Page 37

Helen

Now

We go to Ferragamo. To look at loafers. Naomi seems happier now that she is holding two white calfskin loafers with little brown bits of rubber for soles.

“Do you like these?” she asks.

She hands me a shoe.

“They’re not my style,” I say.

“They’re also not for you.”

She’s still wearing her sunglasses, a glass of champagne dangling from her now free hand like it might spill across the top of the display case in front of us.

“I think I like them better than the first pair,” she says. “Italians understand leather. Try them on for me. I want to see how they look on a foot.”

When we reached the modernist doors of Ferragamo, the store staff locked them behind us. Naomi had called ahead.

“Try them on,” she insists, gesturing with the glass of champagne in her hand.

I reach down and slip them on.

Italians understand leather.

“They feel lovely,” I say. But I prefer a sandal.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to this afternoon that I think she’s enjoying. The softness of the leather contrasted with the grainy quality of the photo. The way the staff of Ferragamo anticipates our every need versus the presence of the carabinieri at the villa. An unfolding crisis set against the inability to decide between ostrich and calfskin.

Italians understand leather.

It echoes in my ears. It drowns out everything else.

“I like shopping with you,” she says. “Can we see another pair?” she asks the man standing behind the case. Then she smiles at me. “It’s like I have a daughter of my own.”

She has always been a roving surrogate, but never a mother. Still, maybe she is the closest thing I will ever get. But she is not what I would consider motherly. For my tenth birthday, she gave me a pair of pearl earrings, despite the fact I wouldn’t pierce my ears until college. She was never good at understanding the difference between a child and an adult and seemed confused when I, as a teenager staying at their house, maintained a very real fear of the dark.

Oh for goodness’ sake, Helen. Can’t you turn off that light? I can’t sleep in this house with a light on!

I learned to accept the darkness because of Naomi.

“Do you know why Marcus and I didn’t have children?” she asks when I don’t say anything.

“I assumed it was by choice,” I say.

She drains the glass and asks for another before beckoning me to follow her to a seating area by a rack of swimsuits.

“I can’t have children.” She says it like she’s sharing a secret, her voice low. “We tried. Unexplained, they said.”

I reach out and touch her arm because it seems like the right thing to do, but she pulls away.

“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she says.

She brushes a stray hair out of her face and takes another sip of champagne, fingers the swimsuits next to her.

“Anyway, it worked out well for you,” she says.

“Me?”

“Yes. Who do you think I will leave things to? I was an only child. I didn’t manage to have children of my own, and my parents’ estate—”

She waves her hand.

It will be years. I know it will be years, decades probably, but the money is a balm. Something that my father and uncle won’t be able to take away. Won’t be able to spend. The news makes me feel lighter. I’m ashamed. But it’s true that the money has always mattered.

“I had no idea,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me,” she says. “I have a weakness for my husband. I always have. Even now.”

Even now.

I think of the look Marcus gave Naomi back at the house. She means Lorna. It was jealousy. It’s why Stan said as much that night on his yacht. It was the quickest way to sow division between them. He knew it would make Naomi jealous. And she is, ferociously. I can feel it, the indignation coming off her in waves.

“It was Freddy,” I say. “He just told me by the pool. He’s worried the police will find out. You don’t need to worry about Lorna and Marcus having an affair. The baby wasn’t his.”

She looks at me then, pulling her sunglasses onto the top of her head, and I can see that her makeup has smudged black under her eyes, that the whites are bloodshot from crying or drinking or downers, maybe all three.

“We owe you an apology,” she says.

Her mouth pulls down at the corners in an exaggerated frown, and it’s even worse—this face—scarier in its cartoonishness.

“Families,” she continues, “they try to do their best. But that doesn’t mean they’re always right. Or good.”

I suspect then that she knows about my father. About my mother. That the inheritance is something like an apology for keeping it secret all these years. It’s what has kept them so strong, their unity.

