After Always

by Barbara J. Hancock

  But it was easy to tell Captain Jericho’s from all the rest. As easy as dark from light.

  There were obsidian-tipped spears, carved and feathered. They hung on walls mixed in haphazard array along with shields and tribal jewelry that looked suspiciously as if it had been carved from bone. There were statues and pottery and tools of unknown origin or purpose. There was a woven basket of poppets—faceless dolls enhanced by scraps of cloth and bits of beading.

  Those in particular I avoided. Especially because there seemed to be strands of hair woven into their bodies—blond and black and brown.

  One long dimly lit corridor was lined with grotesque masks contorted in all manner of hideous expressions. Traveling down this hall made me cringe. Hundreds of empty hollow eye sockets watched me slink past as I tried to pretend I didn’t care. Many of the mouths were frozen open in perpetual snarling maws. They seemed hungry, some of them lined with actual animal teeth.

  The closet at the end of this corridor held necessary linens. I couldn’t do my job without the sheets and pillowcases stored there by a laundry service Mrs. B. depended upon during the summer season.

  I told myself if the people from the laundry service could walk that long walk past the staring eye sockets and pointed fangs, then I certainly could, too.

  So I did. Again and again. While the flick, flick, flickering of Stonebridge’s unreliable wiring barely illuminated the shadows.

  There were too many mirrors at Stonebridge. At first, I blamed the uniform of unflattering walking shorts for my dislike of the random frequent reflections everywhere throughout the house. It was actually the look in my own eyes I didn’t want to see. I’d dust or vacuum or make a bed, and suddenly I would look myself in the eyes with no warning or preparation.

  I wasn’t okay.

  No wonder my mother had gone gray.

  I was up and out and working, but my eyes didn’t hide what I was dealing with inside. Maybe I ran from Michael’s warmth because I didn’t want to ruin it with the constant chill that seemed to radiate from my eyes.

  The worst of the mirrors was on the west landing at the top of the stairs. It was large. Taller than I was and three times as wide. It reflected the landing, the upper foyer and dozens of rooms stretching off in the distance. It was an old mirror. An antique. With a heavy gilded frame and wavering glass. In the rippled glass, the reflections were shadowed and distorted like a freakish view into the hidden heart of the real world.

  In that mirror, it wasn’t my eyes that bothered me. It was Stonebridge, looming behind me. The halls, the walls, the countless closed doors. I tried to make myself pause and look each time I passed. To test my courage. To prove I wasn’t afraid of shadows.

  But I never looked long.

  I would stop and look until it seemed that somehow, behind me, the house was looking back.

  Finally, two p.m. came and I went back to my room for Tristan’s violin. I carried it down to the music room.

  I found her waiting patiently.

  She talked fingering, ringing tones, and bow positions. It all seemed impossible and strange. But when I brought the instrument to my neck and leaned my cheek to draw the bow…suddenly a wavering song happened, quivery and low.

  “Lydia! You’ve teased me. This instrument isn’t new to you,” Mrs. Brighton said.

  I barely noted her surprise.

  Instead, I found and followed a melody I had never heard but instinctively knew. I knew it in the joints of my fingers and the muscles that moved the bow. I knew it in the vibrations that filled my body from where the violin touched my skin, radiating inward to the marrow of my bones.

  “This is ‘The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto,’” Mrs. Brighton declared.

  The music welled up from some liquid source in my soul. It flowed to every cell, filling drought-dried atoms with nourishment they hadn’t experienced in an age. I was full after being empty for so long. And each note was saturated with emotions I hadn’t expressed. It wasn’t tears that rose up to make my lashes cling together and my cheeks wet. It was the music. It filled me to overflowing and physically manifested as salty water on my face. The pain of loss only this violin was capable of communicating with the world was encapsulated in each crystalline drop.

  I should have frozen in shock, but deep down I wasn’t surprised at all.

  I continued, stronger and stronger. When I looked up, Mrs. Brighton’s eyes had widened and her lips were pursed.

