Page 36

Naomi

July 19, 1992

Capri

The lights in the living room were low. So low that Naomi thought she and Marcus were purposefully hiding in the shadows. She lay on the couch, her body pulled farther and deeper into the cushions by the weight of her exhaustion, her drinking. An upholstered quicksand. Marcus sat across from her, rigid and upright in a chair. His foot tapped idly to a beat from somewhere on the island.

A steady, pumping beat. One that felt like it could move blood, animate a body.

She closed her eyes. Maybe when Richard got home, they would turn the lights back on. Naomi knew there would be repercussions. Especially after he had followed Sarah into the night. But it was getting late. Or early. She couldn’t really remember what time they had gotten home. She let the sleep come up from her toes.

—

“Where is she?”

It was the force of the question that woke her.

Where is she?

Naomi almost sat up and asked: Who?

But then, of course, even through the sleep and the thick heat of summer, she knew. Sarah.

Where is she?

Naomi didn’t dare open her eyes. She heard footsteps approach the couch, felt someone’s breath on her cheek.

“Darling?” her husband whispered in her ear.

Naomi kept her breathing even, throaty. Marcus tried to slide an arm under her legs, under her back, but she made her body heavy.

“I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” he whispered.

“She’s blacked out,” Richard said. “Just leave her.”

Marcus tried again, but Naomi knew he wouldn’t be able to carry her all the way up the stairs, not if she stayed limp. When he pulled his hand out from under her back, she had won. The hardest part now was to keep her eyes closed, not pinched shut, but naturally, seamlessly asleep.

The record hit the end of the side, and Naomi listened to someone flip it over. She heard the spark of a lighter, the delicate clatter of a glass. The room smelled like mold and brown alcohol. The whole island was that way.

Where is she?

“What happened, Richard?” Marcus asked again.

They weren’t near her, Naomi could tell that much. They were clustered around the bar cart, their voices low but not hushed. They didn’t want to wake her. It would be so much more complicated if they wokeher.

“Where’s Sarah?”

The room was silent. A painful, gaping silence, one that lasted long enough for Naomi to consider opening her eyes to see if they were still there, but then she heard him. The sound was something guttural, like from an animal. Then the soft muffle of bodies coming together. Richard was crying.

“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I followed her,” Richard said. “But she kept getting ahead of me. Almost like she was trying to lose me. I kept trying to run to keep up. But—”

Richard took a ragged breath, a sip of something. Scotch, probably.

Then Richard’s voice was closer to Naomi.

“You don’t think she can hear us, do you?”

“She’s blacked out,” Marcus replied. “If I carry her upstairs, that’s only more likely to wake her up. Stop being so paranoid. We need to take care of this now. Before morning.”

“Okay.” Another ragged breath. Another sip. “I finally caught up to her. On the stretch of road up to the Villa Jovis. She climbed over the wall into the Parco Astarita—that little garden below the villa, the one that’s just a hill and a few viewing platforms. Without thinking, I hopped over the wall, too. I just wanted to talk to her. To tell her it was just about protecting the family. It wasn’t about being jealous of her. And I—I finally caught up to her. She told me that she didn’t want to talk. She told me that she wanted a divorce. And then—”

There was silence. Naomi forced herself to keep the same wheeze going, the same steady breath that was getting harder and harder to hold on to.

“And then I don’t know how it happened. It seemed like she understood what the divorce would mean. Why the play was so bad. I couldn’t let her leave. Not like that. I just wanted to get the upper hand, I wanted to—”

Someone put something down on the bar cart. A bottle, maybe. Bigger than a glass. There was a muffled sound—swallowing, but the drink snagged in the throat. One of them coughed.

Someone else took a breath. Marcus, she assumed, because he said: “What did you do, Richard?”

She knew that tone. Steady but cold, the same way he had talked to his own father when they fought. A voice that gave no quarter.

In the silence, Naomi could see it. Sarah, the shadows of the stone pines, the light from the moon, the night quiet save for their footsteps on the soft bed of pine needles, her body in that red dress.

