Page 115 of Saltwater

On some level, I always wondered if Marcusknew.I had seen him, standing in the window that night, as I pressed up against the stone wall. Even from a distance, he must have recognized her, must have known she wasn’t me.

I knew your father, your real father, so well, and I can see him, standing over Renata’s body in the morgue and deciding to set me free. Or maybe it’s true that the body was simply too damaged for him to tell.

The necklace, I hoped, would help me know for sure. It would open old wounds. Would push them to make a mistake. Would make himcuriousabout me again.

Only I didn’t anticipate Lorna. Or you. I didn’t anticipate the lengths you were willing to go to. Lengths I myself had gone to all those years ago. I couldn’t have known that putting the necklace in the mail would mean I could finally leave here with you, my daughter. I couldn’t have known that all this tragedy would remake my idea of what family could be. For thirty years, I’ve waited. And even now I would wait thirty more for this outcome.

“So, Helen, tell me,” I say. “What else do you want to know?”

Helen

Milan

Two Years After Lorna’s Death

I am at a table inBrera when I think I see her in the distance—the long brown hair, same as it once was, her legs unending. Even the way she holds her glass of water tilted, like she doesn’t care if it spills. There is no alcohol on the table. A man is with her.

Lorna.

I pass the baby to Ciro and try to slip my body through the sea of tables, knocking into waiters and diners, mutteringScusiwith what little patience I can find. Then I nearly bolt down the street to the café where she was sitting. But when I get there, they are already gone. A handful of euros tucked under the bill, a few coins tossed in for good measure.

A waiter comes by and shoos me away. As if I’m trying to take his tab.

“What was that?” Ciro asks me when I return.

He holds our son, Aaron, on one knee. A dribble of clear drool runs from his lips to his chin. I dab at it. I pull him away from his father. I blow kisses onto his neck and wonder, not for the first time, how my mother was ever able to leave me for so many years.

I have forgiven her, but it still stings. She stayed on the island, my mother insisted, for me. So she could see me, be in my life. Years spent at the villa in the service of just one week. It would have been easy, I know, for both of us—Ciro and me—to resent what was lost thirty-two years ago, to grow bitter, harden around the kernel thatwas taken away: our mothers. But it wasn’t their choice. And we were grateful one of them survived.We survived.

“Nothing, I just thought I recognized someone. That’s all.”

“Who?” Ciro asks.

But I shake my head.

“It doesn’t matter.”

We finish our lunch. We walk with Aaron back to our apartment. The courtyard is private: green and leafy, a tangle of vines and trees. We have views of a single Duomo spire from the edge of our bedroom.

My mother is waiting for us there. She lives, now, in a rambling Palladian-style country home in the Veneto. Some weekends, we visit her and meander the paths that crisscross the fields, the gravel walkways that frame the formal garden. She likes, I think, the space.

“How was lunch?” she asks.

“We missed you,” I say.

“I was meeting with a friend,” she says. My mother has begun to go out again. She has made friends both in the city and in the country. They come over to her house for dinner during the week, and on the weekends, she attends plays and readings. She travels for exhibitions, for joy. She has become something like an oracle for a group of artists and writers who are two decades her junior, and she doesn’t mind when they ask how she knows so much about Mamet or Ibsen, or why she has never produced work of her own.

Like Ciro says, we are always two people. But she is here now, and that is all that matters.

—

The second time Ithink I see Lorna, it is three days later and I am running errands alone in Porta Venezia. She is walking with the same man. He is older, white-haired, dressed in a linen suit, and she wears a simple black dress, her long hair a single, gleaming sheet.

I follow them past a school, past a neoclassical museum, and into the Montanelli Gardens, down gravel paths lined with planes and chestnuts, and when I am close enough that I can almost touch her,they slip into the Palazzo Dugnani. Even though it is closed on Tuesdays. I sit on the steps and wait. First for an hour, then for two. I ask a policeman walking through the park if he has seen them.

I describe Lorna, the man.

“I think,” he says, “I would have remembered seeing a woman like that today.”

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