Page 86 of Saltwater

“Hey—” Marcus said, snapping his fingers. Naomi imagined them inches from Richard’s face. “Hey. You’ve got to pay attention now. Okay? We have to be extremely clear on what happened. There’s only one story. That story is this: We left the dinner. Sarah said she wanted to go for a walk. You went to bed. You were also very drunk. I saw you go to bed, okay? Sarah never came home. She was robbed on her walk, and murdered in the process. When we woke up, she wasn’t here.”

“But her jewelry…”

“I’m going to go take care of that. I’m going to go right now.”

“What if no one believes us?”

“Then we make them believe us,” Marcus said, his voice firm.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Richard said. And as he said it, Naomi knew it was true. He wanted Sarah to stay. He wanted her to be like Naomi—a team player. He wanted her to want the life he wanted. He wanted her to have never written that fucking play. He wanted her to be happy. That was the thing about desire, aboutwanting:it was like a drug or a haze. You’d do anything for it. The craziest and the worst things. Hadn’t men always? Wouldn’t they still? Even after tonight?

“Of course you didn’t,” Marcus said. There was the sound of a light clap, a softshhh.He was rubbing his brother’s back. “Sarah was in a bad place, remember? She wasn’t doing well professionally. After the baby, things were harder. But what you need to do now, Richard, is go up to bed. In the morning, we’re going to call New York and talk to Bud. Everything we tell him is privileged, okay? But we’re still going to say that we think something happened to her, an accident. The optics might look bad. We’re going to get his advice on how to alert the authorities here, all right? And don’t get up early. We won’t make this call until the time we normally wake up. Any earlier would look suspicious.”

Naomi knew none of them would sleep. She wondered, in fact, if she would ever sleep again. This particular night felt like it might bethe longest of her life. Naomi listened to them leave the room, reach the stairs. Their steps echoing into the night.

Halfway up, Richard must have paused.

“It was an accident,” he said to his brother softly.

“The worst things always are,” Marcus said.

Helen

Now

We go to Ferragamo. Tolook at loafers. Naomi seems happier now that she is holding two white calfskin loafers with little brown bits of rubber for soles.

“Do you like these?” she asks.

She hands me a shoe.

“They’re not my style,” I say.

“They’re also not for you.”

She’s still wearing her sunglasses, a glass of champagne dangling from her now free hand like it might spill across the top of the display case in front of us.

“I think I like them better than the first pair,” she says. “Italians understand leather. Try them on for me. I want to see how they look on a foot.”

When we reached the modernist doors of Ferragamo, the store staff locked them behind us. Naomi had called ahead.

“Try them on,” she insists, gesturing with the glass of champagne in her hand.

I reach down and slip them on.

Italians understand leather.

“They feel lovely,” I say. But I prefer a sandal.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to this afternoon that I think she’s enjoying. The softness of the leather contrasted with the grainy quality of the photo. The way the staff of Ferragamo anticipates our everyneed versus the presence of the carabinieri at the villa. An unfolding crisis set against the inability to decide between ostrich and calfskin.

Italians understand leather.

It echoes in my ears. It drowns out everything else.

“I like shopping with you,” she says. “Can we see another pair?” she asks the man standing behind the case. Then she smiles at me. “It’s like I have a daughter of my own.”

She has always been a roving surrogate, but never a mother. Still, maybe she is the closest thing I will ever get. But she is not what I would consider motherly. For my tenth birthday, she gave me a pair of pearl earrings, despite the fact I wouldn’t pierce my ears until college. She was never good at understanding the difference between a child and an adult and seemed confused when I, as a teenager staying at their house, maintained a very real fear of the dark.