Lies That Bind Us(65)

“Wait,” I said. “You think that I . . . ?”

“Did you?” she said, and suddenly she was quite together, quite calm, and both her wet eyes and her cracked voice had a touch of steel.

“No!” I said. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“I think you know why,” said Gretchen.

Everyone was looking at me. What had been a dull, smoldering anxiety in my head had suddenly roared into bright, hot flame.

This can’t be happening.

“What?” I said. “You can’t be serious!”

“You’re jealous of Marcus and me,” she said.

I was so stunned that for a second I just gaped at her. No one else spoke.

“What?” I demanded.

“You know,” she said, snakeskin quiet.

“Marcus,” I said. “Tell her!”

“Tell her what?” he said. He was quiet and still. Wary. His manner gave nothing away, and his uncertainty turned my smoldering anxiety to anger. It flared white hot in my chest.

“Tell her I wouldn’t do that!” I shouted. “You know I wouldn’t. Marcus, you can’t think . . . I didn’t. I wouldn’t! Why would I . . . ?”

“You didn’t like me near him,” said Gretchen. “I could tell. Everyone could tell.”

I felt the sudden embarrassment in the room and knew she was right, they had all thought it, discussed it . . .

“No,” I said. “You’re wrong.”

“Jan,” said Melissa. “I get it, but this is really not the way . . .”

“Shut up!” I shouted. “All of you. I said I didn’t do it, OK?”

“Now, Jan.” Simon this time, also still and quiet but deliberate, like some guy in a movie defusing a bomb. “This isn’t the time for one of your stories.”

I stare at him, breathless, tears starting in my eyes, and then I look to Marcus, who had said they didn’t know about me, not really. He looks down, ashamed, though whether that’s about me or him, I can’t tell.

“I didn’t,” I manage, crying openly now. “I would never . . .”

And I mean it. I didn’t do it. I swear to God, I didn’t.

“We can fix this,” said Melissa, turning between Gretchen and me and smiling. “Tomorrow we can head into town, buy you some new things, Gretchen, and then we’ll have a little chat, just us girls, maybe a few drinks, and then—”

“No,” said Gretchen. “I need to call the airline. I’m leaving.”



Melissa protested, of course, said it would all be better in the morning, but Gretchen stuck to her guns, watching me from under her bangs as if I might attack at any moment, and at last the call was made on the ancient rotary phone in the foyer. Kristen sat with her on the tower stairs as Gretchen talked, but she met my eyes and shrugged with noncommittal exhaustion.

So the jury is still out on me.

Simon and Melissa huddled in the stairwell to their room, then went through the motions of searching the house for intruders while I stood at the bottom and stared, unseeing, at the large tapestry that hung in the foyer, all faded birds in threadbare green and gold. Having found nothing, Brad, who had gone with them, armed with a knife from the kitchen, went back to bed—something of a relief to Kristen, I think, since his patience was already worn thin—and Marcus drifted apart like a satellite in high orbit, just barely connected to what was going on. Once I caught his eye and took a step toward him, but he shook his head minutely and I stopped, trying to decide if he wanted to keep whatever conversation we might have for a more private moment, or if he was just done talking to me.

It was impossible not to feel betrayed by the world and him most of all, and the look I gave him was less imploring than it had been and more accusatory.

You’d think that tales about boys crying wolf would make me immune to this sort of thing, but it didn’t. It was an obvious downside of being a known embroiderer of the truth, a distorter, a misleader, that even when you were being absolutely honest, the best you could hope for was a kind of wary détente, a truce between battles while everyone waited for independent confirmation that you weren’t, in fact, lying your ass off. So I should have known better than to be hurt by Marcus’s careful distance and by the way no one had really come to my defense. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that my word counted, apparently, for nothing, but it still hurt.

It hurt like ice pressed deep into my heart. Like fire. Like rejection.

As to the offense itself, anyone could have done it. We had all had the opportunity to slip into Gretchen’s room—she apparently didn’t keep it locked—at any number of times after we got home from Rethymno or even before we left this morning. If someone had broken in, it could have been done while we were out, but no one seemed to be taking that possibility too seriously. Nothing was missing, and the attack—if that was what it was—felt specific. Personal. There was nothing I could say. The more earnest I was in my denials, the more I looked like a stone-cold lying bitch. After a while, I just stopped talking.

I sat on the stone steps to the tower, caught between wanting to flee to my room and wanting to be supportive of the woman who had blamed me, as if that would help. I knew I couldn’t sleep, though I was weary to the point of exhaustion, and I was, ironically, more afraid than the others. They all thought they knew who had gone into Gretchen’s room and cut up her clothes, an act that was more than malicious. It was voyeuristic. Pornographic. It was frightening, particularly for me, the only person in the house who didn’t think they knew who had done it, the only one who knew for a fact that it wasn’t me.