Page 34

Helen

Now

Death—despite the sun and the heat and the profusion of life that crawls across Capri—is everywhere. Even next to the pool, where Freddy is reading the paper, the deck littered with bodies of bees and spiders and ants that haven’t yet been swept away.

“I have a surprise for you,” Freddy says, setting down the paper.

He seems untouched by the way everything around us is falling apart. Whatever he wanted to say to me in the water is either buried beneath the weight of the events of the last forty-eight hours or made immaterial by Lorna’s death. I envy him this calm. Even while part of me has learned not to trust it.

His eyes flash to my hands, my ears, my chest. He decides his secret is worth sharing. “I’ve made us a shopping appointment with a jeweler,” he says. “I thought it would be a good distraction.”

My heart crashes into my ribs. A jeweler. And also: a distraction. As if a ring or a tennis bracelet or a necklace could help me forget. Even though we’ve never talked about it, it was always assumed Freddy would propose.

“What do you think?” he says. An eyebrow shoots up. “Isn’t it Naomi who always says there’s nothing a good gift can’t fix?”

I want to laugh, but it comes out like I’m being lightly strangled instead. Freddy mistakes it for joy and folds me into his arms, a hand stroking my head.

“I could use a distraction,” I manage.

I say it as much for myself as to him. All the while knowing there is no distraction from the deaths. From my father’s confession. No gift can fix what has happened. No gift will empower me to leave them. Every hour I don’t go to the police makes me more complicit, more suspicious. I know that. They know that.

I didn’t bother to look for my father this morning. I knew he wouldn’t say anything more, wouldn’t even acknowledge the admission. That’s how we are. A quick leak of information and the gag slips back into place.

“Shall we?” He lets go, folds the paper, and looks at me. I’m wearing a swimsuit; it’s damp and smells of chlorine. My hair is still wet.

“Now?” I say.

“Did you have other plans?”

Although something like a plan is beginning to take shape, it doesn’t involve Freddy. So instead I say: “I’ll change.”

It only takes a few minutes to throw on a dress and a sun hat. And even though I expect the drawer to be empty when I pull it out, someone has returned it. My mother’s necklace. As if it was never gone. Its gold surface smeared with dull fingerprints, like it has been fondled. Or maybe I’m the one who hasn’t been able to stop touchingit?

You’re going to wear the scales off. That’s what Lorna said the day it arrived at the office. When I remember this, I see her again: the body, her hair dangling, the net.

I drop the necklace into my bag and meet Freddy downstairs.

—

“Can we slow down?” Freddy says when we merge onto the Via Tragara, swarmed by bodies moving from the funicular to the viewing point and back. I’ve always loved that about Capri—the crowds are contained. It’s like Venice that way. Two blocks off a main thoroughfare and it’s so silent it’s easy to believe you’re completely alone. The true luxury is always down the narrowest, quietest streets. The ones with the best views, the biggest palms, the obscuring tangle of fig trees.

“I didn’t realize—” I say.

I match his pace and spare a look behind us, but no one is there, even though I feel like someone should be. As if there are eyes on my back, even though the police surveillance only lasted that first day, even though my family is back at the villa. Freddy reaches for my hand.

We wind through knots of people moving from boutique to boutique as the shopping district takes shape. Reflective windows and fluttering, domed awnings shelter people who look just like us—discreetly hidden behind enormous sunglasses and hats. I pull my hat off and scrabble my hair into a ponytail. I don’t know why it matters, but it does. I’m sick of hiding things. Let them see, I think.

At the Piazzetta, we slip onto a side street lined with jewelry shops, the glitter in the windows matching the glint of the sun against the flat plane of the Mediterranean. Freddy holds one of the doors open, and an older man behind the counter—his hair shock white and his suit neatly pressed—greets us. The air-conditioning takes my breath away; my sweat congeals on my skin. He holds out his hand and I grasp it.

“Tomasso,” he says, pointing at himself. Then he gestures to a table in the corner. “Please, sit.”

On my way over, I peer into cases full of glinting stones. My mother’s necklace looks nothing like this. But my father never bought her anything new. Everything she had, everything I have, came from my great-grandmother, my grandmother. There are photos of them wearing the same pieces, generation after generation. The jewelry like a legacy or a curse.

