Page 114 of Saltwater

Nothing at all.

Sarah

Now

I watched it happen from behindthe downy leaves of the fig trees. It’s the thing I regret most. That, and leaving you, of course. Once a year, sometimes more often, I have a dream in which I pull Naomi off her and we escape together, here, to this little house. But when I wake up, I’m alone.

It’s easy to say now that I should have gone directly to the police, that I should have done it all differently. But that’s the benefit of distance. That night, and in the days following, it was all I could do to survive. Surviving was my act of bravery.

I didn’t look back. With only adrenaline and fear to keep me moving, I followed Renata’s advice. I slipped into her garden, dominated, as it is today, by the bougainvillea that grows along the wall there. I was lucky. It was dark and the babysitter had been asleep and was groggy.

“Let’s not turn on the lights,” I told her. “I don’t want to wake Ciro.”

I called the number for the private doctor the man in Munich had given Renata. I explained to him that I had a fight with my lover. He didn’t ask questions. He stitched me up. I think he thought they had done it—one of the Lingates. But he serviced the rich. I knew he wouldn’t ask questions. He didn’t want it to blow back on him, on the owners of the villa, on the man in Munich. He left me with medication for the pain and swelling. He told me if the headache got worse,I should go to the emergency room immediately. I expected it would, but it never did.

I was lucky.

I changed into a pair of Renata’s pants, one of her tops. I piled my hair on top of my head, the way Renata wore hers when she worked. I was gentle, I avoided the stitches. When Ciro started crying, I thought of you, asleep in Los Angeles. Safe. With the nanny.

I pulled Ciro out of his crib.Ciro.I’ve always thought he knew I wasn’t his mother. But he accepted the situation. We were both alone now.Hewas alone now. If we were going to survive the next few hours, we would need each other. We had no one else.

The next morning, when he woke up, he came into the kitchen and looked at me with his wise little eyes. He deliberated. He took in my clothes and my hair, my presence in his house, and I watched him, in that moment, decide that I would be his mother from then on. When he wrapped his chubby arms around my legs, it was as if my entire future was decided. I couldn’t leave him. Even with you at home, abandoning Ciro was one more cruelty I couldn’t take.

That, and I knew what they were capable of by then.

They would happily kill me rather than let me go to the police. My existence, my being alive, would always be a risk they couldn’t tolerate. But I knew they wouldn’t hurt you. You were one of them. As much as it hurt me to admit that, I knew it was true. You were safe.

It was a terrible compromise. But I had seen their reach, their power. I chose to hide.

In the early days after the accident, I kept expecting people to notice that I wasn’t Renata. We looked alike, yes, but not exactly so. I wore my hair to match hers; I plucked my eyebrows thinner and liberally used the makeup in her cabinet. Sunglasses and hats helped, too. But when I learned that Marcus had identified Renata’s body as mine, based on not only her damaged features but also the rings on her hand, I realized that I had slipped into someone else’s life permanently.

Sarah Lingate was dead. I was Renata Tomasi. And with every daythat passed, bringing Sarah Lingate back to life became increasingly complicated.

When the police arrived to interview me—or rather, Renata—Isaw it on their faces when I met them at the door. The shock. They thought I was Sarah, they thought I was me. They were right. But then Ciro ran in from the garden crying, and he ran straight to me. He called memamma.I lifted him and soothed him and theybelievedhim. Ciro, in that moment, saved me. Maybe we always saved each other.

The rest of it fell into place slowly, incrementally. Everyone, I realized, saw the woman they wanted. The woman they expected me to be. I was her.

Then Richard, Marcus, and Naomi left the island, and suddenly I was still here. I would always, it seemed, be here. And even though there were days I wanted to go home, to go back to my life, to you, mydaughter,I couldn’t travel—Renata had no passport, nor did she have any money. I had a child in Capri that depended on me. I had no friends, no resources, no family.

But as Renata, I thought I was safe.

My already fluent Italian got better. Ciro got bigger. The job was wonderfully easy, and for the most part, Ciro and I walked around the island. Suddenly it was a year later, and Renata’s employer—myemployer—called and told me that the Lingates would be coming back, this time with their daughter, and could I please get the house ready and find a babysitter for their four-year-old, Helen. The nanny, it turned out, didn’t feel comfortable making the trip.

Initially, I did everything Renata used to do. I opened the house, I stocked the kitchen. To casual acquaintances on the island—the grocer, the gardener—I was passing. In the year after her death, I darkened my hair slightly, then my eyebrows. I gained enough weight to change the shape of my face, my cheeks. I studied Renata’s photos to ensure that I wore the same color of lipstick she did, the same sweep of eyeliner. But it wouldn’t fool Richard. Richard Lingate would take one look at me and know his brother had made a mistake when he identified my body in the morgue.

I explained to my employer that after last year, I wasuncomfortable working for them. I would find a replacement, they could garnish my pay. But I would be happy to babysit their daughter, Helen, provided the housekeeper I found for the week agreed to ferry Helen back and forth to her family. As long as no one complained, the man in Munich told me, that would be fine. Then he complimented me on how much my English had improved.

And so began the system we would use for thirty years. The hired housekeeper would take my entire month’s salary for one week of work, and every morning she would bring me you, my daughter, to babysit. For one week every year, I was allowed to see you grow, to hold you, to be with you. It continued like this until you were fifteen, at which point you started to spend more time with Ciro than with me. It was always the promise of seeing you that kept me here, year after year. As long as you kept coming back, I could keep being Renata.

It might have gone on like that forever. But I started to notice the changes in you. The way you folded in on yourself as you got older. When you should have been unfurling, growing. The evidence of their control was familiar, painful. Only one of them, I knew, would be willing to intervene on your behalf. Only one of them, I knew, was more invested in me staying dead than the others. But it would take something significant to get the message across. After thirty years, the risk seemed worth it.For you.

When they first found Renata’s body, I thought the missing necklace would surely tip them off. But instead, it was reported in the local paper that Richard had accused the fisherman who recovered her body of stealing it.A priceless family heirloom,he had told the police. Really, just a fun imitation that I kept in a box, buried next to the stone pine in the garden here.

So I dug it up. I sent it to your father. Yourrealfather.

And then I waited.

They had always been easily rattled, the Lingates. I remember, still, how Richard reacted toSaltwaterwhen I showed it to him. How his body shook with anger, or maybe fear. How unable they were tometabolize any kind of exposure. How much they wanted to bury my life and my death.

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