  “Your technique is rough. Too mechanical. But we will smooth it. Let yourself flow…” She demonstrated with her own elegant arm sweeping across an imaginary instrument she held to her crinkled cheek. “Your mother didn’t tell me you could play violin. I thought you were only piano.”

  I had been. Always and only. Piano.

  The one time I’d played Tristan’s violin as a joke I had screeched out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and I’d been proud.

  I brought the bow down and dropped the instrument from my face. My skin was flushed. My eyes hot and dry. My stomach fluttered and quaked. The shock was there, after all. It was just that the compulsion to play was stronger than my surprise.

  “I will think where we go from here now that I’ve heard you play, my dear,” Mrs. Brighton said. Her words seemed sudden in the silence. Her voice was hoarse.

  She rose, stiffly, and clicked open a tiny silver brooch pinned to her old-fashioned dress, revealing the hands of a watch face. Distantly, the melodious bongs of a much larger time piece began to sound—one, two, three, four sonorous chimes.

  Four o’clock?

  Shock turned to unease, and I struggled to calm the thud of my heart. I didn’t want to alarm Mrs. Brighton. I settled my face into what I hoped was a relaxed expression. How could it be possible I’d been playing for almost two hours?

  “Goodness! Is that the time? I must have dozed off. You should have woken me, dear! I must speak to Della before dinner,” Mrs. B. exclaimed. She hurried to the door in a rush of spearmint and starched lace. “We’ll do this again soon,” she promised.

  “This” had been a blur to me. Had Mrs. B. slept? Had I been so concentrated on Tristan’s violin that I’d lost track of time? I looked down at the bow in my hand. There was a slight ache in my fingers from the way they’d gripped the unfamiliar instrument. Or as if I’d gripped it too fiercely, for too long. I placed the violin and the bow back in their case and snapped it shut. How had I played so well in the first place, and a song I’d never heard?

  “The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto” couldn’t be a coincidence.

  Though it was too crazy to allow, I let my feet carry me to the music room’s window. I looked outside. This part of the house didn’t face the ocean. I looked out on a dune-scaped garden that had a few meager plantings taken over by sea grass.

  There was no distant, dark figure watching the house.

  There was only sand, oddly whipped by the ocean breeze in plumes of dust that might have been stirred by a person passing—puff, puff, puff—like steps passing away…except there was no one there. No one I could blame for the compulsion to play that had stolen two hours away in the blink of an eye.

  Behind my back, the portrait of Alexander Jericho and the wife he held loomed. Now that Mrs. Brighton was gone, I was aware of those intense green eyes staring at the world he’d left behind.

  Chapter Four

  “Then turn tears to fires

  And these, who, often drowned, could never die”

  (Romeo and Juliet, Act I, Scene 2)

  It wasn’t long after we’d studied Romeo and Juliet in English class that Tristan found The Butterfly Lovers on the bookshelf in my bedroom. Grandmother Li had given me the beautifully illustrated children’s book when I was a little girl. I’d kept it on the shelf in my room through many other reading phases so that now it was wedged in between Victorian poetry and dystopian romance.

  Tristan loved the story of the two young lovers fated to be together even after death. He was particularly interested in the las
t page of the book that opened up into an intricately cut pop out of two butterflies in flight. Every time he came to my house, he would take the book down and page through it while I did homework or talked of other things. He read the book out loud again and again.

  Zhu Yingtai was the ninth child and only daughter of a respectable family. She longed to be as well educated as her brothers. Every day she would ask her father to allow her to go to school even though girls were not allowed. Every day her father said he could not part with his only daughter, but Zhu knew it was because he was afraid to break tradition. Because she was as intelligent as she was beautiful, Zhu came up with a plan. She borrowed clothes from her brothers and dressed as a boy. That night she dined with the family as a friend. Her father never suspected a thing. At the end of the evening, Zhu Yingtai revealed her true self. Her father could no longer object to her education. She would travel to the city and pursue her studies as a boy.

  During her journey, Zhu Yingtai met another boy traveling to the city to study. His name was Liang Shanbo. It was harder to keep her secret with Liang than with her father. But Zhu was determined. Even when she and Liang pledged an oath of fraternity, she hid her true self from the boy she was beginning to love.

