Before Ever After

by Samantha Sotto

  “What makes you think that?” Max replied. “I thought that knowing that Isabelle’s kin were cloth dyers made the solution to Marcus’s dilemma rather obvious. And of course the wooden swords and the chickens in the yard were dead giveaways as well.”

  “You’re not going to tell us how it really happened, are you?” Shelley asked.

  “You’re absolutely right, luv,” Max said. “I’m going to show you. But first we need to head back home.”

  • • •

  The group waited for Max behind one of the sheds near the olive grove.

  “He’s a strange one, isn’t he?” Dex said.

  “I can’t argue with you on that,” Shelley said. And she was even stranger for getting involved with him, she thought.

  Max reappeared with a dusty wooden sword in one hand and a struggling chicken tucked underneath his other arm.

  “Um, we aren’t going to sacrifice a chicken to the gods, are we?” Brad asked.

  “Not in this part of the tour, no.” Max crouched down and held the chicken’s head to the ground. He took the sword and drew a line in the soil back and forth in front of the tip of the bird’s beak. The hen relaxed in his grip and stopped moving. Max stepped away from it.

  Simon stared at the frozen bird. “What did you just do?”

  “She is in a trance,” Max said. “She can stay this way up to half an hour.”

  “So that’s what Marcus did?” Shelley asked. “He hypnotized the chickens?”

  “Marcus convinced Ionus and his family to help him out, and I believe that the children had loads of fun doing it.” Max grinned. “And technically it’s called tonic immobility. It’s a defense mechanism some animals have. That’s why a deer freezes in the headlights. It’s actually pretending to be dead, hoping against hope that the metal monster rushing toward it will be fooled and leave it alone. It’s what our old bishop was earlier afflicted with, I think.”

  “What about the eggs?” Dex asked, his eyes glued to the entranced chicken.

  “That was even simpler.” Max smiled. “Vinegar and alum. The mixture seeps invisibly through the eggshell so that whatever you write on the outside of the egg magically appears underneath the shell. And, as I’m sure you all know because you are such history buffs, alum was also widely used in the ancient cloth-dyeing process to fix the colors to the fabric.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Egg salad and escape

  VENICE, ITALY

  Five Years Ago

  Shelley woke up from a dream about petrified chickens to find Max gone from bed. Just as well, she thought. She would need to get used to sleeping on her own again after the tour was over. She dressed and went downstairs. The dusty kitchen was empty. She waded through the minefield of clutter to get to the front door, catching cobwebs on her jeans. She stepped outside, then bent down and brushed off the silver-gray wisps clinging to her legs.

  “Hey, Shelley! Over here.” Dex waved from the courtyard.

  She looked up. The morning sun shimmered across Alex. A picnic table was set in the middle of her tiled belly and was draped with a crisp white cloth that caught the blue from the sky. Dex, Brad, and Simon were seated around it, cups of coffee in hand. Shelley joined them and was greeted by a breakfast of toast, fruit, marmalade, and five brown eggs in silver cups. “Dining al fresco? What’s the occasion?” she asked.

  “I guess Max got tired of sharing breakfast with his dust mites.” Brad poured Shelley a cup of coffee.

  Max emerged from the olive grove clutching a spray of wildflowers. He set the bouquet in a crystal vase at the center of the table. He kissed Shelley on the lips. “Good morning, luv.”

  Enjoy it while it lasts, she reminded herself. “Good morning. This is lovely, Max.”

  Max sat down. “Let’s eat, shall we? I hope you like soft-boiled eggs.”

  Shelley tapped her egg with a spoon. Nothing happened. She tapped harder, but with the same lack of result. She looked up. Brad, Simon, and Max were already dipping pieces of toast into sunny yolks. She chipped at the eggshell with her fingers. A firm white top peeked from under it. “I think mine might be a tiny bit overdone.”

  “My apologies, luv. My egg timer met an early demise in Austria. You can have my egg if you like.”

