Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  “I’m almost scared to ask,” he said, “how they vote, what they believe. When they reveal anything at all that isn’t about their jobs or their damn health clubs, I kind of want to run or cover my ears like a kid, you know?”

  “La-la-la, I can’t hear you?”

  “Exactly,” said Marcus. “I feel like I’m tiptoeing around, always one false step away from the kind of fight you don’t recover from. I don’t really know why. And we should be able to talk, shouldn’t we? These are smart, successful people. So why do they seem so deliberately, willfully ignorant? I mean, we’re in Crete, for Christ’s sake. The place is stuffed with art and history from every period, philosophy, religion, mythology . . . and no one cares.”

  “I do.”

  “I know.”

  He nodded, the darkness and my terrible eyes conspiring to make him little more than a brown face with glasses.

  “Come closer,” I said. “I’m not being weird. I just can’t see you properly.”

  “No contact lenses, I take it,” he said, smiling ruefully.

  “Of course not,” I said, glad to finally say it. “I lost my fucking glasses in the fucking sea on the first day. I’ve been blind as a bat ever since.”

  He tried to look sympathetic, but then he was laughing, doubling up, tears streaming down his face at the absurdity of it. I couldn’t blame him, and if it wasn’t so fucking infuriating to be almost blind all the time, I’d have been laughing too.

  “Sorry,” he said at last. “Why didn’t you say? We could have found an optician’s in Rethymno . . .”

  I waved the thought away.

  “I’m not spending my vacation at the goddamned eye doctor being tested for a prescription that will arrive—if I’m lucky—on the last day. I have things to do. Lampposts to walk into.”

  “I have a spare set you could borrow,” he said.

  “Those huge Harry Caray things? No thanks.”

  “Might help you get around. Jesus, Jan, we went sightseeing! Knossos. The fort! Did you see any of it?”

  “Lots of stone, right?” I said very dryly. “Looks like the Colosseum? I haven’t seen that either.”

  He gave that familiar laugh of his, something between a snort and a sharp exhale.

  “God,” he mused, gazing up at the night sky. “What a strange little trip this is. Still, we’re seeing more than the beach—those of us who can see, at least.”

  “Oh, you’re hilarious,” I said. “But, yes. Last time we saw almost nothing.” The opening presented itself in my head, though I hesitated to explore it. There was, I felt, a risk, though I wasn’t sure what it was. “Marcus?”

  “What?”

  “What happened in the cave?”

  “The cave?”

  “Last time. On the last day, we went to see . . .”

  “Oh, the Dikteon cave where Zeus was born,” he said. His voice was flat, the words coming out slow and thoughtful.

  “Yes.”

  “When you say ‘what happened’ . . . ?”

  “Something happened,” I said. “I don’t know what it was, but I sense it, and I think you know. It changed things. Not just between us, but in the group. What was it?”

  He hesitated and looked down, then shook his head.

  “I don’t know—” he began, but I cut him off.

  “Marcus? Come on. Lying isn’t your thing.”

  “I wasn’t going to lie,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I was going to say that I don’t know if we should talk about it. It’s all water under the bridge, and I don’t think it’s my place to share other people’s secrets.”

  I considered him closely.

  “Whose?” I said.

  “Jan,” he warned.

  “Who am I going to tell?” I said. “Everyone knows but me. I feel left out.”

  “Not everyone.”

  “Kristen,” I said. He gave me a quick look. “Kristen doesn’t know.”

  “You know that for sure?” he said. It was a real question, one that came from surprise.

  “She says she doesn’t.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “In this case,” I said, “I think it is.”

  “Well, that makes telling you even more awkward,” he said.

  “Because it’s about her?” I said.

  He looked away.

  “Or it’s about Brad,” I said, knowing that was it. “What did he do?”

  Marcus looked back to the house. You could see every detail of the brightly lit living room, the people inside moving soundlessly around, laughing and drinking, like characters in a movie.

  “There’s a bench at the end of the garden,” he said. “Let’s sit down.”

  There was something ominous about his manner, as there was about walking out of the pool of light on the flagged patio and into the deep shade of the garden, the edge of which was lined with tall black cedars. They loomed, and in their deep shade the temperature dropped a few degrees. I stayed close to him, my shoulder brushing his so that I would have to rely less on my dreadful vision, and as we walked, he started to speak.

  “I don’t know what you remember,” he said. “We all went in pretty much one at a time. It was a long and tough hike up the hillside, and it was already late by the time we got there. The crowds had gone. I remember feeling weary and thirsty before we even went inside. You and I were . . . well, we weren’t getting on very well. I don’t recall what we were fighting about, or even if we were really fighting, but we went into the cave separately. Melissa had come up on the donkey and was complaining, so Simon left her. I don’t know what was going on with Brad and Kristen, but I think he was walking faster than her on purpose . . .”

  “On purpose?”

  He hesitated, indicating an old wooden bench, and sat down heavily with a sigh. I settled next to him, gazing back toward the house and its TV window, where our friends—if they were our friends—were acting out their silent little party.

