Before Ever After (2 page)

B
reathing is not an optional activity—but Shelley found the opposite to be true. To live without Max, she had to stop.

Her final breath had been the gasp she had taken when the bomb shredded Max to pieces. It was the last lungful of air she would take as Max’s wife and in it was all she had left of him. If she exhaled, he would be gone. And so she didn’t.

Shelley held her breath and mimicked the motions of life with a white-hot pain in her chest. Walking and reading the paper were activities that were easy to fake, carrying on a conversation, not as much. Eventually she learned that most people were satisfied if she logged in the appropriate number of nods as they spoke. With some practice, she became proficient enough to keep even her nosiest neighbor, Mrs. Pond, happy.

Shelley’s ability to go through the motions wasn’t surprising considering that she had been schooled by the best. Her mom had never quite gotten over the death of her own husband, and Shelley grew up watching her paint on the brightest smile with a berry shade of Revlon lipstick. There had been days when her happiness had seemed so real, so genuine, that Shelley had almost believed it. In the months and years since Max’s
death, Shelley’s mime repertoire had grown to rival her mother’s, expanding to include what in the beginning was too excruciating to even consider.

Online Scrabble was far tamer than the strip version she and Max used to play, but a milestone nonetheless. Shelley had whipped off countless bras to reward her husband’s triple word scores and ruined several tiny metal clasps in the process. Surrendering her underwear had always been easier than challenging Max’s more obscure words and enduring his discourses on their definition, etymology, and Latin conjugations. She later discovered the wonders of Velcro. Regardless of who won, tumbling naked on a letter-littered floor was how their games always ended anyway, along with the loss of yet another vowel.
E
’s, in particular, were in dangerously low supply.

Chicken and eggs were Shelley’s next hurdles to a semblance of normalcy. In her case, it was the egg that came first. She had banished eggs from her kitchen when Max was killed. It was how she had managed to survive Sundays without him.

Sunday mornings had once been her favorite time of the week. It was only then that not waking up in Max’s arms made her smile. The sight of his empty pillow meant one glorious thing: Paris was bubbling in the oven.

Shelley had fallen in love with Max’s baked eggs and cheese almost as soon as she had fallen in love with Max himself. They were in Paris when he first made the dish for her and the tour group she had hastily joined. Since then each forkful tasted like that morning—warm, buttery, and bursting with full-fat promise. But Max was gone, and now Sundays coated her mouth with ash and gritty bits of grief.

She both dreaded and longed for the hour when sleep thinned enough to peer through. She would smile at Max’s empty pillow, believing its false hope with every half-asleep fiber of her body. The waking dream was less than brief, but it lasted long enough for the smell of sharp cheese melting into a layer of eggs and cream to crush her when it drifted away.

She learned to cope by bypassing most of Sunday with the help of marathon nights of online Scrabble. But after countless days of rising at
noon, she finally found the strength to wake up to the emptiness inside her. She found it, of all places, inside a box couriered to her home one Saturday afternoon. It was from Brad.

Brad had told her that he would be sending a draft of his new project. Photography had always been a hobby of his, but he had only ever shown his work to Simon. After Simon was killed, Brad had wedged his camera between himself and a world that did not have his fiancé in it.

Shelley realized that it was now a year since Brad had closed their wedding-planning business to see if his art could feed him (and still satisfy his occasional Prada cravings). She had helped convince him that he could always scrape by as a paparazzo if money ever got tight. Luckily for the celebrities of New York, Brad’s new career was keeping him well fed and fashionable.

She tore the box open. Inside were pieces of a teacup scattered over a kitchen floor. The title of Brad’s new book was printed on the black-and-white photograph.

The shards of porcelain cut into her hands, slicing open old wounds. Shelley dropped the book on the hourglass mosaic inlaid on her foyer floor. She slumped down beside it.

Simon beamed up at her from the open book, his black mod glasses, as always, slightly askew. Shelley stopped herself from nudging them back into place. There was nothing she could do. Simon was dead and his glasses would remain sitting crookedly on his nose.

Tears rolled down the page. She tugged at the edge of her sleeve and dabbed Simon’s face before drying her own. She stroked his damp cheek, lifted the corner of the wet page, and turned back time.

Shelley was in Madrid the day before the world had changed. Her
fingers trembled. She gripped the book tight as Brad’s printed words led her through frozen seconds of ignorant bliss.

Shelley lingered over the tiny nothings, worrying that the slightest breeze might blow them away. These were the mundane specks that leave yawning gaps in shattered lives; no matter how well you think you’ve put all the pieces back together.

She turned the page to the last photo in the series. Her heart broke all over again.

She and Max were asleep in each other’s arms on the sofa bed. The pale light streaming from the window told her that the moment was stolen at dawn, a few hours after they had collapsed in bed after a night of spicy tapas and one too many bottles of wine. They were lying on their sides with Max’s lean muscled form fused into the curve of her back. He was in his jeans, naked from the waist up save for a thin silver chain around his neck. A blank Scrabble tile hung from it and rested beneath his collarbone. She had given the necklace to Max on their first anniversary to celebrate all the vowels they had lost so far.

