Page 21

Sarah

July 18, 1992

Capri

“I won’t take too much of your time. I know you’re on vacation.”

Sarah’s agent’s voice crackled through the phone. There was only one phone in the entire villa, and it hung on the wall in the kitchen, its yellowed, stiffened cord dangling all the way to the tile.

“No, that’s fine,” Sarah said. “What do you need?”

“I just wanted to confirm that you and Richard have spoken? About the play?”

“Yes, of course. He read it.” Sarah wasn’t ready to tell her agent about his reaction, so she settled on the noncommittal: “We’re working it out.”

On the other end of the line, Sarah could hear shuffling papers, a throat clearing.

“I don’t know how to tell you this, Sarah, but his attorneys have been in touch. A preemptive cease-and-desist arrived the day you left. Our counsel has had to take several meetings already. There’s a lot of pressure on this thing, which is something we try to avoid. Perhaps you could talk to Richard. Get them to back off?”

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “What?”

“The attorneys—” her agent repeated.

He had threatened to sue, but Sarah had assumed there were still more negotiations ahead of them. Some light weaseling and hard bargaining. She hadn’t realized he had seen himself in the pages this clearly.

“No. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I get it. I’ll speak to him.”

“I know it’s a hard conversation to have on vacation,” her agent continued, “but if you could talk to him soon.”

“Of course,” she said.

“Because, Sarah…” It was there, in her agent’s voice, a tone she had never heard, high and uncomfortable. “If he doesn’t, the agency heads have made it clear we’re going to have to sever ties. Not my decision, of course, but we can’t face litigation from a client—”

“He’s not your client.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did.

“I’m so sorry, Sarah.”

—

By midafternoon, they were on a skiff, helmed by an Italian who spoke no English but did, apparently, understand lire . The glossy green dinghy was constantly rocked by the waves that crashed into the cliffs of Capri and surged back out to sea in a great churn of salt spray. They sat in the bow, arms against the railing, sun cupped out of their eyes. It had only taken minutes to find someone in the marina willing to rent them the gear and the boat. Naturally, Marcus had haggled over the price for almost twenty minutes before they all piledin.

Sarah had hesitated on the dock. Back at the house, she had tried to call Stan, to ask him if he could help her. Lend her an attorney, a little firepower against Richard. But he hadn’t answered. She was beginning to realize it wouldn’t be as simple as walking out, leaving. They wouldn’t let her go that easily. Even with a divorce, they might tangle her up in disputes like this for years, a slow-moving, suffocating revenge.

“Were you planning on joining us?” Marcus asked.

It would be so much easier, she thought, if they set sail and never came back. All three of them lost at sea. It made her almost giddy, just thinking about it. Sometimes it seemed like death was the only way she would truly be free of this family.

When she didn’t say anything, it was as if Marcus read her mind: “It’s perfectly safe.”

“Of course.” Sarah laughed.

Once they were aboard, their weight seemed like it might flood the boat; the gunwale dipped close to the waterline, and they occasionally took on water when the swells were big. Marcus bailed cheerfully. Below them, the seafloor fell away, the blue of the Mediterranean shifting from warm turquoise to navy. They were making their way to the tip of Anacapri, to a place not far from the Blue Grotto, where the shelf made for good diving and fishing.

“We should have hired something with a motor,” Richard said over the sound of the snapping sails.

“There’s an outboard,” Marcus said, pointing to a small contraption lashed to the back of the boat.

“This is more romantic,” Naomi said.

Sarah briefly wondered who would take care of Helen if the boat drifted off course, if they were all swamped and drowned. The thought strangled her the same way her agent’s words had— his attorneys have been in touch.

Within an hour, they were drifting idly, sail down. Their captain moved to the back of the boat to roll a cigarette, while Naomi and Sarah sorted through the diving equipment, passing flippers back and forth. Richard spit into a mask and cleared the lens.

“You’re not wearing your rings?” he said to her, the question so casual, so harmless, she almost didn’t hear him.

“They’ve been loose,” she said. It was mostly true. They were looser; she’d lost one in the house two weeks ago without noticing until Helen nearly choked on it. But also, she couldn’t bear to wear them.

This was what was so horrifying about the family, Sarah thought. They were so good at pulling a curtain across everything happening in the background. As if nothing was wrong. No lawyers called, no career in the balance. There was only the sun and the sticky saltwater and the imperative to enjoy themselves. It made her want to scream. Instead, she pulled back the rubber band on the speargun and anchored it into place. She tested the tip with her finger. It was pleasingly sharp.

Marcus—following an unsuccessful attempt to bum a cigarette off the captain—had already stripped off his shirt and was deepening his rich tan, lying on one of the wooden benches that lined the sides of the boat, a shirt flipped over his face.

“You’re not diving?” Naomi asked him.

He waved a hand. “You’re not supposed to swim so close to eating.”

Marcus lifted the shirt to look at his wife, who had donned fins and slung the second speargun over her shoulder.

“Are you really going to use that, Nom?”

“What, you don’t trust me?” she said.

“I don’t trust your aim,” Marcus said, feigning a gunshot with his hand.

