The Lies That Bind

by Emily Giffin

“You want a line? How about this one…” He clears his throat and leans toward me. “ ‘I’ve always loved you, and when you love someone, you love the whole person, just as he or she is, and not as you would like them to be.’ ” I feel myself melting inside, goosebumps rising everywhere. But I play it cool and say, “Quoting Tolstoy could just be part of your act.” “Yep,” he says, grinning back at me. “And to think I usually have to quote Tolstoy before I get in a girl’s bed.”

Thirty minutes later, I am standing in the middle of Union Square. It is desolate, just like all the blocks along the way. I hear the whine of sirens in the distance, but otherwise the city is eerily quiet and still. There is no traffic, no hustle and bustle, and instead of the usual feeling of anonymity and being “lost in a crowd,” there is a weird, raw intimacy. Strangers make eye contact, a hundred words passing in each horrified glance. Across the square, two girls are hugging and crying.

We briefly come up with a game plan, then start walking west and south in the direction of the World Trade Center. What was once the World Trade Center. About three blocks later, the burning smell hits us all at once. It is smoke, but mixed with the stench of chemicals. Melting plastic. And something else, too. Something unspeakable.

I manage to hold on to a sliver of hope, playing our collective excuses back on a loop. His cellphone is broken or lost—and he never memorized my number to call from a landline. He went to his mountain house just after he left my apartment early this morning, and doesn’t have cell service or an Internet connection or a television; maybe he doesn’t even know what happened. He lost a close friend in the towers, and is too filled with grief to do anything, including contact me. He has spiraled into depression, something we are all experiencing to various degrees, but his is even more crippling due to his brother’s situation. He’s injured in a hospital somewhere. He’s buried alive in the rubble, waiting to be saved. He will be saved. But with every passing hour, it becomes harder to suppress another explanation. The one that I can’t and won’t say aloud, and my friends won’t say, either. At least not to my face. They are thinking it, though. I hear it in the tentative way they ask if I’ve heard from him—as if I could possibly forget to tell them that I had. I hear it in their wavering reassurances that they are sure the call will come. I tell myself the same. Any minute he will call with a breathless, crazy story. Any minute now he will knock on my door and give me one of his huge, tight hugs.

Everywhere we look there are makeshift memorials—bouquets of flowers; burning candles and incense; chalk messages on the street and sidewalks; and endless placards with names and faces of the still missing. They are affixed to street signs and lampposts and construction fencing and the base of the statue of George Washington and the iconic stone arch itself. Some are elaborate posters with color photographs and long, poetic tributes; others are children’s crayon drawings with scrawled messages to Mommy or Daddy; still others are bare-bones xeroxed flyers. The scene is as haunting and devastating as a hundred funerals in one public square, yet it is also one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Even as my heart breaks, it overflows with faith in God and the inherent goodness of humanity. Love will win, I tell myself.

After all, you reach the mundane, comfortable moments only when a relationship is working. When it’s not working, the passion morphs into something twisted and dark. Drama. Jealousy. A never-ending power struggle.

how wonderful can an engagement be when the question took two tries to stick?

We may not get do-overs in life, but we can always have fresh starts and new beginnings.

I keep going, heading south, wandering all the way down into Battery Park. It’s the first time I’ve been this far downtown since 9/11, and I can’t stop staring at the hole in the skyline where the towers once stood. It’s all still so impossible to believe.

I began to learn that the world treats you the way you demand to be treated.