  For many months, Zhu and Liang studied together and Liang didn’t suspect a thing about his closest friend. Zhu hinted at her true nature, but Liang didn’t see through her disguise.

  Then Zhu was called back home because her father had betrothed her to another man. She was devastated. Liang didn’t know she was a woman. He didn’t know she loved him. He didn’t know that he was about to lose her forever.

  Zhu invited Liang to her home in the guise of introducing him to her sister. When he finally accepted the invitation, Zhu met him in the garden. She had transformed into a lovely young woman. Liang finally understood that his friendship with Zhu was more than friendship. Much more. He begged her to marry him. To forgive him for not seeing the truth. But it was too late. Zhu was promised to another man. She had only wanted to see her true love one last time as her true self before they were forced to part forever.

  Liang was destroyed. To have had great love within his grasp and to irrevocably lose it was more than he could bear. He suffered. He pined. In his terrible loss, he was inconsolable. So inconsolable that he became ill and died just before Zhu was to wed.

  On Zhu’s wedding day, a terrible wind disrupted the service. The wedding procession prepared to parade through the town to say their vows at the temple, but they were stopped again and again. Zhu realized they were being stopped near the cemetery that held her lover’s grave. She tore herself away from the man she didn’t love and threw herself on the ground that kept her from Liang’s arms. She begged and prayed for the grave to open so that she could be with Liang once more.

  As Zhu was buffeted by winds heralding an approaching storm, the ground opened beneath her and she fell into her lover’s grave. But as the town looked on in horror, to their amazement, two butterflies fluttered up from the open grave and flew into heaven together…forever.

  Tristan decided we should get matching tattoos as a way of making our own forever pledge. I didn’t like the idea. I was already nervous about my parents’ growing concerns over the seriousness of my relationship with Tristan. If they wanted me to text him less often, I reasoned getting permanently inked for him would send them through the roof.

  My father’s mother was Chinese. She died of a heart attack not long after giving me The Butterfly Lovers. Though my father had inherited his mother’s height and coloring, he was as American as corndogs. And my mother’s ancestry was European.

  Our family culture was mathematics and music and suburbia.

  Tristan was the one who seemed to be fascinated by my ties to China and, to be honest, I don’t think anyone ever stood in the way of his fascinations. The book had been a gift from a beloved relative. The illustrations were vivid and fanciful. That’s why I’d kept it on my shelf. I didn’t necessarily want the illustrations copied on my skin.

  It was our first ugly fight.

  He didn’t speak to me for days. He’d been devastated that his idea for a meaningful romantic gesture had been rebuked. Looking back, it was my first taste of what it would be like to lose him.

  He avoided me at school.

  He didn’t reply to my messages.

  Finally, when I thought I would shrivel into a cold and neglected raisin of a girl, he showed up after my piano lesson with a small blue butterfly on his wrist.

  I couldn’t say no after that. Even if I was uncomfortable about the way Tristan seemed happy to make Zhu’s parents the villains of the story, I was flattered by his promises of forever and reluctant to continue my opposition. We decided the tattoo would go on the back of my neck at the hairline because even a ponytail or braid would hide it when I had a recital.

  Tristan took me to a tattoo artist who didn’t require proof of age, and I sat stoically through the blood and the needles as my self-styled Shanbo held my hand.

  I always worried that my parents would see the tattoo. The reminder of forever with Tristan that was permanently promised on my skin had been a constant source of unease.

  The thought of the young lovers having to die to be together had always bothered me. It didn’t seem romantic. It seemed tragic. More so now that Tristan was gone.

  …

  It was after I discovered I could play “The Butterfly Lovers’ Concerto,” however haltingly, on Tristan’s violin that my tattoo started to tickle at unpredictable times. Like a light brush of fingers across the wings inked under my skin, the tickle was whisper soft but frequent.

  I began to wait for it, holding my breath and holding still as if the touch would be welcomed by respiration and movement.

