Before Ever After

by Samantha Sotto

  Paolo walked over to her and held her by the shoulders. “Shelley, when you saw that photograph on the computer, you knew in the same way I did that that was the person we loved and lost. I know it’s him. And so do you.”

  Paolo was right. If there had been any doubt in Shelley’s mind of the identity of the man on her computer screen, the pendant around his neck had torn it into a million pieces.

  But knowledge and acceptance are two very different things. Shelley rejected the truth not because it challenged reason but because admitting that Max was alive was more painful than believing he was dead. That he was alive only meant one thing—that he had chosen to leave her—and that she could never accept. She buried her face in Paolo’s chest and wept.

  Shelley shoved the remnants of her breakfast down the drain. She had half a mind to jump in after them. She couldn’t be shredded more than she already was. “Tell me everything,” she said, “from the very beginning.”

  Paolo stared at her from the kitchen island. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well.” He inhaled deeply. “The short version begins with the eggs and cheese your garbage disposal is grinding away. The long version begins with a car crash along a blind curve in Naples. Which one would you like to hear?”

  Shelley looked at the mush disappearing in her sink. “Car crash.”

  “Car crash it is,” Paolo said. “My parents were in a car accident when my mother was pregnant with me. My father died instantly while my mother survived long enough to deliver me through an emergency C-section.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Um, maybe we should have started with the eggs instead.”

  “It’s okay. Chickens saved the day.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “French chicks, to be exact,” Paolo said. “Luckily for tiny premature me, as my grandfather often liked to remind me, the French chicks and their ingenious incubators at the Paris zoo inspired a doctor in the late 1800s to develop a similar incubating apparatus for humans. And so here I am today, fully indoctrinated with my nonno’s fervent belief that you can get through life’s tightest jams if you are fortunate enough to have a chicken on hand.”

  Shelley smiled despite herself, remembering the way Max had doted on his hens. “Well, Max did love his chickens.”

  “And eggs.” Paolo grinned. “Nonno made absolutely the best baked eggs and cheese. It was sort of a tradition with us. The last time he made the dish for me was when he attended my college graduation,” he said. “A week after he returned to Italy, his fishing boat was found capsized on the lake. They never found his body.”

  Shelley thought about the empty casket she had buried at Max’s funeral.

  “Soon after that, I learned about the will Nonno had left and its conditions,” Paolo said. “ ‘A trade,’ as he liked to call it. Next to his philosophy on chickens, you see, the importance of learning that nothing came without a price was something that Nonno took pains to teach me since I was a toddler crying for juice. Before I learned how to speak, I mastered how to hoard stuffed toys to exchange for the things I wanted.”

  “I assume his will did not require you to produce a teddy bear,” Shelley said.

  “No, but Nonno did ask for two things. The first condition was that I hold down a stable job for at least three years. The second was that I care for Alessandra in the lifestyle she had grown accustomed to.”

  “Alessandra?”

  “His pet chicken.”

  “Of course.”

  “Nonno’s conditions weren’t surprising. What really shocked me was my inheritance. I couldn’t—and still can’t—grasp the amount of money he left me. I remember thinking then that he had apparently known a whole lot more about trading than just dabbling in the stuffed-toy market.”

  Shelley nodded. She did not feel like volunteering information about her own inheritance or about her life with Max. She did not trust herself to stay as calm as Paolo if she did.

  “I tried to comply with his wishes as best I could,” Paolo said, “not because I wanted the money, but because I wanted to make him proud. After graduating, I decided to remain in the States. I found a job at a publishing company in New York and read Alessandra a story every night. She and I lived happily enough together, and I put her eggs to use in my attempts at re-creating Nonno’s baked eggs and cheese.

