Lies That Bind Us(36)

“OK,” I said. “I get it.”

“Do you?” he said, giving me a quick, hard look. “I mean you say that, but how would I know?” He hesitated, then took an abrupt step away. “I’m going to go get back in the car.”

I turned to go after him, but he stopped me with a gesture.

“Just . . . ,” he said. “Give me a little while, OK?”

And he walked away.





PART 2

THE CAVE

Furious, Rhea resolved to save her newborn son, Zeus, by replacing the infant with a large stone which Cronus swallowed whole. She then took the baby, bathed him in the river Neda, and took him to a certain cave on Mount Ida in Crete. She then had her other children sing and clash their spears against their shields at the cave mouth so that Cronus would not hear the crying of the newborn within.

—Preston Oldcorn





Chapter Fifteen

“What was the first lie you ever remember telling?” asked Chad.

Sorry. Mr. Hoskins. My occasional therapist.

“I was eleven,” I said. “I told the girls at school that my baby sister was training to be an Olympic gymnast.”

“Which she wasn’t.”

“I didn’t have a sister,” I said.

Chad smiled in spite of himself.

I don’t know what makes me think of that now as I work my wrist around in the manacle, trying to feel if any part of the iron feels weak or thinned by rust. I hold it carefully with my free hand, turning my left slowly inside the cuff, concentrating like some TV safecracker.

You told Gretchen you had a sister who worked in film effects, said a voice in my head. CGI or something. Marcus heard . . .

And wouldn’t speak to me.

I stop what I’d been doing with the manacle, momentarily elated by the memory coming back to me, as if I have found a button and the chain has snapped away. The relief lasts less than a second before the implication of Marcus’s angry disappointment settles on me, and I remember that I am chained in the dark, at the mercy of some nameless, bull-headed monster . . .

No. That’s absurd. He’s a man. Possibly, I suppose, a woman, and my strange sense that his head was too large was just my terrified imagination. He’s a man, just a man.

And he will come back. He will ask the questions I can’t answer, and then . . . I don’t know, but it won’t be good. Anxiety and dread build in my chest. I have to do something. If I sit here in the dark waiting for him to come back, I’ll go insane.

I turn the manacle to the left and then—when my arm won’t go any farther—to the right. It feels solid, uneven and certainly chewed by rust, but not so that it feels likely to crumble. Despair is stealing in on me and I have to push past it. I think of Marcus and try to recall his anger at the lie I told, and I find myself thinking back to when we were here before and the tense return to our shared apartment in Charlotte five years ago. We were tired and stressed with travel and each other, and Marcus went straight to bed before I noticed the light blinking on the answering machine. I remember playing the message and then sitting there, staring at nothing.

Marcus had applied for a place on an intensive teacher-training course in Wilmington: the last month of the summer before classes restarted. It was a government-sponsored program working through the UNC system, and if he committed to doing three of them, along with supplemental online assignments and the construction of a writing portfolio, it would earn him a master’s degree. This was in the days when that meant an automatic pay raise in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.

But it meant a month away, followed by him tethered to the computer in what little free time he had. Wilmington was a three-and-a-half-hour drive, and with my work schedule . . . we wouldn’t survive that. Not then. I knew it with the kind of certainty of things beyond thought: that water is wet, that fire is hot. It was a given.

I knew it as clearly as I knew that it was wrong to delete the message, though that was what I did, as wrong as lying about it when he got more and more restless about not hearing from them. And he knew, with exactly the same kind of surety, that I had lied when he finally reached the school—too late to be admitted to the course—and was told that they had indeed called and left a message to get back to them. It could have been a mistake, of course, a wrong number or a faulty answering machine, but he saw through those possibilities right away and called me on it.

Maybe I should have kept on denying it, but I always know when the jig is up, and I had never wanted to lie to him. So I told him the truth, and then I said the worst thing I could have possibly said.

“I did it for us.”

And while that was true, in a way, it was what killed us. How’s that for irony? Not the Alanis Morissette kind, but the real deal, hard and bitter, like the sword you drew to defend yourself turning into a snake in your hand. I swore I’d never lie to him again, but that didn’t matter. It was over. He moved out the following week. My biggest, most reckless, most desperate of lies had backfired, as they nearly always did, and secured the very thing it was trying to prevent. Marcus walked out and never came back.

Not helping, I tell myself.

I sit up with my feet on the concrete floor, feeling along the edge of the bed platform under the thin mattress. In parts the cement edge is almost sharp. I pull my left hand down toward it, thinking that if I can strike the manacle hard against the edge, it might break, but the chain isn’t long enough. I shuffle down the bed, as close to the ring in the wall as I can get, and try again. I’ve bought myself two, maybe three extra links of chain.