“Are you serious?” Dex said. “You actually own an island?”
“I wouldn’t be too impressed. It’s not exactly the poshest address in Venice, but it’s a good place to raise chickens,” Max said.
Shelley stepped over a clutch of jeweled eggs nesting in a medieval knight’s dented helmet. She inspected the grinning green Buddha sitting next to it. If the statue had not been the size of a barrel, she would have believed it was made from real jade. “What is all this, Max?”
“I needed a showcase for my dust-mite collection.” Max blew a thick layer of dust from a lopsided stack of vinyl records. Alvin and the Chipmunks smiled back at him.
Brad sneezed. “Perfect. Just what my allergist ordered.”
“Gesundheit,” Max said. “Upstairs is slightly more habitable. Best get to your rooms and unpack. When you’re done, bring your sacks with you and meet me outside. You’re about to make history.”
Max emerged from one of the sheds just as the group stepped onto the porch of the main house. He carried a bucket in one hand and four trowels in the other. He waved at the group and motioned for them to follow him to the far side of the courtyard.
Shelley could not keep her eyes off the tower and was only mildly aware that she was now standing in its shadow.
Max set the bucket down. A wave of white slush lapped against its metal rim. “If you’ve ever filled in a coloring book or painted by numbers, you won’t have any trouble with our afternoon’s amusement. I’ve already marked off the places you’ll each be working on. All you have to do is spread some of this plaster and lay the tiles on it. No need to be perfect. Dex, this is your spot. Simon, you’re over here. Brad, you’ll be working right next to Simon.” Max pointed to Shelley’s feet. “And, luv, you’re standing on your bit.”
A pond of ocher, blue, red, and green tile rippled under Shelley’s sneakers. It was the first time she noticed the abstract mosaic sprawled across the courtyard. She drew a sharp breath.
“Ah, I knew it was coming,” Brad said. “The catch. Hard labor in exchange for board and lodging.”
“And did I mention the baskets of olives you’ll be pitting and jarring later?” Max said. “Holler if you need anything. I’ll be in the house making dinner.”
Shelley scraped the excess plaster from the tiles she had set. She stood up and examined her afternoon’s work. What she felt was unexpected and, before this moment, inconceivable. Her jeans were stained with splotches of drying plaster and underneath them her bruised knees were surely an even sadder sight, but there was a warmth in the bottom of her belly, the pleasant heaviness that followed a large fudge brownie and a tall glass of milk. Not a tile was out of place, and in this tiny patch of a world she had created, everything made sense. She may have made her living by hammering out words on her computer, but it was only now that she felt what it was like to create something. It felt good.
Dex laid the last of his tiles and sidled up to Shelley. He handed his camera to Brad. “Would you mind taking our picture? And make sure you get the mosaic in the background, okay?”
Brad framed Shelley and Dex in a shot. “Smile.” He switched to his Nikon and snapped his own handiwork. “I hate to admit it, but this was actually fun.”
Max appeared from behind Shelley. “I think Brad’s mosquito found a new ear to buzz in. I thought I just heard Brad say that getting his hands dirty was fun.”
Brad grinned. “Fun? I meant ‘run.’ That meal you’re whipping up had better be worth all this slave labor, Max.”
“I’ll have to check if you’ve earned a place at the dining table first. Let’s head up in the tower and have a look, shall we?”
The steel spiral staircase shuddered each time Max heaved at the rusty handle of the door at the top of the tower. Shelley pressed herself against the cold stone wall, bracing herself for another tremor. She kept her eyes on Max’s jean-clad bottom, averting them from the sheer drop inches from her cringing toes. There were, of course, other reasons Shelley’s eyes were glued to that particular spot of Max’s anatomy, but vertigo was a perfectly legitimate excuse as well.
Iron groaned through the tower as Max pulled the heavy door open. She followed him outside. A breeze flitted through the doorway, echoing her premature sigh of relief. She sucked her breath back in and stepped back from the parapetless ledge. She bumped into Dex.
