From a young age we’re told that not everyone’s story ends happily — via fairy tales. And yet a part of us goes on thinking that maybe everyone’s story does end happily, until we’re violently disabused of the notion by watching the story of someone we know end, unhappily. You may hold out hope that only the wicked end unhappily, but that’s not at all what happens in the fairy tales, if you read them closely.

She laughed more than other people I knew but harbored certain dark facts about her past; I always connected them to a picture I saw of her mother’s greenhouse, and the outline of their family home in the background. She had grown up on a kind of estate as an only child, in what I imagine must have been extreme loneliness. Her parents later followed her to the city, to be closer to her, and this decision instigated a whole series of events that led to her unhappy ending.

She had one joke she found extremely funny, above all other jokes. It seemed to me to explain much about her personality. It was a joke told to her by her dentist. He said if you ignore your teeth, they’ll just go away. She loved to retell that joke. If you ignore your teeth, they’ll just go away. It struck me that this was the joke of an extremely depressed person. And dentists are the most depressed and hopeless of all the professions; more dentists kill themselves than do any other professional. That’s a fact, it seems to have no relationship to reality. But the teeth, the skull, there’s something definitely morbid about that profession.

Much later she fell from a very high window. We were older then, I read about it online before I heard about it from anyone we knew, I think of her when I have my teeth cleaned, twice a year. I wasn’t surprised by the news, I had been expecting something like it; I was surprised by the fact that the newspaper described her as happily married, with two children.