The sales associate comes over with three boxes, each of them containing sandals in my size—everything from an elaborate gladiator wrap to simple, chunky heels. She leaves after propping them out of their boxes. No one else wants to hear this conversation.

“Mmm,” Naomi says, sipping her champagne. “I hope you and Freddy can work this out. It’s important, you know, to have someone in your corner like Freddy. A teammate. I thought I had that once. But—” She pauses. “He’s wrong about the baby.”

—

Naomi is drunk. She weaves between boutiques—Gucci, Pucci, Prada—and veers into Hermès. When we enter, a security guard closes the door and stands sentry.

He’s wrong about the baby.

She’s angry. And it isn’t lost on me that Naomi’s anger might be useful.

“Can I see your silk scarves?” Naomi asks, leaning over the glass case. “But only the pinks, please.”

While the employees set about gathering them, Naomi pulls a pill case from her purse and slips two white pills into her mouth. She swallows.

“Would you like to see anything?” she asks me.

“I’m fine,” I say.

The truth is, she’s showing me everything I want to see. The cracks and fault lines that are growing, have been growing, between her and my uncle. Maybe, even, between my uncle and my father. I think of him on the Salto , his anger when I suggested we involve Marcus.

“Are you sure?” she says. “I think something in a robin’s-egg blue would look perfect on you. You have your mother’s coloring.” Then she pauses. “I love our mother-daughter days. Don’t you?”

The sales associate returns with a stack of scarves, and Naomi places one, printed with recumbent leopards, into my hands.

“What do you think?” she says.

“Gorgeous,” I say.

I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm for this. Smile. Touch. Compliment. Keep her talking. But my phone rings.

“You can get that,” Naomi says.

Somewhere between Ferragamo and Hermès she shifted, manically, from being on the verge of tears to magnanimous, and I feel the whiplash. Maybe it is just how Naomi deals with anger. It strikes me that I wouldn’t really know.

I look at my phone—it’s Ciro. I decline the call.

“Who was it?” she asks.

“No one,” I say.

“Freddy?”

“No.”

“You’re bad at lying. Did you know that?”

Her words raise the hairs on my arms, and I hope that she’s wrong. She fingers a stretch of scrunched silk toile, wraps it around her arm, drops it in the pile of the items she will pass on. It’s too bright. Too fuchsia. Not blush or rosé or shell. Fuchsia. Plain. She pulls another one and wraps it around my neck.

“Washes you out.” She stares. “You do look so much like her. Especially now.”

“Tell me what you remember about her,” I say.

“We’ll take these,” she says to the employee, who scoops up the pile and rushes into the back, leaving us alone. “Your mother was so talented. Too talented, I think.”

“Such a tragedy,” I say.

It was what we always said to each other: a tragedy.

Naomi cocks her head to the side and looks at me.

“He told you, didn’t he?” she says.

Her eyes are unfocused, and they dip to my mouth and then past my shoulder, as if she’s watching something in the distance. “I saw it on you this afternoon.” She tuts. “I told you. You’re bad at lying.”

She knows. Has probably always known.

It’s a slap that I’m the only one they’ve kept it from all these years. All those days of No comment, all the times I defended him, defended them. There was probably nothing better for them than having a child run interference with the press.

See—her own child believes us.

Maybe when I get home, I’ll chronicle every time they used me to back up their story. Sell the details to the highest bidder. But even that they’ll weasel their way out of. My father may not have told me everything about the night my mother died, but I know she was a risk to them because she was on the inside of the family. They’re only vulnerable to us. To me, Naomi, each other.

“He told me,” I finally confirm.

“You’re taking it very well,” she says. “You’re like your uncle that way. Stronger than your father. So what did he tell you? That he didit?”

I nod. I see my father’s face on the Salto . His anguish. He didn’t want to tell me. He might never have told me, but the reopening of my mother’s death, Lorna, forced his hand.

