Page 13

Helen

Now

Lorna has been missing for twelve hours when Freddy and I board the boat. It’s nearly four in the afternoon, the light two hours away from the perfect golden hour that makes even the worst realities bearable.

Lorna is gone.

Ciro helps me into the boat and I take his hand. I watch my balance, not his face. I don’t want Freddy to witness a look between us, as if our secrets might spill out and embarrass all three of us. There’s no room in any of this for the kind of mistakes Ciro and I have been known to make.

“Thanks for doing this, man. We really appreciate it,” Freddy says from the dock behind me.

“Just the two of you?” Ciro asks.

Does he ask it with too much urgency? Or idle curiosity? I can’t tell. I hate that I sometimes struggle to read him, of all people.

“We haven’t heard from Lorna,” I say, slipping my hand from his.

“Probably still sleeping off last night somewhere,” Freddy says.

“That’s a shame,” Ciro says.

I can’t see his face when he says it— That’s a shame —because his back is to me while he unhitches the line. Out of everyone in my life, it’s Ciro I’ve trusted the most. Ciro I’ve known the longest. And he doesn’t seem worried. About us, about Lorna.

I remind myself this is a vacation; it should be fun.

“Might be better this way,” Freddy says, laughing. “Don’t fall in love with the tourists. Isn’t that what they say?”

He claps Ciro on the back when he returns to the wheel. He’s like this, I know, with everyone. Meet Freddy once and he’ll greet you forever as if you’re old friends. But it feels more pronounced with Ciro. Maybe it’s my guilt, amplifying. So sorry she can’t seem to decide what she wants, man. We’ll be out of your hair soon.

“Must have been a good one,” Ciro says.

I settle onto a banquette, smile at Freddy. Ciro pushes us off, his foot against the dock, his calf flexing at the effort, my stomach twisting.

It’s amazing how easy it is to untether yourself from solid ground.

Years of having to be so good in public have made me brazenly bad in private. When I think no one is looking, that’s when I do the thing that I know will hurt. Physical self-harm never appealed to me. But then, there are other ways to hurt yourself. I like to give myself something only to see it taken away. Because does anyone ever— honestly —enjoy a momentary pleasure? Can you have fun knowing you can never experience a joy or kindness again? I can’t.

But the loss reminds me I’m alive, I’m growing. Even if to the rest of the world, I’m frozen at the age of three, my father crouched in front of me in our driveway, explaining that my mother is dead.

It’s too hot to press up against Freddy, but I squeeze his knee. I want him to know I don’t do any of this to hurt him. I do it to hurt myself.

“I texted her,” I say to Ciro. “Told her we could swing back and pick her up if she makes it down in time. I hope that’s okay.”

Ciro nods. The boat isn’t his or ours; it’s a charter from Sorrento we reserved for the week. A Riva. Naomi’s favorite. All glossy wood and sleek lines. The swim platform wraps around the side of the stern as if it might suddenly become a rudder, sending us underwater, that’s how futuristic the whole thing is. It was supposed to meet Lorna at the dock last night. A trusted friend of Ciro’s, a brother almost, at the helm. I always expected it would be Ciro who drove her, Ciro who carried us that final leg. But after what happened yesterday, I didn’t want them alone together.

Still, Ciro was to follow the boat’s progress: wait until it left the marina, shadow its crossing, be in the wings if something happened. He gives no indication of what happened last night, his eyes watching the horizon as we expertly navigate between other boats.

“What do you think?” Ciro says after ten minutes have passed, throttling back.

“Looks great,” Freddy says, reaching for a cold bottle of beer from the cooler and cracking it open. “Anywhere looks great. It’s so fucking hot today. I just want to get in.”

He rubs his hands in delight, and I wonder, not for the first time, if I hadn’t been born a Lingate if I might have ended up like Freddy—optimistic to the point of oblivious. I envy him this. I always have.

Ciro brings us in along the cliffs and the floppy agaves that tumble down their faces. He drops the anchor, lets us drift until it catches. The only sound is the soft slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. Freddy is in the water before I even have a chance to strip off my cover-up. And as soon as he’s swimming away from us, Ciro reaches for my wrist.

“Aren’t you coming?” Freddy turns around in the water, looks back at the two of us. Looks at us like he sees it, all of it, our whole relationship, the whole plan, plain as day. But he can’t. I know he can’t. My body is slick with sweat from the sun, and I slip out of Ciro’s grasp. I take two quick steps to the gunwale and launch myself into the cool water of the Med.

