Before Ever After

by Samantha Sotto

  Max shrugged. “Trade secret—or then again, it could just be a load of rubbish.”

  “What happened to Antoine?” Shelley asked.

  “Antoine? I … well … I believe he continued to travel around Europe.” Max turned to the group. “Campers, this is as far as the story of Isabelle’s family goes on this leg of the trip. You can spend the rest of the afternoon doing whatever touristy thing you fancy. Oh, and if you happen to come by an Eiffel Tower snow globe, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could pick one up for me. I’ll see everyone back at the house for an early dinner.”

  A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES

  Now

  Paolo took a deep breath. “So Antoine was Max.”

  Shelley nodded. She felt numb.

  “That makes Nonno about two hundred years old and counting,” Paolo said. “It gives a whole new meaning to the expression ‘midlife crisis,’ don’t you think? I can totally understand why he would have wanted to hang out with Adrien.” He looked pleased with his analysis.

  Shelley was not. She looked away. Paris had, like a flower, been safely pressed between the pages of her memory. Now it was drying out and crumbling under Paolo’s scrutiny. This was excruciating, but necessary, she thought. As was keeping a single petal of the past to herself. She held it close to her chest.

  PARIS

  Five Years Ago

  WHAT SHELLEY DID NOT TELL PAOLO

  Shelley watched the barge pull away from the embankment. She overheard Max giving the Templetons advice on the best place to have lunch near the Louvre.

  “Hey, I’m having lunch with Brad and Simon. Would you, um, like to join us?” Dex asked.

  Shelley sighed. It was better than eating alone. “I …”

  “Do you have plans for the afternoon, luv?” Max asked.

  Shelley spun around. Max was standing behind her. “Well, uh … no.” She bit her lip and looked back at Dex.

  Dex gave her a small smile. “I’ll see you later. Enjoy your lunch.”

  “Brilliant,” Max said. “I’m seeing an old friend and I’d love for the two of you to meet.”

  “An old friend?” The image of another gorgeous redhead popped into Shelley’s head. She winced. “Sure. Sounds like fun.”

  “He lives up in Montmartre. Let’s take the metro. You’ll need to save your energy for the race.”

  “Hang on.” Shelley cocked a brow. “What race?”

  “Trust me. It will be fun.”

  “I win.” Shelley gripped her burning sides. The race, as it turned out, was a sprint up the two hundred and thirty-five steps to the Sacré Coeur Basilica. The sprawling view of Paris’s radiating boulevards and monuments from the city’s highest point would have been breathtaking if she had had any breath left to lose.

  “Congratulations, luv,” Max said, “but I think clinging onto my back for the last fifteen steps may be grounds for disqualification.”

  Shelley tried not to look too sheepish. This wouldn’t have been the first time she had broken the rules this morning, she thought. She was certain that having this much fun talking about everything and laughing at nothing with a man she barely knew was illegal in some parts of the world. But she told herself that Max was just another train she could hop off of anytime she wanted to. Just not right at this very minute. She could do it tonight. Or tomorrow. There was plenty of time. Really. “Fine. A tie, then.”

  “A tie it is. What’s my prize?”

  “I think the fact that I let you drag me all the way up here to meet your friend should be reward enough,” she said. “We could have taken the funicular, you know.”

  “But then I wouldn’t have had the chance to know how Adam felt, would I?” Max said. “I can now in all honesty say that I don’t blame him at all.”

  “Adam who? And what aren’t you blaming him for?” Shelley’s face was flushed deeply from the sprint up.

  “Eve’s better half, of course. I now know why he couldn’t help taking a big juicy bite out of that wickedly red apple.” Max stroked the side of Shelley’s glowing cheek.

  “Is that so? Well, sir, I suggest you keep your teeth off my cheeks and your snake in your fig leaf. That’s a house of God we’re standing in front of, you know.”

  “I’ll try my best.” He took her hand and cut a path through the sea of tourists surrounding Sacré Coeur. “Come on, let’s go inside. Pierre’s waiting.”

