Page 30

Helen

Now

The carabinieri leave an officer at the end of the Via Marino Occhio. He leans against the facade of a luxury hotel and watches the tourist girls. He has been so busy watching the girls, in fact, that he has missed my father. Who slipped out, it seems, while Marcus was on the phone with the attorney.

“None of you,” Marcus says, “will say a word without his consent.”

He looks at Freddy, too, who nods, relieved he won’t need to call in his own counsel.

We’re clustered in the study on the first floor. It’s small, with a single fan blowing humid air back and forth. I’ve begun to notice places in the villa where the whitewash is peeling, little areas of mold blooming on the walls. It looks new, but maybe it’s always been here? The decay.

In my hand, my phone vibrates. Ciro’s name flashes on the screen.

“I’m going to take this. Excuse me,” I say, leaving them in the study.

“Not a word,” Marcus calls after me, and I lift a hand.

I know. I’ve already made that mistake.

“Hello?” I answer as soon as I’m out of earshot.

“Helen—”

“Why are you calling me?” I say. I step into the kitchen, where I can be alone.

“I think you should come to the Villa Jovis,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.

The sun is beginning to set, but I imagine the Villa Jovis has held on to the heat. It sits, without shade, on a flat, hot precipice at the eastern side of the island.

“Your father is here,” Ciro says. “He…” Ciro is searching for thewords. “Ha i nervi a fiori di pelle.”

Nerves on the surface of his skin. He is not alone.

“He won’t come away from the Salto. He’s sitting right at the edge,” Ciro says.

I don’t want my father to be my problem. Not now. But maybe I can leverage this: the fact he’s at the Salto and my uncle is here.

“I’ll come as quickly as I can,” I say.

Before I leave, I take the stairs to my bedroom and pull out a bag. I place the manila envelope containing the copy of Saltwater on the bottom and load other things on top—my wallet, my phone, a handful of receipts—just in case the carabiniere stops me. I can’t leave it here and risk my family or, worse, the police finding it.

I hurry. I have to beat them there—my uncle, the police. If my uncle knew my father was on the Salto, he would take over. He would bundle my father up and lock him in the villa. He would have Bud here in a matter of minutes to explain the playbook. Weakness like the one my father is currently displaying cannot be tolerated from a Lingate. That’s how my father has always been seen by his brother—as a weakness.

I hope he’s right.

—

The Roman emperor Tiberius ruled the empire from this stack of ancient stones, the Villa Jovis. Then it was an elaborate palace complex, designed to prevent his assassination. Now it’s a moldering collection of subterranean rooms carved out of the limestone. Maybe we are all ruins, enduring against the permanence of the sea, the sun, our grief.

My father sits at the edge of the Salto. To get there, he has scaled the metal fencing that rings the viewing platform.

Ciro meets me on the stairs. “He has been here for almost two hours.”

“How did you find him?” I ask.

“A friend who takes tickets recognized him. When he refused to leave the cliff’s edge, he called me.”

Although I came, now that I’m here, I don’t know what to do. Lorna’s body was found floating just below where my father sits. And when I blink, I see my father pushing her off a boat, holding her under.

Am I here to comfort him? If so, no one ever taught me how.

“You don’t have to go out there,” Ciro says.

“I do,” I say.

I owe it to my mother, to Lorna. I owe it to myself.

I slip over the railing and traverse the overgrown path that leads to the Salto . My foot kicks loose a stone, and it echoes, gathering speed as it tumbles down the cliff face. Even so, my father doesn’t turn to see me. His lips move, his eyes closed.

“Dad,” I say. It’s a whisper at first. But then I realize I’ll have to be louder. There’s a wind picking up, stealing my words. I say it again. I never call him that. Dad. I sound like a child.

He doesn’t turn toward me, but I’m closer now. I can touch him. I settle a hand on his shoulder.

“Dad—”

He startles. His eyes open. As if he’s surprised he’s here on this ledge, on this island.

“Helen.” He looks up at me but doesn’t stand. His eyes are bloodshot, his linen pants pulled tight against his crossed legs. It’s both terrifying and empowering to see him this vulnerable. To see any of them scared.

The scene is at odds with the manufactured glitter of Capri: how quickly we’ve gone from luxury boutiques and private villas to a tangle of heather and a strip of stone.

“Helen,” he rasps, his voice catching in his throat. “It’s my fault.”

At first I think he means Lorna. But the words of the article recite themselves like a taunt. New evidence. Reopened. Lingate.

“Whatever happened,” I say, “let’s figure it out.” I say it even though I came here to figure him out. But it’s a reflex, this urge to console. So instinctual it makes me nauseated, almost dizzy. A sudden, cellular reminder that maybe I have been foolish thinking I could get some distance from him, from all of them. That maybe, despite how much I’ve fought it, I’ve always been one of them. Isn’t that what family is? A cult you can never leave, a set of behaviors that are burned into you?

