Page 5

Helen

Now

Lorna is gone.

Even so, I expect to see her in the hallway or on the stairs. I imagine her waking up in Naples, catching a ferry. Ciro will know. I rub my fingers across my elbow, feel the callused skin. She’ll be back, I tell myself. She didn’t leave me.

Only there’s that familiar embarrassment, like a flush that spreads through my body. An allergic reaction to the truth. I am a fool.

You can only trust the family, my father used to whisper to me. Back when journalists and photographers stalked the house. It was always his mantra: Family, family, family. If other children took two steps back when they saw me walking through the hallway, I would repeat the word to myself: family.

People love to see a family like ours turn against itself, don’t they? my father would say. Then he would wait for me to answer: Yes.

He wasn’t wrong.

But Lorna was different. She understood what it was like to have a family narrative inscribed on your body, a set of invisible instructions you couldn’t disobey.

Only she’s gone now. We’re all waiting for her—me, my father, my uncle. Waiting for her to come and offer reassurances: It went well; it was easy. Instead, she’s gone. And I realize, my body buzzing, my face burning, that years later, I’ve done it again. I’ve closed every exit, I’ve trapped myself inside.

—

In college, I thought it might be healthy to open up about my mother’s death. It was what most people wanted to know about me. Lingate. I could see them searching the flotsam of memory, looking for a place to slot my name. And then— click. I was jealous, even if I didn’t know to put that label on it, that my father and uncle had enjoyed a time when our name only meant one thing— money —if it meant anything at all.

“This is just for background?” I asked Alma. I was twenty, trying to be a painter. On my own for the first time. Or the closest I would ever get. I still lived at home. They had deemed the dorms a safety risk, worried what I might say late at night in a shared space.

“Yes,” Alma said.

We had met in an acrylics class, but Alma was a writer. She sat at her easel, hunched, like she was leaning into a typewriter.

“I’ve always wanted to tell your mother’s story,” she said to me one day after class.

For my entire life, hearing the words mother and story in the same sentence had made me stiffen. But Alma had a low, gravelly voice. Almost a whisper. I think, now, that it might have been her whispering that made a difference. After a lifetime of having questions shouted at me as I entered school, left the grocery store, or slipped down a step-and-repeat, the whisper felt like a promise.

“If you’d be open to it,” she said.

I looked her in the eye and saw an alternative to the No comment my father insisted on.

“Let me think about it.”

Two weeks later, we sat in a recording booth with two microphones hooked up to her computer. I had paint on my jeans, and Alma had brought her lunch in with her, a sandwich that showed the outlines of her fingers, the bread either very soft or her grip very tight. The thought of food made me nauseous. Everything had made me nauseous that morning. I was young, but no idiot. This was a risk. My first.

“We can keep whatever you want off the record,” she said, brushing her fingertips on her skirt.

“How does that work?” I asked. “Do I need to say off the record ?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Okay,” I said into the mic. “This is off the record.”

We talked for almost an hour—about my mother’s love of Harold Pinter, her preference for sparse staging—before Alma asked me:

“Do you think she was murdered?”

“No,” I said. And I remember this clearly— I said no. “But I can see how that’s a narrative people might gravitate to.”

“What do you mean?” Alma asked.

I liked that when she spoke to me, she tilted her head. She had these wispy bangs that slipped from her temple to her nose and back again. And I could smell the pickles in her sandwich.

“I don’t want this to sound bad,” I said. “But people are fascinated by my family.”

“They are.”

“But only since her death,” I stipulated.

Alma cocked her head again, and the bangs swished like a metronome across her face.

“Are you saying your mother’s death gave your family celebrity?”

“No, not in that way,” I quickly said. “But the accident, it…” I searched for the right word. It was frustrating to have waited so long to tell this story, only to find myself fumbling the plot. I picked a bit of navy blue paint out from underneath my nail. I tried again. “You know, young, beautiful, talented dead women get a lot of attention.”

That was the headline she would try to run with: Young, Beautiful, Talented Dead Women Get a Lot of Attention.

“Do you find it hard to work in her shadow?” Alma asked me.

“Off the record?”

“Off the record.”

“Impossible,” I said. “Because she was so good. I don’t think I’ll ever be that good.” I thought of my mother as an artist. As someone who had been lucky enough to have a life before becoming a Lingate. Not as a dead girl. There was both hope and desperation in that— hope that she lived on through her work, and desperation that I would never measure up. Still, I showed up in front of the canvas every day to try.

Alma shopped the article almost immediately. The Los Angeles Times picked it up—a coup, I realized belatedly, for a young writer. Two days before its scheduled publication, someone called my father to let him know.

But my uncle knew the publisher. He had been a friend of my grandfather’s. During one particularly lean third quarter, Lingate money had kept the lights on. That favor still mattered. They only offered favors that mattered.

“She said the entire conversation was off the record,” my uncle reiterated again into the phone in our kitchen, where I sat on a stool, waiting for it to be my turn.

“The recording,” I said softly. “There’s a recording where I say it.”

He relayed the information, followed by some murmuring and the insistence that “it gets pulled from everywhere, immediately. I don’t care if you have to rearrange the whole fucking paper. You should have called us first.”

Two days later, the L.A. Times printed a story about an LAUSD budget shortfall on the front page, and in exchange for my mistake, I withdrew from USC. I spent the rest of the semester at home, unsure if I would ever be allowed back. The message was clear—the world could always get smaller.

When they finally wrote the tuition check that allowed me to return, it was accompanied by a driver who took me to campus and picked me up immediately following class. The registrar provided my father a copy of my schedule. The distance between the classrooms and the pickup locations was timed. If I was late, he called.

They no longer trusted me. It would be a year before the reins loosened.

That was fine.

It was harder that I no longer trusted myself. I thought I could tell the difference between kindness and manipulation. I thought I could identify the kind of people who were after the one thing my family refused to give: information. But I was wrong.

I called Alma after the fact. She never answered. Girls like her, they couldn’t know what it was like. I waited, instead, for the kind of person who might understand the gravitational pull of family. The way they could suck you into their sun, burn you up.

And while I waited, I learned the most important lesson of all. I learned to play their game.

—

I come down the stairs of the villa, two at a time. I want Lorna to be in the foyer, but she’s not. I want my phone to vibrate and to see her name on the screen. I want her to tell me, right now, before I have to go back out and face them—my family—that we’ve won.

Did she feel it, when we arrived on Capri, how close we were to the end? I felt it. I still do. And as I pass by the mirror in the foyer, the reflection of the gold snakes that wind themselves around my neck flashes. A sharp, bright streak of sunlight hits them, and I touch my hand to their scales.

Snakes—long a symbol of rebirth, but also of deception. Which isLorna?