After Always Read online

  I wasn’t shirking my required work. I usually rose early and completed all the necessary tasks before Michael came for the day. Then, I would hide away, tirelessly sweeping and wiping where no one else bothered to go.

  The first afternoon I heard the baby cry was especially quiet.

  I didn’t realize how comforted I was by distant sounds until there were none. I was sweeping the baseboards in an abandoned hallway when I heard a gurgle and a sigh. I continued, telling myself the noise was farther away than I’d supposed. But then a cough and a cry came after, and I knew I’d lied to myself.

  A soft cry continued, quiet and low. It came from one of the rooms on the floor where I swept.

  There weren’t any guests on this floor. The rooms that held furniture were swaddled in bolts of white cotton sheets gone gray with age. I kept mostly to the halls because the draped furniture was eerie in a way I couldn’t explain—ghostly and strange.

  But the baby’s cry couldn’t be ignored. It seemed to fill my head and prod me to an instinctive urgency that caused my pulse to quicken and my steps to lead me in search of the tiny person who might need my help.

  I didn’t know anything about babies, but the cry was a form of communication my body seemed to understand even when I had no experience.

  I had to find the baby. I had to respond to the call.

  From door to door, I went. Each knob turned beneath my fingers, stubbornly, because these rooms hadn’t been used in many years. Each darkened room was silent and gray, inhabited only by sheeted beings that were only beds or chairs. They somehow frightened me. There was a hushed, expectant quality in the air as if something awaited the right moment to reveal itself.

  My heart pounded in my ears along with the baby’s cry.

  Had it gotten louder? More frantic?

  Each room I opened was empty except for the draped furniture.

  Each room was shadowed because the windows on this floor hadn’t been touched. They were smudged by salt air and time.

  Finally, my hand turned easily on a knob that didn’t protest. It turned with no force, the latch sliding back with a whisper. My brain registered the fact that the door must be opened frequently. The room must be used.

  Yet draped furniture was all that I found when I pushed the door forward.

  It whooshed inward with a soft sigh, the only resistance my own vague sense of apprehension.

  When the door was open and I saw what sort of furniture lay beneath the drapes, real fear drained the strength from my body. My head grew light. My legs trembled.

  Because I recognized the shape of a bassinet in the corner of the room and a rocking chair beside it and because a flutter of white cotton sheet might have been caused by the rocker’s movement and not by a draft from the hall.

  The baby had gone silent.

  He or she no longer cried.

  But I stepped forward into the hushed room anyway.

  I should have stepped out and shut the door. I should have gone downstairs to find someone who would make some sort of noise to chase the baby’s cries from my memory.

  I didn’t.

  Even though the baby no longer cried, I approached the draped bassinet.

  I reached for the corner of the sheet, grayed by dust and time.

  I don’t know what I expected to find.

  But the empty baby bed didn’t soothe me.

  I looked at it for a long time. I waited for another cry, but none came.

  Had Michael’s mother heard the baby cry, too? Is that why she thought the inn was haunted? I wanted to find Michael and tell him about the crying baby, but I still didn’t trust myself with him. Or I still didn’t trust him with the secret fear of abuse I’d buried deep in my heart.

  Chapter Six

  “…But to rejoice in splendor of mine own…”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 2)

  My hands were sore.

  I flexed my fingers as I took the back stairs down to the sandy white-washed boardwalk that no longer seemed to be “white” or “washed.”

  I didn’t trudge. I wasn’t as out of shape as that, but my steps were slower than they’d been a week or two before. We’d only had a few dozen guests since I’d arrived, but I was the only housekeeper. I’d tried to be energetic and professional, though I’d been so distracted that much of the time had been a blur of false smiles and duties that bled, one into the other.

  The work wasn’t that hard.

  Leaving Tristan’s violin alone in its case in my room was the challenge.

  Even resting in its worn red velvet nest it called to me. It sang silently to me until I had the flicking eyes and fluttering fingers of an addict who had gone too long without the thing that seemed to stitch her cells together to keep them from flying apart.

