Page 45

Helen

Now

I spend the next morning waiting for our attorney and hiding from the photographers who roam the streets outside the villa. When Bud does arrive, he tells me my father has declined to retain an attorney, he intends to plead guilty.

It’s a surprise. I had expected him to fight the allegations that he killed Marcus and my mother. But Bud tells me my father is looking forward to the jail time, that he will write to me, that he knows we couldn’t have won the case. Not with a party of witnesses on hand. It’s his use of we that trips me up. As if we are still a family, a team.

Everything, Bud explains, is mine. My father has signed over a modest bank account and made it clear that the contents of the house in Bel Air should go to me. The house itself, however, like everything else of significant value, is in Naomi’s name. Naomi, who is still asleep when Bud leaves for New York.

Since last night, she has been keeping herself nearly comatose and confined to her room. Even when the police came, no one could roust her for questioning. Even when Freddy arrives to take me to dinner, she stays in bed. I don’t mind; it’s easier this way.

Freddy has heard about my uncle, my father, the closing of Lorna’s case. Has heard about it because it has been front-page news without my family to bury it. Freddy, I’m sure, is sad he wasn’t there for the main event.

He takes us back to Da Paolino, where we sit under the lemon trees, just as we did five days ago. Now there are only two of us and six paparazzi at the entrance. Over a bottle of wine, after we’ve exhausted all the easy conversation, Freddy says:

“I hope, someday, we can move on from this.”

Only I don’t know what he means by this or what I want. I order the tuna.

“This isn’t something people just move on from,” I say, even though I’m not sure if that’s true. I’ve already moved on more quickly than I expected. It’s as if a curtain has been dropped over last night.

Fin.

Freddy reaches for my hand and I let him.

“When we get home,” he says, “you’ll realize I’m right.”

When we get home.

“I’m not ready to go home,” I say.

I don’t add that I don’t have a home right now. That it depends on Naomi, of course. On her continuing generosity. Maybe, even, her guilt.

“Should we stay here?” he asks.

I want to tell Freddy that I do, but I don’t want him to. That I don’t need him to. But then the waiter brings our dinner, so instead I say: “What about work?”

He waves a hand.

“They’ll understand.”

He smiles.

It’s Freddy’s particular skill, the way he can glide past, slip over, the unpleasantries in life. Can simply decide that he doesn’t care about Ciro. About Lorna. That news of Marcus’s death and my father’s arrest is simply a passing bit of flotsam, a troubling fact in the moment, maybe, but easily forgotten.

We are eating now, a fork in my hand, but he grabs it anyway and says: “I want you to know that I’m here for you, Helen.”

But I don’t want what’s left of my old life. Freddy included.

We don’t order dessert.

After dinner, we walk toward the Gardens of Augustus. It’s late, nearly midnight, and I say to him: “They’ll be closed.”

He wants to go anyway.

When we get there, the gate is locked, but a man in a green jumpsuit meets us and lets us in. And as soon as we’re in the gardens, I realize that the stone pines are festooned with hanging lanterns. Lanterns that emit just enough light for me to see the bright pinks and yellows of the flowers, the tumbling vines, the face of the enormous cliff just beyond. I can even see the villa from here, its windows like eyes, peeking into the night. I should have been clearer at dinner. I turn to stop him, but he’s already begun.

“Helen Lingate,” he says.

He takes both of my hands in his.

“I love you. I know this week has been difficult for both of us, particularly for you. I’m sorry. But I want us to leave here with something to look forward to. Let’s agree that all of this”—he waves at the island—“however beautiful it is, doesn’t follow us home.”

He has no idea.

He gets down on one knee.

“Helen…”

The box comes out of the pocket of his shorts, red with gold foil. I’m amazed I didn’t notice it earlier.

“Will you marry me?”

Inside the leather box is a diamond. Cushion cut, the size of my middle knuckle. No halo of stones, no dross. Just a gold band and the diamond. He takes it from the box and looks up at me, his face wide and open. In it, I can see a life I thought I wanted once. One where the topography would never have demanded a map.

I say no.

—

Freddy tells me he’s going to leave the island in the morning. The box has already disappeared, the ring an annoyance. We part ways at the Quisisana, and I don’t know what else to do, so I give him a hug. It’s an apology, a goodbye. On both counts, it’s a poor one. He thinks I’ll change my mind, but someday he’ll realize I was right. And he will be grateful.

I walk back to the villa alone, and every part of my body feels loose, as if my joints are unhinged and all the connective tissue severed. I have survived. The one thing I thought only people like Lorna could do. Maybe I learned it from her. I’m grateful. Or I am, until I enter the villa and hear Naomi in the living room. Her low groan—ahowl, really—slinks down the hallway and meets me in the foyer.

She has decamped from her bedroom while I’ve been gone. When I reach the doorway, I see her sitting on the couch, a half-drunk glass of something clear next to her.