Shelley slammed the book shut and lay back on the floor, staring at a ceiling that was falling upward and away. Liquid darkness closed around her as she sank into a well of salty tears. The stale breath she had lived on bubbled from her lips. She curled into a ball, closed her eyes, and waited for the death of her body or her soul, wondering which would save her first.

Max’s breath tickled the back of her neck. He pulled her closer to his chest. His skin was warm against her back, melting her into him like butter. He wove his fingers through hers and placed her hands over her heart. It stirred under her palms. Shelley felt it beat again.

Max kissed the secret spot behind her ear. “Good night, luv.”

Shelley closed her eyes and began to drift into sleep. “Good … bye, Max.”

Wisps of sunshine swirled above her. Shelley burst through the surface of her dream and drew in three years’ worth of air.

It was Sunday morning, her first real Sunday since Max had died. Brad’s book was in her arms, creased from a night in her embrace. She smoothed out its pages and carried it to the kitchen, driven by a long-lost though still familiar feeling: peace and a desperate craving for baked eggs.

Without a sliver of an eggshell in her kitchen, Shelley made do with a breakfast of burned toast slathered with trans-fat-free disappointment. She went through the rest of Brad’s book with oxygen in her lungs and a chipped floral cup of jasmine tea nursed in her hands. The second half of the book was called “One Year After.” It was a diary of the healing humdrum Brad had fashioned from the old and the new.

Shelley closed the book. It didn’t end with “happily ever after.” And now, after three years of crying herself to sleep and one night curled on her foyer floor, she knew why: The story went on.

She took a deep breath. It was time to try to write the rest of it. She had said good-bye to Max the night before, but as she closed her eyes and felt his kiss on her neck, something told her that he wasn’t far away. He was there, holding her hand, steadying her fingers as she turned the pages. She would start small, she decided. A paragraph—she bit her lip—or perhaps something smaller. Shorter. A list. She rummaged through a drawer
for a pen. She pressed its tip to paper.
Milk. Bread
. The pen shook. She gripped it tighter.
Eggs
.

T
he rubbery yellow mess in front of her would have made a less determined person give up on the idea of re-creating Max’s Sunday breakfast staple, but Shelley was made of sterner stuff. She pinched her nose and shoveled in a mouthful of what used to be eggs. Waste not, want not.

Strictly speaking, she would have to waste an inconceivable amount of eggs before she would ever want for anything again, at least money-wise. Max had seen to that. Shelley had gotten the second biggest surprise of her life when she found out how much Max had left her in his will. The biggest surprise was going to come three years later—today, in fact, in exactly three minutes and thirty-two seconds.

00:03:30

Max had willed to Shelley an obscene amount of money and a diverse investment portfolio ranging from office blocks in Stockholm to a private island in the Venetian lagoon. The only explanation Shelley had ever gotten from the solicitor was that Max had inherited his estate years before and that she was one of the two beneficiaries stated in his will. The other was an orphanage in Cambodia.

00:02:15

Shelley struggled to understand why Max would keep such a secret—not that there was anything to complain about in the life they had shared. He had operated a small tour company and spent his weekends at his small free-range chicken farm. When she wasn’t in their 1970s Volkswagen van traveling around Europe with Max or helping him run after chickens, Shelley worked on her mosaic commissions. It was an art Max had introduced her to on their first trip together, and it had instantly become a passion. Working with the chaos of pebbles and broken tile reminded her that almost everything made sense after one took a few steps back.

00:01:24

In spite of her new status as one of the wealthiest women in the U.K., Shelley didn’t scoop up the nearest castle on the market. Nor did it even cross her mind to move back to the States. With Max gone, she wanted to keep everything else in her life as unchanged as possible. She did, however, sell the chicken farm. Chicken chasing just wasn’t the same without Max.

00:00:58

Shelley also continued to make mosaics. Her career as an artist had given her the fulfillment she had craved since she had first channeled Bridget Jones, quit her advertising job, and signed up for Max’s tour five years ago.

00:00:45

She considered what had gone wrong with this batch. Definitely more edible than last week’s, but perhaps it could have done with a bit less cream and a little more tarragon—or perhaps a dash of cayenne?

00:00:37

The doorbell rang.

She swallowed the mouthful she was chewing, belted Max’s plaid blue bathrobe around her, and padded to the foyer in her furry purple slippers.

00:00:24

If Shelley had known what would be standing on her doorstep that Sunday morning, she might not have laughed off Brad’s constant prodding to hire a butler. He had never given up trying to persuade her to live the whole lady-of-the-manor lifestyle he had dreamed up for her. She ignored him, but she promised to rent the same Scottish castle Madonna had used for her last wedding reception when he kissed the right frog someday. Brad had found a couple of promising ones hanging around his watering holes lately.