Page 46

Helen

Now

The villa is empty. The carabinieri have come and gone. Naomi’s body left just as the sun was coming up. An overdose. The police ruled it a suicide without hesitation, then informed me an autopsy would only be completed if I requested one. I did. If only because my family didn’t for my mother. And they were guilty.

Now I am drinking a cappuccino under the green-and-white-striped umbrella that shades the table next to the pool. I am serving myself melon that the housekeeper has set out for me. I am folding the pink pages of the Financial Times when Bud calls from New York.

“How are you holding up?” he asks.

I appreciate that he doesn’t apologize for my loss. All business is all I can handle.

“I’ll survive,” I say.

The housekeeper arrives with a basket of pastries and holds them until I make my selection. Through the phone, I hear our attorney—my attorney—slurping his coffee. Bud has a steady, measured manner. Nothing is ever hurried. Every minute, every sip, is billable. This call will be billed not to them, but to me.

“Since you’ll be staying in Italy for the foreseeable future, I think it best that we go over the paperwork now. I’ve forwarded it to you in an email. We don’t need wet signatures right away, but there are a few articles to go over and places to sign.”

I put him on speaker so I can see the PDF he’s sent me on my phone. The tiny letters swim together.

“Really, all you need to know is that, with Marcus’s death, you’re the sole beneficiary of Naomi’s estate. No one else is named.”

I hear him turn a page.

“Section 3 outlines the listed assets. As you can see”—he waits, presumably for me to find Section 3—“Naomi had significant holdings in real property, stock, and liquid assets. This is simply the liquid number. We can get you current estimates for stock and real property in the next week or two.”

I find Section 3, and the number, the liquid assets, is so far beyond what Lorna and I had been willing to split that the math seems incalculable.

“You will owe something in probate, but not as much as you might expect,” Bud continues. “And if you would like us to keep representing you moving forward, we will need to set up a new retainer and new client engagement form. I can also put you in touch with a business manager and some wealth management associates. I know Marcus did most of that work for Naomi. You’ll probably want someone to step in, unless you feel comfortable managing it yourself?”

“I’d love those introductions,” I say.

Bud shuffles some pages, and I can hear him taking another sip of coffee.

“I think that’s pretty much everything for now. It will take some time for the death certificates to be registered, but we’ll manage all the documentation with the banks. I’ve already overnighted you two bank cards. One will be from UBS, and that will take care of everything while you’re traveling. You probably won’t need to consult the balance while you’re in Capri, but feel free to reach out to us if you need to do so. The accounts won’t be fully transferred for about a week. The other card is an extension of the private Lingate credit line at UBS—this one has no limit. If you need checks—”

“I don’t,” I say.

“Right, I know. What I’m saying is, we are here to help with anything you might need.”

“I’d love for you to draw up a new representation agreement,” I say. “And would it be possible to get someone in Los Angeles to list both Bel Air properties?”

“Are you sure you want to do that so quickly? You may not have anywhere to come home to if they sell.”

I want to tell him that I don’t have anywhere to come home to anyway, at least not in Los Angeles. But all I say is, “I’m sure.”

“We’ll have you names by the end of the week. Oh, and, Helen, you might want to consider hiring someone to help you, the way Lorna helped your uncle. You know. An assistant. We can help with that, too.”

After I finish talking to Bud, I pack my room. Leaving everything else in the house—my father’s, Naomi’s, and Marcus’s things—for the housekeeper to donate, something she had suggested while the carabinieri were roaming through the house, shaking Naomi’s pills, pawing through her dresses.

“The owners have said you are welcome as long as you need the house,” Renata says now. “They send their condolences.”

“I’m going to stay with friends,” I tell her.

“Can I call someone to move your luggage?” she asks.

I only brought a small duffel and carry-on to Capri, barely anything beyond swimsuits and a handful of dresses. But I have taken a few of the scarves Naomi bought at Hermès, a pair of leather Ferragamo sandals.

“Ciro is coming,” I say.

I don’t tell her I’m simply moving next door. At least for now.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

I, however, am not.

—

Ciro closes the gate behind me, and it feels like the closest thing to a homecoming I have ever experienced. I stow my bag under his bed, and we sit in the garden, talking about when to leave for Milan.