  “I didn’t have much luck in my cooking though,” he continued. “It became an obsessive hobby of mine to hunt down the perfect baked eggs and cheese recipe. That’s how I discovered the Backpacking Gourmet. I literally fell off my chair when I saw the picture of Nonno posted on the website. Since I knew that my last name was definitely not ‘Christ,’ I convinced myself that it was insane to think that my grandfather had somehow been resurrected from the dead. I did my best to just push the whole thing out of my head.”

  “Let me guess,” Shelley said. “It pushed back.”

  “Hard. I kept seeing that man’s face as if it were scorched into my eyes. I went through a thousand rational explanations for what I saw but wound up rejecting every single one of them. I finally decided to prove to myself how silly I was being. I looked through our old photo albums, hoping to get a good laugh at my own expense. But as I scrutinized each picture, seeing the same, unchanging face, I realized that it was far from funny.”

  Shelley looked at him with a question she was not sure she should ask.

  “Why didn’t I see it before, right?” Paolo said. “How could I grow up with a man and not notice that he wasn’t getting any older? I asked myself the same thing. But I suppose if you see someone every day, you don’t really notice him getting older or, in this case, staying the same.”

  She was surprised that Paolo could read her so well. His similarity to her husband did not end with his looks.

  “Nonno was always just Nonno. He was certainly fit for his age, but I didn’t really think much of it,” he said. “The disproportionate number of female customers in his secondhand bookstore didn’t seem to mind, either. They were always quite pleased to learn that he was a widower.”

  Shelley’s face fell. She had been so caught up in the morning’s whirlwind that she had not even given a thought to what should have been very obvious from the beginning: Grandmothers were a prerequisite for grandsons. Max had been married to someone other than herself. Her stomach churned.

  “My grandmother died long before I was born,” Paolo said. “Nonno didn’t talk about her much.”

  Shelley rushed to the sink to throw up.

  “Uh … are you okay?” Paolo asked.

  Shelley watched the water wash away her last meal as Max’s widow. Max’s widow. It sounded like a bad joke. She wondered now if she had ever even truly been his wife. She cupped her hands under the tap and filled them with as much clarity as they would hold. She dove in.

  When she emerged, she knew what she had to do. She opened the drawer next to her and groped through it. Inside was the only option she had left. Her fingers found what she was searching for. Her fist tightened around its familiar shape. She drew out her last recourse: her emergency stash of obscenely expensive organic tea. After Madrid, she had made a point of always having a tin of loose jasmine leaves close by. She put the kettle on.

  Shelley poured out two cups of steeped calm and offered one to Paolo. Then she took a long sip and braced herself for the rest of his story. “Please continue.”

  Paolo stared into his tea. “Seeing the truth was like losing Nonno all over again, but I still couldn’t accept what was now in front of me. That is, until Bradford Jensen’s book found its way to the publishing company I work for. The concept of his book seemed promising. I looked through the photographs and was instantly drawn into his story.” He glanced up at her. “And then I saw you …”

  “And Max.” Shelley clutched her chipped floral teacup.

  “There was no denying what I saw this time,” Paolo said. “I called your friend and asked him about the pictures.”

  “You decide
d to find me …”

  “Yes.”

  Shelley drained her tea. She began to accept what she needed to do, defying the million reasons why she shouldn’t. She and Paolo needed answers and they were not going to find them in her kitchen.

  A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES

  Now

  Fish!”

  Shelley and Paolo’s chorus jostled the flight attendant’s practiced smile. It wobbled momentarily, teetering between annoyance and disdain. Then the woman blinked and plastered it back. She handed them their choice of steamed sea bass fillet, leaving the offensive roasted chicken breast and potatoes on her dinner cart.

  Shelley inhaled the entire contents of her tray. The last of the adrenaline that had fueled her had been spent in the sprint to the airport. It was only now, as she was licking the remnants of tapioca pudding from her spoon, that she was beginning to comprehend how she had come to be strapped into a coach seat on a flight to the other side of the world.

