Page 23 of Saltwater

“I thought you hated the ocean?” Freddy says quietly. He takes his drink from the tray that has arrived.

“I don’t,” I say.

“I could have sworn you told me that once.”

I can’t remember when I told him this. But it might have been the night I drove him home from an event Naomi was hosting in Malibu. The same night that he leaned across the console of the car, his lips brushing against my ear, then my chin. Finally, my lips. I let him because it felt so familiar, so easy. Or it might have been one of the other nights that followed. At the end of which we always said to each other:This is it. The last time.

He’s right. I am terrified of the ocean. And what else he knows about me.

“This isn’t even an ocean.” I say it more for myself than for him.

It’s a sea.

“Don’t drown,” he says, low enough that I almost don’t catch it.

—

Helen was at heruncle’s office the day it arrived. A month had passed, maybe longer, since our conversation in Runyon. The Lingates’ driver was waiting to ferry us to lunch, during which he would sit in the parking lot so he could later inform Richard that we had seen no one else.

I was opening the mail. Marcus was out. And Helen was looking through a folder of Sarah’s letters that I’d photocopied for her months before. Even so, whenever we were in the office alone, she liked to page through them and run her fingers across her mother’s handwriting.

Everyone,she used to say,is so fascinated by her death. It’s her life I care about.

She meant it.

Over the years, Helen had amassed, in secret, an archive dedicated to her mother’s work and life. Her plays, her correspondence. Every snippet of interviews, every photograph she could find. And Marcus’s files contained even more of Sarah’s flotsam: scraps of paper with a doodle of Lincoln Center, a note from the lighting guy about tracking, a crumpled tissue smeared with lipstick.

They weren’t shrines. If only because Helen wasn’t worshipping her mother, she was divining, in all those pieces, herself. The part of her that wasn’t a Lingate. The part of her that made me, whether I should have or not, trust her. Marcus, I assumed, kept the material solely to prevent it from ending up in someone else’s hands.

That day, the mail mostly contained bills and invitations. Amazon orders he didn’t want going to the house. They were shockingly banal: vials of beard dye, an exercise contraption for six-pack abs, a book by Esther Perel. I opened another box. I was nearly done.

Sometimes, too, there were crank letters. Handwritten accusations about what the family had done to Sarah. Requests for money in exchange for information. Assurances that the sender had seen Sarah in Bangkok and she was very much alive. Which was why, when I emptied the contents of the last box onto the desk, I didn’t believe it was real.

Helen knew right away.

The necklace barely had time to slither out of its felt bag and into my hands before Helen snatched it. She checked the origin of the shipment. It had come from Naples for Marcus.

“It can’t be real,” I said.

Helen hadn’t spent three years opening the mail at the office. She hadn’t seen the number of people who claimed to be her mother, who claimed to know her mother, who claimed to know why her father killed her mother.

Helen flipped the necklace over and felt along the smooth back until she hit a divot. Then she looked up at the filing cabinet.

“Does he keep insurance documentation here?” she asked. “For Naomi’s jewelry? For family objects?”

There was an entire folder dedicated to photographs of lamps and paintings, individual pieces of silver. I pulled the file while Helen checked her watch. The driver was waiting. I paged through the file until I reached the older items, the things that came from Helen’s grandfather. So many of the items I hadn’t seen—jewelry and artwork that were probably in storage, under drop cloths.

It was in there, folded in half. The file containing two images ofthe necklace, front and, most crucially, back. I passed it to Helen, who held up the necklace to compare. While she did, I checked the box for a note. Nothing. Just a series of stamps that indicated it had come from Italy, twenty-five days ago.

“Who sent it?” I asked. Whoever they were, they didn’t want to be known. Maybe they thought Marcus would know, that he wouldn’t need to be told.

She paused, matched the three small hallmarks on the back to the photo in the insurance file, and looked at me.

“It’s hers.”

I expected she would suggest we call the police, suggest we make its appearance public. Instead, she did the math. Helen knew her mother was gone; the necklace couldn’t change that. But it was a threat to them, and a threat to them was an opportunity for her. She seized it.

“We’re going to send it,” she said. “She would have wanted me to get out.”

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