After Always Read online

  With my sentinel gone, I was finally alone with the empty place where my dark visitor had been.

  Only then did I notice that I wasn’t alone.

  I’d been looking up to search for Michael along the cliff, and I’d almost stepped over a pattern in the sand.

  Words.

  Words carved in the sand, but almost washed away.

  Another wave and then another washed over the sand. The words that hadn’t been there when I’d walked over this exact spot an hour or so before would be erased. I hurried. I crouched. Cold, foamy water washed over my shoes. I made out the words of what had been a verse, a familiar verse, from Romeo and Juliet.

  …heaven so fine…

  I knew the whole quote. Of course I did.

  “‘…when he shall die, Take him and cut him out in little stars, And he will make the face of heaven so fine, That all the world will be in love with night, And pay no worship to the garish sun.’” I said the words aloud, softly, the waves gone to nothing but a distant roar in my ears.

  I looked up from the vanishing impression of letters in the sand. I looked around. There was no one and nothing but gulls as far as I could see. I squinted at the glint of glass I knew to be my bedroom window. Here, right here, is where I’d seen the silhouette of a man.

  The “garish” sun heated my back as I stood there watching the words disappear. I remembered the way its beams had haloed Michael’s hair.

  “I haven’t forgotten you,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them. I’d always been quick to soothe Tristan’s feelings. To head off his sulks at the pass. Was I talking to myself or to a ghost that only lived in my heart?

  I reached out to touch the remnants of the final “e” etched in sand. It was real. Not imagined. If not Tristan, who and how? I’d been staring at the waves, completely ignoring the shore. The sound of the water would have covered up any sound or movement behind me.

  I had been out on the rocks long enough for someone to do it, but…how would they have known the words to write in the sand that would make my heart cringe?

  I stood when the next wave erased all evidence of the letters. I shivered. Suddenly, I imagined the dark figure I’d seen from my window creeping behind me to write the Shakespearean quote on the sand while I stood, unaware. It didn’t seem romantic. It seemed…threatening.

  “Tristan…” I said his name, and it was the first time I’d said it since that shocking day when a voicemail had told me he was gone. His parents hadn’t left the message. The voice had been a stranger’s. One of his father’s administrative assistants. Tristan’s parents hadn’t even returned to Seattle. They had houses all over the world. The place in Seattle had been a pause for Tristan’s education. Not a home. All their things had been packed by a moving company. If there had been a memorial service, it had been in South America and I hadn’t been invited. My mother had bought a sympathy card, and I had signed it. She’d mailed it to the last hotel they’d stayed at in Tierra del Fuego.

  I’d heard my mom speculate that more closure would have helped me.

  She was wrong.

  Rewriting history might help. Pretending that nothing had been wrong.

  “Tristan,” I said again. This time more definite, as if he stood by my side.

  Between one second and the next, a soft cocoon seemed to envelope me. I could still see foam blowing across the sand. I could still hear the crash of every wave against the rocks and the shore. But I wasn’t touched by salt spray or blowing sand. My hair, tousled and tossed moments before, was still.

  In that impossible stillness, a brush of warmth slid against my cheek.

  I leaned into the warmth as if it was a hand laid on my face even though some part of me felt the unnaturalness of it, the wrongness. When I leaned, the warmth became a definite hand, one I’d felt millions of times before, though I couldn’t see it. It was Tristan’s hand. The callouses on the pads of his fingers from violin strings brushed against my skin.

  I breathed his name again, and when I did I tasted his lips on mine. The hairs raised on the back of my neck. A superstitious chill tracked down my spine. Some unknown instinct inside of me said to run, to hide. But hadn’t there always been a tiny element of fear when I’d kissed Tristan? This new danger of not knowing how or why blended with the old danger of not knowing if anything of myself would make it out of his passion alive.

  He’d always accused me of being too analytical. Like my father. Too cautious. Like my mother. Even as my skin flushed and my breath quickened, it was the questions not the fear that caused me to doubt.

