Lies That Bind Us(88)

I don’t know what to say to this, so I just nod and smile and eventually say, “OK. If that’s what you want.”

“I think it is,” she says, and that ‘I think’ makes me feel better, though I am not sure why. “Hey, I never said thank you,” she adds. “For what you did. I mean, I think you know, but in all the craziness, the investigation and all, I don’t think I ever said it. You saved our lives. I didn’t think I’d ever say that when I wasn’t working from a script, but it’s true. You really did. I can’t tell you how grateful I am. If there’s ever anything—and I mean anything—that I can do . . .”

“You would have done the same,” I say. “Ninety percent of it was self-preservation.”

She looks taken aback by the admission, then nods.

“Will you keep working?” I ask. The civil suit against Simon and Melissa’s estate would mean that we all received significant lump sums. Not enough to live on forever, but more than I had ever had or imagined I would have. I had two steel pins in my left hand, and though I was assured I would regain full use of it in time, I couldn’t do the job at Great Deal I’d been doing. It was something of a relief and had made a decision for me that I should have made years ago.

“Oh yes,” she says. “I love what I do. And I know it sounds awful, but all this—the press coverage—has only helped my career. I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true.”

I smile.

“Kristen, you mind if I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Are you actually English?”

Again, I had caught her off guard. She opens her mouth to say something airy and confident, then thinks better of it.

“The studio was looking for a Brit,” she says. “I had been in a show over there and working under my stage name. But I was born Sarah Kristen Congrieve. In New Jersey. My agent knows. So does the End Times producer. But we kept it from the media to give my character a little . . . what does my agent call it? Verisimilitudinous mystique.”

I smile and nod and say nothing.

“You should visit the set,” she says. “Everyone would love to meet you.”

I have attained a little celebrity of my own.

“Maybe after this semester,” I say. I had quit my job at Great Deal as soon as I got back to the States, citing the physical injury rather than the mental strain. I think Camille was relieved, though everyone was nice and supportive. They got me flowers. I am taking classes now at UNC Charlotte, retaking courses and rebuilding my ravaged GPA. Whether I will actually apply for med school when it is all done, I am not sure, but that is the plan, and this time there’ll be no fudged info on the applications, no flights of fancy during interviews. I’ve said things like that before, but this time I don’t just mean it. After all, I’ve meant it before. This time, I know it’s true. Because nothing puts your life in focus like someone trying to take it from you.

Liars are quick to use the most extreme phrases to underscore the truth of their fictions.

Honest to God.

To tell you the truth.

Swear on my mother’s grave.

Well, I really did that last one. I had always known where Gabby and my mother were buried, but I never went. Not once. It was easier that way, both to dodge my responsibility for their deaths and to pretend none of it had happened.

I didn’t feel guilt over the accident. Not now. In my first meeting with Chad after the trial in Heraklion, he had told me that I had just been a kid, doing what kids did when their sisters got on their nerves. It had all gone horribly wrong, of course—my mother losing concentration, the car missing the bend—but it might not have. It might just have easily been the kind of near miss that happens to drivers daily and that they have forgotten by the time they go to bed that night. I had certainly not intended any of what happened, and the sense that what I had done had actively killed them both—though it had burrowed into my head and heart, where it had turned rancid, rotting through the rest of me—was clearly just the poison of grief and confusion.

Nothing I couldn’t have figured out for myself, of course; nothing, in fact, that I hadn’t figured out almost as soon as I realized the truth, back in that lightless cell at the heart of the Cretan labyrinth, but it felt good to hear it from someone else. I went to the grave the following day.

It was cold and wet, a gray December haze hanging over the city so that Charlotte’s multiplying towers vanished halfway up in mist thick as smoke. The headstones were not as faded as you might expect, the names still hard and clear. I laid flowers and wept for them both, and for myself who had been left behind without them, and I said that I was sorry. Then I promised never to lie again, and though I knew I was being melodramatic and perhaps unreasonable, I meant it, and have lived accordingly since. If I feel tempted to spin a little elaboration, one of my spiraling falsehoods that usually began small, a bit of fun to add a little glitter to the world, I’ve found that I can rotate my left hand a quarter turn, then clench my fist. The action sends a shot of pain up my arm like lightening.

It hurts like hell but it clears my head.

I walk back to the car through the wet grass, looking down at my shoes, whose leather is stained dark, and there is Marcus, waiting at a respectful distance. I am not sure what the future holds for us, but it feels like there might be one, and that is a long way from where we were before the reunion—a long way, indeed, from where we had been at the end of the previous trip. Nothing binds people together, I guess, like shared experience, even if that experience is full of fear and sadness. It is too strange, too darkly funny to actually say out loud, but Simon and Melissa may actually have done me a favor—several, in fact—without meaning to, so a part of me almost feels sorry for them.