Lies That Bind Us

The name annoyed me. It sounded vaguely Nordic or German, and the image that popped into my head was the St. Pauli beer girl, with braided flaxen hair and cleavage you could lose a rabbit in.

Simon was talking, and I turned my attention back to him as he led me through the airport toward the doors that opened onto the hot, bright parking lot. Looking at him from behind, I wondered if some of that sartorial effortlessness was actually Melissa’s handiwork, though I found it hard to imagine her picking out his ties and brushing lint from his jacket like some fifties housewife.

“I said, ‘Did you see much of Rome?’” Simon repeated.

“Oh,” I replied. “No, it was just a layover. But I saw the Colosseum from the air.”

“Really?” he said, pulling a face. “Did the plane have to circle or something?”

I hesitated.

“I don’t think so. Why?” I said.

“The airport is close to the coast,” he remarked. “You’d have to go pretty far inland to get a look at the city, and then I’d imagine you’d be too high to really . . .”

“Must have been mistaken,” I said quickly. “I slept a lot on the way in. Maybe I dreamed it.”

He gave a little laugh, but I saw nothing else in his face as he pushed through the outer doors, so I decided to leave it alone.

It was pleasantly, surprisingly warm in Heraklion. I remembered the June heat of my last visit as a physical shock, a blistering, searing sunshine that stood breathless and unmoving in the shadeless parking lot. Charlotte was hot and I was used to it, but the air in Crete had felt thinner somehow, and while that meant it didn’t have the mugginess of home, the sun seemed more intense and relentless: a desert heat. On the plane I had remembered how much I had burned on that beach five years ago, and another stupid pulse of panic coursed through me then even as I reminded myself that it was November. But now the weather was glorious. Midseventies, the sky clear, a slight breeze full of promise and comfort, and Simon had already said we were going to the beach after all. Like the old children’s game, if Simon said it, you had to go along.

Simon made for the biggest, sleekest, shiniest car in the lot and made it beep with a fob in his pocket. It was a huge boatlike Mercedes van, black and new and screaming money. It had tinted windows and looked like it should come with champagne on ice and celebrities fleeing paparazzi.

“Nice,” I said.

“Only the best for our friends,” said Simon.

My heart sank a little, but I rallied. I was newly promoted. A salaried executive team leader. Moving up in the world.

“Gonna be a great week,” he remarked, pushing a pair of Ray-Ban aviators on and turning the engine over. “Lots to catch up on. Old haunts to revisit. Remember that guy who used to sell peaches from a stand outside the Minos? The one with the mangy dog who peed on Brad’s foot? I drove by today, and I swear he was still there. Same guy. Same dog!”

He laughed delightedly.

I looked out of the heavily tinted windows as we pulled onto the road, and I tried to laugh along, but it was cold in the car with its blasting AC, and all I could think of was old haunts.

I shouldn’t have come.



Chapter Three

The screaming doesn’t last. The sheer volume in my little prison shocks it out of me long before it can shred my throat, the sound of my own terror jarring me into numbness. Still, the exertion of all that crying leaves me light-headed, and that’s scary too.

I sit up as best I can, my left arm resting unnaturally far from my body because of the manacle, and I try to decide if the darkness has lessened. I don’t think it has because I can make out no light source, so the softening of the blackness, the vague sense that there are shapes only a few feet from the concrete platform where I am chained, must be my eyes adjusting. I remember dimly from one of my biology classes that the sensitivity of the human eye increases massively in the first few minutes of being exposed to the dark, but I am pretty sure it’s a short-lived phenomenon. It’s not like the longer I sit here, the better my night vision will be. I’ve been awake several minutes now and am sure this is as good as it’s going to get.

Thinking about such things has slowed my heart. I can feel it easing in my chest, as if I were over-revving an engine but have now taken my foot off the gas, though my breath is still thin and gasping. It’s noisy, more sobbing than breathing, and the air feels strangely thin. The room smells of damp and earth and the very slightly chemical staleness of old concrete, and on top of it is the vibrant, rusty tang of blood.