  She had made the decision to fly to Boracay that evening with the same blind haste she had on her first and last attempt at a do-it-yourself Brazilian bikini wax. If there was anything the home kit had taught her, it was that there were certain things in life that did not allow for even a half-breath’s hesitation. But unlike her inadvertent foray into masochism, no amount of anti-inflammatory cream could take away the realization stinging her now.

  Frantic scenes of herself mindlessly packing, jumping into twice-worn jeans, and stumbling out the door with Paolo replayed in Shelley’s head. It dawned on her that she was on the most important journey of her life with a backpack containing only her passport, Max’s plaid bathrobe, a pair of gym socks, and a container of dental floss. The last item was arguably packed more out of habit than haste, the legacy of her reminding Max to floss every single night for two years. She chewed on her plastic spoon. This was the last time, she swore, that she would pack without a list.

  “This is going to be a long flight,” Paolo said. “It’s a good thing that we have a lot to do to pass the time.”

  Shelley set the mangled utensil down and scanned through the in-flight movie selection. She had already seen most of the films. “Cards?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I’ve told you my story,” he said, “now it’s your turn.”

  “Well, you’ve pretty much got the gist of it already, right?” Shelley said. “Girl meets boy. Girl marries boy. Boy dies, but not really. Boy opens café on a tropical island. Girl searches for boy with boy’s grandson. Your standard love story, I would think.”

  “I’m serious, Shelley,” Paolo said. “We might be able to find some clues to this mystery if you could fill me in on a few more details of what you knew about Nonno.”

  The flight attendant drifted by with pots of coffee and tea. Shelley leaped at her chance for a reprieve. “Tea, please.”

  She stirred a packet of sugar into the steaming amber liquid. She took a sip and burned her tongue. Paolo was right. Finding Max without preparing herself would be scalding and beyond horrific. On the other hand, she had once read that you could boil a frog alive without any struggle if you raised the temperature in slight increments. Boil now or burn later.

  “It all started five years ago with a bar of soap.” Shelley heard the fire crackle under her seat. “I had moved to London from the States and was working as a copywriter. My team was on our eighth revision for a new soy-milk soap ad campaign. Our lovely client, you see, had the notion that their sales were somehow directly proportionate to the number of times their brand name was mentioned in the copy. This left me with two choices. The first was to write a commercial that began with ‘new’ and fill up the rest of the thirty seconds with ‘Smilky.’ The second, and my personal preference, was to tell Mr. Appleby exactly where he could shove his moisturizing bar. Fortunately, Sister Margaret talked me out of it.”

  “Sister Margaret?” Paolo asked.

  “My old Catholic-school teacher. The real Sister Margaret is in retirement in a nuns’ community in Florida, but for better or worse, hers is still the voice of my inconvenient conscience.”

  “I take it that the two of you don’t get along?”

  “Let’s just say we’ve learned how to compromise. That’s how I wound up churning out the requisite number of Smilkys—twenty-four to be exact—and stapling it to a resignation letter that was, to be honest, tons more creatively fulfilling. I left my masterpiece on my boss’s desk, grabbed the plastic potted plant from mine, and hurried to catch my train before the euphoric cloud of freedom I was floating on could drop my unemployed butt on the pavement. I needed my hoard of dark chocolate to cushion the fall.”

  Chapter Three

  Campers and caveats

  LONDON

  Five Years Ago

  Shelley hugged her fake fern. It offered as much sympathy as plastic leaves could—support that did not include making the escalator’s descent into the tube station less excruciating. A bicycle with two flat tires could have made a faster getaway.

  The first drop of regret had hit her as soon as she stepped out of her office building. It snaked down her back. As she sprinted to the tube, the trickle of afterthought burst into a downpour. She hated being drenched with hindsight. It seeped through her skin and settled into her marrow, making her joints ache with cold. It was the very reason she made lists.

