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.
Almost. They will serve multiple life sentences for what they did to us and, most damningly, what they did to a boy-waiter who had been fascinated by the shine about them, and whose life they had thrown away like leftover food pushed to the side of the plate as they left the table and got on with their lives.
Kristen and I promised to stay in touch, but I don’t know if the group of six we had been can function as a foursome. Gretchen remained friendly through the trial, but if I thought her a third wheel before the events of that awful night, she embraced that role even more completely after it. She was, I think, more saddened by Simon and Melissa’s betrayal of her than she was outraged, and though I tried to convince her otherwise, she seemed to feel guilty.
“I don’t think it was my fault,” she said when we had gone for coffee in a Heraklion café-bar during the first week, when all the important information was already out in public. “Not really, but I wonder if I forced their hand, you know? After that stuff with Brad, when I freaked out but couldn’t get out of the country. If I’d just not said anything. If I’d just gotten my passport without talking to them, without agreeing to come back and stay one more night, I might have left and there wouldn’t have been any point in them going after you.”
“But Melissa switched your purses on purpose,” I said. “So you couldn’t leave.”
Gretchen sipped from her cup, leaving a ring of rose-colored lipstick on the ceramic.
“Probably,” she said, still looking to give her shiny friends the smallest of outs. “Those purses were exactly—”
“She switched them, Gretchen. She admitted it. You were a target for them before the trip even began. It’s why they invited you. And once they figured out it wasn’t you sending the messages with Manos’s name in them, that it was one of us, they were going to get rid of us all no matter what you did or said.”
I thought back to the trial, as I had done constantly since it ended. At first, Simon said virtually nothing under cross-examination, offering mere shrugs, denials, and claims that he couldn’t remember. He implied the whole thing had been a mistake, the result of a faulty generator and our—mainly my—paranoia and deception. Melissa, by contrast, had been defiant, denying everything but somehow managing to blame everyone else, as if everything that had happened was due to the stupidity and mean-spiritedness of other people and a hostile universe. This impulse toward self-justification was bizarre and, in some ways, more frightening than anything she had said or done the night she set out to kill us all. For someone who had always seemed so composed, so attentive to the way others viewed her, this careless dropping of the veil was shocking and contemptuous, as if no one had the right to judge her so she didn’t care what they thought. That included the jury, whom she frequently sneered at in ways that made for newspaper headlines. I was reminded of the look in her eyes when, after she had been yelled at by the dead boy’s mother that day at the restaurant, Brad had refused to play along with Melissa’s pity party. There had been a feral rage in her face at the thought that someone had the audacity to disrupt what she felt she deserved. It had been the same look she had had that night in the foyer, when she had attacked me for exposing what she and Simon had done.
But she continued to deny everything, even as she scornfully remarked that it was absurd that she might lose her liberty over the death of “some Greek waiter.” The court translator hesitated over the statement, barely keeping her fury in check, and the prosecution repeated the statement several times in his closing remarks. Each time, Melissa just rolled her eyes and sighed. I was surprised no one from the public gallery went for her, the tension, the hatred was so thick in the courtroom. I felt ashamed to have been her friend.
Though the evidence remained open to interpretation, the process of laying out who Melissa had become was excruciating, her beauty and charisma peeled back to show a heart so hard and shriveled that it was painful to look at. I felt the eyes of the jury on the rest of us too, all of them silently, fiercely asking the same question: How did you not know?