vision of the darkened interior of a car, the lurching, the impact. I told her about going driving with Jack in his truck, and the vision with Rachel and the necklace, and my visit with Mrs. Stavros. Nana listened to all of it without interrupting, holding my hand in her surprisingly strong, cool one, her eyes intent on mine.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I wish …”

  I hesitated, aware of how selfish what I was about to say would sound.

  “You wish it would just go away,” Nana said softly. “It’s in the past, and at this point it’s pretty clear that Amanda is never coming back, and people have moved on, except for her poor mother.”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  Like when I would make a castle down at the beach as a little girl with my mom—the same beach where I now went with my friends on Saturdays to party. I used to love making complicated castles with bridges and moats, sticks and shells for decoration.

  But if I made my castle too close to the water—and I always built it too close to the water—eventually the tide would creep up the beach. The waves would lap at the base of my castle, nibbling away at it, and each time they would come farther. Sand would start to seep into my gullies and moats, and the details would be melted away until one big wave would come and immerse the whole thing, leaving a sodden lump where my beautiful castle had been.

  Amanda’s disappearance was like that. There was a reason people didn’t speak about her. It was too sad, too scary for those left behind to think about how vulnerable we all really were.

  “Honey, you can quit, if you want to. But … it’s harder than you might think. The first time I tried, I failed. I started up again, almost without even knowing I was doing it. Just little things, a vision here and there, strangers I ran into at the market or at church. And I hardly ever did anything about them. I had a busy life. You came along, and even if your mom and I had our differences, we were happy then. You and your folks visited me all the time; I thought nothing cou
ld hurt our family. And then … Well, you don’t need to know the details. But something happened. I—noticed something, something that I wasn’t meant to see. It put a question in my mind and the way these things do, it nagged at me and grew until I couldn’t stand it, and I decided I would use the gift just one more time, to find out what was going on.”

  “What was it?”

  “Oh, no, sugar, it’s not my place to tell you that. It doesn’t concern you, anyway, it’s between me and your mom. But I broke my promise. I thought no one would ever know. I … found out the answer to a question, and I thought that would settle my mind. I thought then I could keep my peace.

  “But in the end, even after I swore that I would keep it to myself, I couldn’t. I’d used the gift and now it was like I had no choice but to pass along what I had learned. But that was a mistake, Clare. I had to tell, and in telling what I knew, I set into motion a series of happenings.… Well, I have had to suffer the consequences ever since. And I will until the day I die.”

  “But this other thing, whatever it was you found out—it wasn’t your fault, right? All you did was tell someone.”

  Nana shook her head. “Sometimes knowing and telling is the worst thing you can do.” Her voice wavered and she took a moment, dabbing at her forehead with the handkerchief she pulled from her pocket before speaking again. “If you dig deeper into this mess, there is no telling the terrible things you’ll see. Amanda is gone and it is very likely that she will never come back. We just have to be realistic about it. The odds, in a disappearance like this—well, I’m just saying that knowing things can hurt you. It could hurt her poor mother and that woman has suffered enough. Let it rest, Clare, angel. Let it go. It’s for the best.”

  “But Nana—”

  “You have to trust me on this. I’m old.” Nana said it matter-of-factly. “I’ve lived through a lot and seen a lot, I’ve made my mistakes and I like to think I’ve learned from them. You let this go, now.”