Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  At least as well as you. Maybe better. Perhaps she’s handling whatever trauma you’re so sure is buried in her past rather more skillfully than you are handling yours . . .

  I dug my fingernails into my palms. I remembered Marcus’s throwaway crack about me being the goddess of underachievers. I was smarter than Gretchen. I’d put money on that. But I wouldn’t have much money to put on it, not much more than she would, anyway, because while Gretchen’s aspiration to be a paralegal seemed a pretty decent living that fit her talents, my “career” was hampered by my own self-sabotage. She drifted, smiling through life, did her job, took her classes, took her tests, and moved up in the world. I sat on the sidelines, wallowing in my own fantasies, my own lies, the very things that constantly and irreparably fucked me over time and time again . . .

  There’s a handy little passive construction, said my inner English minor. You were fucked over by your lies. Couldn’t be helped. Circumstances beyond your control . . .

  OK, I fucked myself over through lies. Happy?

  “That’s great, Gretchen,” I said, shamed into being a person.

  “And you reconnected with Mel, how?” said Brad. He was watching her keenly.

  “Well, it’s a funny story, actually,” she said.

  “We will brace ourselves for the inevitable hysteria,” Brad shot back, still motionless as a lizard. Kristen nudged him into silence.

  “I was in a bar with some girlfriends,” said Gretchen. “It was close to campus but I hadn’t been for years. Not since I graduated. A place called O’Flaherty’s. It was an Irish bar.”

  “Astonishing,” said Brad.

  “And I turn around, and there’s Mel, looking just like she always did! Older, of course. This was only two years ago, after all. But still. Same old Mel. And she was by herself and looking kind of blue, so I went over to say hi. I don’t know that she remembered me right away, and she had already had a few little drinkies and wasn’t in the best mood, and I was worried about her getting home OK, so I stayed with her and we just talked and talked. And drank. And drank. And after that night, we’ve been inseparable.”

  “Well,” said Brad in the vague, smiling lull that followed this. “That was gripping. Wouldn’t you say, Jan? I was right there with her. I could see the barstool, the sawdust on the floor, the smell of spilled beer, and the burly red-headed barkeep called, I’m almost certain, Pat.”

  Kristen thumped him hard on the shoulder and said, “Be nice,” but Gretchen seemed oblivious.

  “Why was Melissa so sad?” I asked, still trying to be the good person, a better person than I really was—which is to say that I was, in my usual way, lying.

  “Well,” said Gretchen, leaning in conspiratorially, “she’d had a bit of a fight with Si and had come to get away, have a few laughs and a few drinks . . .”

  “Go home with a strange man,” said Brad.

  The look Kristen gave him this time had no humor in it at all, but again Gretchen rode the wave right through.

  “Between you and me,” she said, “if I hadn’t been there . . .”

  She made a face to suggest what she wasn’t prepared to say, eyebrows raised, eyes almost shut, held tilting to the left.

  “Good thing you were, then,” said Marcus.

  “Must have been quite a fight she’d had with Si,” said Brad, putting inverted commas around the nickname.

  Again, the look from Gretchen, secretive, loving being in the middle and able to perform her closeness to our dazzling hostess, but as she opened her mouth to reply, something flashed through her face. She actually brought one hand up to stop her mouth and she flushed pink, her eyes going round with something like shock, or panic. When she did finally speak, it was in a lower, uncertain tone, and she looked down primly.

  “Oh, you know. Just couples stuff. Ordinary. I mean, everyone fights from time to time, right?”

  A lie, and a big one. It was written all over her face. She’d blundered into it, like she was reversing a car and slammed into a telephone pole she didn’t know was there till the second she hit it. Then she’d hit the accelerator and set the tires spinning, screeching, burning in her haste to get away.

  Clumsy.

  The look in her eyes was panic and a sudden desperate need to be gone, and I mentally adjusted my metaphor. It wasn’t like she’d backed into a telephone pole. It was like she’d run over a body.