  Some people carried hand wipes for emergencies. Shelley made lists. Since she was without a clear long-term plan, they were her best, though not necessarily successful, attempts to navigate life. Things to do. Things not to do. What to do if she did. The latter was particularly important, as she often found herself with a shopping cart full of chips and chocolates despite her best efforts to make a beeline for the yogurt aisle. Still, she tried.

  Whole wheat bread. Jasmine tea. Ignore half-off frozen waffles. Check.

  Phone Mom. Chatter brightly. Fake yawn. Check.

  Flee Ohio. Move to London. Get a job. Check.

  Unfortunately, Shelley’s last list didn’t have an exit plan. She considered the upside of returning to the States and moving back in with her mother. Pressed clothing was always nice. No longer having to subsist on instant ramen was even better. The nostalgia over her mom’s grilled lamb chops, however, fell a dollop of mint jelly short of convincing her that heading home was for the best. She conjured a memory of rosemary baked potatoes. They smelled good, but not good enough. As much as her mother’s dinners were lovingly made, Shelley was all too aware that they came with strings of the thick apron variety. London was as far as she could run to avoid being ensnared in them while still being able to order takeout without needing a dictionary.

  Shelley sighed. She knew she couldn’t blame her mother for her viselike grip. It was her father’s fault. He was the one who had died. She had been ten when cancer ate him away and her mother had started embracing her tighter. Shelley had learned two things growing up pressed flat against her mother’s grief: how to hold her breath and how to squirm away as soon as she had the chance. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her mother—she just couldn’t bear to listen to the echo inside her chest. Nothing was lonelier than the limping beat of half a heart.

  A blast of Italian expletives knocked Shelley to the present. A young couple was manhandling a map of the London Underground a few steps below her on the escalator. She considered helping them but changed her mind. Gelato al cioccolato was the full extent of her Italian vocabulary and would not be of much use in getting them to their destination unless they wanted ice cream. The woman grunted, snatched the map, and threw it in the air. It flapped against Shelley’s face. The man hollered an apology Shelley’s way and chased after his companion.

  Shelley pulled off the map, relieved to be irritated at someone other than herself. She scanned the map of multicolored lines, envying the order of preordained stops. She wished that making her way through life was as simple as tracing a thick blue line from Piccadilly station to a reasonable mortgage, a car, and a medium-size non-shedding
dog and/or cat. Sensible. Straightforward. Allergen-free. The route itself wasn’t complicated, she admitted, except for her habit of jumping off trains. She cradled her fern and remembered why it was in her arms. She had leaped off another one. She had not followed her list. Again.

  Sit. Grin. Bear it. Damn.

  Advertising had been slightly tolerable while it lasted. And so was her fleeting stint at a golfing magazine before it. At the very least, these jobs had paid the bills. Shelley groaned into her plant. If only eating dark chocolate and running away were financially viable life skills.

  She had become quite adept at the art of escape, and not just from jobs that required her to write about soy milk or golf balls. Since moving to London a year earlier, she had developed a talent for making a clean getaway from men who got too close. The last one was named Roger. Shelley had promised herself that she would never end up like her mom, and dumping men just before things became too serious seemed like a reasonable strategy. It followed the same principle as pushing away a dessert after a few bites. Guys like Roger were fun rides that were easy to hop off of miles before she was in any danger of having her heart split in two.

  Meet. Date. Run. Check. Check. Check.

  (Shelley kept copies of this particular list in her pocket. She had always found accents particularly sexy, and in London there were many opportunities to get distracted.)

  Shelley reached the bottom of the escalator. The Italian couple was kissing by a vending machine. She rolled her eyes and made her way to the edge of the platform. Paper rustled against her foot.

  A yellow leaflet clung to her heel. Shelley tried to pry it free, stretching the pink tentacles that glued it to her shoe. The top half of the paper tore off. She teetered near the platform gap, hopping on one foot and trying to regain her balance without dropping her plant.

  FANCY GETTING LOST? The words leaped from the tattered page in Shelley’s hand.