Page 39

Helen

Now

Naomi leaves me in Hermès. And for a moment, I’m frozen. The good daughter, waiting for her bags. Despite everything, the training is cellular. I collect them and step out into the street, but Naomi is already gone, swept up in the midday crowds that swarm the shopping district of Capri.

I start walking toward the villa, looking for her dark hair pulled back severely into a bun. But I don’t see her.

My mother.

Marcus.

The force of it hits me. I stop walking and the tourists flow around me. I had read it, of course. But there were other dissimilarities in the work, enough elements of fiction that I assumed other pieces of Saltwater couldn’t be autobiographical.

The worst part was, I could see it. I could see the way I looked more like him—my forehead slightly broader, my body a little bigger. I had stared at photographs of my mother, trying to find evidence of her in me, but I could have seen the truth at any time.

Did my father see it? Wasn’t it always there? Wasn’t I the ultimate betrayal?

I can’t help but wonder if Naomi is wrong. If maybe my father, too afraid to place the blame on his own brother, did kill her. All his jealousy, all the infidelity, spilling over in one terrible, angry moment.

I think I finally understand his paternal uninterest in me. I was a reminder of his crime, of hers—murder, an affair, it was the same. A continual haunting.

The ache of this realization lodges itself behind my sternum and presses down on my lungs. Making them smaller and smaller until I feel like I can’t manage even the shallowest breath. Countless times I have felt like I’m being punished for something I never did. For my mother’s death. For the suspicion it brought to my family. For my father’s fear of overexposure. For their collective desire to keep the myth of the family alive. But maybe the reason was always more prosaic. That I’m being punished for what my mother did. For the one thing she couldn’t take back. The one thing that left permanent material evidence of her mistake.

Me.

But it gnaws at me: Does he know?

Most brothers—most families —would fall apart over something like that. Instead, I can see mine closing ranks. If my father found out about Marcus and my mother, he would have forced himself to live with it. To bury it. Killing her would have only brought more attention. More scandal.

But if he doesn’t know—

If he doesn’t, it’s because it might be the one thing Marcus knew he wouldn’t forgive. Which made my mother a liability to my father, my biological father. My uncle always knew that I was evidence, that the play was evidence. Which means I can use both to push them apart. They’re only strong as long as they stick together.

Maybe it was this that Lorna found out—how to destroy the family from the inside.

—

“Your family looks a lot alike,” Lorna once said to me.

She had stopped by my father’s house to drop something off and ended up staying. I could feel it on her, her curiosity. I had learned to spot it in childhood. The way friends’ eyes would begin to roam around the topography of the house, as if constructing a map for future use.

“I saw the photo in the study,” she said by way of explanation.

It was one of the few photos of my mother that my father kept in the communal rooms—six of them on the island a few days before it happened.

“Even your mother looks a little like a Lingate. Don’t you think?”

I knew what she meant. There had always been something uncomfortable about that photo. It had a cultlike quality to it. All their faces pulled in wide, open smiles. Join us . Even Stan and Renata in the background seemed to look like them. It was a photograph that had a magical ability to pool everyone’s features together into a uniform aggregate.

“Maybe that’s why he chose her,” I said to Lorna.

I meant it as a joke, but there was some part of me that wondered if it wasn’t true. They were, after all, the kind of people who spent a great deal of time worrying about things like bloodlines and legacies. My grandfather had been one of them. It was, I knew, how they approached me.

“Is the other woman in the photo your aunt?” Lorna asked.

“No. My mother was an only child.”

Lorna sipped the glass of water I had poured for her and didn’t say anything.

“That’s the worst part of it,” I finally said to her, breaking the silence in the kitchen. “No matter how much distance I get from them, I’m always going to see them when I look in the mirror.”

—

I catch my reflection in the window of Chanel and look away. I can’t unsee what Naomi has told me about my parentage. And now I can feel her suspicion infecting me too. Like a contagion. I think of Lorna cashing my uncle’s check. Of Stan’s comments on the yacht. Of the grayscale photo the police brought. Of the pregnancy.

It would be so clichéd to kill your mistress.

It’s so much easier to get away with if you only do it once. Isn’t that what the carabiniere had said?

I hear Freddy, too: No, you barely know her. But he’s wrong—I am beginning to know her. I only hope I’m not too late.

I pass the patio of the Quisisana Hotel, where a handful of women sit under exquisitely woven straw hats, huge ribbons anchoring them in place.

“Helen!”

There are too many people on the patio for me to see who’s calling. And I don’t want to stop and make small talk, so I pretend I haven’t heard anything. I continue on, past a group of kids—teenagers, really—all of whom are on their phones.

“Helen!”

I recognize the voice but keep walking. Stan’s footsteps echo behind me—he jogs to catch up. I lengthen my stride as much as I can without looking like I’m doing it on purpose. Ahead of me is the split where I tack right, back to the villa.

“Helen, wait.”

I’m sure it usually works, that tone. But I keep moving.

“Why are you running from me?” he asks.

“I’m not running,” I say. “I just didn’t hear you.”

“Can we talk?” he says.

“Now isn’t a good time.”

I try to squeeze past him, to slip between his body and the stone wall, but he closes the gap. He holds his hands up.

“I’m the source,” he says. “The one that pushed for the reopening of the investigation. I know you’ve seen it by now. But I was always waiting on that information from Lorna. I knew it was there, that she would find it eventually. And she did. What I need to know is if you’ve found it.”

