The Keeper of Happy Endings(28)

I don’t know what’s happened to Aurora Grant to make her sad. I only know that something has. But she’s young. There’s time for her to escape the void. Her gallery will be her lifeline. As the shop was mine. I like the idea of it, a gallery for undiscovered artists. And the title—Unheard Of. I like the girl, too, and what she said about the building—that it felt like it had been waiting for her. Perhaps it’s right that her lifeline should begin where mine ended. Fate has taken up our threads and woven them together. Not seamless, perhaps, but inextricable now.

I top off my wineglass and return to the study, lingering in front of the wall of framed photographs. I rarely look at them these days—even now, the loss is hard—but this afternoon, when Rory was here, I found myself peering over her shoulder, trying to see them as she did, for the very first time. She was staring at a photo of the front window, asking if I still remembered Anson’s face, when I suddenly caught our reflections in the frame’s glass. She was looking back at me, and for a fraction of an instant, Anson seemed to be standing there too, his face superimposed over hers. Then I blinked and he was gone, leaving only our faces in the glass. It was only a fluke, a trick of the light and memory, but it felt so real at that moment, so startlingly and achingly real.

The dress box is still on the floor where she left it. I carry it to the chair and sit with it in my lap for a time. I don’t need to open it. I know what’s inside: pieces of my past threatening to burrow into my heart like wounded things. Reminders of my lost happy endings. I thought them gone, relegated to the dark space beneath the stairs, then reduced to ash. But they’ve been exhumed now, and I have no choice but to remember.

I feel my breath catch as I lift the lid and peel back the tissue. The dress is just as I remember, shimmery and frothy white. I run my hands over the beading, recalling long nights spent sewing in secret. Maman would never have approved had she known. She would have thought it a terrible waste, since there were precious few grooms left in France by the time I finished it. Still, I brought it with me when I left. Because I had dreams of my own happy ending. One day I would wear my lovely dress with its clever enchantment, and I would prove Maman wrong. I would prove all the Roussels wrong. It nearly worked too. Instead, I lost everything.

Tears scorch my throat as I set the box aside and turn out the light. I thought I was ready, but I’m not.

My wineglass dangles from my fingers as I make my way down the hall to my bedroom. I’m tired, and my head aches. I forget how loud public places are and how much they take out of me. My thoughts drift to the plastic vial in the nightstand, a prescription one of my doctors wrote the day I left the hospital, to help manage the pain. I stopped taking them after a week. They made me feel so heavy. But the vial is still there, an insurance policy should the nights get too long or the days too empty. I think of them now and then. Sometimes I even take them out, pour them into my palm, imagine swallowing them all at once. I won’t, of course. I have other things on my mind tonight.

I undress in the dark and climb into bed, my thoughts wandering back to Rory. If I were to read her the way Maman taught me, what would I see? She would be easy, I think. She’s like me in that way too—or how I used to be. Wide open to the world. Maman used to scold me for it. She said I could never hide anything, that my face would always give me away.

It was true once, but I’ve learned over the years to hide a great many things from the world. From myself too, I suppose. Pain has a way of hardening us, each new heartbreak laying down a fresh layer of protection, like the nacre of a pearl, until we think ourselves impenetrable, immune to both our present and our past.

What fools we are to believe it.





THIRTEEN


SOLINE

The temptation may arise to use la magie for selfish ends. But such transgressions will always bring an ill wind, which will then be visited upon future generations.

—Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch

11 December 1942—Paris

Two and a half years of Nazi occupation have decimated Paris.

I will never forget the morning they came. I heard the soldiers before I saw them, like the distant roll of thunder as I hurried along the Rue Legendre, and made my way to the Place de la Concorde. I don’t know what I expected as I turned onto the Champs-élysées. War, I suppose. Panicked Parisians taking to the streets in one last attempt to stave off the invaders. Soldiers brandishing weapons and taking prisoners. Guns. Bombs. Fire. Blood. The chaos of war.

But there was no chaos. In fact, there had been a strange and sinister order to it all, a steely precision that was almost breathtaking. Motorcycles, horses, columns of tanks and armored cars, and thousands upon thousands of soldiers moving in lockstep, immaculate in their helmets and gray-green uniforms. As for Parisians taking to the streets, there had been none of that either. Instead, onlookers lined the sidewalks, silent and slack-jawed, awed by the machine that was swallowing their city whole. Or what remained of it at that point.

The wealthy and well connected had been pouring out of Paris for weeks: cars, trains, horse-drawn carts clogging the roads, bound for the coast as l’exode began in earnest. Shops had closed. Hotels had emptied. Theaters went dark. Even the market stalls had gone quiet in anticipation of the invasion. And finally, in June of 1940, it came to pass. Hitler’s Wehrmacht entered Paris without firing a shot, and by late afternoon, swastikas flew over the Arc de Triomphe and the Tour Eiffel.