Lies That Bind Us

by Andrew Hart

  I don’t know why I keep coming back to her. It was Simon, after all, who set this all in motion, his crime five years ago that made everything at the villa necessary for them. Maybe women always seem worse when they turn nasty because we expect better of them, though that is clearly stupid. The papers called her Lady Macbeth, a lazy and inaccurate reference, but I sort of understood it, particularly when I learned that the first time I had been visited by the monster in my cell, it hadn’t been Simon under the scuba gear, it had been her. They traded off. Like they were sharing chores.

  Was that love? The willingness to do absolutely anything for each other? To imprison, torture, kill to keep their perfect and exclusive bubble intact?

  The idea bothered me. It didn’t seem like love, but I watch the parents in the park with their kids, the obsessive care and attention that feels so proprietary, so consuming, the families so ready to circle the wagons and point their guns and knives at whoever is outside the limits of their love, and I’m not so sure. Strange that love can turn so poisonous, so corrosively selfish. I think of the Goya painting, the wild-eyed Cronus devouring his child, and I see the mad hunger I glimpsed in Melissa as she squatted over Marcus with the hose.

  It’s hard to remember her now as she was when we first met, when she and Simon seemed so gloriously unblemished, and I can’t do it without delving back through old photographs. There, in those first days of the 1999 we promised to celebrate, I see captured not so much who they were, but how we saw them, and each untainted image is full of light and energy and laughter, a joy so unconscious and complete that it brings tears to my eyes. I don’t hate Simon and Melissa for what they did to me. I hate them more for what they did to a Greek family they thought beneath them. I hate them for what they showed the world to be.

  But that is unhelpful. Whatever the world is, I still have to live in it. We all do. Maybe that’s the truth at the heart of the labyrinth myth—that we’re wandering, lost, always trying to stay one step ahead of our personal monsters, always ready, sword in hand, spooling out Ariadne’s thread in the hope that one day we will make it out in one piece.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The trial lasted weeks, but we didn’t have to be there the whole time. Marcus was grilled for withholding his suspicions, but in light of his cooperation with the police, he wasn’t charged. His tip about the Jet Ski turned up other witnesses who had seen Simon in the snorkeling area that day, and though no smoking gun came to light—the Jet Ski itself having been cleaned and repaired too many times to retain any blood or similar evidence so long after the crime—the circumstantial case was very strong. Add to it what Melissa had drunkenly confided to Gretchen the night they met for the first time since their school days, and I was surprised it took as long as it did.

  We returned to the house only once, three days after we left it, and I showed them where I was held—the concrete bed, the manacle on the wall. Marcus came with me and looked, shamefaced, but when he tried to apologize for his lack of faith, I just shook my head and kissed him.

  Maria, Manos’s mother, came to the trial every day, supported by an assortment of relatives and friends all dressed in sober black. I remembered the day we went to the Diogenes, the fury on Maria’s face when she recognized Melissa. It was Marcus who had suggested we go to the taverna that day. He had been fishing for a reaction. Simon, understandably, hadn’t wanted to go, but Melissa forced the issue. I wondered about that now. Was she testing the water to see if they were in the clear, or was it something darker, more sinister? Had she gone back merely to see if one of us—nudged by the restaurant where the boy had worked—would give some sign of what we knew, or was she there to rejoice in her secret knowledge? If nothing else, the fact that she never considered how Maria might respond spoke of both her arrogance and her contempt for the woman and her family. That Maria blamed Mel for what was then considered the boy’s accidental drowning must have come as a surprise to her; but the brazenness with which Mel had outfaced her, the way she had made herself the victim after the fight, getting us all to rally round to make sure she was OK, sickened me. I remembered wondering if all those restaurant owners and shopkeepers, the hotel staff and the cab drivers, all secretly hated the wealthy tourists on whom they depended, and I felt again a sense of responsibility and shame for all that had happened. Maria said nothing during the trial but our eyes met once across the courtroom. I put my hand on my heart and just looked at her, my eyes streaming, till she nodded once and looked away.

