An Academy for Liars

Chapter 43

Lennon spent the bulk of those first weeks at Dante’s house ravaged by a guilt so ferocious it felt a lot like grief, replaying Ian’s final moments, turning the memory over in her mind until she’d rehearsed it so thoroughly, she felt as though she was reliving it. Sometimes she saw him—halved at the waist—drowning in the great gyre of her nightmares, his mouth filled with seawater, screaming alone in the deep dark of the churning currents, his entrails floating in loose spools about his arms. In those horrid nights, she often woke screaming, to Dante at her bedside, coaxing her awake, and talking her through the dream’s aftermath on the bathroom floor, where she dragged herself upon waking from the nightmares, to lie on the cool tiles and ground herself. It was not uncommon for her to lie there until sunrise.

The days, though, were better. Lennon slept late into the morning, and when she woke it was usually to Dante swimming out in the ocean. She could see him making the crossing between the coast and a small island about a mile and a half offshore. He threaded through the water with strong, sure strokes, back and forth, lap after lap. But by the time Lennon got up—showered and brushed her teeth—he’d be in the kitchen, making breakfast, as if even out in the water he knew the precise moment that she’d woken up.

Dante, as it turned out, was a more than competent cook. Each morning, he made a small spread—French omelets, johnnycakes, and fruit were daily staples, but sometimes there’d be fresh bread or occasionally pastries too. When he was done in the kitchen, they’d eat together in the breakfast room. Dante would sip his coffee, looking up from his own plate to encourage Lennon, with a nod or a gesture, to eat as much as she could. And Lennon found the silence between them to be every bit as satisfying as a stimulating conversation.

“How do you feel about camping?” Dante asked her one morning, passing a cigarette across the table to her.

Lennon shrugged. “I’ve done it a couple of times. Why?”

“I thought we’d go out to the island,” he said and nodded out the kitchen window. “We could even stay the night, pitch our tents on the beach?”

The request caught her off guard. She hadn’t taken Dante for the camping type. But what surprised her even more was her own response. “Why not?”

Hours later, they took a skiff boat—loaded with tents and sleeping bags and other camping supplies that Dante had hauled down from the attic—and headed out to the island during high tide. As they approached the island’s shore, Dante climbed out of the boat and into the waist-high water. He dragged the boat ashore, pulling it high up the beach with a rope as Lennon, trying to help, shoved it from behind, her feet piercing deep into the wet sand. She slipped several times in the process, and Dante, laughing, eventually waved her off and told her to wait on the beach.

The island was no more than four or five acres across and, apart from the narrow beach, was heavily forested. While Dante made camp, Lennon explored, gathering armfuls of firewood as she walked. Because the island was so small no matter where she was, she could hear the sound of the waves crashing ashore, catch glimpses of the water between the trees. But the farther she ventured, the more disoriented she became and her thoughts returned—as they always did—to Ian, trapped in the maw of the elevator doors, his hand outstretched, a moment before she tore him apart.

Tears came with the memories, but she fought them back, doubled over, a hand pressed flush against a tree to steady herself. She took a few deep breaths but sucked the air in too fast, and before long she was panting, hyperventilating alone in a copse of scraggly pine trees, wondering how she’d made such a mess of things and wishing that she’d just jumped when Ian had ordered her to.

After all, she could’ve recovered from broken bones. But she couldn’t unsee him, torn in half at the torso, twitching on the elevator floor.

By the time she returned to the beach, Dante had a tent pitched on either side of the fire pit. He was sitting on a large rock near the tide pools, a speargun in his hand, which he was in the process of loading, the butt end wedged against his sternum, his arms straining with the effort of drawing back the rubber. He looked, Lennon had to admit, almost annoyingly hot. Straining in the sun, his brow slick with sweat, shirtless and barefoot and more relaxed than Lennon had perhaps ever seen him.

“You all right?” he asked without looking up at her. She wondered if the reason he couldn’t fall for her the way she had for him was because for Dante, there was no mystique. He could see through to the core of her so easily. There was nothing she could hide from him, no part of her that felt truly private when she was under the weight of his gaze or even just standing beside him.