—

There’s no explanation for how Ciro and I came to be—we always were. Like a reflex, a muscle memory. An addiction. We were young when it started, fifteen. That summer he was working in the garden at the villa as if he had materialized from nothing.

And of course, Ciro hadn’t just materialized. His mother, Renata, babysat me when I was a child. The villa’s housekeeper would take me to the small wooden door in the garden wall every morning and knock. We would wait, listening for the latch to be thrown, the door pushed open, and I would walk through. There, at the little house, in the little garden, Ciro and I played together, ate the crespolini that his mother made, lay on the cool concrete patio and sipped lukewarm sodas.

It was the closest I came to a normal childhood. She taught me how to say amore so that I sounded Neapolitan, like I finally belonged somewhere. And then she added: “Your mother spoke wonderful Italian.” Renata, unlike my own family, told me things about my mother. How much she loved me, how proud she would be of me. My mother, she said, was the reason she cared for me while my family was on the island. “We always hoped you and Ciro would play together. I can, at least, give her that.” Then she hugged me, her arms ropy and strong. I wondered how my life might have been different if I’d had Renata as a mother. If I’d had a mother at all.

There was no Capri in my childhood without Ciro in it, but then, suddenly, we were teenagers. At fifteen, Ciro made me realize how good hurting myself could feel. At home, I was too tall and thin. Too much the daughter of a murderer, as the kids at my high school liked to whisper after I passed. Money was supposed to make you popular. It just made me miserable.

Then there was Ciro—tan, funny, gorgeous. He knew about my family and didn’t care. A gift.

We sneaked away from the villa that summer to drink beers at the Gardens of Augustus after they closed. Ciro offered me a cigarette—my first—and the music from the bar next door allowed us to pretend our lives were bigger than just two teenagers on a park bench.

“I’m not a virgin,” he told me. “Are you?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

He didn’t say anything at first, but then he took my hand and turned to me and said:

“We should sleep together.”

I wanted to pull my hand away. To pretend that I had never thought about sleeping with Ciro—which was pretty much all I thought about that summer.

But I liked how matter-of-fact he was. No one in my life was blunt like Ciro. Honest. I was frozen, terrified of what might come next but desperate to find out. I let him move his hand from my arm, to my shoulder, to my breast. And then, when I couldn’t take him learning the truth, I ran. It would be four more summers before we finally fucked.

Then, when I was twenty-one, I begged my father to let me spend a year abroad in Rome. He only let me go, I know, to get me away from Alma, from all the Almas. I had to agree to video surveillance of the apartment and a nightly Skype at nine, during which it was mandatory that I be home. I was not allowed to leave the apartment following the call, and if I did, the surveillance would alert my father in L.A. It was the longest leash I would ever get.

Ciro came to meet me my second week there.

“ This is your apartment?” he asked.

It was in Prati. A nineteenth-century renovation on the ground floor with marble inlay everywhere and a pocket-size garden in the back. Two bedrooms, two blocks from the Tiber. A friend of Naomi’s owned it and never used it.

Crucially, there was a metal door to the alley that the gardeners used to get access. I used it to escape.

I was afraid to spend more than a week with Ciro. Worried that all those summer memories would break apart out of season. But he flopped onto the couch and crossed an ankle over his knee, took in the living room with its French windows and frescoed ceiling, and whistled. I met him on the couch and climbed into his lap. Finally, I was an adult.

First, he took me to the Villa Borghese, then to a trattoria in Trastevere. We ate and fucked and walked and did little else for almost a month before I said:

“Will you show me Naples?”

We were in bed in Prati, the sound of a woman calling her dog echoing through the open windows. I always loved that about Rome, the echoes.

“I don’t know if you will like Naples,” he said slowly, and I knew he was trying to telegraph one thing to me: Let’s not.

“I want to meet your friends,” I said.

He sat up. “It’s not like this.” He pulled back the sheet and made his way to the bathroom, ran the water in the shower. “It’s not Prati.”

“That’s okay,” I said. Because it was. “I still want to see it.”

“Maybe,” he said.

I got out of bed and walked to the door of the bathroom. I leaned against the jamb and watched him duck under the running water.

“No,” I said. “I want to go. Let’s go. Why don’t you want me togo?”