“Can I get you anything?” I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. We have avoided each other, but now her grief feels like it has spilled across the house, like I am made sticky by it when I get this close to her. She knew them so much better than I ever did—my father, my uncle. I don’t know what to call them anymore. Now that it’s too late to call either one of them anything at all.

I make my way to the Louis XIV chairs opposite where she sits. She is only capable of lifting her chin slightly. Whether from the drinking or her private cocktail of pills, I can’t be sure.

“It never should have happened,” she says, her voice slurred. “But it did. Because he was protecting me. ”

“I’m sorry.” I say it because there’s no better alternative available, not because I feel it. There’s no point in reminding Naomi it was her jealousy that brought us here.

“Are you leaving with me tomorrow?” she says. “I haven’t packed.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“A permanent vacation?”

“Just a few extra days,” I say.

“Things seem to go your way, don’t they, Helen?”

I don’t respond. I don’t necessarily agree.

“I think I should go up to bed,” I say.

“Wait,” Naomi says. “Have a drink.”

She points to the cart. I want to decline.

“Please,” she says. “Just one.”

I relent. I pour myself a glass of champagne, which is open and chilling in a bucket like always.

“Very celebratory,” she says. “You’re happy with the outcome, aren’t you?” Then: “You look like her, you know.”

“So you keep telling me,” I say.

“It’s been hard,” she says. “Having to look at you all these years. But I’ve done it. I’ve done it because I’ve loved him.”

“Marriages are complicated,” I say. It seems true.

She laughs, but it’s watery and catches in her throat.

“Marriages,” she says. “What do you know about marriage? What do you even know about love?”

“I think I know something about love,” I say.

It’s true. At least, I hope it is.

“You think you love Freddy?”

“Not Freddy.”

“Do you know when I knew that I loved your uncle?” Then she catches herself, laughs. “I mean, your father ? I knew when I was fifteen. Do you know what that’s like?”

I do.

“Do you have any idea what you would do for someone you have loved that long? That thoroughly?”

“I’m sure he appreciated it,” I say.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“I used to think so, too. Until you. Until Lorna.”

“Naomi, I promise you he and Lorna weren’t having an affair. The baby was Freddy’s,” I say.

She shakes her head sadly. Still, she doesn’t believe it.

“He lies,” she says. “It doesn’t seem like it, but he lies.”

We all lie, I want to say.

“He lied to me that night in the garden. We were there, right down there”—she points behind me, toward the water—“and he couldn’t decide what to do. He was so worried. But I knew what to do.” She points at her chest. “There was only one decision. And I made it for both of us. And all these years, he’s known. We never talked about it, but he knew. It’s why he never said anything to Richard. It’s why he didn’t say anything last night. Because he was still trying to protect me. After all these years. In the end”—she sounds sad, her voice high, cracking—“in the end, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill her. I knew he couldn’t. He never loved me as much as I loved him. And then he started doing it again. Again!” She shouts the word, as if Marcus might be able to hear her, might come running to help her. But he won’t.

The details of her story are slurred and disjointed. But Naomi is confessing. Confessing that she killed my mother. I made it for both of us . I reach for my phone in my purse and think about pressing record. But I hesitate.

“I never trusted him after that night,” she says. “And I was right! She was pregnant! I found the test in her room the night we arrived. I didn’t think it was her room at first, I thought it was yours. I was looking for that god-awful necklace when I found it, the little cardboard box. So I told him. I told him what he had to do. He had to fix it. Don’t you understand? The money wasn’t going to be enough for her. It never is with girls like that. It never was with your mother. I told him if he didn’t do it, this would finally be the end. I wouldn’t clean up this mess, too.”

Marcus.

It seems the police have been right this whole time. That it was always going to be one of us— all of us —that killed her.

“He killed Lorna,” I say. “To prove to you, what? That he loved you?”

That he loved your money? I think it, but I don’t say it.

Naomi’s actions are coalescing into something monstrous and vicious. Her jealousy, her desperation. The leverage she wielded against her own husband to blackmail him into killing. The way she ruthlessly removed every threat to her relationship. I wonder if there was ever a time she considered removing me. Two women dead, her husband dead. And still, she’s haunted by the mistake Marcus made thirty years ago. By me.

“Have you considered the cost of what you’ve done?” I say.

I mean losing Marcus, the only thing she seems to love. But she says:

“Oh yes, so very much like a Lingate to worry about the cost. ” She laughs. “Do you realize how broke you all would have been all these years without me? Do you understand that?”

“Naomi,” I say, “you have been incredibly generous.”

“You don’t understand,” she says. “But you will.”

There is something about the way Naomi seems to grow excited, agitated, as she lists the things she has done for us—the illusion she has allowed us to keep. It snuffs out the feeling of freedom I had earlier, as I walked back to the villa. In its place, dread blooms.