  Brad did not recover. Not completely. I mean, he can walk and talk, and he looks the same as he always did, except that he always has a slightly hunted, anxious look, as if things are happening around him that he does not understand.

  “He forgets things,” says Kristen, when we find a moment alone together. “Little things, like where he put the keys, but also movies we saw the day before. All of it, just gone. He’s not sure what happened here, but he knows he’s . . . well, different. It’s ironic. I don’t think he could do the job he used to do now, so his losing it matters less. And he is—God forgive me for saying this—nicer now. Not as mean, you know? He used to be funnier, but there was often a little cruelty in his jokes. Now . . . it’s like he got old overnight. But it’s not so bad. He’s become quite sweet, and most of his humor is directed at himself, at the things he doesn’t seem to be able to do . . .”

  She wipes away a tear and pulls herself together with a shudder that turns into a smile.

  “I thought you guys had been breaking up,” I say. “Before that night, I mean. I thought—”

  “We were,” she says quickly.

  “But now you are staying with him, in spite of everything?”

  I try to say it kindly, like I am impressed, but I am a bit baffled by it all. It isn’t like Brad can’t feed himself anymore and needs help going to the bathroom, but he isn’t the man he was and will surely be relying on her income, if nothing else.

  “He doesn’t remember,” she says, and the smile is different now, fragile as eggshell, her eyes frank but unfathomable. “We broke up, but he doesn’t remember. I just haven’t the heart . . .”

  “Are you sure?” I say. He had, after all, been obsessed with Melissa, had tried to seduce Gretchen as Melissa, and had ravaged her underwear when she turned him down. “You don’t owe him, Kristen. He might not be the person he was, and I’m not saying you should punish him for what he did, but that doesn’t mean you have to take him under your wing.”

  “I know,” she answers. “But—and I know this doesn’t make any sense—it’s like what happened to him made him the man he should have been, the man he would have been if it wasn’t for all that other crap: the competitiveness, the need to prove himself funnier, smarter, richer, better than anyone else. He sees Melissa and Simon for what they are and seems bewildered that we were even friends with them. It’s weird, but without all that stuff in his life, he’s . . . different, like all his armor has been taken away, and for the first time in years, I can see the guy I fell in love with.”

  I don’t know what to say to this, so I just nod and smile and eventually say, “OK. If that’s what you want.”

  “I think it is,” she says, and that ‘I think’ makes me feel better, though I am not sure why. “Hey, I never said thank you,” she adds. “For what you did. I mean, I think you know, but in all the craziness, the investigation and all, I don’t think I ever said it. You saved our lives. I didn’t think I’d ever say that when I wasn’t working from a script, but it’s true. You really did. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. If there’s ever anything—and I mean anything—that I can do . . .”

  “You would have done the same,” I say. “Ninety percent of it was self-preservation.”

  She looks taken aback by the admission, then nods.

  “Will you keep working?” I ask. The civil suit against Simon and Melissa’s estate would mean that we all received significant lump sums. Not enough to live on forever, but more than I had ever had or
imagined I would have. I had two steel pins in my left hand, and though I was assured I would regain full use of it in time, I couldn’t do the job at Great Deal I’d been doing. It was something of a relief and had made a decision for me that I should have made years ago.

  “Oh yes,” she says. “I love what I do. And I know it sounds awful, but all this—the press coverage—has only helped my career. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true.”

  I smile.

  “Kristen, you mind if I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Are you actually English?”

  Again, I had caught her off guard. She opens her mouth to say something airy and confident, then thinks better of it.

  “The studio was looking for a Brit,” she says. “I had been in a show over there and working under my stage name. But I was born Sarah Kristen Congrieve. In New Jersey. My agent knows. So does the End Times producer. But we kept it from the media to give my character a little . . . what does my agent call it? Verisimilitudinous mystique.”