“Ouch.” Dex peeked over Shelley’s shoulder. “Holy … Don’t they have building safety codes around here, Max?”
“I ran out of bricks. Besides, if there was a wall over here, you couldn’t do this.” Max strode toward the edge of the platform. He plopped down and dangled his legs over it. He turned to Shelley. “Best seat in the house. Coming, luv?”
“I’ll need to check my calendar.” Shelley gripped the doorway. “Oops. Sorry, tumbling to a horrible death isn’t penciled in for today. Perhaps we can reschedule for, say, fifty years from now and skip the horrible part?”
“Nonsense. It’s perfectly safe up here. It’s the ground that might cause some problems.” Max held out his hand to her. “Trust me.”
Shelley sighed. She bit her lower lip and reached for his hand. “If I fall, I’m taking you with me.”
“Too late.” Max drew her close. “You already have.”
Shelley lowered herself next to him. She continued to hold his hand—not because she was afraid of falling, but because she was certain that if she did not, she would float away. She leaned toward him and anchored herself on his lips.
“Careful now, wingless lovebirds.” Simon clung to the doorway.
“Yeah, we don’t want to spend the rest of our holiday scraping you guys off the ground,” Brad said.
“Then join us,” Max said. “Let the caretakers worry about the five odd stains they’ll find on the courtyard.”
“Oh, well.” Dex took a deep breath. “What the heck.” He walked to the ledge and sat down.
“I’m going to regret this.” Simon clenched his teeth over his mint gum and followed Dex. He lowered himself next to him, puffing out peppermint-scented wisps of air.
Brad rolled his eyes and groaned. He left his camera at the doorway. He crouched down and crawled to the edge. Then he sat down and hooked his arm around Simon’s. “So … what do you do for thrills around here, Max?”
“Well, I don’t know about thrills, but she’s kept me busy.” Max pointed to the courtyard. “Campers, I’d like you to meet Alessandra. You can call her Alex.”
Shelley’s gaze fell to the courtyard, immediately followed by her lower jaw going slack. The pixel pond of tiles receded and in its place surfaced … the largest chicken she had ever seen. The sheen of ocher tiles caught Shelley’s eyes, drawing her attention to her first great artistic effort—a single mosaic feather on Alex’s plump bottom.
A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES
Now
Paolo’s perfectly shaped nostrils flared from the chuckles escaping through them.
“A brilliant start to my career, I know,” Shelley said.
Paolo burst out laughing. A chorus of shushes erupted from behind his seat. He turned purple as he choked on the laughter he was miserably failing to stifle. He caught his breath. “Well, you’ve come a long way since then,” he said. “I’ve seen your work.”
“You have?”
“Yes, when you fainted and collapsed on your foyer floor.”
She pushed the memory away. “Er, yes. That was my first project when I moved into Max’s place.”
“It was an hourglass, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
VENICE, ITALY
Five Years Ago
Simon admired Alex from his perch on the tower. “I read somewhere that mosaics have been called eternal paintings or something like that.”
Max nodded. “That’s why I thought it would be the most fitting way to tell Venice’s real story.”
“Real story?” Dex asked.
“Mosaics have been thought to be eternal because of the resilience of the materials use
d to make them—glass, gold, stone, enamel. Undisturbed, they can weather time indefinitely,” Max said. “The same, however, cannot be said for the mosaic’s foundation. A mosaic, by necessity, is set in plaster, a less hardy material that one day will crumble.”
“That’s not exactly something you want to hear after spending hours scraping your knees and encrusting your fingernails in glop,” Brad said.
“But that’s exactly the point,” Max said. “It’s the futility of the exercise that makes it quite remarkable, the human struggle to build something permanent on something inherently …”
“Impermanent,” Shelley said.
And just like that, it happened.