  I played whenever I could. Though that often turned out to be late in the wee hours of the night when guests were asleep or soothing their insomnia with cocktails.

  I’d found the attic bower I’d first seen when my cab had approached Stonebridge. It was a forgotten hidey hole of a room with a stubborn lock and a rickety widow’s walk balcony outside its casement window.

  I played there…too often, too long and well into the early morning when I should be sleeping.

  It was a rendezvous of sorts, a clandestine escape where the violin and me and my memories of Tristan could be together without real-world interruption. The memories weren’t all bad. That’s what would have been the hardest to explain to other people. There had been laughter to offset the tears. Tristan had been capable of being gentle and achingly perceptive. When he wasn’t angry. Trouble was his anger was unpredictable. And I wasn’t nearly as perceptive as he was. The violence always came as a surprise. At first. Later, I was braced all the time.

  I was still braced. Even though Michael had given me no reason to be. He wasn’t the only presence at Stonebridge, and my instincts told me there was a reason to be prepared. One strange and unseen. I’m not sure why but the playing was part of that preparation.

  Only, my hands did hurt.

  I’d woken that morning to throbbing knuckles and red-tipped fingers. My index finger and my ring finger had even developed raw places where the strings had rubbed.

  It was my day off. While I contemplated my fingers, the sun had begun to shine through my windowpanes, and I’d been startled by the shadowed flash of black-tipped wings.

  I’d risen from my bed and crossed to the window to see that the shadow had been a gull. I’d watched it bank along the sun-bleached gray walls of Stonebridge before it had climbed higher to arc back to the sea.

  Behind me, on the foot of my bed, the violin case had waited. And I’d even taken a step toward it, pulled by an invisible compulsion, forgetting my fingertips needed to rest and heal.

  That’s when my phone had pinged with a text from my mother. Only a silly heart made with a greater than symbol and a three. But replying meant I had to step away from Tristan’s violin, and those steps felt so good I added a few more and a few more until I was dressed and down the back stairs.

  At the back of the house, I almost ran into a stooped elderly man in a raincoat. He was bent by age and arthritis. His posture was so poor that he hadn’t seen me, and I’d been in such a hurry to leave the house that I hadn’t seen him. He held several fishing poles in one of his twisted and gnarled hands.

  “Name’s Abernathy. I take care of the boats and such,” he said, gesturing toward a leaning outbuilding with a faded sign that read Livery. It was full of rowboats that seemed beyond use, warped and faded. There were also dozens of bikes that had probably been available to guests at one time but were now rusty and abandoned. I didn’t think poor Mr. Abernathy was up to the job of taking care of anything at all.

  “I’m Lydia Li,” I said. “I’m the summer housekeeper. Heading out for a walk.”

  I took his free hand carefully when he extended it. I didn’t want to squeeze his swollen joints.

  “Good. Good. Young girl like
you is just what Mrs. Brighton needs around the place,” Mr. Abernathy said. But then his smile faded. “Be careful. This old place can be hard on you.”

  His hand had tightened on mine. His skin was rough, and his windblown face was covered in wrinkles. He must have been here a long time.

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised.

  I watched him take the path that led in a meandering line through dunes and tall bunches of dried grass to the bridge. I couldn’t imagine any fish living in the sludge of tidal pools and sand, but maybe he would fish until the tide came in.

  I continued on my way to a different path that overlooked the rolling water of the ocean. My purple windbreaker was bright against the scrub brush and sandy dirt along the cliff where I strolled.

  High above me, gulls circled. I had no way of knowing which one had flown by my window, but I watched them, trying to guess. That one—the one that swooped lower than the others to skim a wave. No. That one—the one that swirled acrobatically in the updrafts created by mist heated by the sun as it rose from the cove below.

  Then, just as I’d found an odd sort of peace in my gull-searching game, a breeze lifted the hair off the back of my neck and a tickle of phantom fingers teased across my butterfly’s wings.