  “Sure,” said Brad. “We all have our little squabbles, don’t we, dear?”

  “They don’t usually lead us to go out looking for a new bloke,” said Kristen. “But yeah.”

  “Well, no,” said Gretchen. “Obviously. I didn’t mean that . . . and from time to time, everyone . . . I mean, I’ll bet you . . .”

  “You’ll bet I what?” said Brad, no trace of friendliness now.

  “Nothing,” said Gretchen, who now looked like she wished she had gone to bed. On cue, she checked her watch, her hand visibly shaking. “Is that the time? Boy. I need to hit the hay.”

  The room was suddenly loaded with a tension so electric, you could almost hear it humming like cables stretched between pylons, like the heaviness of the air before a storm. For my part, it was just awkwardness, embarrassment, and maybe Marcus felt the same way, though it was hard to be sure at this distance. From the others I felt a swelling anger and hostility that I couldn’t completely explain. Brad got to his feet, teeth gritted and eying Gretchen as if he were going to start yelling questions or accusations; Kristen got up quickly, taking his hand and gripping it even as he tried to shrug away.

  “Us too,” she said. “You want to use the bathroom first?”

  Gretchen blinked, catching up.

  “No,” she said. “You guys go ahead. I think I’m just going to crash.”

  Gretchen fled, and after a deliberately staged bit of business with glass washing and tidying to make sure she was safely out of the way in her room, Brad and Kristen went up after her in steely silence.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” said Marcus in a whisper.

  We both got the giggles, then sat back with our drinks, shaking out heads.

  “There are some weird-ass tensions in this group,” I said. “Was it always like this?”

  Marcus shook his head.

  “Gretchen wasn’t here last time, of course,” he said. “But no, I don’t think so. It’s different now.”

  I was suddenly self-conscious. It was different for us, at least, because we were different.

  “Just older, I guess,” I said. I had wanted to be alone with him like this, and not simply because I had meant to ask him about the cave, but I was suddenly weary beyond words, and I didn’t think I was alert enough to get into anything even vaguely difficult with Marcus. Not now. I had caught some of the strange tension off Brad and Gretchen’s exchange like it was contagious, and now I just wanted to go to bed and wake up in the light and warmth of the Cretan sun . . .

  “What do you suppose Mel told Gretchen?” said Marcus, almost to himself.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She might be delusional about just how close she and Mel really are,” he replied. “But she really knows us, have you noticed? All kinds of little things. Personal history. How I take my coffee! She had it all ready for me this morning, and when I asked how she knew I took it . . .”

  “Black with one sugar,” I inserted.

  “She just gives me this knowing smile and says, ‘Oh, I’m an expert on all Mel’s little buddies.’ It kind of freaked me out.”

  “That is weird,” I said.

  “It’s like she’s been studying us in preparation for coming, while we know nothing about her. We just asked, and we still know nothing about her. She went to school with Mel years ago and they met in a bar after college? It’s bizarre. And did you see how she reacted when Brad . . .”

  “Also weird.”

  “Granted, but when he asked what Mel and Simon had been fighting about, she freaked, like she’d given something away. It’s
fucking strange. She comes to a reunion for people she doesn’t know. A reunion, for fuck’s sake. What’s that all about?”

  I was starting to giggle again. His hushed earnestness, combined with the fact that he was saying things I had been thinking, seemed incredibly funny.

  And you were pleased that he wasn’t as charmed by her as you thought.

  That too.

  “She even looks a bit like Mel,” Marcus went on. “Have you noticed? I’ve mistaken them for each other twice. Twice!”

  “I don’t think she can help that,” I said, cutting the girl a little slack. It felt good to be her defender while Marcus took aim. “It’s not as if she dresses like her or something.”

  “Oh my God!” said Marcus, delighted and horrified. “How weird would that be?”

  We laughed some more and for a warm, bright moment it was like we had gone back more than 1999 days and it was, as it had once been, the two of us against the world, together.