Shelley let it slip out of her, a shade of a thought that had been hovering around the periphery of her mind since the night she and Max had become lovers. It had been waiting for an unguarded moment such as this to take form. And now she could not take it back. She had given it a voice. Her voice. It whispered the truth in her ear: That of all the great monuments people strove to build, love was the leaning tower of LEGO. It had crushed her mother and now it threatened to flatten her. If she let it.
“Exactly.” Max nodded.
“Oh, okay, I get it. Mushy foundations. Venice is like a mosaic because it’s sinking, right?” Brad said. “But what does Alex here have to do with anything?”
“Venice would not exist if not for her and a few of her friends,” Max said. “And today you have completed the only monument to the truth behind how Venice came to be. As I told you on the boat, Roman refugees who fled the barbarians invading the mainland founded Venice. As the Roman empire declined, the lagoon became a temporary sanctuary during times of invasion. In 568, however, a few years after the emperor Justinian I died, their relocation became more permanent in nature. Italy, which was then under the eastern Roman empire in Constantinople, no longer had the strength to defend itself from the Lombard horde spilling over the Alps.
“Legend says,” Max continued, “that the bishop of the Roman city of Altinum asked God for a sign to guide him as the barbarians drew nearer. After three days of fasting and prayer, the sign he was waiting for came in the form of a vision of birds fleeing with their young. The bishop took it to mean that they needed to leave the city as well. God then told the bishop to climb the city’s tower. From there, the good bishop saw the place in the lagoon that was to become their new home—the island of Torcello.”
“And how much of that story is true, Max?” Simon asked.
“Well, I suppose you could safely put your money on everything up to ‘Legend says,’ ” Max said. “But the truth will have to wait. Dinner’s getting cold.”
Shelley braved the maze of clutter in the main house to return to the courtyard later that evening. She had slipped away from Max’s arms and left him asleep in their bedroom. Now she was walking barefoot across the moonlit mosaic, feeling the cool, smooth tiles on her soles.
A cloud passed overhead, casting a wide shadow across the courtyard. Without any light to show her the way, Shelley let memory guide her to her destination. She reached the darkest part of the shadow just as the cloud unveiled the crescent moon. The tiled feather was pale in the evening, she thought, a cheerless version of the fierce ocher it had been when it had found its place under the sun. She knelt down and ran her hand over her work until her fingertips grazed a loose tile. It wobbled at her touch.
If someone had asked Shelley at that moment why she was crouching in the dark in the dead of night wearing only Max’s pajama top, she was prepared to say that she was getting some air. But since she had the courtyard to herself, she was glad she didn’t have to lie. Shelley then thought, to the satisfaction of Sister Margaret, that, technically, saying she was out for some air was not entirely a lie. She would after all be breathing in the course of pursuing her real objective. The fat nun in her head nodded her approval and rolled back to sleep. “Air it is.”
“Air what is?” a voice whispered in Shelley’s ear.
Shelley shrieked and stumbled back. She looked up in terror at Dex’s grinning face. “You just scared the hell out of me, thank you very much!”
Dex chuckled. “What are you doing out here?”
“I …” Her practiced lie stuck to the roof of her mouth like a heaping spoonful of peanut butter.
“I needed some air,” Dex said. “The dust in that house was killing me.”
“Um, yeah, me, too,” Shelley said.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” Dex asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
Shelley sat next to Dex at the end of the crumbling dock, swatting away determined mosquitoes. The rhythm of the waves washing over the beach did little to lull the restlessness inside her.
“The tour’s zipped by, hasn’t it?” he asked. “Do you know where we’re going tomorrow?”
Shelley swallowed hard. She knew too well that Max’s tour was going to end in a couple of days, and without knowing it, Dex had just put into words the very reason why she had left Max’s side. The whispering in her head had not stopped, and now the ominous creaking of a tower made from colorful plastic children’s blocks joined it. It was a relentless chorus calling out Shelley’s gnawing fear that despite all she was coming to feel for Max, she still had no idea where she was heading tomorrow—or any fraction of time beyond the present. More than ever, she felt the urge to flee.