  This time the touch made me shiver, and I shoved my hands in my pockets, suddenly chilled. I hadn’t been waiting and hoping. In fact, the opposite, I’d been trying to forget.

  I was tired.

  From work. From lack of sleep. From the violin. From my…grief.

  So very tired.

  My sore fingers closed around the worn nub of crayon I’d forgotten in my pocket.

  I remembered again coloring, coloring, coloring and my mother’s playing and Mrs. Brighton insisting it was time for her to stop and put me to bed.

  “You’re up early. Aren’t you supposed to sleep in on your day off?” The broad o’s and sharp r’s I’d come to recognize as pure Down-easter and the deep voice I’d come to recognize as pure Michael startled me from behind my back.

  I didn’t turn.

  I didn’t look.

  But I did stop my steps and allow him to catch up. I also tensed every muscle in my body, bracing against…what? Companionship. Connection. Anything that would prove I was still alive when Tristan was dead and gone.

  I shivered again. This time because the gull’s cries seemed louder. The waves roared and the air around me went crisp and still. Maybe it was the sunrise, or maybe I had finally fully woken to the sights and sounds of the day. But I’d been walking in a fog, and when Michael arrived beside me, the fog had lifted.

  “I guess I’ve gotten used to waking early,” I said. “What about you? Do you even take a day off?” I asked.

  I risked a glance his way. He wore his usual jeans and T-shirt along with a faded jean jacket in deference to the chill. He hadn’t strapped on his tool belt yet, although I’d bet his multi-tool was in his back pocket. Always ready for anything. His feet were planted in a broad stance, and his arms were crossed. But his chin was tilted so he could watch the gulls. He was tall and strong and athletic. I’d noticed those things right away when we’d met days and days ago. What I hadn’t noticed, what I hadn’t really seen, was the sculptural quality of his cheeks and jaw. I’d thought him naturally appealing between pretty and plain. I’d been wrong. There was nothing plain about Michael. He was warm and attractive, but it was subtle. It took your breath the same as beautiful did, but more deeply and slowly, over time.

  The hard gravel in my chest tried to beat faster, but I breathed in and out, slow and steady, and told myself it didn’t matter. The sudden beauty I’d seen in his everyday sort of features didn’t matter.

  But when Michael’s amber eyes cut sideways and he caught me looking at his face, it did matter.

  He got quiet. Even quieter than usual.

  I got quiet as well.

  We both seemed to hardly breathe for a little while.

  I wasn’t only drawn to him because I’d noticed his physical attractiveness. And it wasn’t only his warmth, although I’d had a constant chill for months that seemed to ease as we stood there, side by side, as it always eased around him. It was his calm. His stillness. More than anything I was like a skittish wild creature being lured by an outstretched hand. I stared at his face because I didn’t know whether I should trust my instinct to run away or follow the urge to edge closer and dispel the cold a little more.

  Then, he spoke again, and I looked away from the movement of his finely shaped jaw.

  “There’s always something that needs doing. And I like the work. I like Stonebridge,” Michael said.

  I looked back at him thinking “like” was such an odd word for the monstrously huge old place. I wasn’t sure I liked it at all. I found myself strangely nervous in dark stairways and blind corners. And uncomfortable with all the closed and locked doors.

  “I like the activity this time of year especially. The guests coming and going. I like staying busy. And Mrs. Brighton. I like her, too,” Michael said. “She hired me several years ago. I was sixteen. Lied. Said I was older. She must have known. I was a foot shorter back then. And I’d never even changed a light bulb. She hired me anyway.”

  I couldn’t imagine a shorter version of the guy beside me. Or one who hadn’t always known exactly what he was doing. The young man I knew seemed to face the challenge presented by the aging hulk of Stonebridge with undaunted determination and know-how.

  “She started paying me more when I decided to take engineering classes at the community college,” Michael continued.

