Lies That Bind Us(42)

“Hey, what’s with the they?” said Simon. “This was all us.”

“OK, we do it well,” said Melissa. “I guess we’re honorary Greeks.”

“Cretans,” said Brad.

I shot Marcus a look, but he didn’t react, merely laughing as Simon exclaimed in mock outrage.

“Who are you calling a cretin?”

“I never even thought of that!” said Gretchen, delighted. “Is that where the word comes from? Is it, I don’t know, racist?”

“Cretans aren’t a race,” said Brad.

“Neither are morons,” said Simon.

“I thought it was pronounced krehtin,” said Marcus.

“Really?” said Kristen, making a face.

“Yes,” said Marcus. “You’ve never heard that?”

Kristen shook her head, and Marcus gave her a puzzled look that lasted a fraction longer than the moment merited.

“Check it out, Brad,” said Simon. “We beat the professor on vocabulary!”

“Yes!” said Brad, pumping his fist. “F for the teacher! See me after class, young man!”

Marcus acknowledged the joke with a self-deprecating smile, but I noticed the way his gaze slid back to Kristen. It was an odd look, appraising, watchful.

“So tomorrow: shopping?” asked Gretchen.

“Shopping!” Melissa sang out, raising her glass. “There’s supposed to be some really cute leather stores in Rethymno.”

“Ooh, leather,” said Simon. “Looks like my lucky night.”

“Shut up,” said Melissa.

“It’s so great that we’re seeing more of the island,” said Kristen. “Last time we barely left the hotel, apart from looking for bars and that one trip to the cave thing. What was that place called?”

I happened to be looking at Melissa as she said it, and I saw the change, the way her shoulders clenched and her spine stiffened, the freezing of the smile that had been so genuine only a moment before. And it wasn’t just her. There was a momentary stillness, as if the time had stopped and I was in a weird little bubble, as I had been in the scuba gear, a world unto myself. It lasted only a second, the spell broken by Marcus saying, “The Dikteon cave, where Zeus was born and hidden from his father, Cronus.”

“That’s right,” said Kristen, seemingly oblivious to the odd tension in the air, the way Melissa was studying her drink without actually seeing it. “You know I saw an old painting a couple of years later, Cronus eating his children. Awful thing. All dark and bloody, and he has this baby with no head, and he’s got these wild, mad eyes. Totally freaked me out.”

“Goya,” said Marcus. “It’s pretty horrible. He actually painted it on the wall of his living room.”

“In his house?” said Kristen, aghast.

“It wasn’t transferred to canvas till after he died.”

I remembered the myth. The Titan Cronus—Saturn—had been warned that one of his sons would take his throne from him and rule over a new order of gods, so he destroyed them all shortly after they were born, eating them. Zeus’s mother fed Cronus a stone in place of the child and hid the god in the Dikteon cave till he was old enough to fulfill his destiny, cut his siblings from his father’s belly, and imprison him in the underworld dungeon called Tartarus. The memory sent a tremor of discomfort through me, though I wasn’t sure why.

“To think we actually went there . . . ,” said Kristen with a shudder.

“More burgers?” said Brad, getting up and moving to the grill. It was a kind of joke, I guess, but no one laughed.

“I’ll get some more wine,” said Melissa, rising and heading to the kitchen.

Kristen looked up like a startled bird, vaguely aware that something had happened, but shrugged it off when Gretchen, who still looked a bit starry-eyed around her, said, “So tell me about filming. Do you get to write your own lines at all, or do you have to stick to the script?”

The atmosphere still felt just a little off, and when I looked around I thought Simon was watching Brad with unusual attentiveness as he moved the meat patties onto the cool part of the grill with a long-handled spatula. He felt my eyes on him and turned, snapping on a smile like a mask.

“More wine, Jan?” Marcus asked.

Before I could respond, Gretchen said, “Did I just feel a raindrop?”

It’s funny the way unimportant things can annoy you. It was a perfectly innocuous remark, and it quickly became clear that it really was starting to rain—hard, as it turned out—but it felt like she was pulling the conversation back to her, as if no one had been paying her enough attention, and all this talk of our last visit was getting on her nerves.

“I’ll take some of that wine,” she said to Simon as she got up. “But I’ll take it inside, I think. You coming, Marcus?”

I turned to her sharply, on the brink of saying “he was talking to me,” or something equally unwarranted, but managed to keep quiet. And in truth what I really wanted to say was “Why are you here? Who are you?”

Stupid.

I watched the way she trailed her hand as she walked past Marcus, grasping his and pulling him jokily up. He bumbled and went along with it, but I felt the blood rise in my face.

“Come on,” said Simon, giving me a look that was as close to compassionate as I have ever seen from him. “Let’s get inside before we get soaked.”