“Yes,” I said, cautious now. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, gazing out over the sea. “Everyone is so weird about it. Like something happened that no one wants to talk about. Have you noticed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t know why.”
She looked at me then, shading her eyes from the sun and fixing me with a steady, appraising gaze that made me suddenly sure someone had said something about my not telling the truth.
“Honestly,” I said. “I don’t know. I had been wondering the same thing. I noticed the way the others responded when you mentioned it before but . . .”
“I asked Brad,” she said musingly, “and he got . . . defensive. Hostile. It was not like him, even with all the work stress and everything. Scared me.”
That I had not expected.
“I could ask Marcus,” I said. “Not sure he knows anything about it, but . . .”
She nodded vaguely, looking back out to sea.
“Not Simon though, OK?” she said. “Not Mel.”
“OK,” I said.
“Something else,” said Kristen. “You remember the word we saw in the leaves back at the villa.”
“Or imagined we saw,” I said, not sure where this was going but feeling a tug of unease. “We thought it said Nanos or something.”
“Right,” she said. “I think it was Manos.”
I thought for a second, then nodded noncommittally.
“Could have been,” I said. “Why? What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m pretty sure the woman at the restaurant said it. Maria. The one who yelled at Mel. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but among all the screaming she said it. Twice.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I don’t know why the scuba mask bothers me so much, but it does. It feels . . . macabre. Horror movie stuff. I try to convince myself that it’s just because my captor wants to hide his face in the same way he’s hiding his voice, but that doesn’t help because it reinforces the possibility that he is someone I know.
If there’s an upside to the mask, it’s that concealing his face means he’s not decided for certain that I will die in this little stone box, chained to the wall. I might get out. I might walk away from this dank little cell and walk under the sky once more, and when people ask me who held me captive here, I won’t be able to tell them. If that wasn’t at least possible, he wouldn’t care whether I could recognize him or not. I wasn’t dead. Not yet.
So why don’t you believe it, this ‘upside’?
I’m not sure, but I don’t. It smells like a lie, a sour, deathly tang like rotten meat that I, old expert liar that I am, can detect at a hundred paces. He’s going to kill me, mask or no mask. I feel it. So the hiding in the dark, the voice concealer, really is just to scare me? To make me think I’m in some kind of nightmare from which there is no waking up?
Working pretty well, then.
I test the chain again, as I have a thousand times. I stand and stretch and inspect the floor with blind, crawling fingers, as if there is something I might have missed, but I sit down again with nothing: no progress, no discovery, no hope.
I know what I have to do. I’ve known it for a while, I think, but I wanted to believe there was an alternative, something less desperate, less awful. There isn’t, but I keep looking for it, like when you misplace your keys and you keep re-searching the same spot over and over, knowing they won’t be there, but half believing in something like magic, something summoned from despair and driving, animal need that will change the laws of the universe and set the ring of keys where you knew it should be but knew just as well it wasn’t. But I have searched my cell over and over, and the keys are not there. There is only one possibility left to me. It almost certainly won’t work, and the attempt will bring new levels of pain and misery, but it is all I have.
A year or two ago I caught some soft news piece about a woman who had been ravaged by her friend’s pet chimp. She had visited the house having had her hair cut in some new way, and the animal didn’t recognize her. It had ripped most of her face off and—and, for some reason, this was the part that had given me nightmares—torn her hands off. It had simply taken hold of her, one hand in hers, the other on her arm, and pulled her hand off, first one, quite deliberately, then the other.
I hadn’t believed that possible, or at least, the possibility had never occurred to me and not just because I didn’t know chimpanzees were that strong and aggressive. I just hadn’t imagined that with sufficient force and savagery, you could yank a hand right off at the wrist.
I feel my swollen wrist with my free hand, working the manacle as high up onto my hand as I can, pushing it back and forth, tilting it from side to side till it will move no farther. It lodges at the knuckle. There’s softness between my thumb and forefinger and actual space beneath the crevice at the base of my palm and the cuff. With my right hand, I squeeze the fingers and thumb of my left as hard as I can, gasping as the pain roils and swirls, reaching a steady simmer, and then I press the edge of my hand against the concrete of the bed platform, stand up, and push down on it with my other hand, using all my weight. The pain comes to a rolling boil, but the cuff shifts another half inch. It won’t come over the core structures of my hand, the bones that give it shape and form, but it needs to move no more than another inch and a half for me to be free.
Now it’s just a matter of the pain. And the sacrifice.
I’m sweating. My breathing is thin and ragged. My heart is throbbing. My eyes have begun to stream. I think of the chimp tearing the woman’s hand off, then push the horror away.
I consider stepping out of my dress so I can use it to staunch the blood, but I don’t want to wait any longer.
I’m satisfied that the manacle can be made to move no farther, not without altering those structures in my hand, the spur of which is where the rusted iron is most clearly stuck. I’m light-headed as I stand, and the pain swells and kicks as I let go with my right hand and lean out into the darkness, all my weight straining against the chain. I rock on the balls of my feet, tipping first toward the wall, then away, building force and speed with each agonizing pull, like a gymnast on the high bars, working up the momentum for an acrobatic maneuver. I take deep, rapid breaths through bared teeth, a weight lifter bracing, then I lean into the wall over the bed so that my hair brushes against it, and then slam hard away, trying to hit the opposite wall.
Once.
Twice.
The pain is bright as a flare, hard and sharp as glass. I feel the sinews pop, the muscle tear, the bones break.
Three times.
I fall heavily against the far wall, clutching my wounded hand and sobbing.
Free. Broken, but free.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Well, Mel is the lead singer, obviously,” said Brad, toasting her with his glass of red.
“Obviously,” said Gretchen.
“What about Simon?” said Melissa. “He’s got rock star written all over him.”
“I’m the unspeakably well-paid manager,” said Simon. “I found the rest of you playing seedy nightclubs and made your careers. You’re welcome, by the way.”
“I’m lead guitar,” said Brad, putting his glass down and doing a little air guitar solo.
“Yeah,” said Melissa. “The bad boy of the band.”