  “You’re an engineer?” I said. I had been so certain that I would be a concert pianist. Before. After, my high school graduation had come and gone in a blur of grief. Now, I was in limbo. Uncertain if I could face tomorrow much less a future at a conservatory that once threatened to come between me and Tristan.

  “Will be. One day,” Michael replied. So simple. So certain.

  I looked behind us at the great hulking house I’d needed to escape from that morning. I saw something very different in it than Michael saw. He saw opportunity and possibility. I saw dust and decay.

  Just then, one of the swirling gulls above us shed a feather. I had turned back to the cove but the fluttering movement of the black-tipped gray feather as it fell caught my eye.

  It would fall down, down, down to the ocean in the cove and be washed out to sea. I watched it fall. The haphazard dip and swerve of its trajectory was hypnotic in its inevitability.

  Michael had seen it, too.

  He didn’t wait for it to fall. He stepped to the edge of the cliff where a low rail at his knees would probably be useless in stopping his momentum if he slipped. He reached up and out for the feather until it floated into the palm of his hand. Then, he closed his fingers and pulled it back over land. All so sudden and quick and carelessly graceful. I found myself holding my breath again.

  “I like gulls, too,” Michael said, twirling the saved feather in his dexterous, calloused fingers. “Some people think their calls sound sad, but they would change their minds if they would only watch them fly.”

  He held the feather out to me, and I reached and took it from him, like a gift, before I stopped to consider.

  From his hand to mine, the gull feather passed and with it came the realization—I didn’t know how I felt about Stonebridge, but I liked Michael. More than I should. The feeling was warm and soft in my chest, unexpected and frightening. I was never supposed to be warm and soft again. I was supposed to continue to harden and cool until I was an unfeeling statue of Lydia, incapable of love and loss and remembering pain. I didn’t want to risk another relationship. Not only because I had promised Tristan forever, but because that vow had turned out to be a mistake even before he was lost at sea.

  …

  I made my way down to the water with the gull feather shoved in my pocket like I didn’t care, but I didn’t toss it away. I had taken it from Michael’s fingers, and I kept it still. My che
eks were warm even in the chill morning breeze.

  I headed to the spot where I’d seen the dark figure my first night at Stonebridge. I’d been here three weeks now, and the point was often my destination when I had time to come outside. In fact, I always wound up here even if I had another destination in mind. Today, I had chosen to run away from Michael rather than bask in the warmth he seemed to offer. But was I running to this spot as much as I was running away from him? I was conscious of being watched. Far above, Michael still stood at the edge of the cliff with Stonebridge behind him. The sun made the ends of his hair light as the ocean breeze played it around his face.

  He hadn’t pressed his company on me when I’d indicated I wanted to walk alone. But he hadn’t left me to it, either. My face flushed. Not from exertion. Wandering to this spot was a private weakness. One I didn’t want to share. When I reached the part of the shore where rocks led out in an odd sort of natural jetty to deeper waters, I wanted to search for evidence of my shadowy visitor without being observed. Because an audience made my search unrealistic and, maybe, too sad to contemplate. Where did a woman go from the time and place where she allowed herself to look for the ghost of her dead soul mate returned from his watery grave to stalk her?

  My hands fisted at my sides as I allowed that thought under Michael’s distant gaze. The wind stung at the edges of my lids where moisture seemed to threaten too often. I wouldn’t let them fall. I stepped from craggy rock to barnacle-covered stones as far out as the tide would allow.

  My hair whipped around my face. I stood, not minding the ocean spray because it moistened my cheeks and lips with saltwater so I didn’t have to shed my own tears. The crashing waves did my crying instead.

  Because he was gone and a part of me was glad.

  I don’t know how long I stood. The sun had risen high in the sky. The tide was coming in, slowly pushing me back toward shore, stone by stone. A glance up at the cliff told me Michael’s vigil had ended before mine. Maybe he got bored watching a crazy woman bearing witness to the sea’s pain trying to pretend her own pain wasn’t all guilt and guise.