  “Oh, right.” Shelley smiled guiltily. “But, you know, yesterday’s story has actually put me in the mood for hard-boiled eggs.” She peeled off the eggshell and gasped.

  “What’s the matter?” Brad asked.

  Shelley continued to stare at the egg in her hands.

  Brad reached for her shoulder. “Shelley?”

  The strength drained from her fingers. The egg began to slip from her grasp. Shelley squeezed her fist around it. A warm mush seeped between her pale knuckles. She opened her hand. Egg salad. Her heart sank. She prodded the mess with her fingers, searching for the two words she thought she had seen. They were gone. Perhaps they had never even been there.

  “Are you okay?” Simon asked.

  “I … I thought I saw something.”

  “Huh?” Dex arched a brow. “Where?”

  “On the … uh … egg,” Shelley said. “There was something written on it …”

  “The egg?” Simon asked. “What did it say?”

  Shelley bit her lip and turned to Max.

  Max looked into her eyes and took her mush-filled hand in his. “It said …”

  Shelley held her breath.

  “ ‘Marry me.’ ”

  A FLIGHT TO THE PHILIPPINES

  Now

  Wow. So that’s how the two of you got engaged,” Paolo said.

  Shelley looked out the window. “I didn’t say we got engaged.”

  “But I thought you said …”

  “I said that’s how Max proposed to me.”

  VENICE, ITALY

  Five Years Ago

  It seemed like it was only yesterday that Max had proposed to her. Oh, it was. Shelley sighed. Many things had changed since then. For one, she had become a thief earlier this morning. She hoped the island’s caretakers could forgive her for stealing their boat. It was the only way she could flee Max’s island.

  “Don’t answer. Not yet.” Those were Max’s exact words, she recalled, right after he said “Marry me.” Perhaps, she thought, if he hadn’t said them, things would have been different. She would not have paused. She would have said—screamed—yes! But Max had given her time to think straight … out the door, onto a stolen boat, and onto a train leading to nowhere.

  Shelley shrank into her train seat and stared at the ticket in her hand. She wasn’t quite sure how it had gotten there. She vaguely remembered standing in front of a ticket booth and babbling about hard-boiled eggs, tumbling LEGO towers, and not wanting to end up like her mother. How the bespectacled clerk in it had come to any conclusion about her desired destination was rather remarkable, she thought, considering that she herself had had no clue. She had just wanted to get a ticket. Any ticket.

  Letters swam in front of Shelley’s eyes as she attempted and failed to remember how to read. She gave up trying to decipher the words printed on her ticket. The fact that she had no idea where she was going didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the little slip of paper in her hand took her as far away as possible from Venice—and Max. Maybe then, she hoped, her higher brain functions would start working again.

  The hours that followed the proposal had grated on her, rubbing her raw with reason. She had survived them by going through the day pretending that it was still possible to answer yes. It was the lie she clung to as she made love to Max and kissed him that last evening on the island.

  He had tasted bittersweet, like the last piece of dark chocolate cake lurking in the fridge the night before a lemon-and-apple-cider-vinegar cleanse. The memory was still in her mouth as she sat on the train wearing only the clothes she was able to grab while Max was sleeping.

  Shelley had quietly pulled on Max’s gray cotton shirt and her own pair of jeans as she padded out o
f the house before the sun was up. That she had managed to leave with her pants was a stroke of sheer luck. Finding her clothes after Max had ripped them off her was always challenging. She had already lost almost half of the underwear she had packed for the trip and several shirt buttons. Leaving her handbag containing her phone and wallet on the island, however, was considerably less fortunate. Thank goodness for Dex and the money sewed into his underwear.

  “So, are you planning on telling me why you’ve kidnapped me?” Dex asked from the seat across from her.

  “Pass. Next question, please.” Shelley was feeling guilty about dragging him along. He had been a necessary accomplice when she realized she had no idea how to steer, much less start, the caretakers’ motorboat. He had been taking pictures on the dock when she ran into him during her escape. Holding his camera hostage as she herded him to the boat had not been one of her finer moments.