“She kept insisting it was over. That she wanted a divorce,” Richard said. “You know we can’t do that. You know it. I started to panic. And I pushed her. Or she fell. I—I—don’t know.”

He was trying to tell the story. Really, he was. But Naomi knew he would never finish. He wouldn’t have to. Marcus would take over now. Richard had always been the weak one. Their father had been right about that, at least.

“And you left her body there?” Marcus asked.

“I—I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe someone would find her and think it was a robbery or something.”

“So you took her jewelry?”

There was silence. He hadn’t taken her jewelry. She could see him running. Looking over his shoulder the whole way home, slipping into a doorway as a group of drunks passed him, in an attempt to look casual when he had to walk a handful of steps down the still-busy Via Tragara. He had forgotten the jewelry. The idiot.

“No,” he finally said. “I didn’t.”

Marcus said nothing, but there was the sound of a body slumping against the back of a chair.

“Another mess for me, then, isn’t it?”

Naomi couldn’t help but sense some relief in Marcus. It was over. The drama with Sarah was over. Even if Marcus needed to clean up after Richard, at least this was the end.

“It was a mistake,” Richard said. “Can’t we just say that? It’s the truth.”

Marcus laughed, thin and hard.

“Can’t we just tell the police that you accidentally killed your wife because she wanted a divorce? No, Richard. We cannot tell them that.”

“It’s worse than that, and you know it! It’s not just the divorce, Marcus. You know that.”

“First thing in the morning,” Marcus said, “we will call our attorney and get his advice. But tonight, we call no one. We were at a party. Everyone drank a lot. People enjoyed themselves—”

“But our friends,” Richard said. “They saw Sarah and me together. They watched me follow her.”

“They didn’t witness a murder. Let them tell their side of the story. They also saw how much Sarah drank. Why she might be inclined to wander off into the night alone, right? You need to remember from now on it’s going to be about controlling the narrative wetell.”

Naomi tried to think back to the party, to how much they had drunk. But the early evening seemed so far away, as if it were months ago.

“Hey—” Marcus said, snapping his fingers. Naomi imagined them inches from Richard’s face. “Hey. You’ve got to pay attention now. Okay? We have to be extremely clear on what happened. There’s only one story. That story is this: We left the dinner. Sarah said she wanted to go for a walk. You went to bed. You were also very drunk. I saw you go to bed, okay? Sarah never came home. She was robbed on her walk, and murdered in the process. When we woke up, she wasn’t here.”

“But her jewelry…”

“I’m going to go take care of that. I’m going to go right now.”

“What if no one believes us?”

“Then we make them believe us,” Marcus said, his voice firm.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Richard said. And as he said it, Naomi knew it was true. He wanted Sarah to stay. He wanted her to be like Naomi—a team player. He wanted her to want the life he wanted. He wanted her to have never written that fucking play. He wanted her to be happy. That was the thing about desire, about wanting: it was like a drug or a haze. You’d do anything for it. The craziest and the worst things. Hadn’t men always? Wouldn’t they still? Even after tonight?

“Of course you didn’t,” Marcus said. There was the sound of a light clap, a soft shhh. He was rubbing his brother’s back. “Sarah was in a bad place, remember? She wasn’t doing well professionally. After the baby, things were harder. But what you need to do now, Richard, is go up to bed. In the morning, we’re going to call New York and talk to Bud. Everything we tell him is privileged, okay? But we’re still going to say that we think something happened to her, an accident. The optics might look bad. We’re going to get his advice on how to alert the authorities here, all right? And don’t get up early. We won’t make this call until the time we normally wake up. Any earlier would look suspicious.”

Naomi knew none of them would sleep. She wondered, in fact, if she would ever sleep again. This particular night felt like it might be the longest of her life. Naomi listened to them leave the room, reach the stairs. Their steps echoing into the night.

Halfway up, Richard must have paused.

“It was an accident,” he said to his brother softly.

“The worst things always are,” Marcus said.