Before Ever After (30 page)

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.

S
helley 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.

S
helley 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.

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.”

“Why not?” Dex asked.

“They were invaded,” Max said.

“The barbarians followed them here?” Simon asked.

“No. The mosquitoes did,” Max said. “The waters that had once surrounded Torcello gradually filled in with silt, turning its harbor into a mosquito-infested
laguna morta
, a dead lagoon. Thousands died from malaria. The island’s settlers had no recourse but to once again pack up their lives and leave. They rebuilt their homes on the Rialto. You can still see the original marble from Altinum in the buildings that stand there today.”

Shelley imagined the early Venetians taking their homes apart, stone by stone, until there was nothing left. She thought about crumbling mosaics and the pieces of the life her mom had never quite managed to pick up. She thought about Rose, love stories, and inevitable endings. She looked at Max and felt light-headed. She sank onto the white stone chair.

Max smiled at Shelley. “That’s called Attila’s Throne.”

“As in Attila the Hun?” Shelley asked.

“Yes, but poor Attila must have been standing for quite a long time, because that chair was made a hundred years too late. But what makes this chair really interesting is the myth that whoever sits in it will be married”—Max smiled—“within a year or sooner.”

Shelley jumped to her feet. “Well, um, that’s a lovely bit of trivia. But we didn’t come all this way to chat about a chair, did we?”

“You’re absolutely right, luv.” Max took Shelley’s hand and strode toward the church. “We’re here to see the end of the world.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Brad whispered to Simon as they entered the Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta. “More mosaics.”

A communion of patterns and colors covered the floors and walls of the ancient church. Shelley stood in awe of the Byzantine mosaics. On one apse was the tiled image of the Madonna and Child, looking lovingly at all who glanced their way. On the opposite end of the church was a more disturbing scene: the Last Judgment.

“If you are familiar with Christian teaching, you will recognize this as a depiction of the day after the End of Days.” Max pointed to the mosaic of a godly figure presiding over writhing souls pleading for mercy. “This is the moment when Jesus Christ passes judgment on all who have ever lived and died, and decides where they will spend eternity.”

“Do you believe in the end of the world, Max?” Simon asked.

Max nodded. “Of course.”

“Really?” Simon said. “I didn’t take you for the religious type.”

“I’m not,” Max said. “But I do know that the world will end.”

“What makes you so sure that it will?” Shelley asked.

“Because it has ended before,” Max said, “and it will again.”

“What do you mean, Max?” Shelley frowned.

“I mean exactly that,” Max said. “The world has ended before. Many times, in fact.”

“It has?” Brad said. “I must have missed that on the news.”

“Look around you,” Max said, “and tell me that the Apocalypse did not happen here. Some people think that the world will end at some point in the future in a great, unimaginable, final cataclysm. I have a somewhat different point of view.”

Dex grinned. “So you don’t think a giant asteroid will crash into the earth?”

“I’m not discounting that possibility. I did watch
Armageddon
. Bruce Willis was very convincing. I just don’t think the world has to run into a massive rock to end. Our world, after all, is what we choose to create around us, here and now. We build homes, towns, cities, civilizations—grander than all that came before, but never enduring. Etruscans. Egyptians. Greeks. Romans. Venetians. Where are their empires now? Where are the worlds they built? Gone. Judged. Ended. But life goes on. We take our shattered bricks, spread our plaster, and build again … hoping that we are starting over for the last time,” Max said. “This was the same hope held by Isabelle’s kin more than a thousand years ago, the only thing they could carry with them when the Lombards were at Altinum’s gates.”

“This isn’t another depressing story, is it?” Brad asked.

Max smiled. “Don’t worry. Isabelle’s ancestors were smart enough to own a chicken—several, in fact.”