  “Fine, then just tell me why we’re going to Rome.” Dex waved his ticket in front of her.

  Ah, Rome. Mystery destination solved. He was proving useful already, Shelley thought. He could read. “Because it’s not Venice?”

  “Try again.”

  “And you can take a lot of nice pictures there?”

  “I see that you’ve really thought this through.” He rubbed the freckled crease on his forehead.

  “I’m sorry. I really am.” Shelley handed his camera back to him. “There’s still time to get off the train.”

  Dex sighed. “It’s okay. Who would I take pictures of if I went back?” He pointed his camera at her. “Say cheese.”

  Shelley mustered a smile. This wasn’t exactly a time she wanted to remember.

  Rome was still about four hours away. Shelley was exhausted from nearly thirty minutes of dodging the subject of Max and smiling for Dex’s camera. If she said “cheese” one more time, she was certain she was going to become lactose intolerant. Still, posing for pictures was a good way to keep Dex happy until they could get to the embassy in Rome and replace their passports. She was determined to stick to that plan as they rode the train. It was either that or answer Dex’s questions about Max. She chose cheese.

  “That looked great,” Dex said, checking her photo on his camera screen.

  “Um, do you mind if we take a break?” Shelley’s mouth was beginning to ache from all the false smiles.

  Dex stretched his long legs. His foot brushed against something beneath the seat across from him. He crouched down. “Well, look what we have here.” He pulled out a worn guidebook. He sat back down and flipped through its tattered pages, stopping at the section on Florence. “Too bad we’re not going to be able to see Florence. That’s where the Uffizi museum is.” He handed the book to Shelley. “It would have been nice to see the statue of David.”

  A penis. Just what she needed, she thought as she stared at the picture of the naked man on the dog-eared page. The tension and movement in his cold marble muscles stirred memories of the much warmer body she was aching for. With the exception of a certain carved body part (that Shelley objectively felt was less endowed than its real-life counterpart), the massive statue of David was a veritable stone replica of the man she loved.

  Shelley sighed. She did love Max; this she knew without question. That was the problem. Saying yes to Max’s question was easy. Saying yes to what he did not ask was not. To have said yes meant she consented to a beginning—and an end. Till death do us part. There was a very real reason for this wedding vow. It proclaimed the infallible truth that all marriages ended in one of two ways: spouses died or love did. She refused to be widowed by either. She read the caption beneath the photograph of the statue silently.

  Michelangelo chose to depict David at the point when he had already decided to fight Goliath, but before they had engaged in battle. It represents the journey across cognizant choice and deliberate action.

  Shelley looked at the statue’s eyes and was struck by the determination and courage she found there. But there was also something else. Something she had not expected to see. Peace.

  Her choice had not left her with the same serenity. Perhaps, she thought with a sigh, it was because running away was actually the opposite of a decision. It was procrastination. She had yet to make a real choice. She needed to find Max. Having no clue where the tour group was headed next, however, posed a slight problem. She looked at Dex. “Um, you don’t suppose this book would have a section on prominent chickens in history, would it?”

  Dex took a nap after making a valiant though vain effort to scour the guidebook for chickens. Shelley watched him sleep. A tiny stream of saliva dribbled from one side of his mouth and pooled on the green sweater he had balled under his neck. She smiled. Dex was sweet and simple, the kind of man her mother had always wanted her to marry. So unlike Max. When she had looked into Max’s amber eyes, there was an easy charm in a flicker, depths of strength in a glint. Sometimes, when Max thought she wasn’t looking, she caught a glimpse of a longing so devastating, she had to look away. And yet she would always look back, unable to resist what haunted her the most: the reflection of an extraordinary new world.

  Shelley wondered where Max was now, even as she accepted the futility of finding him. Having also failed to find any reference to historical chickens or eggs in Dex’s guidebook, she decided that the logical thing to do would be to find her own bearings. Max would return to London at some point. She would contact him then and give him the answer he might not necessarily want but at least deserved to hear.

