Before Ever After (21 page)

“It is good to let go of regret,” Brother Aidan said.

“But I did not let it go, Brother. I told you the day I lost my sight that
the darkness allowed my body to remember things that my mind had forgotten. I heard a voice that day I went blind, a voice that made me see something that my eyes could not. I heard your voice … and I remembered.”

Brother Aidan’s breathing was almost as labored as the abbot’s. “What did you remember?”

“I remembered a quiet good-bye at the gates of a monastery, the voice of the man who saved me. It was deep and gentle, but not without grit, very much like
yours.
”

Brother Aidan stiffened in his seat. The abbot tightened his grasp on his hand.

“Is that not true, Brother Aidan?” the old man asked. “Was it not your voice that bid me farewell? You are my stranger—the immortal angel God sent to watch over me. You were the one who guided me into this life, and you are now my last companion as I leave it. Speak now and tell me if that is not the truth. Speak before I reach the shore.”

Brother Aidan took the abbot’s hand and kissed it good-bye. “Think of me when you get there.”

The abbot smiled and closed his eyes. “Where will you be? Will you not follow?”

“I will be here,” Brother Aidan said. “As always.”

A
bbot Thomas succumbed to senility or was, at the very least, delusional in his last days,” Max said, “and Aidan did not have the heart to kill a dying man’s faith.”

“But why was Aidan acting so evasively? What was he hiding from the abbot?” Shelley asked.

“Let’s just say that he had entered the monastery for less than pious reasons. He did not come to follow the Cross but to chase his own curiosity. He did not want the abbot to find out that his becoming a monk was an academic exercise and not the religious experience he pretended it to be. Aidan had questions, and he thought that the monastery could provide him with answers. And this is the answer he found, the same secret that we have pursued.” Max tapped his finger on the explicit.

Shelley squinted at the book. The ancient language lay dead on the page. And then she saw it—a format—so teasingly familiar it danced on the tip of her tongue. Numerals. Steps. Measurements. She laughed. “Max, this is Aidan’s rooster soup recipe, isn’t it?”

Max grinned. “Well done, luv. You have in your hands the elusive secret for escaping youth.”

“I’m not convinced.” Dex folded his arms in front of him.

“It is a recipe, and quite a good one, I assure you.” Max checked on his cooking pot.

Dex sat up straighter. “I’m sure it is, but what I don’t buy is the merit of rotting into a husk. With all due respect to the older members of our group, if I had a choice, I would rather stay young. I don’t want my mind to slip away. I don’t want my memories of the life I’ve shared with the woman—with the
people
I love—to be ripped from me. If there really was such a thing as a fountain of youth, believe me, I’d be the first in line with a bucket.”

“Not if I beat you to it,” Brad said. “Dying sucks. I’d love to live forever.”

“Forever, Brad?” Shelley said. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t enjoy getting wrinkles, but I imagine that living forever would be like being the last person at a party—and then watching the room fill up again with people you don’t know, playing music you can’t stand. You wouldn’t even have anyone left to remember the good old days with. Think about it, Brad. Could you imagine eternity without Simon?”

Brad pressed his lips together.

“Shelley has a point.” Jonathan squeezed his wife’s hand.

“How about you, Max?” Simon asked. “Is immortality your cup of tea?”

Max looked at Shelley. “Perhaps with a bit of honey.”

“Come on, Max,” Shelley said. “Be serious.”

“I am,” Max said. “In my humble opinion, forever is a bitter brew. In many ways, I envy and admire Abbot Thomas. He accepted death for what it is.”

“Which is?” Simon asked.

“Rest,” Max said.

“I suppose death must seem that way when you’ve lived that long,” Shelley said. “Life, I imagine, looks very different when you’re standing at the very edge of it. I wouldn’t know how I’d feel or what I’d do if I suddenly found out that I was dying.”

“But you are, luv,” Max said. “It’s a path you’ve been on since the day you were born. I’d say you’re almost a third of the way through.”

“Once again, thank you for such a pleasant thought.” Shelley slumped back in her seat.

“That may be true, Max,” Simon said, “but I think Shelley was talking about a more imminent end. What if you found out you only had a few months to live? Or even weeks? Do you whip out your list of ‘things you need to do before you die’ and race to check things off? Or do you lock your loved ones in a cottage somewhere and hug them until they can’t breathe?”

“I like the hugging part.” Max slipped his arm around Shelley’s waist. “But I can think of more interesting things to do in a secluded cottage.”

“You’re impossible.” Shelley slapped Max’s bottom.

“Like that, for example,” Max said.

“We are in a house of prayer, in case the two of you have forgotten.” Brad closed his eyes and clasped his hands together piously. “Brother Bradford. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

“You’d be excommunicated faster than you could spell the word,” Simon said. “But while we’re on the subject of impending demise and bucket lists, I have a question for the group. What would be at the top of your list?”

“Well, I suppose I would like to see the world and have a trunk full of photographs to show for it. Retiring on a tropical island would be good, too.” Dex looked at Simon. “How about you?”

“Well, if I had to prioritize,” Simon said, “I suppose it would be to settle down and have a family.”

“Oh … uh,” Brad stammered, “me, too. Right after I went naked skydiving over the Grand Canyon.”