She tightened her fist around the ocher tile that she had pried from the courtyard. Its sharp corners cut into her hand. She bit down the pain.
Shelley had taken back a piece of herself, a tile that would remind her that once she had stayed on a train longer than she had intended and fallen in love with a man she did not know. But if she was being honest—which she was not at that moment—she would admit she had taken the tile in the selfish hope that one day that man would find himself walking barefoot on a moonlit mosaic and feel that something was missing … and then, perhaps, remember her, too.
A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES
Now
Shelley placed her hand on her chest and felt the small square pendant through her cotton blouse. She’d had its corners smoothed years ago, but now, as she hurtled toward a different island in search of a different man, she felt the tile slice into her heart.
VENICE, ITALY
Five Years Ago
Shelley scratched at the mosquito bites she had accumulated while sitting on the dock with Dex the night before. The red bumps on her legs, she thought, sadly outnumbered the bricole posts their boat was passing on the lagoon. Max raised his voice over the boat’s motor and explained how the wooden pilings, topped with orange lamps, marked the shallows and kept boats from running into mud. Shelley looked at the clusters of bricole and wished that life were as easily charted.
Dex steered past a post. He had pleaded with Max to let him take the wheel when they set off from Max’s island.
“These bricole are by far the best way ever devised to keep unwanted, nosy neighbors away,” Max said.
“What do you mean?” Simon asked. “Aren’t they supposed to mark mudflats and sandbanks?”
“Indeed, and whenever charming invaders decided to pop by for a visit, the ancient Venetians simply pulled out the posts to confuse them,” Max said. “It’s a pity hiding isn’t as easy nowadays.”
Shelley looked at Max and had the feeling that he wasn’t talking about the tourist-loving Venice. “Why? Is there anything you want to hide from, Max?”
“People don’t hide because they want to, luv. It’s because they need to.” He turned to Dex and pointed to an island rising in the horizon. “Straight ahead, my good man.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
The traffic on the lagoon thinned as the motorboat approached Isola Torcello. A brick bell tower loomed larger in the horizon. The boat slowed as the waves dwindled into a brackish soup of silt and weeds. A heron perched on a sodden islet tilted its head at Shelley, as though asking her why she had bothered to come this way.
&nbs
p; Shelley leaned over the side of the boat. The swamp mirrored the different shades of muddy brown she was feeling. She was almost certain that she could make out the line where time had stopped and left the island of Torcello to fend for itself. It was hard to believe that only ten minutes away the city of Venice was busy plying tourists with all the accoutrements of the postcard-perfect holiday.
Dex pulled the boat over to a small dock.
If loneliness was a place, Shelley was convinced that she had found it. She stepped onto the island.
“Campers, welcome to Torcello. Follow me.” Max took Shelley’s hand and led the group down a trail alongside a small winding canal.
“You have a thing for deserted islands, don’t you, Max?” Brad asked.
“They have their charm,” Max said as they approached an arched stone bridge. “That is the Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil’s Bridge. They say that the devil built it in one night.”
“And I know why he was in such a hurry to get out of here,” Brad said. “This place feels like a ghost town.”
“Perhaps,” Max said, “that’s because it is.”
The trail ended in a dusty piazza bordered by a handful of stone buildings. Among them was an octagonal church whose bell tower the group had seen from the lagoon. A massive, roughly hewn white stone chair was planted in the overgrown grass in front of it, a throne waiting for its forgotten king.
Max leaned against the carved chair and looked around the piazza. The broken marble columns dotting it outnumbered the people in the tiny square. “There are only about twenty people who live here now. That’s about 19,980 less residents than when the island was at its peak.”
Simon looked at the sparse architecture around him. “Twenty thousand people lived here?”
Max nodded. “After they fled from Altinum, the Roman refugees prospered here, finding their fortune in the salt trade. They took the stones from their homes in Altinum and built a city and harbor. But as you can see, they didn’t stay here.”
Before Ever After Page 21