  “Come on,” I said, getting up and offering my hand. “Bedtime.”

  I realized my mistake as soon as I saw his face.

  “I didn’t mean—” I said, but he cut me off, grinning and nodding and not quite looking me in the eye, so I pulled my hand away before he could take it.

  “Of course,” he said. “I know. Sleep time.”

  I lay awake much longer than I expected to, so I heard the sound of someone moving in the corridor, a strange, stealthy movement that set old boards creaking, then silencing, then creaking again. I kept still, trying to determine whether the sound was coming from the hallway outside my door or the floor below.

  Yours. Pretty sure.

  Which meant what? That Marcus—the only other person with a third-floor tower room—had decided to go to the bathroom or gone down to make himself a sandwich, or . . .

  That Gretchen had come up to apologize some more? Or he was paying her a visit . . .

  No. I didn’t believe it. I got up and stood motionless by the door but was suddenly so tired that I felt wobbly and light-headed. After a minute or two, standing there, listening to nothing, I forgot why I was there, and when I remembered again, I decided that I had been asleep after all and had dreamed the creaking of the floorboards. I went to the window and peered out and down, though I didn’t know what I was looking for, and my gaze found the gate at the end of the drive. It was open. Not thrown wide and fastened back like it would be to let a car in. Just cracked in the middle, as if someone had slipped through on foot.

  The doors and windows were all locked downstairs. There was no alarm system, but the house was secure. It had once been a kind of fortress, after all.

  Still . . .

  I made a mental note to mention it to Simon. Maybe there was something wrong with the latch. He’d want to look at it.

  I shuddered, feeling suddenly and inexplicably unnerved by the depth of the darkness around the house, the lack of street lamps or the familiar ambient glow I was used to in Charlotte, even when the lights were out. I took it for granted. Without it, up here in the mountains where the only light was the moon and stars overhead, the darkness felt strangely ancient, primal, a darkness that led the mind to invent monsters. It filled the great window like a pool.

  I didn’t like it. It made me feel scared, exposed.

  I stumbled quickly back to bed and pulled the covers up around me like a shield, my head thick and throbbing from all the wine, though why it had kicked in so abruptly then, I had no idea.

  Chapter Nineteen

  He will be back soon. I know it—and I will not be able to tell him what he wants to hear. I try to make a picture of the fragments he has given me. At first I thought he wanted to hear about something I did, but now I think differently. He thinks I saw something and then did something bad in response.

  Naughty.

  It was a strange word and thinking about it again raises the hairs on my neck as his voice had done, that singsong tone of his . . .

  It wasn’t me who had done something bad. It was him. But I had found out about it and then—afterward—had been naughty. What had I done or tried to do?

  Blackmail.

  Yes. That felt right. That would be naughty, wouldn’t it? He did something, and I caught him and tried to milk him for it . . .

  Except that I didn’t. My momentary elation dies like a sputtering candle, and I feel the full dread of what is going to happen next. He thinks I have tried to hurt him, but I don’t even know enough to negotiate some kind of deal, some way out . . .

  I am going to die for someone else’s crime. I am going to be murdered by mistake.

  It is almost funny, and if I thought I might be able to convince him of his error, I might still find it in me to laugh. But there is no mercy in that voice, no understanding. He might be giving me one last chance to speak, but he is also toying with me, enjoying my misery, my terror.

  He isn’t going to let me live, no matter what I say, no matter what I know or don’t know.

  Manos.

  The word floats up like driftwood surfacing from some deep, unseen current. It bobs on the surface of my consciousness, rotating in the flood, but I can make nothing of it. It sounds Greek—and familiar, which doesn’t help—and as I try to puzzle it out, a new possibility occurs to me. I have been assuming my captor has the wrong person, that his questions are absurd because he thinks I know something I don’t. But what if I do? Or did? What if I really did stumble upon some crucial truth, the core to everything that is going on, but have forgotten it?