  Shelley found sanctuary inside the basilica’s hall. The cacophony in the street faded as she breathed in the fragrance of incense and candle smoke. Her heartbeat slowed for the first time since she had met Max—only to start racing again when he rushed her toward the stairwell of one of the church’s towers. She winced as she stared up at the winding stairs. More freaking steps. This was an odd place to meet Max’s friend, she thought, unless that friend turned out to be one of the pigeons perched on the tower’s ledge. From what she was quickly learning about Max, this was not exactly far-fetched. She was panting when they reached the top.

  “Ah, here he is,” Max said. “Shelley, I’d like you to meet my dear old friend, Pierre.”

  Shelley glanced around the empty tower. The loss of oxygen from all their climbing, she decided, must have either made her blind or Max delusional.

  “Saint-Pierre, that is.” He pointed through the dome’s window at a small church standing on the slope beside Sacré Coeur.

  “I see …” Shelley stuck her head out the window. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Saint-Pierre. Max has told me so much about you. Though I have to say that he did give me the impression that you were, well, much more alive. But no matter, some of my best friends are town houses. I even have a charming old rail station for an aunt on my mother’s side.”

  Max laughed. “Let’s head over there, shall we?”

  “Head over there? Are you telling me that we climbed all this way just so that you could point to where we were actually going?” Shelley’s cheeks were still blazing.

  “Of course not. We climbed all this way so that I could see if you could get even more rosy and delicious.”

  The street in front of Saint-Pierre was deserted except for the three tourists who had just left the small church.

  “What’s so special about this place, Max?” Shelley asked. Whatever it was, it seemed to be a well-kept secret.

  “It’s pretty hard to compete for attention when you’re literally standing in the shadow of such a flashy neighbor,” Max said. “Still, I thought that Paris’s oldest church was worth a visit.”

  Shelley stared at the eighteenth-century stone edifice and wondered if he was mistaken. Surely there were churches in the city that were older than this one.

  Or not.

  Her doubts were erased the second she set foot inside the stark medieval hall. She could hear its age.

  Shelley had first come to the conclusion that age was a sound when she went hunting for a place after she first moved to London. Most of the places she had seen were white shoe boxes that reeked of fresh paint and lemon air freshener. This was, after all, the easiest way to make a place feel shiny and new. But all the Lysol in the world could never change how a home sounded.

  New places snapped, crackled, and popped. The flick of a light switch was crisper, the toilet flushed with a fury, and the drawers slid open with the whoosh of an Olympic bobsledding team. New apartments were like yapping puppies in a pet store, jumping over one another to be picked.

  Older places were more restrained. Each sound they made was thoughtful and deliberate: the slow, echoing plops of a leaky faucet, the falsetto creak of a floor plank, the soft sigh of a breeze through a jammed window. She had chosen the oldest apartment she could find. It was quiet, but not nearly as silent as Saint-Pierre.

  Max took a seat in the back of the empty church. “As you can see, Saint-Pierre is much older than its facade lets on. It has been ruined, rebuilt, and repurposed more times than your grandmother’s couch.”

  “How old is this place, Max?”


  “It was originally built in the twelfth century as part of a Benedictine abbey,” he said. “But the site’s history goes back farther. The abbey was constructed over an earlier Merovingian chapel that was in turn built on the site of a Roman temple of Mars.” He pointed to the choir bay. “Those two granite columns are from that first temple.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Shelley said.

  Max nodded. “Yes.”

  “In a sad kind of way.”

  “Sad? Why?”

  “All this history, all the things this church might have seen,” she said. “It’s a shame that it’s been overlooked.”

  “I wouldn’t feel too bad for old Pierre, luv.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, let me put it this way. It has served as a chapel for a burnt-down abbey, a tomb for a desecrated royal corpse, a telegraph tower for the revolutionaries, a dusty wheat warehouse for the Russians, and even a munitions depot for the Paris Commune. I think it’s about time it’s overlooked, don’t you think?” Max said. “It’s earned its anonymity.”

