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.
It’s just enough. With care, I can move my left arm in a short arc that will bring the iron cuff down on the edge of the bed platform. I push the thin plasticky mattress aside and, when it snaps back into place, fold it back and sit on it. I practice the movement, raising my left hand to shoulder height, then moving it down till the manacle meets the concrete lip. I do it four, five times at quarter speed, then I brace myself.
The manacle is everything in your life that is broken, I think. It’s your job and your loneliness and your stupid impulse to lie, to wreck whatever you have that is good . . .
I take a breath, holding my arm out, my teeth gritted, then I slam it down, hard as I can.
The pain screams through my wrist, where it meets the concrete, and I know that I cry out even as I hug it to my chest, cradling it in my right hand. I missed the manacle entirely, and the full force of the blow seems to have caught my radius. I can’t tell right away if it’s broken, but it feels like it might be.
Stupid.
I hug my wrist against my breasts and rock silently back and forth, trying not to sob, the heavy chain stretched to its limit. After a moment like this, with the initial agony draining away, turning to an insistent ache that spikes with the slightest movement, I start to test the wound with the cautious fingers of my right hand. I feel no bloody slickness, no obvious tearing of the skin and flesh. The pain is all in the bone. I twist my left hand minutely, and for a moment it feels like it might be OK, but then it blazes, and it’s like a light comes on in my head, a hard, burning light, impossible to look at.
I go still again, and now I realize that the tears I have been resisting are running down my cheeks. I let them fall, sitting motionless for perhaps as much as five whole minutes, and then I lift my injured arm carefully, feeling the way the tug of the chain makes my wrist groan. Bracing myself with my good hand, I lift my feet up onto the mattress and kneel as close to the wall as I can, facing it. I find the most neutral position I can for my left hand and begin to feel along the chain with my right. If I can’t break the manacle, maybe I can find a link that could be twisted apart, or a gap in the ring mount on the wall.
My fingers work slowly, methodically, inspecting every surface, every inch, working my way from the wall up the chain to the manacle.
“What did you do?” my captor had asked.
I keep thinking he, but it could be a woman. The voice was being altered. I am sure of that. But the English sounded good. So not a local Greek. I think back but the memory of the voice in the dark is like the memory of the house, and I can’t home in on its specifics. But then a detail comes back to me.
“What did you do?” he had asked. But then, the next time, after I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, he had added, “What did you see?”
Strange. I search my memory of our last visit to Crete, but all I can think of is sun and drinks on the beach and laughter and, of course, Marcus, wonderful, diffident, brilliant Marcus, slipping slowly away from me. I had known it by the end of the week, days before the fiasco of the phone message. There was something in his manner, something weary, drained, and sad, like a lost child. I had felt it, even if I denied it to myself, lied about it. It was the best week of my life, but by the end of it, something was wrong, broken.
And now that I think about it, it hadn’t just been him and me. We had done everything together, the six of us, for five days, but on the last day, the day after the cave, things had been different.
The cave.
My hands have been working along the links of the chain, probing, checking, but I stop, suddenly chilled. The half memory of the cave sends a ripple of unease through me, though I don’t know why. My hands are still as my mind tries to focus.
It had been our one excursion, a tour to a little monastery in the mountains, followed by a visit to the cave where, in mythology, Zeus was born. The ride had taken ages, and we arrived tired and irritable, wishing we had stayed on the beach. The cave itself was at the end of a hike. Melissa had rented a donkey to ride and then complained how much it smelled. It was a deep cave, full of connected caverns, whose stalactites and draperies were lit with specially positioned flood lamps. It had been chilly and atmospheric and . . . what?