“I’m fine.”

He stood up, made for the skiff boat. “Good, give me a hand.”

The waters just off the coast of South Carolina were murky, which made spearfishing a challenge. But Dante employed a few psychic tricks to maximize his efforts. His strategy was simple: he would circle the boat and extend his will in a kind of radius through the nearby waters, luring fish closer. Lennon was to do the same, and when any particularly promising marks swam close enough, Dante would dive down to spear them.

Persuading fish and crabs, as it turned out, was entirely different from persuading rats. And it took some time for Lennon to really get the hang of things. No two creatures were the same, she learned, and crustaceans, for example, had an entirely different psychic structure than mammals, which made them incredibly challenging to manipulate. Rats were a fairly easy mark in comparison. Their innate curiosity opened their minds to psychic interference. While crustaceans and fish weren’t as intelligent—in the conventional sense—they had strong flight instincts that were at times difficult to supersede. As Lennon lured fish closer to the boat, they often snapped free of the tether of her will and retreated at the sight of Dante.

But even when she messed up, which was often, Dante would surface to take a big breath of air, push his goggles back to the top of his head, and smile at her. A full, deep-dimpled smile. Nothing held back, no joy that was hidden from her. She’d never, not once, seen him look even remotely as happy at Drayton, and despite all of her guilt and grief she was grateful to be the person who got to see him like this, even if she wasn’t the only one, even if he didn’t want her in the way that she wanted him.

During those long hours on the water, Lennon slowly improved, and by the time they were done for the day Dante had speared a few striped sheepshead, several flounder, and a Spanish mackerel. Lennon, for her part, scooped up several of the blue crabs she called to the surface of the water with one of the nets Dante kept on the boat. She placed the largest of the bunch in the cooler and let the small ones go, per Dante’s orders.

That evening, they started a fire on the beach. Dante gutted the fish and boiled the crabs, and they ate their fill on the sand. The fish—grilled whole, seasoned, and spritzed with fresh-squeezed lemon—was, Lennon thought, one of the best meals she’d ever had. It was also the first time she’d eaten a full meal in one sitting since Ian had died, and she felt guilty for every single bite.

Dante gazed at her from across the fire. “You need to go easy on yourself.”

She looked at him, and away, picking a bit of meat from a fish bone.

“I’m not telling you to forgive yourself, but at some point, you’ll need to set your guilt aside. Allowing yourself to be eaten alive by it won’t bring Ian back.”

“You don’t understand,” said Lennon, staring at the ground, so ashamed she couldn’t even bring herself to meet his gaze. “I deserve to feel guilty. Back in the elevator, I made a choice. It wasn’t an accident. I chose to rip him in half. The least I can do is feel guilty for it.”

“Look at me,” said Dante, and Lennon looked as her eyes filled with stinging tears. “You have nothing to apologize for. Okay? Nothing. So when you return to Drayton, and you will—soon, I’m sure of that—you give people two options. They can either respect you or fear you. But don’t let anyone make you question yourself. You did what you had to do. Am I clear?”

She didn’t speak.

“Lennon, am I clear?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He got up and went to stand at the water’s edge. “Come here.”

Lennon stood and followed. The tide was out, and gentle waves licked the shore. It was a bright night, thanks to the near-full moon, its reflection shattering into bright shards of light on the black surf.

Dante cast a hand out, and Lennon watched, enthralled, as he held the little waves back, interrupting their rhythm for no more than a few moments, before releasing them again. “This is how I settle my mind when things start to feel like too much. Try it. Just focus on the water.”

Lennon did try, but the most she could do was send little ripples across the surface.

“How do you do it?” she asked him finally, exasperated by her own ineptitude. What was meant to ease her nerves had quickly devolved into a humbling lesson about brushing against the limits of one’s own power. But that was better than her wallowing in guilt. And perhaps that was Dante’s design.

Instead of explaining how to hold the waves back, Dante decided to show her. It was the first time that he had ever opened his mind to her, and what she experienced in those moments took her breath away: The scope of his power, the way that it expanded through the facets of reality itself. The fact that one man could extend a hand and just seize it all, like it was his.