  “How?” I asked, even as I tried to reach for him to bury my hands into his riot of hair to show that I wasn’t rejecting his kiss.

  But the second the question left my lips, Tristan’s kiss did, too. The wind swept back in as if relieved it was no longer held away. The volume of the world was no longer muted. Waves, gulls, the sound of a distant ship’s horn—swept in as surely as the wind and the water at my feet.

  …heaven so fine…

  My heart pounded against the cage of my ribs, gravel no more.

  Chapter Seven

  “Go, then, for ’tis in vain

  To seek him here that means not to be found.”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 1)

  I shouldn’t take Tristan’s violin down to the beach, but two compulsions warred inside my chest. My heart expanded to respond to both.

  I needed to play.

  I needed to walk where Octavia walked and where secret fleeting messages were written in the sand.

  I left the case and Tristan’s package in my room.

  I cradled the violin against my chest as if it were a child.

  The day was dry. The sky was blue without a hint of storm clouds. Mr. Abernathy didn’t seem to note the fair weather. His bright yellow raincoat was barely stirred by a gentle ocean breeze.

  I didn’t encounter Michael. I hadn’t seen him through the dark stairways and hallways of Stonebridge as I’d passed furtively through noonday shadows caused by curtains and corners and blackened bulbs he’d yet to replace.

  I didn’t see him now as I approached the steep pathway in the cliff that led to the shore.

  I worried I’d drop the Ming Jiang Zhu violin before I even made it to the risk posed by saltwater. I clutched it carefully and picked my way thoughtfully through bramble and gorse and pebbled terrain.

  But I didn’t turn back.

  The steady crash of the surf urged me on. The melody of “The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto” burst from my lips in occasional murmurs and snatches of hums before I would press my mouth tight against the inadvertent song. It sounded airy and strange and not altogether sane coming in halted, breathy gasps.

  The sand was hot under my feet when I made it to the base of the cliff. I paused to ponder my bare toes. The sudden heat had taken me by surprise. My feet were scratched and bloodied from the rough path. I blinked. I didn’t remember leaving my shoes behind.

  A small thrill of unease rose in my throat, but the heat urged me forward to the wet sand, and the movement toward the surf made me forget about shoes.

  Water, especially saltwater, could ruin Tristan’s violin. Like the shoes, the risk was a practical matter I couldn’t seem to currently understand. The worry was vague. It couldn’t compete with my compulsion to play.

  I had to play.

  I had to play, here.

  Now.

  I waded out from rock to rock as I’d done many times before. This time I wore a maxi dress that hindered my legs the wetter it became. I struggled onward. The rocks held me mostly above the water. The violin was mostly safe, high in my arms above my head.

  When I came to the last rock that jutted out into the sea, I planted my feet firmly and fitted the instrument under my chin. The damp wood would spell future disaster for the instrument’s sound, but still I raised the bow.

  I played and the music filled me. Some remaining discernment in my ear or in my musician�
�s soul called my playing discordant—too fast, too loud, too frenzied, too frantic.

  I didn’t care.

  I played in the surf and the music found its audience in the crashing waves and the swooping gulls, in my increasingly water-logged body and the wind whipping my hair.

  I stopped playing when I was buoyed and thrown off the rock by the rising tide. I’d played too long. I held the violin high as I fell. I instinctively saved it from being submerged even though my own face was splashed and the water lapped at my chest. The rocks leading back to shore had disappeared beneath sucking waves.

  Thank God I was barefooted.

  My dress billowed and wrapped, billowed and wrapped with the rhythm of the ocean. But my feet found purchase on the sand, and I struggled to keep it. The pull of the tide was a wrestling, physical embrace I fought with every step, every stride.

  I couldn’t use my arms for balance or propulsion because I had to hold the violin high. I’d like to think I would have sacrificed the instrument if my life depended on it. But I’ll always wonder. It took me a very long time to make it back to the beach using only my legs.

  When I finally collapsed to my knees onto the sand, my body trembled from exertion and fear.

