Page 104 of Saltwater

In the chaotic moments that followed my uncle’s fall, in the ones I recount to the carabinieri, none of the guests stopped to ask if I was okay. Only Renata swept across the expanse of the garden and let me bury my face in her shoulder. Renata, who, I think, must have known. About the play, about my parentage, about that night. She was less shocked than the others. As if the outcome was inevitable.

It’s strange to lose both your father figures—one biological, the other actual—in a matter of minutes. And as I continue to talk to people—the police, the guests, Renata—I am forced to remind myself how many times Iwantedthis, about the lengths I went to in order to get here. But the real thing is nothing like I imagined. It’s as freeing as I had hoped, but more terrifying.

And now that my escape route is here—illuminated by the hurricane lamps that light the pathways of Gallo Lungo—I’m surprised to find myself stumbling. I’m not as practiced as they were thirty years ago. My story is uneven. It has gaps. I don’t talk about Lorna or Ciro or Freddy. I don’t talk aboutme.Instead, I talk aboutthem.About my mother and father. About how Marcus let her die to cover up my father’s mistake and that Naomi knew.

I hope they will arrest her here, on the spot, but they don’t. Everyone treats her delicately. Everyone remembers how close she got to the cliff’s edge after Marcus fell. She’s unable to give a full statement; she only answers a few questions. Her voice is gone, her energy sapped. The officer, the one who originally came to the house, who worked on my mother’s case thirty years ago, tells me that they will talk to her at the villa in the coming days. That right now isn’t the time. They think she’s an accessory, a witness. But I want them to understand it washerwho brought us here, to this point. That all my mother ever wanted was to live. That it’s all I ever wanted, too. But Naomi couldn’t bear it. Couldn’tstandit. I wonder if she watched my mother die in that garden before Marcus sent her body off the cliff.

“We will hold your father without bail,” the officer says to me. These words shake me out of my stupor. And despite how warm it is, how still, my skin feels cold and prickly. “He will need an attorney, but you should know that a plea deal may be the best course of action. He will not be home for many years,” the officer says. There’s an apology in his tone. “He may die in Italy.”

My father is sixty-seven and will go to an Italian prison for an undetermined amount of time. My uncle is dead. I am almost free. It was supposed to feel better than this.

The officer finishes taking my statement and releases me back intothe crowd of guests. Nearly all of them are strangers to me. I am an object of fascination and pity. I am a story for later, a story that will grow and change until it, too, becomes a myth.

The night of the Lingate murder.

I don’t begrudge their wanting to transform this into something bigger, into a narrative that can spill out and be whipped up into the perfect dinner party moment, the entire table hanging on every word. They all want to know the gritty details—what was whispered, what was said before they noticed us standing there—but none of them are willing to ask. Their theories will form the conversational backbone of cocktail hours and charity luncheons for years to come.

Stan, I think, will know. But he won’t want to talk about this night. It’s already given him enough.

We should be sure that our stories match.

I think of Freddy saying that to me in the garden at the villa, but it feels like a memory from a time when I was someone else. Someone who didn’t believe they could do something this big, this drastic. Who certainly didn’t think they could do it alone, without Lorna. Maybe Ciro is wrong, maybe we are more than two people. Maybe we are so many people that we are incapable of ever really knowing ourselves. Maybe my father never thought he was capable of killing someone until he pushed my mother.

I feel the same tremor of guilt I’m sure he felt all those years ago, the sensation that zips up your spine and says:I can kill. I am capable of killing.I shake it off.

I finger the card the officer gave me.

I had asked him about Lorna. It had been my first question after I answered all of his. He was greedy for everything I could give him. He was excited, I could tell, to finally pry into our lives, to see if what he had suspected was true.

“Do you have any additional leads?” I asked.

He gestured behind me at the garden, the amphitheater, the guests.

“It’s clear, I think,” he said, “that Marcus must have been responsible. We have the photograph of them together. Your aunt has stated it was him. There was the money, the sex, the secrets—” He listedthese things off on the tips of his fingers, he spit a little when he saidsecrets.

He didn’t care that I told him Marcus and Lorna weren’t having an affair. He didn’t care that the DNA wasn’t a match or wasn’t usable. Like Naomi, he didn’t believe me. It’s easier, in this case, not to.

“We will continue to build the case,” he said, as if he had always planned on Marcus dying, as if he was thrilled by how tidy this had all become for him, “but I think we can safely assume that evidence will point to your uncle.”

I wanted to protest, but there was no reason. What evidence could I offer him? That I didn’t think Marcus and Lorna were sleeping together? That I believed Freddy when he told me he thought the baby might be his? But that I didn’t think Freddy—Freddy, with his soft hands, his weak stomach—could’ve killed her? That I still thought it more likely that Marcus paid her off than murdered her? But then, maybe I’m wrong.

It turns out I never knew them that well anyway.

I think of Lorna’s body in the net. Of the number of times I thought I saw her on the island. For years, I hoped to see my mother like that, to run into her. But she never appeared. Maybe my father saw her, maybe they all did. I hope so. I hope someone was as haunted by her as I am. It only seems fair.

—

“Are you allowed togo back to the villa?” Ciro is standing next to me. He came by boat after the police arrived. He helped recover what was left of my uncle’s body. Slipped it into a black bag for transport to the morgue in Naples.

“I think so,” I say.

It’s still early by Capri standards, not yet midnight. The sit-down dinner was quickly transformed into a buffet. And despite the events of the evening, all around the garden, guests hold plates of food and glasses of wine. Werner has been delighted to play host to the carabinieri, offering them tours of the villa, snapping photos with them. I can’t help but wonder if we were the real performance.

“Do you want me to drive you back?” Ciro asks. “I could take you and Naomi right now. I’m sure everyone will understand.”

Naomi.

I look around the garden and see her next to the bar, a drink in her hand. From the way she looks, her dark hair matted, her skin pale, it’s not her second. Or her third. I don’t know what I owe her right now, what she owes me. Are we still family? That word:family.I’m not sure it fits. How could it, after tonight?

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