  Shelley found herself agreeing with him. It was, perhaps, no different from curling under the covers after a long and hard day. “But still,” she said, “I’m sure it must get lonely.”

  He reached for her hand and covered it with his. “I suppose it does.”

  It was both hidden and highlighted by the sunlight filtering through the trees along the road. Flitting shadows stirred its landscape constantly. Shelley found it difficult to get her bearings. An eyelid. A chin. A cheek. They changed with every step, with every shift of the breeze. Max’s sundappled face was the perfect place to get utterly lost, she thought, and so was the maze of Montmartre’s crooked little streets. She hoped for such a misfortune as they made their way down the hill.

  Shelley could not understand the effect Max had on her. She was turning into a version of herself that she had not been introduced to, and she wasn’t sure if she was pleased to make her own acquaintance. A brush of his arm stripped her down to synapses and nerves. Shelley: Acoustic and Live in Paris.

  They approached a wall of rough-hewn stone. A sundial was carved into it and a painted blue rooster crowed in elegant script: Quand tu sonneras, je chanteray.

  “When you ring, I will sing,” Shelley said. The inscription was hardly profound, but it made her smile. It gave her something else to think about besides how Max bit his lower lip when he paused to think.

  “Ah, you speak French. And here I was thinking I could make you believe that it said something convenient like ‘Seize the day’ or ‘Kiss the man named Max.’ ”

  Shelley cursed Sister Margaret’s French lessons. Her knees wobbled, so she leaned on the wall for support. “Ha ha.” She willed herself not to melt. There wasn’t anything funny about the situation. It was delicious. And terrifying. She pretended to check her watch. The numbers blurred. Everything was moving too fast. She searched frantically for the train door and got ready to jump. “I … uh … think it’s time we head back.”

  “It is?” Max glanced at the sundial. “The gnomon never lies.” He gestured to the iron bar casting a shadow on the dial. “I believe the Greeks were spot on when they gave it that name. It means ‘one who knows’ or ‘that which reveals.’ ”

  “And what exactly does it reveal, Max? Other than the fact that the sun is shining, that is.”

  “The truth, luv.” Max shrugged. “Unlike that wristwatch of yours.”

  “Hey, don’t dis the Timex. It hasn’t fallen apart on me yet—even after falling into the tub. Twice.”

  “I’m happy for both of you. The fact remains though that it is little less than an illusion.”

  “An illusion?”

  “Yes. It helps us pretend that we can put time on a strap and wrap it around our wrist; that we can cut it into bite-size pieces and save some of it if we get up exactly at half-past seven, have breakfast on the train at eight, and are in the office before the large hand strikes nine.”

  “Well, Max, I could be wrong, but the last time I checked, that’s what watches were supposed to do.”

  “Sadly, yes,” he said. “Which is why I appreciate sundials. They aren’t nearly as pretentious.”

  Shelley sighed. “Okay. I am officially lost.”

  “Look at it, luv. It is the closest we can come to grasping what time really means. It moves on whether you wind it or not. It doesn’t have a snooze button you can hit to bargain for an extra five minutes. The earth turns, the sun rises and sets, and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do about it.”

  “That has got to be the most depressing thing I have ever heard.”

  “Depressing? I find it very helpful.”

  Shelley’s eyebrow shot up. She wasn’t sure if Max was making fun of her. “Really.”

  “Absolutely. If we accept time for what it is, how it flows and how we flow with it, I doubt very much that we would continue wasting loads of it by constantly checking our watches. The gnomon’s shadow falls where it falls—and so do we. Where we are now is where a lifetime’s worth of steps have taken us. Are we early for this moment? Are we late? Should we hurry back to the town house because your watch says so or should we linger as long as we can in the second where we stand?”

  Shelley was taken aback by the way Max looked at her. His eyes seemed to plead with her to understand. And when she studied the sundial, she did. It did not have hands to tell her if she and Max were half-past acquaintance or a quarter before prudent. It simply cast a shadow that mirrored where hers fell. Both pointed to Max. This was where she was and no other place or time mattered more.

