Page 19

Helen

Now

The villa is empty. And even though I didn’t expect Lorna to be here, some part of me hoped she might be. Waiting in the kitchen with a knowing smile, a wink. An acknowledgment we had won. But she’s not. She’s been missing for eighteen hours. Perhaps my father and uncle are alerting the police. Perhaps they’re there right now.

I know what the police would think—another missing girl, the Lingates. No. The police don’t know about Lorna. Only we do.

Freddy kisses me on the cheek and says he’s going to swim before dinner. He leaves me alone in the foyer, and I watch his progress through the garden to the pool, where he drapes a striped towel over a chaise and dives in. It sounds delicious but I don’t have time for a swim.

Instead, I take the stairs two at a time. On the second floor, I pass my father’s room, his door open, and pause. He doesn’t let the housekeeper in to clean while we’re here, but even so, his room is spare, as if inhabited by a monk.

He didn’t used to be that way, at least that’s what I’ve gathered. My parents used to live in the Bel Air house, hung with contemporary art and stacked with Imari plates, handmade wicker furniture and antique kilims, a housekeeper and nanny and gardener, all of whom were full-time. On staff. Gradually, he got rid of it all.

An aspiring Buddhist monk, one paper called him. Ascetic, said another. I had to look that one up. But all of it added up to the same thing: pretend poverty as penance. The art came down with the dishes. The walls were washed white. The staff became occasional contractors. His meals became regimented, Ayurvedic. He meditated every morning at six. The schedule, the cleansing, the fixation on purity, became just another form of control, of rigidity.

Or guilt. That was what everyone thought. He’s guilty.

But it wasn’t like that. It was almost like he thought he could touch her—my mother. Like she was just on the other side of this veil. And that everything else needed to be pared down so that he could devote all of his energy to this—to reaching her. Maybe, if he closed his eyes, emptied his mind, starved his body of anything processed, she might tell him what happened that night.

He has been guilty of so many things, but not murder. He isn’t strong enough for something big like that. His actions too small, too tight, too paranoid. He wouldn’t risk it.

I continue to our bedroom and shower quickly, washing away the salt. I brush my hair back, severe and tight to my scalp, and pull on a simple white dress, which I pair with the necklace. All day it has been calling to me, exerting this strange pull that I could feel even when we were on the boat, like an echo or a reverberation reaching me at sea. Fitting for Capri. It was near here that the Sirens supposedly lured sailors to their death. The chatter—the song—stops when I close the clasp at the back of my neck. It clicks into place, the metal cool, almost damp against my skin—and everything goes silent.

I try to imagine what my mother would tell me to do, what she did that week on the island. It would have been easy, over the years, to become obsessed with her death. The reason for it, her motivations, the how of it. I chose instead to focus on the woman she was when she was alive. The artist, the writer. There were always enough people fixated on her death. But now I worry it’s her death—this necklace—that might explain Lorna’s disappearance.

Beyond the French doors of the balcony, I can see Freddy asleep by the pool, his head listing to one side. I slip down the hall and into Lorna’s room. I pull open the dresser drawers and paw through her toiletry kit. I want to know what she’s taken with her—clothes, medication, jewelry, even her passport. But I find everything here. Her suitcase, I realize, isn’t even unpacked, as if she didn’t want to bother to hang things up, as if that kind of permanence might have been too large a commitment. Bedside, I find an abandoned cellphone charger. I wonder how much life she has left in her phone, if it’s really dead.

In the bathroom, I pull open the glass cabinet. Everything is where it should be—except for her toothbrush. I can’t find her hairbrush, either. A bottle of ibuprofen rests on the counter next to an empty glass. But nothing, really, has been taken. It’s a room that says, I’m coming home, I never planned to be out this late.

Her carry-on is on the floor, and I rifle through that too, finding her passport nested in the front pocket. I set it on the floor next to me and pull out everything else: receipts and cords, a box of gum and a pair of earplugs—the classic detritus of travel. But I feel something else through the pocket, something in the interior. I shake it out, emptying it onto the ground, and with the second strong shake, it comes out, a rectangular box, still in its plastic— test di gravidanza, it reads across the front.

A pregnancy test.

“What are you doing?” Naomi’s voice is silky, each word sliding into the next, and even though I am surprised to hear her, I take my time before turning around. I do my best to keep the pregnancy test behind my back.

“I was just checking to see if Lorna’s phone is here,” I say. I lean back so she can see the bag but not the pile of refuse behind me. I didn’t even think about Naomi. Naomi, who was probably asleep while I showered, while I rifled.

“Why would she leave her phone?” Naomi asks.

She’s dressed for dinner: a pair of wide-legged white linen pants and the smallest of blue camisoles. Huge pearls circle her neck and wrists, dangle from her ears. Even now, she still looks like a child—birdlike and wondrous. Her progressively aggressive surgeries have helped maintain that scrubbed-clean look, despite the drinking. She takes a step into the room.

“She’s been leaving it here,” I say. “I don’t know why.” It’s the truth.

Naomi moves her body in a way I’ve never seen—quick and sinuous, like a snake striking—and suddenly she’s past me and looking at the contents of Lorna’s bag, scattered on the floor. She nudges the pregnancy test with her sandaled foot, and the plastic crinkles against the terrazzo floor.