  “The cave was creepy, remember?” he said. “It went deep into the mountainside, and you had to follow this roped-off stairway, but it was huge, and every time you thought you were at the end, you’d go round some massive stalactite and there was more cavern, more little greenish lanterns set into the rock. Parts of the path were steep, dangerous.”

  I remembered. The whole place was eerily silent, dripping coldly as it had for centuries off those ancient folds of stone hanging like swags of fabric. It was beautiful, but it was the kind of beauty that felt hard and primal, a beauty in which people are irrelevant and unwelcome. The cave had known history and myth. It was history, and in it, you felt insignificant, like one of those bugs that is born, mates, and dies all in one day. And it was dangerous, the path punishingly hard and slick with the constantly dripping water of centuries past. Then there were the formations themselves, bulbous and strangely organic-looking; some of them polished like bone; others spongy like vegetables or brains, split open. Creepy was right.

  “So we’re all in there by ourselves,” said Marcus, “and I won’t lie: I’m a bit freaked out and looking to leave as soon as I’ve done the basic circuit of the caves. So I’m walking as fast as I dare, and I lose my way, miss a turn or something. But then I think I hear someone around a bend in the passage, so I figure I must be able to get out that way. I go round the corner and there’s Brad and Melissa.”

  He floats it out there like that’s all I need and goes quiet.

  “Doing what?” I say. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but it wasn’t this.

  “I don’t even really know,” he said. “It was dark, and I’m surprised—and they are surprised—and at first I don’t even recognize them, and then they break apart, and it’s clear that they were doing something they shouldn’t, and I apologize and try to get the hell out of there as fast as I can, but the damage is done. On the way out, I bump into Simon, who is looking for them, and he knows—I can just tell that he knows—and I get out of the way before he finds them, but I’m still i
n the cave when the shouting starts. It echoes back, you know? I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but yeah. That was it. That was the end of the holiday, pretty much. The next day everyone was pissed off and quiet. Simon wrecked his Jet Ski. And in the end we all just went home. In a heartbeat, it was all over. I was amazed when I heard from Simon a month or so later, more so when he talked about seeing Brad. I figured they had all worked it out, that it was just some vacation flirtation that got out of hand, and it was all done and mended. But I also figured Kristen knew. I guess not.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so for a moment we just sat there. Was I surprised? Not really. Melissa flirted with everyone. It was her basic mode of being. She made people love her, or at least she made them want to be around her. Like that kid at the restaurant. Waiter boy. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, but he positively swooned over her, and we went back time and time again because she liked it. Was I surprised that she had had a bit of a thing with Brad? That it seemed to have gone further than flirting? No. I was only surprised that she had been caught. Mel was careful, and she usually walked a fine line between playfulness and anything that might spark real jealousy in Simon. Maybe Brad had forced the issue. That seemed possible. He still seemed to watch her with a kind of fascination. Maybe that was why no one had told Kristen. Because it wasn’t really over. The incident was past and everyone had moved on, but who knew what the hell Brad thought—felt—in his heart of hearts? Kristen deserved better.

  Not that my opinion mattered.

  “What was Plato’s myth of the cave?” I said.

  “Not really a myth, more a metaphor,” said Marcus. “The people who live in the cave and have never been outside see shadows on the walls cast by the sun. Animals and stuff. Because they’ve never been outside they think the shadows are the real thing rather than just, you know, shadows. Plato thought life was like that. That all we saw were shadows, but that the real things—the ideal forms of them—existed somewhere else.”

  “Huh,” I said, remembering. I try to decide if it’s relevant to what I’ve just been told and decide it isn’t.

  “We should go back in,” he said.

  “Yeah. You know, Marcus, that was very professorial of you just now. The Plato bit, I mean.”

  “Ha. Is that a compliment?”

  “Well, I know you don’t like being called professor, so . . .”

  “I don’t mind it from you,” he said.

  I smiled up at him and almost—almost—went to kiss him. For his part, he dithered as only Marcus can and then haltingly started to walk back to the house, each step closing our window of opportunity a fraction till we were back and had to be part of the group once more.

  I thought of that window for the rest of the night, wondering if it was steadily closing as the week came to an end. I didn’t know why the possibility of getting back together with Marcus seemed more likely in Crete than it did in Charlotte, where we both lived, but it did, as if the foreignness of the place, its ancient monuments, glorious scenery, and storied towns made everything more exotic, more alive with possibility. Here, I was vacation Jan, not the Great Deal flow team leader who had so disappointed her friends. It also occurred to me that Marcus was looking better to me here too. I didn’t come back intending to rekindle those old, long burned-out fires. Being here had made me consider the possibility.

  I wondered if that last part was true or if I was still lying to myself, if I came expressly to be with him and take him home to my apartment like some souvenir statue.