“What would you like to see?” Tomasso asks.

When I don’t answer, Freddy offers, “Rings?”

He smiles at me for confirmation. I nod. Swallow.

“Perhaps some earrings, too?” I say.

It sounds like I’m being a bad sport, not wanting to join in on the fun. Rings! Most women would be ecstatic.

We look at a series of stones and settings. Four carats, five, six, and, finally, seven. They’re all too big. Freddy wants something like that, but I don’t. I don’t need it. I’m surprised to find that instead I need him to finish the conversation he started with me about Lorna in the shallows that day. Whatever it is, that’s the bright, sharp thing that would make me happy right now.

Predictably, none of the earrings suit me.

“Do you have anything antique?” I ask, and Freddy seems to light up, like in saying this, I have revealed some deep, authentic aspect of my personality he has never had access to.

Antique!

“Sì,” Tomasso says, “momento.”

He steps into the back room.

“What do you think?” Freddy asks, pushing a loose diamond with his index finger.

I want to say that it’s impossible to think about marriage right now. That I’m horrified he can. Maybe beneath Freddy’s implacable optimism is something closer to my father and uncle’s desire to pull things in closer. Is that the familiar thing that attracted me to him in the first place? Could I feel it?

“I think I want something more sophisticated,” I say, hoping he can read between the lines. Smaller. Distinctive. Further off.

Tomasso looks at me and holds up the ring he’s brought from the back, antique.

“Sì?”

It’s beautiful, but I change the subject. I pull the necklace from my bag.

“I wonder if you might help me,” I say to Tomasso. “This is a family piece, but I don’t know much about it.”

He sets down the engagement ring with the rest of the diamonds and takes the necklace from my hands gently, reverently even.

“Ah,” he says, turning it in the light.

When he does this, I can see how the necklace—a solid gold collar made up of writhing snakes—has delicately etched scales within the larger ones. And when he twists it, it looks like the whole thing is moving, slithering. He sets it on the counter and fumbles in the drawer behind him, pulling out a cloth and a small dropper bottle. He shakes the bottle, and applies one drop to the underside of the necklace. Immediately on contact, the solution begins to fizz. Before I can reach for the necklace, save it from dissolution, he wipes the liquid off with the cloth and buffs the piece.

“I think,” he says, “it is very nice. Not gold. But ben fatto, yes?”

A fake.

I am desperate for things that are real right now. Even if I always feared this. That the hallmarks on the back might have been faked. That this is one more cruel joke to add to the list—anonymous callers claiming to be my mother, ransom letters twenty years later, so-called secret letters written by my mother to her lover. Only this hoax pushed my family—pushed me —to extreme measures. It isn’t just the weight of the necklace I feel in that moment, it’s Lorna’s death.

Freddy can tell the tone of the appointment has shifted. He transitions into a lightly worn pout. He wants to talk about rings, not necklaces. And I wonder if I should let him, if I should just give in, let myself float along with the current that seems to buoy my family. It’s what, I realize, Naomi has always done.

I won’t let it happen to me, too.

Tomasso nods and passes me back the necklace, begins to collect the loose stones on the table and return them to their miniature cubbies. When he gets to the ring he has just brought out, he holds it up to me.

“You like antique?” he says. And then he points at the necklace. “Antica.”

“It’s just a fake,” I say. “A copy.”

He shrugs.

“ Forse ma, it’s old. Antica. ”

That might make it worse, that someone has found and sent me an old replica of my mother’s necklace. That they sought it out.

“Here,” he says, holding out his hands for the necklace. “Pinchbeck,” he says.

I have no idea what he means by pinchbeck, but I pass it back to him. He flips it over and opens the collar, reveals its clasp. Then he points a craggy finger to a cluster of markings where a faded star is visible.

“It was…” He makes a gesture with his hand, as if he’s running the Italian words through a rock tumbler, waiting until they polish into English. “A reproduction,” he finally settles on. “But”—he holds up his hand—“from the 1800s. Old,” he reiterates.

Antica.

Even so, he’s right—it isn’t the genuine article.

I nod, slip the necklace back into my bag; he scribbles the word pinchbeck onto a notepad for me and pats my hand. It feels like an apology for the fact we’re not leaving with a ring.