  I smile and nod and say nothing.

  “You should visit the set,” she says. “Everyone would love to meet you.”

  I have attained a little celebrity of my own.

  “Maybe after this semester,” I say. I had quit my job at Great Deal as soon as I got back to the States, citing the physical injury rather than the mental strain. I think Camille was relieved, though everyone was nice and supportive. They got me flowers. I am taking classes now at UNC Charlotte, retaking courses and rebuilding my ravaged GPA. Whether I will actually apply for med school when it is all done, I am not sure, but that is the plan, and this time there’ll be no fudged info on the applications, no flights of fancy during interviews. I’ve said things like that before, but this time I don’t just mean it. After all, I’ve meant it before. This time, I know it’s true. Because nothing puts your life in focus like someone trying to take it from you.

  Liars are quick to use the most extreme phrases to underscore the truth of their fictions.

  Honest to God.

  To tell you the truth.

  Swear on my mother’s grave.

  Well, I really did that last one. I had always known where Gabby and my mother were buried, but I never went. Not once. It was easier that way, both to dodge my responsibility for their deaths and to pretend none of it had happened.

  I didn’t feel guilt over the accident. Not now. In my first meeting with Chad after the trial in Heraklion, he had told me that I had just been a kid, doing what kids did when their sisters got on their nerves. It had all gone horribly wrong, of course—my mother losing concentration, the car missing the bend—but it might not have. It might just have easily been the kind of near miss that happens to drivers daily and that they have forgotten by the time they go to bed that night. I had certainly not intended any of what happened, and the sense that what I had done had actively killed them both—though it had burrowed into my head and heart, where it had turned rancid, rotting through the rest of me—was clearly just the poison of grief and confusion.

  Nothing I couldn’t have figured out for myself, of course; nothing, in fact, that I hadn’t figured out almost as soon as I realized the truth, back in that lightless cell at the heart of the Cretan labyrinth, but it felt good to hear it from someone else. I went to the grave the following day.

  It was cold and wet, a gray December haze hanging over the city so that Charlotte’s multiplying towers vanished halfway up in mist thick as smoke. The headstones were not as faded as you might expect, the names still hard and clear. I laid flowers and wept for them both, and for myself who had been left behind without them, and I said that I was sorry. Then I promised never to lie again, and though I knew I was being melodramatic and perhaps unreasonable, I meant it, and have lived accordingly since. If I feel tempted to spin a little elaboration, one of my spiraling falsehoods that usually began small, a bit of fun to add a little glitter to the world, I’ve found that I can rotate my left hand a quarter turn, then clench my fist. The action sends a shot of pain up my arm like lightening.

  It hurts like hell but it clears my head.

  I walk back to the car through the wet grass, looking down at my shoes, whose leather is stained dark, and there is Marcus, waiting at a respectful distance. I am not sure what the future holds for us, but it feels like there might be one, and that is a long way from where we were before the reunion—a long way, indeed, from where we had been at the end of the previous trip. Nothing binds people together, I guess, like shared experience, even if that experience is full of fear and sadness. It is too strange, too darkly funny to actually say out loud, but Simon and Melissa may actually have done me a favor—several, in fact—without meaning to, so a part of me almost feels sorry for them.

  Almost. They will serve multiple life sentences for what they did to us and, most damningly, what they did to a boy-waiter who had been fascinated by the shine about them, and whose life they had thrown away like leftover food pushed to the side of the plate as they left the table and got on with their lives.

  Kristen and I promised to stay in touch, but I don’t know if the group of six we had been can function as a foursome. Gretchen remained friendly through the trial, but if I thought her a third wheel before the events of that awful night, she embraced that role even more completely after it. She was, I think, more saddened by Simon and Melissa’s betrayal of her than she was outraged, and though I tried to convince her otherwise, she seemed to feel guilty.