  If I’d been wearing the layered petticoats and accouterments of Victorian times, I never would have made it back to shore.

  Tristan’s violin wasn’t dry. I’d never let my arms fall, but the maple glistened more than it should in the late afternoon light. The waves had been insidious, intent to devour us.

  …

  I wiped the violin down with a clean, moist cloth to make sure no salt was left to warp its surface as it dried. I should have taken it to Mrs. Brighton to ask her advice about how to save it, but I wouldn’t have been able to explain why I’d taken it to the beach in the first place.

  Once it was wiped clean and left to dry on my bed, I stripped my own wet clothes off and showered. I washed the salt from my hair. But nothing seemed to soothe the trembling in my legs. I watched the water float away from my scratched feet. It swirled around the drain in pink tendrils colored by my blood.

  Chapter Eight

  “To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 5)

  The next day, after I’d texted my parents and completed my chores, Mrs. Brighton sent me to find Michael. The tide was high. It swirled and eddied beneath Mr. Abernathy’s familiar figure on the bridge. I couldn’t see his fishing line in the water, its filament too fine and too far away. When I lifted my hand to wave hello, he must not have seen because he only continued to stand looking out at the horizon, an old slumped figure, gnarled from too many years by the sea.

  I made my way down to a sand bar beneath the bridge where a man was pushing a rowboat into the murky water. Michael. The boat floated away, tugged by the current, but he held it by a rope in one strong hand. He saw me coming. I could tell by the way he studiously avoided looking directly my way. Instead, he tied off the rope against a tilted piling that must have once belonged to a long-gone pier.

  The boat bobbed and danced against the swirling water while he threw several items on board: a bucket, a clam digger’s rake, two pairs of tall rubber boots. Mrs. Brighton had asked him to take me clamming. This was a favor for her, not for me. It took courage for me to approach him. He didn’t welcome me, and I had practically run away from his touch on the cliff the last time we’d spoken. But the boat tossing on the waves was worse than Michael’s stiffness.

  It was only a rowboat. Small and easily controlled. It wasn’t a sailboat. There was no storm. Still, it took all the brave I could muster. Not because it would be the first time I would be on the water since Tristan died, but because I would be with Michael and I knew Tristan would have hated that.

  Or would hate that.

  My pulse kicked up and my nerves tightened. I was hyperaware of Michael striving to act as if he wasn’t hyperaware of me.

  “You’re far from the house and far from your usual spot in the cove,” he said. I caught only a glimpse of amber because he barely tilted his eyes my way before they were focused back on the gear in his hands. He’d taken out the multi-tool to flip open the knife attachment in order to cut through a frayed bit of rope. His moves were sure and graceful, almost like a dance, but one with only the most practical of steps.

  “Octavia’s spot, you mean,” I said quietly. The noise of water slapping the wooden side of the boat almost drowned me out. Almost. Michael heard.

  He stilled, but only for a second. Then, he placed the tool in his back pocket and threw more things into the boat—a thermos, an aluminum-sided cooler.

  “That’s a dark way of looking at it, but true, I guess. That’s where she waded out into the waves until she was so far her wet skirts dragged her down,” Michael said.

  I’d experienced the tide coming in and out in that same spot. I’d barely made it to shore in much lighter clothes than a Victorian woman would have worn.

  “By the time they retrieved her body, she was blue and cold, but still beautiful, they say. Jericho kissed her, but he didn’t cry. He would only allow his own valet to tend to her body and prepare it for burial,” Michael said. “The town was used to his eccentricities and they bowed to his wealth and privilege. No one protested or tried to take her away to the funeral home.”

  “I guess it’s a story passed down through the generations,” I said, trying to understand his knowledge and interest in a woman a hundred years dead.

  “I’ve wondered why he didn’t stop her since I was a little boy and I first heard the story. I guess their relationship was more complicated than I could understand,” Michael said. “Still seems strange. Even now.”

  He straightened and looked out over the water as if he could see around the land blocking our view of the natural jetty of rocks that led into the sea. I imagined Michael saving her. The lovely, legendary Octavia clinging to his broad back. Jericho? Why did I imagine him watching from the cliff as she slowly, slowly sank beneath the waves?