  …

  Saturday morning, guests began to arrive. I wore one of the khaki blazers and walking shorts uniforms. I also pinned my hair off my neck for the first time since I’d gotten my tattoo. I reasoned the tiny butterfly wouldn’t show beneath the tendrils of hair that escaped the pins. Running up and down the stairs of the giant house was hot and hard work. I needed to look as cool and professional as possible to offset the old, dusty hotel.

  At that point, I hadn’t realized Michael noticed everything. He was quiet and busy. It was easy to imagine him as preoccupied. But he wasn’t. Not at all.

  I was down on my knees to straighten a carpet runner curled by a guest’s wheeled suitcase, and Michael was changing another frazzled light bulb in the upstairs hall when it happened.

  A cloud passed over the afternoon sun, and as the shadows in the hall lengthened, a soft touch of fingers slid over the tattoo on my neck, causing me to startle and take in a sudden gulp of air.

  “That’s an unusual place for a not-so-unusual tattoo,” Michael said.

  I stiffened. I braced for the touch to come back even as the cloud passed and a new light bulb brightly illuminated the hall.

  “It was a secret. My parents couldn’t know,” I said.

  For some reason, even though I’d said very little to Michael in the days we’d worked together, I found myself sharing the whole story.

  He listened, sitting on the top of the step ladder like a lifeguard at a crowded beach. One in faded jeans with a tool belt hanging low on his lean hips. His tan and his sun-streaked hair made it easy to imagine him shirtless and vigilant and flocked by bathing-suited admirers who wouldn’t be caught dead in walking shorts. While I talked, he flipped the ever-present multi-tool into different configurations in his right hand. I thought maybe he was looking for the right configuration to fix this strange, broken girl he’d found. When I finished, he climbed down. He closed the tool and slipped it away in his back pocket. I didn’t expect him to do anything after that except fold up his ladder and walk away. Instead, he knelt beside me. He brushed aside the tendrils of hair that almost covered the tiny butterfly. I held my breath. Unlike the whisper of the phantom touch, his warm, calloused finger as it traced my tattoo was intim
ate and real. I’d seen myself in all the mirrors even when I’d tried not to look. I was too pale and too thin and the shadows under my eyes were way worse than the khaki uniform.

  But I swear Michael’s touch seemed to negate all of that. I wasn’t the kind of girl who would attract a muscled future engineer with warm eyes and crinkles already starting to form at the edges of his frequent smile. And, yet, somehow, I was. His touch wasn’t a come-on, but in spite of his intentions, the second the calloused pads of his fingers brushed against my skin I was more awake than I’d ever been. I’d been right. Numb wasn’t possible with Michael. My heartbeat raced and blood rushed to my face and chest and the tattoo he touched.

  “So he took you to a tattoo parlor so unprofessional they didn’t even check for IDs, and he had you get inked when he knew your parents wouldn’t want you to, when you had already said no?” Michael asked, completely missing the point. Tristan was gone. And there was no configuration of Michael’s multi-tool that could fix what had happened.

  I stepped away from his soft touch. The rock in my chest had trembled, and I chewed my lips to stop an answering tremor. Michael’s eyes were a warm brown, the color of aged copper in the hallway shadows. They met mine and didn’t look away. He seemed to see someone else when he looked at me. Not the girl I used to be and not the girl I was now, but another Lydia who was just out of my reach. Braver, better, in touch with who she was and what she wanted. And who she wanted. Is that what he saw when he looked at broken things? With his engineer eyes, could he see the potential of an object—or a person—to be whole again?

  “I’m glad I did it,” I said. “Especially now that he’s gone.”

  There had been plenty of times when Tristan still lived that I’d wished I hadn’t gotten the tattoo, but now, the butterfly negated Michael’s touch. His finger had been too pleasant on my skin, but the blue butterfly was a cool, past promise that stayed long after the pleasure of Michael’s touch was gone. I couldn’t deal with his touch or with the look in his eyes. Or with the expectation that I was someone besides this girl, one haunted by a past she couldn’t forget.