Page 28 of Saltwater

“What do you do here?” I asked him, our fingers entwined on top of the crisp bedsheets in our room.

“What do you mean?”

“For work,” I said.

We had never really talked about it, although I knew he worked summers on Capri, ten, twelve hours a day during high season.

“There isn’t really work here,” he said after a minute. “Some. But it’s not easy to find.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I asked, facing him, my head supported by my hand.

“Why don’t you leave L.A.?” he asked me.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

Ciro was the only one who encouraged me to leave them, who believed I could. I rolled onto my back. Stared at the thin bit of pastel wallpaper peeling where it met the molding. After a minute, he asked:

“Do you ever think you could move here?”

It was the first time Ciro had stripped back his skin to show me his heart. And I could feel it, in the bed, the way it was vibrating, shaking. Hetrustedme with it.

“Are you asking me to move here?” I said.

“Not yet. And not here, to my apartment. Maybe somewhere else, a small house in the Veneto? An apartment in Milan. A—”

I breathed in the must of the room, the smell of the salt air. The thickness of the city.

“I love it here,” I said.

I didn’t necessarily mean Naples, but it didn’t really matter.

We were still young. So young that anything seemed possible. Even the idea of us. The idea of me here. Him believing it made me believe it, too.

So I said, rolling back on top of him: “Yes.”

—

I catch up toFreddy in a shallow eddy—all volcanic rock and glittering sun. The water gently jostling us up and down. I swim up to him and wrap myself around him, sloppily, apologetically. Freddy is the one thing I’m allowed to have. An imitation of the genuinearticle. The never-quite-satisfying replica. But without him, there would be nothing at all. And I love him for that.

They love him because he’s like us. His parents longtime friends of Naomi’s. Generations of compatibility, confidentiality.

I try not to hold that against him.

“Hel—” he says. He pushes me away, holds me at arm’s length. It makes me panic. I think he knows. About Ciro. About Lorna.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” he says. His hands drop from my arms.

“What’s up?” I say. I laugh. But there’s something inside me trying to claw its way out. My guilt, maybe. My fear.

He wades to shore and sits against a rocky outcropping, the only bit of sand the inlet has. I don’t know if I should join him, so I stay in the water, up to my shoulders, facing him. A few steps behind me, the water is overhead; the shallows always fall away so quickly on Capri.

His eyes search the shoreline, avoiding mine. His fingers move across the rocks around him, as if he’s feeling out the perfect, comforting texture. There’s a cold upwelling coming from the deep, from somewhere behind me.

“It’s something I did, Helen. Something I regret. That I haven’t told you about…” Still, he won’t meet my eyes, and my mind is ticking through the options—an affair, a lie, a divulgence, a work thing, an inappropriate moment or word or impulse. There’s so much terrain that could be covered byI did something.

“I…” Again, he trails off. As if contemplating the words causes him anguish.

I join him on the sand, and within a few minutes out of the water, the sun is blistering. “It’s okay,” I say. “We don’t have to talk about it now.”

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