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll get us a hotel.”

“I don’t want a hotel. I want to stay in your apartment with your friends.”

It struck me then that it was possible none of them knew he was here, in Rome. With me. That I would be a surprise. That I was the secret.

“You think that,” he said, pulling the hair back from his face, “but I promise you a hotel will be better. I’ll find something.”

“I don’t want to see that Naples,” I said, taking two steps into the bathroom. “I want to see your Naples.”

He laughed. But there was no humor in it.

“Girls like you always think that.”

“What do you mean, girls like me?”

I knew what he meant. And I wanted him to say it. I was going to make him say it.

“You know,” he said, waving a hand through the water, soaping his chest, his balls.

When I didn’t say anything, he spit it out.

“ Rich girls,” he said. “Rich girls.”

I left him there in the shower and went out for a coffee. And then, later that week, I convinced my father I needed to go to Naples.

—

Naples was all noise and exhaust and bodies. Flows of people and cars and coffee, the sound of neighbors yelling from their windows above the street. And Ciro’s house, a two-room apartment he shared with four others, was not in a charming historic center, was not in Prati, but on the outskirts. In a concrete high-rise where laundry flapped constantly in the wind.

“You can see,” he said as he led me up the stairs, the elevator perennially out of service, “why I like to spend summers with my mother on Capri.”

I laughed as a group of children rushed past, hurtling down the stairs.

The interior of Ciro’s apartment was utilitarian and spare. Every object—the couch, the table, a leaning bookcase—tired. There were no rugs or curtains or elements of warmth, just an air of cigarette smoke and the sound of shirts snapping in the window. Ciro led me to the door of his bedroom, where two twin mattresses lay on the floor, their sheets a tangled mess.

I wanted to lean into him, to look at him and tell him I didn’t care. That I could do it. We could live here together. But I couldn’t.

We didn’t stay long—just long enough for an introduction to his one roommate who was there—and then Ciro led me back into the fray of the city. There was something about being here, with the shadow of Capri looming in the distance, that made me feel closer to my mother. She had spent two years in Venice, writing, working, living, before she met my father. Maybe that was why I could feel her here. In the heat and the bodies and the gestures. As if I could believe that she might turn a corner, come barreling toward us. And even when she didn’t, it was still okay, because I could imagine it.

Ciro took me to a pizzeria at the top of the funicular, to the flea markets, and, finally, to a simple hotel near the Piazza del Plebiscito. Despite my insistence, he had known me better than I knew myself.

“What do you do here?” I asked him, our fingers entwined on top of the crisp bedsheets in our room.

“What do you mean?”

“For work,” I said.

We had never really talked about it, although I knew he worked summers on Capri, ten, twelve hours a day during high season.

“There isn’t really work here,” he said after a minute. “Some. But it’s not easy to find.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked, facing him, my head supported by my hand.

“Why don’t you leave L.A.?” he asked me.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

Ciro was the only one who encouraged me to leave them, who believed I could. I rolled onto my back. Stared at the thin bit of pastel wallpaper peeling where it met the molding. After a minute, he asked:

“Do you ever think you could move here?”

It was the first time Ciro had stripped back his skin to show me his heart. And I could feel it, in the bed, the way it was vibrating, shaking. He trusted me with it.

“Are you asking me to move here?” I said.

“Not yet. And not here, to my apartment. Maybe somewhere else, a small house in the Veneto? An apartment in Milan. A—”

I breathed in the must of the room, the smell of the salt air. The thickness of the city.

“I love it here,” I said.

I didn’t necessarily mean Naples, but it didn’t really matter.

We were still young. So young that anything seemed possible. Even the idea of us. The idea of me here. Him believing it made me believe it, too.

So I said, rolling back on top of him: “Yes.”

—

I catch up to Freddy in a shallow eddy—all volcanic rock and glittering sun. The water gently jostling us up and down. I swim up to him and wrap myself around him, sloppily, apologetically. Freddy is the one thing I’m allowed to have. An imitation of the genuine article. The never-quite-satisfying replica. But without him, there would be nothing at all. And I love him for that.

They love him because he’s like us. His parents longtime friends of Naomi’s. Generations of compatibility, confidentiality.

I try not to hold that against him.

“Hel—” he says. He pushes me away, holds me at arm’s length. It makes me panic. I think he knows. About Ciro. About Lorna.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” he says. His hands drop from my arms.

