THE WISH

“I wish I may. I wish I might. Have this wish I wish tonight.”

Rosalie Evans eyes and hands were clenched tightly, as she knelt by her bedside, just as her mother had taught her how to do. Rosalie’s mother, Anna, God rest her soul, was Roma, fiercely proud of her traditions and her people. But generations of persecution had left her with a vibrant distrust of the outside world around her. And before she passed, she had passed that distrust and a world of secrets, down to her only child, her daughter, Rosalie.

Rosalie’s father had left mother and daughter shortly after Rosalie’s birth. Very shortly after. “I will find a woman that will give me a son!”, he roared as he stormed out of the delivery room, never to be seen or heard from again. With a stoicism born from generations of male neglect, Anna never shed a tear. For she knew the true power of the Roma. And though she could tell no outsider, she knew that power didn’t come from a prick. The true power of the Roma had come down through the generations of their women. The secret words. The secret glimpses of the future. The secret spells cast in the dark of night. But most of all, the secret power of the wish. Let their men swagger all they wanted to, but even they, deep in their hearts, knew where the Roma’s power lay. It lay buried in the wet womb of its women, where the true power of life and death sprang forth.

No amount of time or location could change this. And Anna and Rosalie didn’t live in a caravan in Romania. They lived in a MacMansion in Scarsdale. And Anna’s customers in her dry-cleaning empire had no inkling of Anna Thompson’s background. The Roma, to them, we’re just gypsies who would travel about offering to resurface your driveway at half the cost of anyone else and then move on before the next rain washed the black paint into the gutter.

Anna was well aware of what the outsiders thought of her people and so she kept her background a closely guarded secret. But she poured all the secrets of her people into her daughter from a very early age. Even before Rosalie could talk, her mother would place her baby fingers into the complex intertwining that would pass for prayer to the outsiders but was really a direct connection to worlds they had no inkling of. To worlds of the past and of the future, where the bridge between the two was sometimes as simple and as powerful, as a wish.

So, Rosalie grew up in two worlds. One world filled with TikTok, toys and learning how to read. And the other, kept totally separate, was a rich world of spells, incantations and Gods that would have been totally incomprehensible to the members of the First Presbyterian Church of Scarsdale that Anna took Rosalie to every Sunday. For of all the secrets that Anna had poured into the young Rosalie from her earliest age, there was one that she kept to herself. For on one dark rain driven night when Rosalie was barely 14 months old Anna had seen a glimpse of the future. She needed no crystal ball. All she needed to see was in the dancing candle flame that shone alone in the room she was in. And in that flame, she had seen her own death. There was no fear but a certain urgency that she needed to pass on all she knew as quickly as she could to her young daughter before the sand in her hourglass ran out.

So, with the blissful ignorance of a child, Rosalie’s life was filled to overflowing with the two worlds that she inhabited. And like a child that had to learn two languages from birth, she knew inherently how to keep the two separate and with Anna’s help she learned how to translate the ancient language and rituals of the Roma into the innocuous day-to-day utterances and activities of a small child in upscale America of the 2020’s. And she learned her lessons well. So well, that when her mother passed when she was only eight years old Rosalie didn’t shed a tear in private because she knew that Anna and her secrets would always be by her side.

As a child of the moneyed class Rosalie was not forced into the desperate life of a foster child. Arrangements had been made well beforehand and Rosalie found herself living with the childless couple that had been the primary attorneys for Anna’s estate. They were delighted with the raven-haired little girl and Rosalie was delighted with them. For as she grew into a beautiful young woman Rosalie kept contact with her mother on the other side. Not often. Nor did she use her powers indiscriminately. She never played the lottery. She avoided looking into the future. Her life was good and while she might have once wished for a certain college acceptance, no one at Harvard was the wiser for her academic record was excellent.

That’s where she met Tommy Evans. She was swept away. He was handsome and even richer than her. He seemed so perfect that she didn’t even bother to look into the future for she was that assured he was the one. And after graduation they were married at the First Presbyterian Church of Scarsdale. After their Tahitian honeymoon they settled down in a duplex on the Upper East Side. Both had landed mid 6 figure jobs with investment houses down down on Wall Street. Everything was perfect. The Roma side of her life seemed very far away.

That was before the first time he hit her. She had always known he had a temper, but she had found that exciting and thought it gave him depth. But the novelty quickly wore off as the attacks increased in frequency. Which brought them both to the fateful night when he kicked in the door to their bedroom. He had obviously been drinking and was wearing only an Oxford shirt with his prick sticking out. “You can stay on your knees for what I’ve got ready for you!”

If the light had been better and he would have been a little bit more sober he would have noticed that her fingers were interlaced in a very particular manner. It looked like she was praying but what the hell? The last time either one of them had been in church was their wedding nine months ago. He started towards her. Fists clenched.

“I wish I may. I wish I might. Have this wish I wish tonight.” He never even heard the ancient Romani words that lay just beneath the surface of her childhood prayer.

She opened her eyes and slowly looked up. All that was left of Tommy Evans was a crumpled Oxford shirt on the bedroom floor and the seed that he had left it in her womb. Rosalie needed no ultrasound to know that it was a girl. Anna will be pleased.