“Oh.”

It’s all she says. A sad little slip of a word— oh.

I’m gripped by the inexplicable urge to tell her it’s mine, that Lorna was holding on to it for me. But I can tell that even if I said it, she wouldn’t believe me.

—

We’ve picked the body of the fish clean; only its unseeing eyes and translucent bones remain. The whole table looks like a still life of expired excess. A reminder of our own mortality.

My uncle pours more wine. He’s like Bacchus, pouring, pouring, pouring, all of us sloshing around in this big sea of liquid. An elixir. A poison. I’ve drunk so much I’m not sure I can tell the difference anymore. They have, too. Concerns about Lorna and the money blunted by the booze and a reassuring conversation with the family attorney earlier.

No one has heard from Lorna, not Marcus or my father. But still, they’re sitting here drinking, laughing. Marcus’s arm draped languorously over Naomi’s chair, my father smoking a Gauloise. None of them seem to feel any sense of urgency. Ten million in the wind and zero cares. About the money. About her.

Before we sat down to dinner, I cornered my father in the kitchen.

“I think we should call the police.” I searched his face as I said it, trying to tell him without words that I might do it myself if they didn’t take this seriously.

“We have people looking into it,” my father said. He didn’t elaborate. “We don’t need the police, Helen.”

He reached toward me, his hand suspended in the air before it came to rest on my shoulder, but only for a second. He withdrew it. As if he realized a moment too late that the gesture was a mistake, made by a foreign limb he couldn’t control.

“Please be patient,” he said. “And in the meantime, let’s keep this to ourselves.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And, Helen?” He paused. “Could you please stop wearing that necklace?”

I am wearing it now. At dinner.

“I saw Werner today,” my uncle says, “ran into him on the patio in front of the Quisisana. He’s invited us to Li Galli. Apparently he restored Massine’s theater there? They’re hosting some production. I don’t remember the name. A ballet, maybe?” He waves a hand, like all private islands are the same, all ballets, too.

Freddy squeezes my shoulder and whispers in my ear: “I’m sure she’s fine.”

And when he says fine, it feels like there’s an electrical current running along the surface of my skin. Like I’m becoming a conduit for some spectacular lie. It’s fine. She’s fine. Even though he doesn’t have a clue.

The night is loud—full of insects and music and the sound of people finishing dinner at the restaurants up the hill from our villa. I can even hear the water slapping against the boats anchored in the marina. And I know why my skin is electric—I’m being haunted. The necklace, the drone of conversation, the abundance of wine. It must have been just like this, thirty years ago. The same conversation. The same table. Did they wait to call the police for my mother? Worried, like they are now, that the ripples from such a call—the energy—might fly into the night and come back to shock them?

For a minute, I see Renata, Ciro’s mother, making her way from the house across the garden. And then she’s gone. The flicker, so quick, so terrifying, that I start to worry I’m incapable of seeing anyone for who they are.

“Let’s give it until tomorrow,” Freddy says, laying a hand on my arm. “Maybe she’s fallen in love.”

Can he feel the current?

“So what do you think?” my uncle asks.

“About?” Naomi weaves in her chair, enough that her earrings knock gently against her neck.

“Li Galli . Should we go?”

“What are Li Galli?” Freddy asks. But no one answers him.

“Why not?” my father says.

He lets Marcus do most of the talking, but now that he’s come to life, there’s a casualness in his voice that makes me uncomfortable. He’s confident we’ll resolve the Lorna problem quickly, out of public view. After all, it would be impossible to go to a place like Li Galli—Capri’s famed private archipelago of rocks—or accept an invite from someone like Werner with news about Lorna in the press.

In fact, the confidence feels outsize. More than an attorney might be capable of instilling. Like he knows where she is. Like they all do. I replay the contents of Lorna’s carry-on—receipts, cords—and realize what wasn’t there: her laptop.

“I’m going to use the bathroom,” I say, standing from the table. I walk away before anyone can stop me.

Inside the villa, I take the stairs to Lorna’s room. I sit down next to her carry-on, which I had carefully repacked. And there, inside, is her computer. I don’t even need to power it on. Once opened, it takes me directly to her desktop. No password protection. It’s unusual for a work computer, the laptop issued, I know, by my uncle. But even more unusual is the fact that the entire desktop is empty. No files, no folders. When I click into her inbox, everything has been deleted. Every application I open is empty.

Recently opened—blank.

Downloads—blank.

Browser history—wiped clean.

Whatever she found, Lorna hasn’t left a record at all.

It’s familiar, the feeling that they’re always two steps ahead of me, always just far enough in front to block the exit. Because I know they’re the ones who did it—my father and uncle. They’ve had the laptop all afternoon. They knew something was wrong when she wasn’t home this morning.

I put the computer back and stand. Lorna’s bed is still made, but now I notice that the bed skirt on one side of the bed is tucked up, pressed between the mattress and the box spring. I rip it out, thinking of my fucking family. But when I do, a small bit of brown comes with it, just the slimmest edge of something. I pull fiercely.

The whole manila envelope slips out seamlessly. And inside I find ninety or so pages. Aged, faded, thin. I lift out the first page. It’s a title page that simply reads: Saltwater. By Sarah Lingate.