I tell him that I want an apartment on the edge of Brera. Something surrounded by greenery, something old. Or maybe something new but strange and useless. If there is no dishwasher and the door heights are too low but the ceilings extraordinarily high, that will be fine. I just want it to be mine.

“I have a friend,” Ciro says, “whose sister is a rental agent in Milan. I can text her. We can go next week.”

Even the idea of July in Milan—sticky with heat and agog with visitors clustered around the Duomo—cannot dissuade me from this plan. It feels like I’ve already waited years.

“Can you text her now?” I ask.

At thirty-three, I feel as if I am just being born into the world. The newness both thrilling and terrifying. Were it not for Ciro and Renata, my body feels like it might float away, carried on a sea of optimism and money.

Not that there isn’t guilt. It’s there, lurking at the edges of my happiness—the fact that I haven’t mourned the loss of Marcus, my real father. The fact that I have declined to provide an address at which my father can write me. The fact that, in the end, I was more like Naomi than I ever suspected. Perhaps that part of me, the Lingate part, can be buried now. Submerged, drowned. They may have been my family, but what does that really mean? Family. Maybe I would rather use that word for Renata and Ciro. Maybe I already have.

“She says she will find us options by next week,” Ciro says, looking up from his phone.

“Will you be leaving so soon?” Renata asks.

She carries a tray—beers, a carafe of water, a bowl of olives, and a plate of chips—out to us.

“You will come visit,” Ciro says, “as soon as the high season ends.”

“Yes,” she says. She sits, picks up a beer that’s sweating with condensation, and sips. “I think this season will be my last.”

“But you never leave Capri,” Ciro says.

Renata shrugs. “The world comes here, but I miss going out and seeing the world, too.”

I imagine a future in which Ciro and I have children and Renata lives close by, a future in which there will be no army of nannies and housekeepers, just life as I always wanted to experience it. It does not take the balance sheet Bud sent me earlier to have that kind of life, I know that. But it will make it easier, and I am grateful.

Perhaps I will discover how quickly one can become like my grandfather and spend it all, turn a large fortune into a small one. It seems impossible to think that I might spend it all. But we will spend some.

“I’ll get train tickets,” Ciro says. “A boat to Naples.”

It would be easy for us to take the helicopter that took Bud yesterday, or a private plane, but the train is more romantic.

“Can we go tomorrow?” I ask.

“Or the day after,” he says.

I grin. I am giddy. I wonder how I let them keep me from this—him, Italy. Maybe it is better than money. Only now I won’t have to decide.

“Would you mind running next door to get us some champagne?” Renata asks Ciro. “There should be some cold, stored in the refrigerator. I doubt anyone will mind if we borrow a bottle. Considering.”

Ciro kisses me. He slips back into the garden of the villa, bound for the kitchen. And despite the joy, part of me aches for Lorna, who will never know this, who came so close. I wonder, if she had lived, if she and Freddy might have had the baby, if they might have figured out a way to make it work. If they might have been the two to go home together.

As soon as Ciro is gone, Renata reaches across the table and sets a hand on my arm.

“It shouldn’t have taken this,” she says. “They should have let you go sooner. Let you have some space from them, from what they wanted.”

Then she points at the necklace, the collar of snakes I’m wearing, have been wearing almost every day, and she says:

“But at least it did what it was supposed to do.”

“What do you mean?” I say. I finger the metal, warmed by my skin. But I know what she means: it’s a talisman. It has to be.

“Your mother loved that necklace,” she says. “Even though it was part of your father’s family, purchased by your great-grandfather in a fit of collecting in the early 1920s. Back when looted antiquities and plenty of fakes were widely available on the market. He was an undiscerning man. If it looked old, he bought it. The broker who sold him that necklace said that it had been forged in Vulcan’s fire by his own hand. That it had been found in the remains of a house somewhere in Phocis. But your mother always knew it was tin. It only made her love it more.”

“Do you know who sent it?” I ask, holding a hand to the warm metal, feeling the scales under the soft pads of my fingers. The temperature of my chest, of the necklace, seems to be increasing, growing hotter as I wait for Renata’s response.

“I did,” she finally says.

“But they never found it,” I say.

And I can see my father’s face the first time he saw it, how desperately he wanted to escape the coiling snakes and their unblinking eyes. How happy he must have been to have them lost at sea.

“I’m sure that’s what they told you,” she says. “But that’s the funny thing about family stories. They are so rarely the truth.”