  Again the idea strikes me as darkly funny. Dying over something I’ve forgotten is, if anything, worse than dying for something I never knew. Now it’s not just an accident—it’s another study in my dazzling ability to fuck things up.

  Manos.

  The word continues to spiral on the currents in my head, but it’s already being carried away, and I no longer feel sure that it means anything.

  There has to be more I can remember. It is maddening to still have these dark holes in my mind where the last few days have been, though, now that I think of it, the vague amnesia began before I woke up down here, and it affected all of us. We were all tired, listless, forgetful. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, but now I wonder if it was more than sun and jet lag and overindulgence.

  Drugs?

  God knows we were drinking constantly, and anyone had the chance to slip something in our glasses. But that would mean it had been someone there. One of the group . . .

  That couldn’t be. Surely. I have decided that my interrogator was not a local, but I haven’t seriously considered the possibility that the person who chained me up here is one of those I was laughing and drinking with only days ago. One of my friends.

  Or is that me sidestepping reality again, just another lie?

  No, I haven’t put a face to my captor, but then I haven’t tried to, have—in fact—avoided even thinking about it, because a part of me knows that it is at least possible that the face in the dark is one I know all too well. The thought settles on me like snow, freezing me in place, heaping up around me. It is paralyzing. Unhelpful. Instead of dwelling on who my captor is, I need to focus on escape. If I am going to think about him at all, it is to come up with something I can use against him.

  I think over our last encounter again.

  A scent blew in with him. It lingers in the darkness still, a sharp, familiar smell—gasoline and motor oil—and it takes me back to the tire and lube place beside the Great Deal employee lot. There are other memories too, some much older and too dark to look at . . .

  Night and silence and blood and gasoline all combining to hiss, You have been here before . . .

  and one memory that is new and fresh: the generator in the basement of the villa.

  That’s where I am. I’m sure. When Simon showed me the generator, there had been another door; I saw it quite clearly in my mind, pulled out of forgetfulness by the scent of the oil. A wire-mesh door to storerooms and cellars . . .

&
nbsp; Simon?

  No. I just can’t get my head around the possibility. The fact that I am down here close to where he was working—if that’s where I am—doesn’t mean it has to be him. Anyone could have gone down into the cellar, tracking a little oil and gas in as they did so . . .

  The oil and gas prove nothing. I try to remember if I had smelled it the first time he came in to question me, but I can’t remember it. It strikes me as I compare the two visits that his demeanor felt quite different that first time, more reserved, less coldly playful. I don’t know what to do with that and come back to the smell, remembering that I noticed something else under the odor of oiled machinery. I reached for it with my mind and came up with, Rubber.

  I frown to myself, pushing at the idea, but it holds up. Yes. Some kind of pliable rubberized plastic. And when I tried to hit him—more a panicked reflex than a real strike—I made contact with something hard where his face should be. That had felt familiar too. I put the two together, the plasticky scent and the stiff, resistant something around his head that had made it seem too big for his body: like the bull head of the Minotaur. But suddenly I am sure, though my certainty leaves me almost as bewildered as I had been when I didn’t know.

  He is wearing the scuba mask.

  Chapter Twenty

  The power was still out. I wasn’t sure why that pissed everyone off so much, but it did.

  “We’ll have to get more gas while we’re out,” said Simon. “Maybe pick up some more cans too, in case it doesn’t get fixed in the next few days.”

  “Few days?” said Gretchen, dismayed. “Why does it take so long? It’s not even raining now.”

  “Because it’s fucking Greece,” said Brad darkly. “The glory days of this island civilization-wise were like five thousand years ago, right, professor?”

  Marcus smiled tightly and nodded.

  “Well . . . something like that.”

  “In some forgotten grave,” said Brad, “King Minos is probably still waiting to recharge his bronze age iPad and leaving himself voice mails saying, ‘As soon as the lights come back on, don’t forget to feed the Minotaur.’”