  “Did Octavia and Jericho have any children?” I asked. I hadn’t mentioned the empty bassinet to anyone, but I hadn’t forgotten the baby’s cry.

  Michael didn’t look at me. He continued to look at the horizon.

  “She was pregnant when she drowned,” he said.

  I gripped the side of the boat with my hands to try to steady it before I climbed in, but it wasn’t the boat’s rocking that made me woozy.

  “Many people refused to believe she’d committed suicide even though witnesses saw her alone in the sea,” Michael said.

  “But Jericho wouldn’t have…” I said. His hands on her shoulders. Something about them was wrong. I could never seem to focus on what bothered me about them. It was a nagging concern more felt than seen. I needed to see the portrait again without becoming distracted by his eyes.

  “It was a long time ago. We’ll probably never know,” Michael said. “I don’t believe in ghosts in spite of what my mother says. She’s fascinated by the Jerichos’ doomed romance. I just change the light bulbs. Help Mrs. Brighton. Gather clams.” He brought his attention from the horizon back to the boat and the oars. “We’ll row out to the marsh beyond the bridge. You can only reach it when the tide is high. We’ll dig as it falls and return before it drops too low,” Michael continued.

  He was back to basics. Acting as if he was fulfilling Mrs. Brighton’s request with no personal interest whatsoever. But there was a tension in him that seemed attuned to the tension in me. It was like we both would rather forget the clam dig, maybe forget everything else, and just be with each other. Imagining what might happen if we did that made my tension rise. He was entirely too approachable. There was something warm and inviting about him even when he tried to act like the last thing in the world he wanted was to take my hand or… He didn’t fool me. And I couldn’t fool myself, either. Not when I noticed every twitch of his lips and every flick of his eyelashes that indicated he was keeping track
of my every move even when he pretended not to.

  Michael wasn’t Tristan. Things could be different with him, maybe, if I was brave enough to try.

  I became a tingling statue of me in a rowboat when it hit me: He was kissable. Really kissable. His lower lip was a little fuller than his upper lip, and suddenly noticing that slight swell made me crazy. He wasn’t just kissable. I wanted to kiss him. My stomach swooped with the thought, and my own mouth went dry. I bit my lip, hard, to remind myself I wasn’t going to do it. Brave or not brave, there was no way I was going to attack a guy I’d basically just met when he was only innocently preparing a boat for launch. When Michael was ready, he nodded toward the boat with no verbal encouragement. I scrambled in hoping my thoughts didn’t show. He thought I’d rejected his friendship when we’d talked on the cliff. I guess it had seemed like a rejection when I’d wanted to walk alone after the stunning electricity of his fingers touching my hand. Closer to the truth was that I’d been too overwhelmed to handle wanting his touch to go on. And on…

  Michael rowed and I held the sides of the rocking boat. I pretended I hadn’t been fantasizing about tasting his lips seconds before. I projected as casual as could be. I wasn’t relaxed. I’d never be relaxed with Michael again now that I’d noticed his lips. But for the sake of my sanity I did manage to focus on other things. I wasn’t ready for this. And, yet, for the first time I thought sometime I would be. Maybe sometime soon. We came closer and closer to Mr. Abernathy. I was sure he must see us, but he didn’t call out or wave. He did turn to watch us float under the bridge and away from it to the marsh where Michael jumped out to drag the boat up on the mucky shore.

  I pulled on a pair of the oversized rubber boots and sloshed along in Michael’s wake. We worked in silence that became companionable over time. Mainly because I didn’t look at his mouth. He showed me how to look for the tiny air holes in the sand that indicated a clam’s burrowing place. I noted how the stiffness in his shoulders and jaw eased as we worked together. I also noticed that the tension between us didn’t go away. Maybe teaching me how to dig clams was the last thing on his mind. Maybe he was having as hard a time as I was focusing on the tiny air holes in the sand.