“Yes,” I said, feeling suddenly sure that this was what we needed. “We can go into town tomorrow night.”
We didn’t, of course. We had every meal from that night on with Melissa and Simon, Kristen and Brad, holding on to them so that we spent less time sniping at each other, and they had been a godsend. It struck me as slightly odd that she should invite us like that, that they couldn’t have just slid the concierge a few euros and kept the table to four. And as we got ready to join them that night, I even wondered if the spectacular bikini entrance had been deliberate too. In fact we had been so charmed by them—so dazzled—that we didn’t look the gift horse in the mouth, but later I found myself wondering if we had always been designated as audience to their greatness, as if they’d needed people to perform their perfection to. They’d recruited us as ordinary people, lesser people who would bask in their reflected glories as a way of making them feel better about themselves. We just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Could it have been that simple?
Maybe.
What the hell did I know? And even if I was right, I couldn’t put all the blame on them. We had loved it, Marcus and I, the glamour, the sense of being part of their social circle, like we had been scooped up from our quiet gray lives and raised above the clouds to a place of golden light and the promise of continual happiness. It was the life we had been promised by every magazine I had ever looked through, every TV commercial I’d ever seen. So we embraced it and clung on, even when the cracks started to show, even—God help us—when we secretly knew what they were under the shine.
I think of Melissa rubbing suntan lotion into Simon’s back on the beach, kneeling astride him, turning to look at me and smiling, aglow with sex and charm and the easy confidence of wealth. I can almost smell the warm coconut oil, hear the music from the hotel’s sound system, feel the glow of my skin under the sun, Marcus lying, eyes closed, beside me. It’s idyllic, glorious, and I want it back so much that it tugs at my gut, my heart, like the most exquisite pain. And then, quite suddenly, the light changes, and now we’re in the dim lobby of the villa, and Mel is straddling not Simon, but Marcus. He’s faceup and she’s shoving a hose into his mouth. She snaps her head round to look at me, and her face is full of malice and rage, her eyes black and toxic. It’s as if she’s trying to eat him, like she’s a vulture on the road, protecting the carcass she’s found from interlopers. Yes. That’s it. She’s a gaunt, ravenous thing, starving to gobble up that crumb of the world that someone tried to take from her.
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.