Before Ever After (29 page)

Sanctuary, for Shelley, was not the lilac bedroom she had left in
Ohio. It was much smaller than that. (Which was rather fortunate since she was able to fit it into the carry-on bag she took with her to London.) The chipped floral teacup was the first thing she had smuggled out of her mother’s house when she moved out. In it she found a pocket of porcelain solitude whenever she needed to get away from her mom’s loneliness; it was the same quiet solace the island embraced her with now.

Max took Shelley’s hand and led her to the main house. “We’ll be staying here tonight.”

She looked back at the tower. “Er, why is there a tower on the island, Max?”

“The same reason all towers are built, luv.” Max shrugged. “Perspective.”

A small dust storm rose as the group navigated their way through the welter of curios, artwork, and artifacts that carpeted the main house’s first floor. Shelley tiptoed around a mummified Egyptian cat guarding a large Oriental vase. She imagined that this was what an old china shop might look like—after the proverbial bull had run through it. She stubbed her toe on a wooden sword. “Ow.”

“I apologize for the chaos,” Max said. “The caretakers only look after my island’s farm. I prefer to keep the house locked up when I’m away.”

“I’m sorry,” Brad said. “I think one of those mutant mosquitoes must have been buzzing in my ear. I thought I just heard you say that this was your island.”

“You did,” Max said. “It’s been in my family for generations.”

“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.

P
aolo’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.”

S
imon 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 used 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.