Page 18

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance: 10

We’re back at the villa—after I nearly drowned Helen, after lunch, after the slushy lemon ices we ate on the Belvedere di Tragara on our way back from the beach club—and the sun is finally behind Monte Solaro. Freddy tips a pitcher of sangria the housekeeper has left for us into a glass. It’s that in-between time I didn’t know existed until I met rich people: cocktail hour. Drinks before dinner. An hour to ease themselves into the labor of conversation. Here, on Capri, it’s sacred. Like church.

Usually it doesn’t bother me to be around alcohol. But today, I envy them the anesthetizing flush that spreads across your face after the first sip, the way the liquid softens your thinking, makes life more palatable. Because without it, a loop from the afternoon keeps playing in my mind—me pulling Helen under, Helen gasping for air, Helen whispering Let’s not tell Freddy, and the two of them laughing on the way back to the villa, sipping their lemon ices like nothing had happened. Like nothing had ever happened.

She’s sitting next to me at the table, wearing the necklace. The snakes twisting around her neck. Their red eyes match the flush of her cheeks. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’re watching me, doing the work on Helen’s behalf. It’s unnerving how calm she seems after what happened. Like she washed it off with the saltwater.

It must be a consolation to her father that she’s not a complete clone of her mother. She looks like him, too. The way her nose turns, the distance between her eyes.

I was told once that all daughters resemble their mothers more than their fathers. It’s in the genes, they say. That extra helping of my mother’s genes still terrifies me. I know I have her addiction; it found me early. It’s the rest of her I’m afraid I might see in the mirror one day: the weakness and poverty and helplessness. Or the violence. Maybe that’s what came out of me in the water— her.

Did she ever think that I would go from the filth of her apartment to this? Not that I’m sure this is better. At least at my mother’s house, it was easy to know what to worry about—avoid the bottles, her boyfriends, and the expired milk. Naomi has the same orange bottles on her bedside table my mother did; their labels read lorazepam, Dazidox. The size and shape of the pills familiar.

That’s the thing about people like the Lingates, like Stan, and even places like Capri. You can’t tell what’s truly bad. Was it the boat of Italians pulling up the ladder? Or is it this family, drinking and nibbling on snacks? Is it me?

When I first started going to parties, I used to think the older men—the ones with white hair, who seemed to be doting and slow—would be the safest place to start. They were a father, sometimes a grandparent. And that made it worse, somehow, when it turned out they were the roughest. The cheapest. The most perverse.

They like that you can’t tell. That’s the whole point. Helen knows it, too.

When I first met her, it was easy to mistake the material facts of her life as evidence of care—the house, the allowance, the driver, the way she was shielded from the outside world. But I once dropped something off at Richard’s house and saw it—her hesitation. Recognized it immediately. When I asked if I could use the bathroom before I left, she stilled, if only for a second. But long enough for me to realize this wasn’t Helen’s house, not really. It was the same hesitation of other pretty young girls who answered doors around the city.

I’m sorry, he’s not home.

No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.

She said, “Of course,” and let me inside. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.” She motioned to the bathroom at the end of the foyer, and then to the kitchen, which was through a large living room.

“Thanks,” I said.

I passed a wood-paneled room, a study, the door open. There was a desk, dead center, and a handful of books and picture frames, all of which looked like they hadn’t been moved in years. Otherwise, it was bare. Marcus kept an array of rare coins on his desk, a carved jade paperweight, a handful of old, scratched fountain pens. A scattering of objects he picked up, turned over. Threw, on occasion.

Richard’s study was nothing like that.

I paused, then stepped inside to examine the two framed pictures kept on the credenza nearest the door—one was of the family under a lush green canopy, the four of them with a man and a woman I didn’t recognize. It looked like Capri. Naomi wore a white dress pulled off her shoulders. Sandals on the women. Sarah—tan, radiant. The woman next to her was equally bronzed and looked like she could be her sister. Only, I noticed, she was holding a tray. The whole photo had a snapshot quality to it, and when I looked at it again, I realized the man I couldn’t initially identify was Stan. Younger, fresher, but with the same dour expression.

That was how I learned Stan knew the Lingates. That whatever was going on with Marcus wasn’t a glancing insult. It was personal.

I slipped into the bathroom but found there were no locks. There hadn’t been any on the door to the study, either. Three locks on the front door, but once you were inside, any expectation of personal space dissolved. I ran the water, flushed the toilet, and stared into the mirror until I felt like enough time had passed. And then I found Helen in the kitchen.

“Do you want some water?” she asked.

She was always like this, a hostess. Unfailingly polite. She pulled a bottle of sparkling from the fridge and passed me a glass.

“These are the same glasses Marcus has,” I said, holding it up to the light.

“Mm-hmm,” Helen said. “We also have them at the beach house and the Aspen house. I guess it’s easier.”

“I thought the point of being rich was that you could choose whatever you wanted?”

Helen didn’t flinch. She looked me squarely in the eyes and said:

“Oh no. There’s never a choice.”

—

They arrive as a group—the three of them, Naomi, Marcus, and Richard—with Marcus carrying a silver tray as wide as his chest, loaded with glasses, two oranges, a can, and a selection of bottles that contain dark liquid. When he sets the tray down, its handles are curved like shells. I recognize the glasses on the tray immediately, Richard has the same ones. I nearly laugh.

“Negronis,” Marcus says, “and an aranciata for Lorna.”

He cracks the can, pours it into the heavy highball with diagonal etching, and drops in a few ice cubes from the sweating bucket Richard has carried out.

I take a sip of the soda; it’s sweet and bitter all at once, and it wets my dry mouth, which still hasn’t recovered from our swim.

