The Keeper of Happy Endings

by Barbara Davis

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.

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.

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.

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.

Never a hair out of place, never a faux pas made—that was Camilla Lowell Grant. The right clothes, the right home, the right art. The right everything, if you didn’t count the chronically unfaithful husband and the intractable daughter. Still, Camilla bore her burdens admirably. Most of the time.

we are taught from a tender age that happy endings are for other people.

A maléfice—a curse passed down through the generations—because one of us, some foolish Roussel whose name has long been forgotten, once used la magie to steal another woman’s husband, breaking the first tenet of our creed: do no harm.

Superstition, some might say. But I’ve seen the evidence myself, or at least heard of it. Giselle, my mother’s mother, deserted by her failed-artist husband after giving birth to a second daughter. Tante Lilou, widowed when her handsome Brit husband rolled his car into a ditch the day they returned from honeymooning in Greece. Maman, abandoned by her mysterious young lover when she turned up pregnant. And me, of course. But that is a story for another time.

Maman, born Esmée Roussel, daughter of Giselle Roussel, was known as La Sorcière de la Robe. The Dress Witch.

Purple is the color of our kind, the color of la magie—of magick.

Maman would hold the items in her hands one at a time, letting her eyes go soft and her breath go deep, until the images began to come up. Echoes, she called them. Of what has been and what is to come.

Every soul creates an echo. Like a fingerprint or signature that becomes infused in the things around us. Who we are. Where we belong. What we’re meant to bring to the world.

When the charm is complete, it is sewn into the dress, discreetly worked into the seam that will lay closest to the bride’s heart.

On the wedding day, when the lovers exchange vows, their union is said to be envoûtée—spellbound.

It felt like a sign, as if fate had in fact sent a wave with her name on it.

Dreams are like waves, babe. You have to wait for the right one to come along, the one that has your name on it. And then when it does, you have to get up and ride it.

You think you’re the only one, singled out by fate to suffer. You’re not, of course, but it feels that way.

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 just realized something.” “What’s that?” “You’re my fairy godmother.”

Now, whatever the sign above the door might say, Soline Roussel’s echoes would continue to live within these walls. And so would hers.

We cannot undo what has been done, but we can move forward—three generations bound by blood and echoes, making up for all the lost years.

Lovers wound one another for many reasons, but in the end, fear is always at the root of it. It’s a hard thing, perhaps the hardest of all, to trust when we’re afraid—to open ourselves to the risk of forgiveness. But forgiveness is the greatest magick of all. Forgiveness makes all things new. —Esmée Roussel, the Dress Witch