At this, the captain laughed and gestured a throwing motion.

“He says we’re more likely to catch something with nets,” Sarah translated.

They had all been fishing together—in Baja and off the coast of Florida—sometimes from a boat, sometimes in the water. But that had been before. When the pretending came more easily. Now there was something about free diving with a speargun that matched the primal anger that curdled in Sarah’s stomach. The combination heady, making her feel nearly drunk in the sun with the rocking boat.

Sarah followed Richard into the water. Naomi came last, slipping over the gunwale. The first dip was bracing and briny.

The three of them swam toward the cliffs, a pod of snorkels. Sarah only paused to look back at the boat once. They were alone.

In the Med, there were no dramatic coral formations or colorful schools of fish. But there were sneakier surprises—small darts of silver and, occasionally, the shadow of something thick and menacing just outside of their vision. A tuna. A shark. Sarah kicked slowly behind Richard, letting the distance increase and allowing herself one delicious image of something pulling him into the blue depths. To take so much, and then take even more. It would have been unconscionable to anyone but a Lingate.

Sarah loved the wildness of Capri, the gradual familiarity she had built with the island, with the villa, with the person she had become who vacationed here. Capri may have seemed civilized to the countless visitors who traversed the island every day, but it was also a wild tangle of animals and rocks. They all became a feral version of themselves here.

Sarah dropped farther back behind Naomi and Richard. She lingered where the shelf fell away into a dark trench. She let the water bounce her, soothe her. Until she heard a scream, the pitch so high it carried underwater. And when she looked toward where Naomi and Richard should have been, all she could see was a massive silver body—a bluefin tuna. Six hundred pounds. Sarah nearly mistook it for a boat, but then she saw the slice of its tail, its twitchy movements.

Her heart in her throat, she pulled around her speargun and aimed. As soon as her finger found the trigger, she released it, shooting for the broadside of the fish. The spear arced through the water, a delicate stream of bubbles following its path. But before the spear could reach its target, the tuna moved, its body sending a shock wave through the water as it slipped back into the dark of the Med.

Richard’s cry came only seconds later. The spear had missed the tuna and lodged itself into the soft tissue of his calf. He had been right there, behind the fish. She hadn’t seen him.

But hadn’t she imagined what it would be like if Richard were—suddenly, inexplicably—gone? She had fantasized about it. Now he was here, in front of her, bleeding. She made it happen. Sarah felt strangely calm as she watched the blood work its way through the water, get picked up by the current. She ran a hand through a thread of it.

It took Naomi’s nails pressing into her arm—a silent What the fuck? Help! —for her to come to. They surfaced as a group, and when Richard kicked his leg, he screamed:

“I can’t move it—I need to take it out!”

He ducked his head underwater as if to pull out the spear.

“Don’t!” Sarah called, grabbing his arm to stop him. “It’s barbed!”

She felt him jerk away, felt the accusation in his movement.

“Don’t pull it out,” she repeated, the saltwater filling her mouth in waves she kept having to spit out. If he did, it would only bleed more.

She and Naomi grabbed Richard by his armpits, one of them on each side, and began to drag him toward the boat. Their progress was slow, and Richard wouldn’t stop crying—alternating between a low whine and a whimper. As soon as they were within earshot, Naomi called:

“ Aiuto! Aiuto! Help!”

Sarah watched the fisherman pull in his line and Marcus sit up, holding a hand against the sun.

“The spear—” Richard said, spitting saltwater out of his mouth now, too. “Sarah shot me!”

“There was a tuna,” Sarah said, but he wouldn’t stop.

“She shot me !” he repeated, his voice registering higher and higher the closer they got to the boat.

His accusatory tone calcified, reduced to something caustic. She hadn’t meant it. Dreaming about it wasn’t the same as doing it. But Richard didn’t care about distinctions like that.

“It was an accident,” Sarah said lamely. “I tried for the tuna.” But no one was listening to her.

When they reached the skiff, Sarah pulled herself in and turned to reach for one of Richard’s arms alongside Marcus. The fisherman took Richard’s waist. He slithered into the body of the boat, the spear hitting the hull with a thud. Richard cried, but didn’t touch the metal.

“Shit,” Marcus said.

Sarah could see how much blood there was now, the way it was pumping into the hull of the boat, the edges of the wound ragged and swollen with saltwater. Naomi struggled over the gunwhale.

“Oh god,” Marcus said. Then he touched the spear, an experimental hand, and Richard writhed, clutched his knee.

“Just get me the fuck out of here,” Richard said. “I need a doctor.”

The captain went to the back of the boat and began to pull on the choke of the motor, but it coughed and refused to start. Richard looked down at his leg, the blood now staining their towels, the gear, his thigh and swim trunks. There was nothing Sarah could do for him. Nothing any of them could do.

Naomi stepped in. She unrolled an already bloodied towel and wrapped it around the spear. Marcus removed his shirt and placed a makeshift tourniquet at the base of Richard’s knee. This, at least, seemed to stanch some of the flow. Under sail alone, it would be at least an hour until they reached the marina. The engine sputtered to life.