“Have you heard from the shipping company yet?” Marcus asks me. He eyes Helen’s neck, her snakes, while he runs a bit of orange rind around the rim of a glass.

That morning, before the beach club, Marcus had asked me to start an inquiry with the shippers to locate the port of origin for the necklace. I filed it and forgot because I knew what would turn up: a small courier in Naples. No videos, no credit card receipts.

“Let me check.” I pick up my phone from the table and scroll through, trying not to stiffen as I dismiss a missed call from Stan. Marcus begins to mix drinks.

It’s there, the response to my email. It arrived only thirty minutes after I sent the inquiry, and the part of me that works for them, the assistant part of me, kicks my heart rate up a notch. I’ve slowed the system. The job of assistants—good assistants—is to expedite it. Even if the information will ultimately prove fruitless.

“Anything?” Richard asks.

He’s antsy, his eyes moving from Helen’s neck to my phone. The necklace seems to have shaken Richard-the-guru, and Richard-the-suspect is peeking out—jittery and quick-tempered.

“Yes, actually, it came in this morning.” I never lie about timing; Marcus almost always asks for things to be forwarded. “A private outfit in Naples on Via Monteoliveto. No credit card receipt.”

Helen is wearing it, I know, because they hate it. It’s a reminder of her. But they can’t say that, not with me and Freddy here, not if they want to maintain the fiction that it was an accident, a tragic mistake. I can’t help but admire it, how smoothly they pretend. It’s the only thing about them I understand: the pretending. There’s a special kind of theater to it. Only I know it will slip. It already has in the set of Marcus’s jaw, Naomi’s blown pupils, Richard’s fluttering hands.

I reach for the orange sitting on the tray. The juices have spread across the silver, staining the neat stack of cocktail napkins the housekeeper must have organized for them. I can already see it floating in my drink—the perfectly round slice, the real fruit bleeding into fake. I’m holding the knife, sawing through the flesh, when next to me Richard says:

“By the way, we’re going to join Stan on his boat for dinner.”

The knife slips.

“Fuck,” I say, pulling my bloodied thumb away from where it had been holding the fruit at its base. I stick it in my mouth, and the flavor tells me right away the cut is bad.

“Let me see,” Marcus says, dragging my hand away from my mouth, and I let him look it over, wrap it in a dozen cocktail napkins.

“I think it will be okay,” I say.

It felt like I kissed the bone.

“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Naomi says.

And I see it, the way she’s watching Marcus. Her eyes sliding back and forth between my hand and his. This trip is her first opportunity to supervise our interactions close up, and I wonder if that’s why he invited me. To prove to his wife he hasn’t been sleeping with his assistant. I would laugh—Marcus is the only one who has never made me uncomfortable, not like that—but for the pain, which is now setting in, a deep, thick aching.

“I’m calling a doctor,” Marcus says, and he steps away from the table, scrolls through his phone, holds it to his ear.

“It’s fine,” I say. But they’re all looking at the cocktail napkins, the cocktail napkins I have already bled through.

“Let us get you a doctor,” Helen says. “I promise we won’t leave without you.”

I don’t know if she realizes her promise is really a threat. Maybe she does.

—

Marcus cradles my wrist while the doctor puts in three tidy stitches, his thumb resting idly against my vein. It’s impossible to imagine there’s still blood in there after how much I’ve bled, but of course there is. Lots of it, in fact.

“How does it feel?” Marcus asks me.

“Fine,” I say.

It’s the truth. I’ve had worse.

I try to wrest my arm free, but the concierge doctor tuts. When he arrived, in neatly pressed chinos and carrying a black leather bag, Marcus offered to go in with me. Now the doctor pulls a piece of black thread through my thumb, and I wish it were worse. Bad enough that no one would expect me at dinner.

“Do you feel up to running an errand tonight?” he asks me quietly.

The envelope.

“Of course,” I say. “I could go now, if you like.”

I sound too eager, even to myself.

“No.” Marcus shakes his head. “Have you noticed Stan talking about Sarah recently? Just in casual conversation.”

“I haven’t,” I say.

It’s an empty echo. Stan can’t help himself. But he’s not the only one—so many people are always asking about Sarah. Maybe they never stopped.

“You don’t think he could have sent the necklace?” he says, his voice low.

“Stan?” I ask.

I stare longingly at the doctor’s bag, wishing I could fish out a bottle of benzos or oxy or just a muscle relaxant, for fuck’s sake. I need something to help me get through anything having to do with Stan.

“Maybe tonight you could just listen? Talk to whoever else might be on the boat? See what Stan says while we’re not around? And then afterward, we might need you to go to shore. Late.”

“Whatever you need,” I say.

I’m better. Less earnest. I’ve stopped bleeding.

“I’ll let you know later,” Marcus says.

They haven’t decided if they’re going to pay. Not yet, at least. The rich are always so cheap. Maybe Helen was right and we should have asked for five million. She never wanted ten. I did.

“And would you mind talking to Naomi tonight? I know she can be difficult, but earlier, while you were out, she was telling me how much she would like to get to know you. You understand, don’t you, the delicate balance between a wife and an assistant? Particularly an assistant who looks like you.”

I smile. I use my uninjured hand to pat his knee. I’ve gotten quite good at offering privileged men absolution. The service isn’t free, but it’s in high demand. I learned that from them.

“Of course,” I say. “She has nothing to worry about. I’ll make that clear.”

Marcus nods, satisfied.

“Just be sure,” the doctor says, “no alcohol or blood thinners. And try to keep your heart rate down. It will only make it bleed more.”