  Dex whimpered. “Sheil …”

  Shelley turned to Dex. Had he called her name? His eyes darted after a dream beneath his lids.

  “Sheila. Please. Stay!” Dex jolted awake. His sweater fell to the floor.

  “Dex, are you okay?” Shelley touched his arm.

  Dex grabbed his sweater, looked away, and wiped his eyes with its sleeve. He turned back to face her. The fractured smile Shelley had first seen when they met in Max’s van had returned. It reminded her of a flannel robe, the kind people throw over their pajamas when they rush to answer the door. Rumpled and slightly askew.

  “Sorry, was I talking in my sleep?” Dex asked.

  Shelley nodded, noticing that his lashes were still wet. “Who’s Sheila?”

  Dex swallowed and looked out the window. He dug his fingers into the sweater. “She’s my wife,” he said to his reflection in the glass.

  “Wife?” Shelley’s head jerked back in surprise. “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “This trip was supposed to be our honeymoon. Sheila … couldn’t come.”

  “I don’t understand …”

  Dex looked at her and sighed deeply.

  “Sheila doesn’t know me anymore,” Dex said, “on most days at least. She’s sick. Familial Alzheimer’s disease. It’s an extremely rare form of Alzheimer’s that afflicts younger people.”

  This was it, Shelley thought. This was the pain that had been peeking through the cracks in Dex’s smile the entire trip. “Oh, Dex, I’m so sorry.”

  “We had always dreamed of traveling around Europe. But Sheila got sick and the disease progressed more rapidly than anyone expected. The changes were small, almost unnoticeable at first. She started forgetting little things … her keys, her purse. But later, more things started to fade. Hours, days, faces. Me. It was like I was dead to her … just …” Dex choked on his tears.

  “Just what?” she asked quietly.

  “Worse. It was like I never even existed.” Dex swallowed back his pain. “But there were still good days to look forward to … days when we could talk, laugh … dream. It was on one of those days that I asked Sheila to marry me.”

  Marry me. Max’s voice breathed into her ear. Shelley fought back tears.

  “And she turned me down,” Dex said.

  “But I thought …”

  “I managed to change her mind. As you may have noticed, I can be quite persistent.” He tapped his camera. A shy smile flickered in his eyes.

  Shelley
smiled back. Dex had taken more pictures of her on this trip than anyone ever had on all her vacations combined. “I have.”

  “In time, Sheila came to understand why I needed to be with her.”

  “And why did you?” Shelley regretted the question as soon as the words had tumbled out of her mouth. She had not meant to be crude, only honest. In staying, Dex was choosing to be left behind. He was either a fool or the wisest man she knew.

  “Because I don’t believe in jumping off trains, Shelley,” he said. “Do you remember what Jonathan said about Rose when we were at the monastery? How he wanted to make memories with her while he could? That’s how I feel about Sheila. I want to be with her while I can. I want to remember as much as I can: the funny squeak she makes when she hiccups … the way her skin smells like peaches … the way she curls into a ball next to me when we sleep.” His voice grew softer. “These are all I’ll have of her after she’s … gone.”

  “That’s why you were so upset that night we took Jonathan to the hospital.”

  “Yes,” Dex said, “except that I remember thinking that Rose had it slightly better than me. Rose could at least hope that things were going to be okay, even for just a little while. I don’t even remember what that’s like anymore. Sheila isn’t going to get any better. I’m sitting in the waiting room—all day, every day—knowing that every second brings us closer to the end. Can you imagine what that feels like, Shelley?”

  Shelley bit her lip. She didn’t have to imagine it. She was very aware that people and relationships had expiration dates. She had watched her dad wither and her mom fade next to him. It was exactly why she had fled from Max. Things couldn’t end if she didn’t let them begin.

  “But you know what? I’d do it all over again,” Dex said. “Losing someone to F.A.D. is extremely rare, but finding the other half of your soul is rarer. Any man, at least any man who had found what I had, would do the same, which leaves me wondering why …” He paused, looking hesitant.