  She liked to believe that what happened next was due to Adrien’s special brew sloshing about inside her. Before Sister Margaret could object, she clasped Max’s face and claimed the only truth she cared to know—his taste in her mouth.

  Berries. No. Red summer fruits. And oak. With a hint of vanilla highlighting a surprising freshness before an intense long finish. (Shelley had read something like that once on a label of a Cabernet Sauvignon she decided she could not afford. She had taken home the red sweet stuff that came in a box instead. But kissing Max made it impossible for her to ever pick up another carton again, even at half-price.)

  She pulled away to grasp for the safe and familiar, but not before her life had split in two: the wait before Max’s lips and the raw yearning that came after it.

  A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES

  Now

  Earth to Shelley. Come in, Shelley.” Paolo nudged his seatmate.

  “Hmm? Oh, yes, right. Sorry,” she said. The sundial she had been standing next to had disappeared, but the taste of Max the first time she had kissed him was still in her mouth.

  “So where did you go?” Paolo asked.

  “No … nowhere. I’m just a little tired, that’s all,” Shelley said.

  “Maybe you should try to get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

  “I’m fine, really. I don’t want to sleep. I can’t,” she said. “The sooner we’re done with this, the sooner I can get rid of all his … lies.”

  Instant coffee, followed closely by fat-free mayo, was the biggest lie ever told to humankind, Shelley had thought. Her life with Max had just leapfrogged over it. All three looked exactly like what they were pretending to be on the outside, but the truth inside was a different matter. She could not digest any of them.

  “I understand.” Paolo reached over and gently squeezed her hand. “But I think you might be wrong about that.”

  Shelley pulled her hand back. “Wrong? About what?”

  “You don’t have to dismiss your past as a lie because of what we are finding out now,” he said.

  It was like watching a Chinese action movie dubbed in Russian, Shelley thought. She saw Paolo’s lips moving, but she couldn’t understand the words coming out of his mouth. She didn’t like Paolo’s kung fu.

  “Paolo, I don’t even know Max’s real name. He is a man who has faked his own death—at least twice that we know of�
�has abandoned his wife and his grandson, and oh, let’s not forget, is hundreds of years old. Please feel free to jump in anytime and tell me which part of my husband was not a lie.”

  “His love.”

  “What did you say?”

  “His love.”

  “That’s what I thought you said. I thought perhaps that you had lost your mind. Apparently you have.”

  “Shelley …” Paolo fixed his eyes on his lap. “Do you know what it’s like to grow up without parents?”

  She pressed her lips together. She thought about her dad and the huge box of birthday cards he had written for her before he died. Every year, he still wished her another year of joy and adventure. She could still hear his baritone in his thick handwriting.

  Happy Birthday, Seashell. Always, Daddy.

  “No, I don’t,” she said truthfully.

  Paolo looked at her and smiled. “Neither do I. I was tucked into bed and kissed good night. I was scolded if I didn’t clean up the mess in my room. I was hugged if I fell off my bike and scraped my knee. My parents died, but I was never an orphan. Nonno was my family. He raised me as his son and there was not a single day that I doubted that. Even now. You can make a child believe a lot of things. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny … just about anything really, except love. You cannot make a child believe you love him if you don’t. My grandfather loved me, Shelley. I know that. Whoever else he was or turns out to be, he was and always will be Nonno to me. My childhood was not a lie. And I don’t think your life with Max was, either.”

  Tears burned behind Shelley’s eyelids. “You’re right, Paolo,” she said. “Children know when they’re loved. It’s when you grow up that you’re more easily fooled.”

  EMMENTAL VALLEY, SWITZERLAND

  Five Years Ago

  It had become clear to Shelley after the group had climbed the first hill why Max had left the van at the train station. The grassy trail was not suited for anything but mountain bikes, cows, or in the tour group’s case, several pairs of blistered feet.