What the hell is going on?

I force myself to be quiet, to sit and listen for any sound that isn’t made by me, like I’m reaching out with my ears into the darkness. Then I take a breath, swallow, and say “Hello?”

There is no reply, but I say it again, louder this time, listening to the fractional and instantaneous echo. I try it again, speaking like a sound engineer at a concert Marcus and I went to years ago.

“One, two. One two,” I say, spitting the T sound as the roadie had done. “One, two. Two. Two. Two.”

It had amused me at the time, his earnestness as he made the nonsense noises before giving his thumbs-up to some invisible colleague in the sound booth at the back of the hall. I hadn’t really processed what he was doing, but I understood it instinctively now. He was listening to the shape of the sound as it went from microphone to speakers, the pop of air on the consonants, and I realize I am doing the same. I am doing what bats or dolphins do, bouncing sound to get a sense of where things are. I can’t read the results like animals, but I feel in my bones the way the sound brings the walls of my cell in. I can’t see them, but I instinctively know that the room is very small. Maybe only ten feet square. And while three walls are hard and flat—stone or concrete, probably the latter—the fourth is somehow different. Not softer, exactly, but more absorbent. A door. Large and wooden. Sensing that it is there, I think now that I can almost see it, a deeper blackness in the gloom.

I frown, marveling at my little discovery, trying not to admit how little that gave me to work with. There is also an irregularity in the wall directly across from the bed, the way I am facing and almost level with my steady, if largely useless, gaze. A panel? Or a cupboard mounted on the wall? I can just make it out as a dark rectangle. I reach for it, stretching as far as I can, but get nothing but air. I swing my feet down to the floor and get the uneven shock of finding I have one bare foot and one still wearing what feels like a sandal.

My sandal.

Thin leather straps and a little thong over the top of my foot gathering around the ankle and looping around the big toe.

My sandal. I can see it in my head, and with it comes the sense of things remembered but hidden in shadow just out of arm’s reach.

Crete. I came to Crete. To see old friends.

I remember packing, laying out colorful clothes on the bed at home, taking the plane, but after that . . . I frown and regroup. I am Jan Fletcher. I live in Charlotte and work at the Great Deal store on Tryon in the University area. I drive a white Camry, bought secondhand from the Town and Country dealership on South Boulevard. I can see my apartment in my head: the fading, hand-stenciled vines on the bathroom wall, the smell of the neighbor’s ratty terrier that poops under the gardenia bush by the front door. I am on vacation . . .

The word sounds bleakly funny, but I brush past the urge to laugh because I know it will turn into a sob, and I try to remember more. What happened after I arrived? Was I in a car accident?

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to make sense of why I think of that first, but can recall nothing relevant, nothing connecting me to a car or a wreck. I came to see Simon and Melissa, Brad, Kristen, and Marcus. That, I’m sure of.

Marcus . . .

Did I see them? I feel sure I did but the details don’t come. I reach for them, and the effort to push through the haze to the truth of what happened next is almost physical, like straining against a heavy door in my mind.

It doesn’t open.

I set both feet and rise unsteadily. I can stand straight without straining my left arm unduly. I turn onto my side on the concrete bed with its thin mattress and take a long step with my right foot, feeling all the slack leave the chain around my left wrist as I lean away from the ring in the wall. I stretch out with my right hand, straining, reaching . . .

Nothing.

I am covering about six feet of the cell, and the cabinet on the wall—if that is what it is—will be at least a foot deep, maybe more, but if my echolocation guesstimate about the size of the cell is right, that leaves me still two feet short of reaching it. It may as well be a mile. I pull at the manacle, twisting my wrist back and forth, but the bracelet lodges at the base of my thumb and won’t move. I lean away from the wall till the pain becomes intolerable, then give up.