With Richard sitting, Naomi supporting the spear, and Marcus monitoring the blood, they made their way back to the island. The entire time, Sarah thought of the moments before she shot her husband. It had happened so quickly—the flash of silver, her finger on the trigger. It had been a mistake, hadn’t it? It couldn’t have been anything else. She had to take a chance with a fish like that, didn’t she?

At the dock, they were met by a car that took Richard to the local emergency room. Sarah knew he would have preferred, of course, to go to Naples, but it didn’t matter—it was just a wound at the end of the day. A wound that required almost twenty stitches and a course of antibiotics. And while the doctor sewed him up, Sarah told him the story, in Italian, about the tuna, about its size. As big as a house, she said.

“Things like that,” the doctor said through thickly accented English. “ Pfft, they only happen once. You must not let those opportunities get away.”

He understood.

“Yes,” said Sarah, “I know.”

—

They were walking through the Piazzetta on their way back from the doctor’s when Sarah stopped.

“I think you should go ahead without me,” she said.

Richard leaned on the cane he had been given, Naomi at his elbow.

“Are you serious?” he asked, his face florid. The bleeding hadn’t sapped his anger.

Marcus stepped between them.

She needed a table at the Bar Tiberio, a drink. She needed time away from them. She couldn’t tell them that she no longer trusted herself. That she wanted to replay the moments in the water over and over again until she was certain it had been an accident.

The island had shrunk since that morning, a through-the-looking-glass trick that made the streets shorter and the shoreline of Naples farther. Sarah worried about their remaining time alone at the villa. The walls were so thick, no one would hear her if she called for help. It wouldn’t be like on the water. There would be no captain, no doctor.

“Yes,” she said, firmer this time, “don’t wait for me.”

“It’s fine,” Naomi offered, putting a hand on Richard’s arm. “It’s fine.”

Naomi glanced at Sarah with a look that said, You don’t have to do this.

But she did.

“Fine,” Richard said. “Do whatever the fuck you want. That seems to be all you’re capable of anyway.”

She could have pointed out that she had spent four years doing exactly what he wanted. The perfect play-along wife. But she didn’t. She waited until they were out of sight, then she found a table under the awning. It was more private than the tables that created the perimeter of the Piazzetta. She wanted a few minutes to fade into the background.

It scared her, having that family as an enemy. But it also made her feel the way she used to on opening night, like anything could happen—chaos or brilliance. Both, if she was lucky.

The waiter came by and she ordered a glass of wine. There was still dried blood at the corner of her cuticle, and she wet a paper napkin and worked at it until the napkin was reduced to pieces, then she started at it with her fingernail. Digging. The waiter set her glass of wine on the table and ignored the mess.

“You’ve got to let that be,” Marcus said.

He slid into the seat next to her, an act that took considerable doing because of the crowds at the surrounding tables. Everywhere, a sea of chairs, cigarettes, bowls of potato chips, and drinks.

“This isn’t a good idea,” she said. “You should have gone with them.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. And it almost certainly matters to him.”

“No,” Marcus said, pulling out a cigarette from his back pocket and offering her one. She held up a hand, passing. “What matters is what happens now.”

When she didn’t say anything, he said:

“You’re angry.”

“I’m tired.” She took a sip of wine. “I want out. And for the record: it was an accident.”

Marcus sighed and wrapped his arm around the back of her chair and leaned in. Sarah had seen him make this move countless times—at dinner parties and work events—whenever someone’s feathers were ruffled or the tension had reached a fever pitch. Marcus-the-defuser. All broad smiles and easy laughter, the arm pulling you in closer.

Trust me. You’re overreacting.

Sarah had even written this habit into one of the characters in her play. The kind of man that men liked despite his position of power, not because of it.

“This will pass,” he said, raising a hand to the waiter and pointing at Sarah’s glass. “Take it from someone who has been in a relationship for nearly twenty years, marriages go through phases. This is just a phase.”

“So you’ve gone through a phase where you may have tried to kill your spouse?”

Marcus laughed. “You didn’t try to kill him. You hit his calf. Also, I thought it was an accident?”

“I thought it was a partnership.”

“All right,” Marcus said. And she could hear it then, the thing that underpinned the physical closeness, the ease, the broad smile—the moment Marcus transitioned to leverage, to transaction. That foundational Lingate impulse toward control. “Enough. You want to leave. He’s angry and won’t let you go without inflicting his own damage. So what’s next?”

Sarah brushed the crumpled bits of napkin off the table and onto the ground.

“I want a divorce. It’s the right thing for both of us.”

“Sarah—”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it.”

“Could I if I wanted to?” He sighed again and waited while his glass of wine was placed on the table; a bowl of olives came, too. Then, as soon as the waiter left, Marcus leaned in, so close that Sarah could feel his breath against her neck, and whispered, “I just want to be sure that my brother and I—that everything between us can stay as is. Despite what you’re going through. I don’t want to end up in a situation where this spills out into a source of conflict for Richard and me. We’ve had enough of those over the years.”

“Our divorce would have nothing to do with you and Richard. Nothing. ”

“Sarah,” Marcus said, lifting the glass of wine to his lips. “You know that isn’t true.”