Lies That Bind Us

You’re in Crete, I remind myself, hoping that will jog more from my memory. I can picture the sea, the sky. A house, strange in its mixture of old and new . . .

The memory, if it is indeed that, makes me shudder, a deep, cooling flicker that runs uneasily through my body like an earthquake and leaves my skin puckered, each hair rising. There’s something about that house that I don’t like . . .

The blood on my hands . . .

. . . something about the house that a part of me needs to forget.

So I have. I push at the memory, trying to draw it out of the shadows, but it slithers away, not wanting to be found. I am almost relieved, though I don’t understand why my memory feels so fuzzy. The bump on my head feels superficial, and I don’t believe I was concussed.

The amnesia—if that’s not too grand a word for it—also feels selective, only blacking out the last few days. Older stuff is still there, and as if to make the point, my brain dredges up something I would have happily forgotten: a book Marcus bought me, paintings and poems drawing on the Greek mythology he knew I was so attached to. And though I had loved the book, the pictures had been a little too good, some of them so dark and creepily atmospheric that I skipped over them to get to lighter, happier material. One of them was the picture of the Minotaur brooding in the shadows of the labyrinth. It brimmed with strangeness and menace so that you could almost smell the musk of the creature. I had hurried past it, jumping to the end of the tale so I wouldn’t have to look at it or—ridiculously—feel it looking at me. The isolated Cretan house in my memory is like that, a vague and unsettling dread waiting for me when I turn the page.

At last I roll onto my right side and open my eyes, though that makes no difference either until, very gradually, I see, or feel that I see, the thin variance between the wall and door, the dark patch across the room that might be a cabinet.

And something else.

There is another darkness, one that I am almost sure was not there before. It nestles in the corner by the door, a squat dense shadow, like a rough, tall pile. I stare at the spot, feeling the nameless horror of it and trying to remember. It is like reaching across the cell, straining with my mind the same way my body tugged at the chain fastened to the ring in the wall, and as with that physical stretching, I find nothing but my own tiredness. But I am almost sure.

The pile, or whatever it is, was not there before. And that can mean only one thing. As I slept, overwhelmed by whatever drug-induced exhaustion led to my imprisonment, someone has been in.



Chapter Six

“Ta-da!”

Simon sang it out as we pulled up a long, narrow driveway and the house was suddenly visible through the trees, as if he were pulling the dustcover off an antique or a gift. I hunkered lower in my seat to get a better view and managed an awed “wow.”

It was huge, three stories tall in parts, a rambling and imposing oddity of jumbled styles and periods. Parts of the outlying structure looked ancient, built out of weathered gold and amber stone blocks, part palace, part fortress. They included what looked like a bell tower on the west side of the house and a wing with large and regular arched windows flanked by relief-work pillars. The central block, by contrast, was an angular mass of glass and steel, built into the older stonework and roofed with pinkish tile. Still other parts of the house—the word felt inadequate for something that was more like a small modernized castle—looked rustic and unpolished, especially sections of the ground floor that had been patched together with rough stone and concrete blocks. All told, it managed to be whimsical as well as impressive, and under the blue Cretan sky, I found my doubts and anxieties melting away in a kind of surprised joy.

“Only a rental,” said Simon, “but should do us for the week.” He said it as only he could, in a tone that sounded both proud and dismissive, what my coworkers would call a humblebrag. “Parts of it are Venetian, so that’s, what? Sixteenth century? Seventeenth?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed.

“Pretty cool anyhow,” he said, shrugging as he guided the Mercedes into the corner of a spacious forecourt, gravel roaring under the tires. “The original design was obsessively symmetrical—everything doubled and balanced for proportion, I guess—but the upper stories have been heavily remodeled, and at some point they got rid of the eastern tower. I think it looks better this way. Let’s get you inside and see if Melissa’s got the fog cutters going.”

“Fog cutters?” I echoed.

“I know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Kind of last year, but we got this kick-ass recipe from a bartender at Satan’s Whiskers in Bethnal Green.”

“In London?” I said. I was trying to process information that otherwise meant nothing to me, like a school kid preparing for a test in a class she had never attended. Being with Simon and Melissa often felt like that, like you were working to show that you deserved to be with them. Pretending, really.

Simon gave me a quizzical smile.

“Yes, Jan,” he said. “In London.”

I laughed self-consciously and opened the car door to hide my face. Before I came I had thought about switching my prescription glasses for those with the lenses that adjust to the light, but it had seemed like an extravagance and maybe like I was trying too hard to look cool. Now I wished I had them, even if they wouldn’t fully hide my blushes. But then Simon was talking again as he walked down the drive to close the wrought iron gates, saying how I really should go over and visit their “flat” there, as if that was a normal thing for someone like me to do, and I felt better again.

I was moving to the trunk to get my suitcase as the front door—a heavy, varnished thing with a massive bronze knocker in the shape of a lion’s head—banged open, and there was Melissa, arms spread wide as her smile, dressed in something white and flowy that made her look like a goddess.

“Jan!” she squealed, moving down the steps toward me, her arms still open, as if she were trying to catch the whole world to her. The welcoming hug felt like it took place in slow motion, like I was surrounded by love and warmth so acute, so wanted, that it brought tears to my eyes. She squeezed me to her Chanel-scented breasts, burbling about how happy she was to see me, how delighted that I had made the trek. Then, still holding me, she leaned back to look at me, drinking me in. I adjusted the glasses her overenthusiastic embrace had dislodged and smiled back shyly before she pulled me to her again.

“It’s been years!” she exclaimed. “You look wonderful!”

“One year,” I said, “near enough. When you and Simon came to Charlotte to see your parents.” I didn’t bother contradicting the other observation. That would only lead to more disingenuous compliments on her part and poorly hidden inadequacy on mine. Melissa looked like Aphrodite, as imagined by the Hollywood of the 1960s: alabaster skin, flowing chestnut hair, and eyes of cornflower blue. I looked like . . . like I’d just gotten off a plane. Like I lived alone and spent my days—beginning at three in the morning—in a yellow polo shirt with my name on a brass badge . . .

Not when you get back, I reminded myself. Executive team leader.

I forced an unsteady smile and told my inner voice to shut up for once.

“It’s good to see you,” I said, meaning it.

Simon had taken my luggage.

“I can manage,” I protested, but he waved me off.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Come on. I’ll show you your room.”

“Don’t be long,” said Melissa, more to him than me. “I’m adding the ice to the drinks. Gretchen and Marcus are parched!”

I opened my mouth to say something but couldn’t find the words. As she bustled off, turning that beatific smile of hers on me like a lighthouse scanning the horizon for whoever needed it most, I lowered my gaze to the tiled floor and followed Simon.

The foyer was cool and dim, with a hanging tapestry and a little central table, upon which sat an ancient black rotary telephone with a braided, cloth-wrapped cord.

“Our one link to civilization,” said Simon, grinning.

This was one of the older parts of the house, I assumed, and the stairway in the tower—a tight stone spiral—seemed to come from the same era. It felt cool and massive. When I saw stonework on Charlotte houses, it was always obviously a shell tacked up around the house for old-timey decoration. This, by contrast, was structural and genuinely, unpretentiously ancient. On the next floor up, however, everything changed, opening up, most of the house’s antiquity vanishing, the angles getting crisper, more precise, the space airier and glowing with large modern windows. The next flight of stairs was polished pine in a black-steel frame that rang with each step.

“Just one more floor,” said Simon, wheezing slightly. “What do you have in here, the kitchen sink?”

“Sorry,” I said. “Never been a very good packer.”