“Do you think Ciro will still want you when you are poor?” she says.

She spits the last word.

I’m not poor.

I can sell the contents of the house, get a job. But I had assumed, maybe stupidly, that she might help me. And I don’t know what it will be like without her support. None of us have had to experience that.

Yet.

“Like marries like,” she says. “That’s what my mother told me when Marcus and I got engaged. But even so”—she drains her drink—“they made me get a prenup, my parents. You never know, my mother said. You don’t want to be responsible for his debts. You want to be sure he doesn’t take you down, too. She was right, my mother. You and Ciro won’t need a prenup.”

She holds out her glass and shakes it at me.

“Would you?” she says.

I stand. “What are you drinking?” I ask.

“Vodka,” she says. “Neat.”

I take her glass to the bar cart and look for the vodka while she continues behind me.

“Do you know what my prenup with your father says?”

“No,” I reply over my shoulder.

“That we leave the marriage only with what we brought into it,” she says. There’s a smugness to her voice.

I pop the top off the vodka bottle and then I see it, at the back of the bar cart, where I left it earlier: the little cup full of Naomi’s pills. The loose ones I corralled when she was passed out two days ago. Hidden by the forest of bottles, their presence has gone unnoticed.

“Do you know,” she says behind me, “what Marcus brought into our marriage?”

“I don’t,” I say.

“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing. Do you think he ever knew what nothing really meant?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I forget what her question was. I’m only half listening. I’m looking for the vodka, but distracted by the pills.

“Well, you’re going to find out,” she says. She sounds triumphant, as if she has played the best practical joke, told the funniest story at a dinner party. “Because when we get home, I’m changing the plans for my estate. I think it’s fitting that you only get what he was going to get. Your father. ”

With Marcus and my father gone, there is no buffer between Naomi and me. I am Marcus’s daughter, the only part of him she has left, which might be some kind of family. But it’s easy to imagine Naomi seeing too much of my mother in me one day. Deciding she can’t let that reminder live.

After so much collateral damage, I would only be an afterthought.

A tragedy, she would say.

I make the decision quickly. It’s a permanent solution. One that won’t involve lawyers and arrests, the police and Naomi’s estate attorney. Everyone will believe it was suicide. There’s a symmetry to it, after all. Isn’t that what they said about my mother for years? A suicide. An accident. I pick the pills up, making sure that Naomi can’t see me. But of course, it hardly matters. She’s too drunk to notice.

I drop them into her glass, stir. It takes a few minutes, but they begin to dissolve. I pretend to make myself a drink as well.

The living room is dim—lit by only two table lamps. There is some ambient brightness from the moon outside, but it’s dark enough, I think, that she won’t be able to see the dissolved pills, the milky hue they’ve given the clear vodka. I swirl it to distribute them. The graininess is visible, like a little cloud at the bottom of her glass. I worry she’ll notice. Of course she’ll notice. But I have to try. I turn to face her, bring her the drink.

She takes it from me.

She looks at it. And in that moment, I think she sees. But then she throws it back in one swallow. She’s already too drunk, too drugged, to notice.

I hope it’s enough. I don’t sit back down.

“Tell me about my mother,” I say.

She looks at me.

“Did you hear what I said?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“And the only thing you can think to say is Tell me about my mother ?”

I don’t respond.

“She was brilliant,” she says. “She was beautiful and she was brilliant and she ruined my life and probably ruined yours. What else do you want to know?”

“I want to know what she was like. How she talked. What perfume she wore. Where she liked to work. What inspired her. Her favorite meal. Her favorite book. I want to know what she said that night and every night before. I want to know if, in addition to looking like her, I am like her.”

Naomi looks up at me, her eyes unfocused, and it seems impossible that the drugs could work that quickly. But then, I don’t know what else she has already taken. I don’t even know what I just gave her. She begins to talk about my mother. Five minutes tick by, then ten.

“You’re nothing like her,” she finally says. Her voice is thick now. The words take effort. “She had nothing and built everything. You have everything and will be…” She tries to take a deep breath, as if speaking is making her winded. Her chin collapses against her chest, but she manages to get it out as a whisper: “… nothing. ”

I stand there, in front of her, listening to her breathing become slower, and slower, until finally, I can’t detect it at all. I wait for what seems like hours, although it can only be ten minutes, maybe less. And while I wait, I look around the living room. At the tasseled couches and the polished picture frames. At the bookcases filled with moldering early editions, the paintings completed by lesser-known impressionists, the terrazzo floors from the early twentieth century. This villa, whose textures and histories and disappointments are my own.

There is the sound of music coming from somewhere down on the marina. A steady beat. A thrum. A pulse. I place two fingers on Naomi’s neck. I slide them up, under her jaw, to where her artery should be pumping, and I wait.

Nothing.