The Keeper of Happy Endings
Barbara Davis
There are all sorts of heroes, and almost none of them will ever have something shiny pinned to their chests.
—Soline Roussel, the Keeper of Happy Endings We are the chosen, handmaids of La Mère Divine, descended from an ancient line, called upon to further the cause of love and true happiness. We are les tisseuses de sorts . . . the Spell Weavers.
—Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Though this story features historical events, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, events, dates, and incidents are products of my imagination or used fictitiously.
PROLOGUE
SOLINE
Faith is the essential ingredient. If one loses faith in la magie, one has lost everything.
—Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch
13 September 1976—Boston
I have always grieved the ends of things. The final notes of a song as they ebb into silence. The curtain falling at the end of a play. The last snowflake. Goodbyes.
So many goodbyes.
They all seem so long ago now, and yet the collective rawness still chafes. I’ve had too much wine tonight, I think. It has made me morose. Or perhaps I’ve simply had too much life, too much sadness—too many scars. Still, I find myself drawn to those scars, a map of wounds that takes me neither forward nor back.
I’ve brought the box down from the closet again and laid it on the bed. It isn’t heavy in the physical sense, but the memories inside carry a different kind of weight, the kind that sits heavily on the heart.
It’s made of sturdy stuff, thick gray cardboard with metal fittings at the corners and a heavy cord threaded through as a handle. I hold my breath as I lift the lid and fold back layers of crumpled tissue to gaze at the dress within. It has aged over the years—like me. The packet of letters is there too—most in French, a few in English—tied with a length of ribbon. These I will read later, as I often do on nights like this, when the empty places in my life stretch like shadows all around me. There is an order to this ritual of mine, a sequence I never vary. When so much has been uprooted—so many things lost—one must seek comfort in rituals. Even the sad ones.
I lift out the dress and hold it in my arms, the way one holds a baby or a promise—close and perhaps a little too fiercely. I step to the mirror, and for an instant she looks back at me, the girl I was before Hitler came to Paris, full of hope and naive dreams. But an instant later, she’s gone. In her place is the woman I’ve become. Worn and alone. Dreamless. My gaze slides back to the box, to the brown leather case lying at the bottom, and I feel my heart squeeze, remembering the first time I saw it. For safekeeping, he said as he pressed it into my hands on that last morning.
I unzip the case for the hundredth time, running my fingers over the tortoiseshell comb and matching shoehorn, the shaving brush and razor. Such personal things. And he’d given them to me. I remove the cut-glass flask from its band of brown elastic—long since empty—and unscrew the cap, yearning for a whiff of the bright, clean scent I’ve engraved on my memory. A blend of seawater and the peel of fresh limes.
Anson.
Only this time, for the first time, there is no hint of him. For thirty years I’ve been lifting this empty bottle to my nose, taking comfort in the only thing of him left to me—his scent. And now even that is gone.
I wait for tears, but none come. I suppose I’m beyond them now. Emptied. And perhaps it’s just as well. I return the flask and zip the case closed. My eyes stray to the packet of letters, usually the final step in my sorry little ritual. I will not read them tonight. Or ever again, I think.
It’s time to let go. Time to let it all go.
I return the shaving case to the box, then fold the dress and lay it inside, arranging the sleeves tenderly across the bodice—the way I’ve seen bodies laid out at funerals. Fitting, I suppose. I caress the fabric one last time, then fold the tissue over it all and lower the lid.
Adieu, Anson, mon amour. C’est la fin.
ONE
RORY
May 26, 1985—Boston
It couldn’t be Sunday. Not already.
Rory smacked the snooze button and fell back onto her pillow, wishing the day away, but five minutes later the alarm shrilled again, which could mean only one thing. Somehow, another week had been swallowed whole, gone in a blur of takeout and old movies, interminable nights immersed in other people’s happy endings.
A pulpy paperback thumped to the floor as she threw back the covers and put her feet on the floor. Kathleen Woodiwiss’s A Rose in Winter, finished last night around 4:00 a.m. She stared at it, splayed open at her feet like a felled bird. She’d never been a fan of romance novels. Now she couldn’t devour them fast enough, a guilty pleasure that made her vaguely ashamed, like gambling or a porn addiction.
She scooped up the novel and tossed it into a wicker basket filled with a dozen more just like it, waiting to be taken to Goodwill. There was another box by the front door and a third in her trunk. Junk food for the brain, her mother called them. But her eyes were already sliding to the stack of new titles on the nightstand. Tonight, Johanna Lindsey’s latest awaited.
She poked through the jumble of unopened mail beside the bed, including the master’s program course catalog she’d been doing her best to avoid, finally locating the steel-and-gold Rolex her mother had given her when she finished undergrad. As expected, it had stopped running, the date in the little magnifying bubble off by three days. She reset the time and slid it onto her wrist, then set her sights on a mug of strong coffee. No way was she facing today without caffeine.