Simon rolled his eyes. “How about you, Rose? What would you like to do first?”

“Well, I’ve already skydived without my knickers, but I suppose it would be more fun if Jonathan joined me the next time around.”

“I’ve jumped out of an airplane behind enemy lines for my country, Rose,” Jonathan said. “That was enough for one lifetime, I believe.”

“So if donning a parachute and not much else isn’t your thing, what else remains on your to-do list, Jonathan?” Dex asked.

“When you get to be my age, you would hope that there wouldn’t be much left to cross off. And that’s exactly how it was before I met Rose, to be honest. I was nearly done with my short but respectable list. But now,” Jonathan said, “my list has grown quite long. Afternoon tea, quiet walks, rainy mornings—nothing I haven’t done before, but everything I need to do now with my Rose as many times as I can, while I can.”

“Jonathan …” Rose embraced her husband, her tiny arms barely reaching around his chest.

Dex hurried to dab at the corner of his eye. “I can’t think of a better list than that, Jonathan. That certainly beats hurling yourself from an airplane any day.”

Brad elbowed Shelley. “Your turn.”

“Oh, come on.” Shelley threw up her hands. “You can’t expect me to give my answer after that, do you?”

“Go on, dear,” Rose said. “We’d love to hear it.”

“Well, um, okay.” Shelley chewed her lip. “The funny thing is, I actually do have a list. Several, in fact. But there’s a couple that I always carry with me.” She pulled out a leather-covered notebook from her bag. A faded pink paper was tucked in its sleeve. “This is the first one I ever made. I was a kid. It’s silly, really.”

“That’s too cute!” Brad said. “Let’s have a look.”

Shelley unfolded the list. “When I wrote this one afternoon in our kitchen, I obviously wasn’t thinking about dying. What I was thinking about was my mom and her scrapbooks. After my dad died, my mom’s favorite way to pass the time was to wedge me by her side and go through all her mementos of their life together. Love letters. Flowers. Concert tickets. Everything. She never tired of telling me how she met my dad and how they fell in love waiting in the rain for their bus. It sounded like a fairy tale, a story of how a prince met and married his princess, but
then …” She glanced at Max. He smiled at her, but all she could see was an hourglass shattering on the floor.

“But then what?” Dex asked.

Shelley took a deep breath. “I realized just how sad the story actually was. It was the story of a princess left to live alone on the blank pages of an unfinished book,” she said. “That’s why I wrote this. It’s a magical spell my younger self made to make sure that what happened to my mom would never happen to me. I didn’t want the ‘ever’ that came after happily. I didn’t … don’t want to be the one left behind.” She read from the pink page.

Shelley busied herself refolding the list and tucking it back into her notebook. A grocery list slipped out and fell to the floor. She took her time picking it up. She wasn’t in a hurry to see the group’s reaction to her list. Especially Max’s.

Brad grinned. “So have you kissed any good frogs lately?”

Shelley turned to Dex. “Um, could you please pass the figs?”

Dex pushed the bowl toward her with a sympathetic smile. Shelley stuffed two figs into her mouth.

“I hate to be the one to break this to you, but I think you might have some difficulty finding a prince to sign that kind of a prenup, Shelley,” Simon said. “Except maybe for the part about eating flies.”

Rose clasped Shelley’s hand and gave it a squeeze. Shelley was taken aback by how frail the older woman’s hand felt, only slightly more substantial than cobwebs or a passing thought.

“My dear,” Rose said, “you might be surprised at how much happiness you can find in the pages of the shortest of love stories. Unlike penises, their length truly does not count.”

S
cribbling a soup recipe at the back of a prayer book sounds like something Nonno would do, all right,” Paolo said. “He always did have an odd sense of humor.”

“I guess you’d have to be if you were immortal.”

There, she’d said it. Fast, flippantly, and coated in a gel capsule of glib. It was the only way she could swallow the truth without choking. Max was immortal, and she was an immortal’s widow. It was a paradox too cruel to understand.

“So do you really think that’s what he is?” Paolo asked.

“Julien, Antoine, the Basilisk, and Brother Aidan, Abbot Thomas’s guardian. All of them … they were all just one man,” she said. “What else could Max be?”

“I don’t see any bite marks on your neck, so I guess that rules out the other possibility.”

“Very funny. You’re just like him, you know,” Shelley said. “He never took things seriously—not even his own death, it would seem.”

“I’m sorry, but I have to find some humor in this whole experience. The more I learn about who Nonno was, the more I find myself wondering about who I am. You married an immortal, but I am his grandson. What does that make me, Shelley?”

She could hear the strain in Paolo’s voice. Guilt dropped in her gut like a heavy pasta dinner. “I … I’m sorry. I’ve been so focused on myself, I haven’t stopped to think how you must be feeling. I promise that I’m not as idiotic in real life.”

The tension in Paolo’s brow smoothed over. A hint of the smirk hovered at one corner of his mouth.

Shelley inhaled sharply. She had caught another glimpse of Max in the dimple that deepened in Paolo’s olive cheek.

“Real life,” Paolo said. “That sounds kind of funny now, don’t you think? As bizarre as things are, do you realize that this moment is
actually the closest either of us has actually come to the truth? Life has never been more real, Shelley, and as profoundly unnerving as it is, I’m actually … glad.”