  “I don’t think it was my fault,” she said when we had gone for coffee in a Heraklion café-bar during the first week, when all the important information was already out in public. “Not really, but I wonder if I forced their hand, you know? After that stuff with Brad, when I freaked out but couldn’t get out of the country. If I’d just not said anything. If I’d just gotten my passport without talking to them, without agreeing to come back and stay one more night, I might have left and there wouldn’t have been any point in them going after you.”

  “But Melissa switched your purses on purpose,” I said. “So you couldn’t leave.”

  Gretchen sipped from her cup, leaving a ring of rose-colored lipstick on the ceramic.

  “Probably,” she said, still looking to give her shiny friends the smallest of outs. “Those purses were exactly—”

  “She switched them, Gretchen. She admitted it. You were a target for them before the trip even began. It’s why they invited you. And once they figured out it wasn’t you sending the messages with Manos’s name in them, that it was one of us, they were going to get rid of us all no matter what you did or said.”

  I thought back to the trial, as I had done constantly since it ended. At first, Simon said virtually nothing under cross-examination, offering mere shrugs, denials, and claims that he couldn’t remember. He implied the whole thing had been a mistake, the result of a faulty generator and our—mainly my—paranoia and deception. Melissa, by contrast, had been defiant, denying everything but somehow managing to blame everyone else, as if everything that had happened was due to the stupidity and mean-spiritedness of other people and a hostile universe. This impulse toward self-justification was bizarre and, in some ways, more frightening than anything she had said or done the night she set out to kill us all. For someone who had always seemed so composed, so attentive to the way others viewed her, this careless dropping of the veil was shocking and contemptuous, as if no one had the right to judge her so she didn’t care what they thought. That included the jury, whom she frequently sneered at in ways that made for newspaper headlines. I was reminded of the look in her eyes when, after she had been yelled at by the dead boy’s mother that day at the restaurant, Brad had refused to play along with Melissa’s pity party. There had been a feral rage in her face at the thought that someone had the audacity to disrupt what she felt she deserved. It had been the same look she had had that night in the foyer, when she had attacked me for exposing what she and Simon had done.

  But she cont
inued to deny everything, even as she scornfully remarked that it was absurd that she might lose her liberty over the death of “some Greek waiter.” The court translator hesitated over the statement, barely keeping her fury in check, and the prosecution repeated the statement several times in his closing remarks. Each time, Melissa just rolled her eyes and sighed. I was surprised no one from the public gallery went for her, the tension, the hatred was so thick in the courtroom. I felt ashamed to have been her friend.

  Though the evidence remained open to interpretation, the process of laying out who Melissa had become was excruciating, her beauty and charisma peeled back to show a heart so hard and shriveled that it was painful to look at. I felt the eyes of the jury on the rest of us too, all of them silently, fiercely asking the same question: How did you not know?

  I couldn’t answer that. Simon had turned out to be shallow, selfish, and ruthless in a bland, predictable, and petty sort of way, but it didn’t shock me—maybe because he was a man. I’m used to the way men, suitably draped with respectability, with money and status, are absolved and dressed with things that, if squinted at without your glasses, look like virtues: strength, confidence, and ambition. Melissa was more of an enigma, her sense of sneering superiority to all around her—including, I would say, Simon—less easy to explain and harder to swallow. A double standard, perhaps.

  Even so, the evidence against them was largely circumstantial, and it was still possible that, however much the jury hated them, they might still get away with it. The turning point came when Simon abruptly changed his plea to guilty. It was clear that the trial was going badly, and everyone in court—and, for that matter, in the papers—figured he was cutting his losses, but I felt that there was more to it than that. I think I saw the moment he made his decision. Melissa was on the stand. From time to time she had tried to play the radiant and misunderstood goddess, but her furious contempt kept showing through, and the mood of the room was solidly against her. The prosecutor asked her whose idea it had been to go scuba diving and, when the question had been translated to her satisfaction, she rolled her eyes.