He shakes his head. I squat down so I’m at his level. It’s the kind of thing he never did for me as a child. And when I finally look him in the face, I can see he has been crying, is still crying. I have never seen my father cry. The sight sets off a slow, melting spiral that gathers steam and pushes faster and faster into something like blind fear.

I am both desperate for him to tell me everything and horrified that he might. I look at the sea below us and see a shadow beneath the water’s surface. A fish or a dolphin, perhaps. But it quickly morphs into a body. Lorna. My mother. I look behind me to see if Ciro is there. Ciro should be there. But he’s gone. We’re alone on the Salto. The sun nearly below the rim of the Mediterranean.

“Ciro?”

I call for him.

But there’s no answer. Even if he’s there, he wouldn’t hear me over the wind.

My father reaches for my arm and his hand is cold.

“I can’t do this again, Helen,” he says. “I’m so tired.”

He looks gaunter on this island. In three days his cheeks have become sunken and a greenish tinge has spread from under his eyes toward his temples. It strikes me that I haven’t seen him sleep since we arrived. And I know he’s telling me the truth: he can’t do it; he is tired.

“What can’t you do?” I say. “You don’t have to do it alone. Let me help.”

Tell me.

My father begins to sob.

“I have tried,” he says, “for years, to make up for it. I never meant any of it. It was always an accident. I’m a good person. I was a good person. But I made a mistake. And now they want to bring it all back. Bring all of it back. Helen—” He looks at me, his face wet, and the feeling of panic returns. This isn’t about Lorna. It’s not about the money or the trust. It’s about a past I never wanted to look closely at to begin with. Because we were a family. He was my father.

I’m frozen on the Salto . I owe him this. Even if I had the money, I’m not sure I could escape this, the sheer obligation of my blood.

“Whatever it is,” I say—and I don’t mean it—“whatever it is, you can tell me.”

It sounds like something I’m supposed to say. When what I want to say is, Let me go. Get the fuck away from me. You’re a monster.

But he can’t tell what I’m thinking; he never could. My father barely knows me at all. Maybe if my mother had lived, if our family had been more normal, he might have figured out a way. But he didn’t.

“You don’t understand,” he says to me. “I loved her.”

“I loved her, too.”

It might be true about either of them, I realize—my mother or Lorna.

“No.” He shakes his head, like an even worse sadness is waiting for him. “Sometimes when I’m here, I think I see her. Your mother. It’s like a hallucination. I can’t control it, it just…”

He doesn’t finish, but I don’t need him to. Because I know what he means. At the funicular. In the water. I see Lorna everywhere. He’s cursed me with these visions, this smear of guilt.

I want him to keep going. At least I think I do. But I’m worried about what I might do if he tells me here. What he might do.

I try to stand. To pull him up with me. But he won’t budge from the cliff’s edge.

“She’s haunting me,” he hisses.

I know what he means.

“Let’s go back to the house,” I say. “Marcus will know what todo.”

My father laughs. But there’s no humor in the sound.

“Oh yes. My brother always knows what to do. And he never lets me forget it.”

I pull harder now. I look behind me for Ciro. I need him to come help me, to get my father, physically, up.

“But what now?” my father continues sadly. “Now that they’ve reopened the investigation. She’s come back, hasn’t she? Maybe she was always going to come back.”

“Let’s go back to the villa,” I say.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.” I want us—both of us—to get off the Salto. Because it feels too easy out here to jump, to push, to fall. Did Lorna know this about me? That I wasn’t ready for the truth? That I could handle the villa, the shadow of her, but not the reality of my family?

My father jerks away from me.

“I just need you to know that I didn’t mean it,” he says. “Do you believe me?”

“Dad—” I say.

His hands are pressed hard and flat against the ground, ready to push him off and into the abyss.

He asks again: “Do you believe me?”

I say yes. What other choice do I have?

“Then you should know,” he says, “you should know I killed your mother.”

There’s a solemnness to the pronouncement, but he doesn’t hesitate when he says it: ikilledyourmother.

“What about Lorna?” I ask.

I don’t know how I manage the question, I only know that I haveto.

He looks bewildered. “Who?” he asks.

“Lorna?” I say again.

“I’m talking about your mother.”

He says it slowly, enunciating each word like he’s explaining something to a child. And I’m not sure what he expects my response to be, but it’s immediate. I leave him on the Salto. I don’t care if he jumps. Falls. I nearly trip on the path back to the ruins of the Villa Jovis.

I hear him behind me, calling after me. But it doesn’t matter because all I can hear is the echo.

I killed your mother.

I killed your mother.

I killed your mother.

And then, before I can run down the steps back to town, two hands grab me and pull me into the remains of Tiberius’s Roman baths.