“What’s up?” I say. I laugh. But there’s something inside me trying to claw its way out. My guilt, maybe. My fear.

He wades to shore and sits against a rocky outcropping, the only bit of sand the inlet has. I don’t know if I should join him, so I stay in the water, up to my shoulders, facing him. A few steps behind me, the water is overhead; the shallows always fall away so quickly on Capri.

His eyes search the shoreline, avoiding mine. His fingers move across the rocks around him, as if he’s feeling out the perfect, comforting texture. There’s a cold upwelling coming from the deep, from somewhere behind me.

“It’s something I did, Helen. Something I regret. That I haven’t told you about…” Still, he won’t meet my eyes, and my mind is ticking through the options—an affair, a lie, a divulgence, a work thing, an inappropriate moment or word or impulse. There’s so much terrain that could be covered by I did something.

“I…” Again, he trails off. As if contemplating the words causes him anguish.

I join him on the sand, and within a few minutes out of the water, the sun is blistering. “It’s okay,” I say. “We don’t have to talk about it now.”

The truth is, I don’t want to barter secrets. I know he doesn’t have enough to make it an even trade.

He scans the horizon, and I can see that it’s taken him hours, maybe days, to work up to this. Whatever it is. I worry that he’s telling me now. That it might have something to do with the necklace, withLorna.

So I ask: “Is it something that can hurt you?” I put my hand on his knee and search the side of his face. “Hurt us?”

“Define hurt, ” he says.

I don’t want to. I want Freddy to be the one easy thing in all of this, even if I don’t deserve it.

He kicks a leg out, toes dug into the sand, and finally looks me in the eye.

“It’s about Lorna,” he says.

Her name feels like a punch. Lorna.

“What about her?” I try not to snap the words at him, but I do. I’m running through the list of things he might say: he saw her last night, she never left the island, she left the country, she texted him, she’s dead. I don’t know. I didn’t even know he thought about Lorna.

Freddy’s shoulders drop and he shakes his head; his confidence slips.

“Never mind,” he says.

Never mind?

I try again: “How can Lorna hurt us, Freddy?”

“You don’t need to worry about Lorna.”

“How can you say that? Of course I’m worried about her! She never came home!”

“Lorna can take care of herself,” he says.

This only makes it worse. Lorna can take care of herself. The boat suddenly feels much farther away. The villa, my phone, my lifelines. There are consequences if this goes wrong. My life, already so narrow, could become even smaller, even harder to survive. Like my mother’s.

“You barely know her,” I say, my voice low, controlled.

“No,” he says, looking at me.

And I wonder, Is this it, is this the thing?

“You barely know her,” he says. “Lorna was big on the party scene before you met,” he adds quickly.

The party scene. As if that means something, as if I should recognize the words. But then, I know Freddy was the party scene. He spent the middle stretch of his twenties in and out of rehab, finally getting sober at twenty-seven. My family always liked that he had a secret of his own, a weakness. It gave him something to lose. These days, sober is no longer the right word, but neither is addict. I don’t judge him for it. The drinking is mostly under control.

“I know she drank. Her mother did, too. That’s why she quit. I know she didn’t get through school. So what?” I say.

I say it more for myself than for him. Because the truth is, I’m uncomfortable learning things about Lorna that I don’t know. And it worries me that Freddy knew her. Knew her and she never mentioned it when I introduced them three years ago. But then, there are things I’ve kept from her as well, things like Ciro. It’s too late now anyway, our one shared secret bigger than the rest.

“I’m just saying that she can handle herself, that’s all.” Freddy holds his hands up. He’s delivered his message; he’s done.

“Okay,” I say. I try to even out my nerves. “Okay. But if we haven’t heard from her by this evening, we need to do something.”

“Do you think she had anything to do with the necklace?” Freddy asks, the thought idle.

And I don’t. I didn’t. But I replay it anyway—that day at the office when it turned up. Her opening the box. Me reaching for it. Did she know it was coming?

But he doesn’t mean then—he means now, on the island.

“Do you even think it’s real?” Freddy asks, propping himself up on his elbows.

I look at Ciro, only a few yards away, rolling a cigarette at the back of the boat. I’ve never been good at telling the difference between real and fake, but this, this, I’m sure about.

“Yeah,” I say, “it’s real.”