  I snorted to myself, and Simon shot me a look as if he thought I was laughing at him, so I smiled and chatted until it was time to go up to bed, and I made a point of not looking at Marcus while Gretchen hung on his every word, of keeping my good night to him brief and nonchalant, even as I felt the window closing a little more, so that there was only a crack of light above the sill. I was considering this overwrought metaphor in my room when the screaming started.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “You said the first lie you told was about your sister,” said Chad. “Any idea why that would be?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean, it was a long time ago. I don’t remember. I just liked the idea of having a sister.”

  He considered me in that shrewd way of his that was almost mockingly smug. I didn’t like it. I liked it when he listened to me. He was a good listener, and that, in a weird kind of way, was sexy. But his appraising, therapist watchfulness got old fast. He reached for a folder and flicked it open.

  “But you did have a sister, didn’t you?” he said.

  I sat very still. I had not seen that folder before.

  “Where did you get that?” I asked.

  “Gabriella,” he read aloud. “Two years younger than you. Yes? Jan?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you’ve never mentioned her before.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t think it was relevant,” I said. “She died a long time ago.”

  “In a car accident,” he said, consulting his notes, as if just spotting the detail for the first time. “With your mother.”

  I wanted to be somewhere else now, but the longer I sat there, the steadier his gaze became. I considered getting up, screaming some outrage about his nerve in requesting my old medical records, then storming out and never coming back.

  “Jan?” he prompted.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Your mother and sister both died in a car accident when you were ten.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your father . . . ?”

  “I never knew him. After my mother died I was raised by my grandmother till I went away to school.”

  “That must have been very hard.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean, in some ways, I guess. But it was OK.”

  I don’t know why I am thinking about this now. To take my mind off my situation, I guess.

  My situation.

  It’s a grotesquely inadequate phrase.

  The pain in my hand is so great that I have to feel to make sure it is still there, that I didn’t just tear it out at the root, like the chimp, leaving the hand lodged in the manacle on the wall while I sit here bleeding to death from my ravaged wrist. But it’s still attached, though I can barely touch it to be sure.

  The brutal surgery had been about as simple and rough as I could imagine. I had just pulled—yanked, really—till enough bones broke that I could drag what was left out of the manacle cuff. It took all my strength, and now I’m horrified by the results. I can move my fingers, just, but my thumb is badly dislocated and probably broken. It hangs loose, resting at a distressing right angle to my palm. It hasn’t bled as much as I thought it would, but the skin around my knuckles and the heel of my hand where the damage to the thumb begins has been peeled away. The muscle beneath feels smooth and soft as raw chicken breast.

  I have found the sandal I threw away and now sit there beside it in the dark, clutching my broken hand to my breast, waiting for the pain to subside and wondering why now, of all times, my desperate mind keeps straying back to my dead sister.

  And Mom.

  My memories of her are astonishingly brief and few. I have photographs that I used to get out from time to time in an effort to remember more, but the pictures have eaten all other memories, like the last fat fish in the tank, so that now all I can remember are the pictures. A couple of decades later I still weep for her, but I don’t know what exactly it is that I’m missing, and it is the idea of the loss itself that drives my grief. Of my sister Gabby, there is even less.

  I sit there, listening to my breathing, trying to decide if the pain in my useless hand is subsiding, and I decide eventually that it isn’t. I’m going to have to function without it. I did this to myself to get free. It was crazy not to use that freedom now that I had it.

  I get unsteadily to my feet, wonder briefly if there might be any use in holding on to the sandal, and decide th
ere isn’t. Too flimsy to use as a weapon. Even considering that is alarming, and as I move quietly to the door, I find myself wondering with a new and different dread if I am going to have to fight my way out.

  “Where were you when the accident happened?” asks Chad in my head.

  Not now, I say to myself. I don’t want to do this now. I can’t. It’s not relevant.

  “Are you sure it’s not relevant?” says Chad, and this is not memory anymore. He’s in my head talking to me now.

  “I was at school,” I say, the words actually coming out in a rough whisper.

  Stop thinking about this, I insist to myself.

  I am at the door now. I don’t think it is locked. I have been trying to escape for what feels like hours, trying to get away from a man who will certainly kill me if he finds I have gotten out of the manacle.

  Focus!

  The door is cold to the touch, solid and wooden. I hold my crippled left hand behind me and reach for the handle with my right. There’s a metal latch, the kind with a lever you press with your thumb while pulling the handle.

  It will make noise.

  No, I think. It won’t.

  He has come in twice now, and I didn’t hear the door latch either time. I make the decision, take a breath, and push the lever. It moves so smoothly and silently that for a second, I don’t realize that the door has opened.

  Oiled, I think, and that gives me a moment’s pause because it suggests deliberation. Whoever has done this to me planned it.

  For almost a minute I listen for footsteps, movement, breathing. Anything. When I’m as sure as I can be that there’s no one standing on the other side, I pull the door open. It should feel good, this escape from the cell, but any relief that action brings stalls immediately as I find the darkness as thick out there as it was inside.