Naomi sighs. But it’s thick and wet, like her breath has been caught and comes out wrong.

“I always thought it might happen again,” she says. “She was so pretty. Just too pretty maybe. You’re beautiful”—she looks at me—“but not like that.”

Her voice has taken on a milky quality, her words strung together, one right after the other: justtooprettymaybe. And it’s then that I realize she’s slurring, probably from whatever pill she took fifteen minutes ago.

“I don’t think anything could have made her happy,” she continues. “She just wanted so much.”

I don’t know if she means my mother or Lorna. The same could be said about both.

“Do you know what that’s like, Helen? To really want?”

Before I can tell her yes, emphatically yes, she waves a hand.

“No. People like us never do,” she muses. Then: “You know, she was better than he was. Much more accomplished.”

It seems she’s talking about my mother. But the thread is hard to follow, the pills working their way through her system.

Naomi frowns, exaggerated. “Men don’t like that, do they? It makes them sad.”

I’ve never known anything about my parents’ marriage, but her implication is clear: he killed her because he was jealous. Not over an argument, but because of her talent.

The arc of Saltwater confirms everything Naomi is telling me. And I wonder if he read it, if he didn’t like what was reflected in her pages. If, as Naomi said, it made him sad.

My phone rings again. It’s Ciro; I decline.

“I think you should get that,” she says.

When I ignore her, she changes subjects. “I forgave him,” she says, back to slurring. “I decided to forgive him years ago. Years. Because I loved him. Because we were family. But this thing with Lorna—”

This thing with Lorna.

My mother and Lorna keep blurring into the same history, the same person, in Naomi’s retelling. And I’m not sure we’re talking about my father anymore.

She reaches into her purse and pulls out a folded piece of paper and pushes it at me. I unfold it. The paper is worn, and I can see now that Naomi has looked at it dozens, hundreds, of times, this simple piece of paper. It’s a bank statement from their joint account. And there, on the page, is a check to Lorna for five hundred thousand dollars. Deposited the day before we left for Capri.

“It’s for her to take care of it, ” Naomi says.

She seems certain. And the evidence, the date on the check, is damning.

“You think he bribed her to get an abortion?” I ask.

“Of course she didn’t get it,” Naomi says. She seems exasperated with me now, like I’m not following quickly enough. Like it’s all so obvious and I just can’t see it. But all I can see is that Naomi is getting more and more frustrated. When she speaks, it’s as if her mind is working faster than her mouth can operate, as if everything has slowed physically, while mentally she’s still sharp. Even though I know neither is really true.

“There must be another explanation,” I say.

I want to reach out and touch her, but for the first time, I’m afraid of her, I’m afraid of Naomi. I can see it. I can see that beneath the drinking and the pills and the sunglasses, an anger has been growing, frothing, waiting for the right moment. And now that it’s here, she’s going to play her hand through. People like that—people willing to bet it all and risk a loss—are scary. I should know. I’m one of them.

“You’re not listening to me,” she says. “I forgave him. But he did it again. ”

“Cheated on you?” I ask. And then: “Killed her?” Because suddenly both seem possible.

But Naomi shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “He got another woman pregnant. For the second time.”

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe because I know what Naomi is implying. She’s implying that Marcus is my father. That he did it again with Lorna. And I’m certain this is what she means, because it runs through every page of Saltwater. The characters in the play who, after losing it all, decided they might as well fall into bed together, fall in love. I believed my mother had used them as models—my father and uncle. The way I might during a figure study. I hadn’t considered that the material might be true. Hadn’t wanted to see it, maybe.

My mother and uncle had an affair.

Naomi lays a heavy hand on my shoulder.

“You don’t mind waiting for the bags?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Of course not.” I’m too stunned to say anything else.

“Don’t hold it against him,” she says.

“Who?”

“Your father. Don’t hold it against him, what he told you.”

I can’t breathe.

“Because he’s wrong. He didn’t kill her.”