I think of the blank browser, the empty desktop, Saltwater. Me.

“I’ve been busy with other things,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I’ve been thinking,” he says. “It must have been your uncle who met her that night at the marina.”

“How do you know that someone met her at the marina?” I ask. It seems impossible that the police came to his yacht. Showed him the same photo. But how else would he know a man had met her that night?

“The police and I…” He doesn’t finish. He doesn’t have to. Of course Stan has gotten himself involved. What did he promise them? A new building? Donations? Cars?

“I think we’re all responsible for what happened to Lorna,” I finally say.

I know Stan always considered Lorna expendable. Girls like her always are, not just to him, but to my uncle, to families like mine. They’re a quick NDA, an easy settlement. Everyone moves on.

“What do you need me to do?” he says.

It isn’t defensive. And I believe him; he wants to help. Or at least he feels that he should, that he owes it to me or to my mother. Since I saw Stan at the funicular, I’ve been wondering if Lorna brought Saltwater to Capri to sell to Stan. What it reveals about my family, about me, about their potential motivations—the way it dramatizes their betrayals, the insecurity of their world—maybe Lorna thought Stan could use it. That it was enough for him, for the police, to gain a little leverage.

And so I pull the manila envelope out of my bag, where I’ve kept it since yesterday. I don’t have copies, and I know it’s a risk trusting Stan, but I need someone with more resources on my side. I need to make it clear to them that these pages, these rumors, this hard truth, will haunt them more publicly than I can. They’ve been able to hide me. But they won’t be able to hide from Stan, from the increased police scrutiny.

Hopefully I won’t need those things. But I need a backup. Didn’t Lorna think of Stan as an excellent backup?

“This is what she found,” I say, handing him the envelope. “We’ll be at the ballet on Gallo Lungo tonight. Can you make a copy and meet me there with the original?”

Stan doesn’t even wait. He opens the folder and fans through the pages.

“Do you know what this is?” he asks me.

“Her play,” I say.

“Her last play.”

“Stan,” I ask, “can you get the police there?”

“Yes,” he says. “Of course. What are you going to do?”

I don’t answer. Because what I’m going to do is crack the family open. No one but me fully understands what that means.

“Don’t let her down, Stan. Don’t let either of them down.”

I push past him.

—

My phone rings again. This time I answer.

“Where are you?” Ciro asks.

“Almost back to the villa,” I say.

“I’ve just heard from my friend,” Ciro says. “He thinks they might be close to an arrest. They’re waiting on some documentation from a source. For your mother, not Lorna. He wouldn’t tell me who.”

I don’t say anything, and into the silence Ciro says: “You aren’t surprised.”

It’s the first time since we arrived on the island that I finally feel like I am ahead of them—my family, Lorna, even Ciro. The sensation is quick and flooding: it’s the control I’ve been missing. I’ve waited decades for this feeling. It’s taken me years, but I’ve finally realized this is what it means to be a Lingate—the pursuit of self-preservation above all else.

“I wanted to be sure you knew,” Ciro says. “They’re moving quickly.”

I hope he’s right. I hold the phone to my ear and push through the last of the crowds. It would be best, I know, if they arrive tonight. After I’ve set our secrets loose. They’ll be there in time for the fallout.

“Thank you,” I say. I mean it.

“My mother will be at the Gallo Lungo event tonight, working,” Ciro says. “I don’t think she knows your family will be coming. But she’s there if you need her—”

I think of Renata saying They lie. She must have known.

“I hope they come tonight. Can you tell your friend that? That tonight would be best?”

Public, I want to say, but I don’t.

“They’re working as quickly as they can.”

I nod, even though he can’t see me. That’s good.

I realize that it’s the golden hour on Capri. The moment when the sun starts to set and the shadows work like fingers through the creeping vines and cacti. The Mediterranean no longer blue, but gold, and I wonder how anyone could be so ugly in the face of such beauty.

I’m about to find out.

But as I come closer to the villa, I see Freddy working his way uphill.

“I have to go,” I say to Ciro, and drop my phone from my ear.

When he gets closer to me, I realize Freddy’s fully packed, lugging not only his carry-on but a duffel as well. He’s leaving. He tries to shoulder past me without talking, but I reach for his arm.

“Freddy—”

“I’ll be at the Quisisana,” he says.

So it’s a hotel, not a departure. It’s for the best that he won’t be with us tonight.

“Okay,” I say.

I want to say more in that moment. To give him assurances. To tell him I’m sorry. Even to assuage his fears about Lorna and the baby and the police, but I can’t find it in me. Maybe I don’t want to.

When I don’t, though, I can see his disappointment. He shifts the weight of the duffel to the other arm and gives me a look that tells me he expected this. It still seems unfair the way he’s treating his infidelity like it’s more acceptable than my own. But then, Lorna used to always say men take rejection worse than women.

They kill over it.

There has been so much rejection when it comes to my mother, to Lorna. I still don’t know whose confession I should believe—my father’s, Freddy’s, Naomi’s, or Stan’s—but I’ve decided to trust my mother’s words above all else. It’s her legacy, after all. The one thing she left me. The one thing my uncle, it seems, didn’t want me to see.

“You should hurry,” he says, nodding back at the villa. “They’re all ready to go. They’re waiting on you. No one wants to be late for cocktail hour on the private island, do they?”