Page 26 of Saltwater

But the loss reminds me I’m alive, I’m growing. Even if to the rest of the world, I’m frozen at the age of three, my father crouched in front of me in our driveway, explaining that my mother is dead.

It’s too hot to press up against Freddy, but I squeeze his knee. I want him to know I don’t do any of this to hurt him. I do it to hurt myself.

“I texted her,” I say to Ciro. “Told her we could swing back and pick her up if she makes it down in time. I hope that’s okay.”

Ciro nods. The boat isn’t his or ours; it’s a charter from Sorrento we reserved for the week. A Riva. Naomi’s favorite. All glossy wood and sleek lines. The swim platform wraps around the side of the stern as if it might suddenly become a rudder, sending us underwater, that’s how futuristic the whole thing is. It was supposed to meet Lorna at the dock last night. A trusted friend of Ciro’s, a brother almost, at the helm. I always expected it would be Ciro who drove her, Ciro whocarried us that final leg. But after what happened yesterday, I didn’t want them alone together.

Still, Ciro was to follow the boat’s progress: wait until it left the marina, shadow its crossing, be in the wings if something happened. He gives no indication of what happened last night, his eyes watching the horizon as we expertly navigate between other boats.

“What do you think?” Ciro says after ten minutes have passed, throttling back.

“Looks great,” Freddy says, reaching for a cold bottle of beer from the cooler and cracking it open. “Anywhere looks great. It’s so fucking hot today. I just want to get in.”

He rubs his hands in delight, and I wonder, not for the first time, if I hadn’t been born a Lingate if I might have ended up like Freddy—optimistic to the point of oblivious. I envy him this. I always have.

Ciro brings us in along the cliffs and the floppy agaves that tumble down their faces. He drops the anchor, lets us drift until it catches. The only sound is the soft slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. Freddy is in the water before I even have a chance to strip off my cover-up. And as soon as he’s swimming away from us, Ciro reaches for my wrist.

“Aren’t you coming?” Freddy turns around in the water, looks back at the two of us. Looks at us like he sees it, all of it, our whole relationship, the whole plan, plain as day. But he can’t. I know he can’t. My body is slick with sweat from the sun, and I slip out of Ciro’s grasp. I take two quick steps to the gunwale and launch myself into the cool water of the Med.

—

There’s no explanation forhow Ciro and I came to be—we always were. Like a reflex, a muscle memory. An addiction. We were young when it started, fifteen. That summer he was working in the garden at the villa as if he had materialized from nothing.

And of course, Ciro hadn’tjustmaterialized. His mother, Renata, babysat me when I was a child. The villa’s housekeeper would take meto the small wooden door in the garden wall every morning and knock. We would wait, listening for the latch to be thrown, the door pushed open, and I would walk through. There, at the little house, in the little garden, Ciro and I played together, ate thecrespolinithat his mother made, lay on the cool concrete patio and sipped lukewarm sodas.

It was the closest I came to a normal childhood. She taught me how to sayamoreso that I sounded Neapolitan, like I finally belonged somewhere. And then she added: “Your mother spoke wonderful Italian.” Renata, unlike my own family, told me things about my mother. How much she loved me, how proud she would be of me. My mother, she said, was the reason she cared for me while my family was on the island. “We always hoped you and Ciro would play together. I can, at least, give her that.” Then she hugged me, her arms ropy and strong. I wondered how my life might have been different if I’d had Renata as a mother. If I’d had a mother at all.

There was no Capri in my childhood without Ciro in it, but then, suddenly, we were teenagers. At fifteen, Ciro made me realize how good hurting myself could feel. At home, I was too tall and thin. Too muchthe daughter of a murderer,as the kids at my high school liked to whisper after I passed. Money was supposed to make you popular. It just made me miserable.

Then there was Ciro—tan, funny, gorgeous. He knew about my family and didn’t care. A gift.

We sneaked away from the villa that summer to drink beers at the Gardens of Augustus after they closed. Ciro offered me a cigarette—my first—and the music from the bar next door allowed us to pretend our lives were bigger than just two teenagers on a park bench.

“I’m not a virgin,” he told me. “Are you?”

“Of course not,” I lied.

He didn’t say anything at first, but then he took my hand and turned to me and said:

“We should sleep together.”

I wanted to pull my hand away. To pretend that I had neverthought about sleeping with Ciro—which was pretty much all I thought about that summer.

But I liked how matter-of-fact he was. No one in my life was blunt like Ciro. Honest. I was frozen, terrified of what might come next but desperate to find out. I let him move his hand from my arm, to my shoulder, to my breast. And then, when I couldn’t take him learning the truth, I ran. It would be four more summers before we finally fucked.

Then, when I was twenty-one, I begged my father to let me spend a year abroad in Rome. He only let me go, I know, to get me away from Alma, fromallthe Almas. I had to agree to video surveillance of the apartment and a nightly Skype at nine, during which it was mandatory that I be home. I was not allowed to leave the apartment following the call, and if I did, the surveillance would alert my father in L.A. It was the longest leash I would ever get.

Ciro came to meet me my second week there.

“Thisis your apartment?” he asked.

It was in Prati. A nineteenth-century renovation on the ground floor with marble inlay everywhere and a pocket-size garden in the back. Two bedrooms, two blocks from the Tiber. A friend of Naomi’s owned it and never used it.

Crucially, there was a metal door to the alley that the gardeners used to get access. I used it to escape.

I was afraid to spend more than a week with Ciro. Worried that all those summer memories would break apart out of season. But he flopped onto the couch and crossed an ankle over his knee, took in the living room with its French windows and frescoed ceiling, and whistled. I met him on the couch and climbed into his lap. Finally, I was an adult.

First, he took me to the Villa Borghese, then to a trattoria in Trastevere. We ate and fucked and walked and did little else for almost a month before I said:

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