Page 3 of Saltwater

It’s not what I imagined. It’s smaller. Sharper.Steeper.Muchsteeper. Two bony shards jutting out of the Mediterranean with a swale in the middle. Blond cliffs everywhere. It’s a wonder they don’t bother them—the cliffs.

Helen’s mother was famously found dead beneath one of them, her body mangled and bloated. Thirty years ago, in fact. I’ve searched out the earliest articles. I’ve memorized the blotchy gray scale of the old photographs. I’ve found myself growing sentimental over the way her red dress clung to her legs when she was pulled from the water. The way her hair obscured her face like a morgue sheet. It’s the kind of elegant tragedy that still receives glossy retrospectives:Lingate Death—Decades Later, Questions Remain.It was an accident. Maybe a suicide. That’s what the family has always said.

And every year they come back here to prove it’s true.

I want to set down this glass of champagne, but there’s nowhere to put it. So I cradle it like a baby bird, worried too much pressure might break it. The air is thick with salt. It’s uncomfortably humid, but they don’t care.

“I want you to feel like a member of the family,” my employer says, his words cutting through the chop of the waves.

But I’m not one of them. I am not a Lingate.

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“You’d love it,” Marcushad said to me in early May. We were having lunch a few blocks from his office, at a place with white tablecloths and waiters so deferential they always seemed to have a backache. He insisted that I try his braised quail, and its tiny bones felt like carved ivory in my fingers. I don’t like foods that take a lot of effort to consume—small game birds, soft-boiled eggs, crab, lobster—they’re time wasters, a pantomime of manners, all miniature forks and spoons. But that day, I nibbled.

“It’s not like you imagine,” he continued, massaging his fingers into his napkin. “It’s so much better, Capri.”

He said the name with a sharp accent on the first syllable. Like a gunshot:kapow.Only it wasKaa-pri.

I’d never been to Italy.

“Better than Majorca,” he continued.

I’d never been to Spain, either.

“Inconvenient,” he said, “but worth the effort. The best places always are.” He washed down his quail with a gulp of white wine and tossed off: “You should come.”

It was an accident, I think, that invitation. But I’ve always liked seeing money up close. In private it gives off a heat. The cool, slick public façade replaced by an addictive glow.

“Okay,” I said.

I assumed he would forget the conversation. But then he sent my flight information. And that was what surprised me most—hehad reached out to confirm there would be space on the jet. Even though it wasmyjob.

You should come—he had meant it.

“Don’t people like that always travel with their assistants?” my roommate had asked me.

“I’ve never traveled with them.”

A staff was always discreetly arranged in advance. NDAs signed, preferences made clear.

“But is it really that strange he would ask?” she said, rifling through our fridge, empty but for leftovers in dented Styrofoam containers and two half-drunk bottles of wine. “Since you and Helen are friends. Maybe she was going to invite you all along?”

Maybe.

It would be better this way.

Helen Lingate and I werefriends.We were friends, despite the fact that I lived here, with a roommate, in my mid-thirties, within earshot of the 405. I had worked hard for Helen. You have to when people have money. They’re suspicious. For good reason. But I had put in the time. And now the heir to all that Lingate money and I saw each other at least once a week—a hike, a lunch, a bar meetup where I always ordered a lemonade and she a gimlet.

“Will it be weird?” my roommate continued, struggling with a cork jammed into one of the bottles of wine. “You working and her—”

“Lounging,” I supplied.

“Yeah.”

I shrugged. I wanted to pretend a little longer; pretending made my life bearable. But I had already talked about them too much.

Discretion was the job. And Helen had recommended me. Her uncle, she said, needed an assistant. We were only acquaintances then. I ran the front of house for a busy bakery in Brentwood she visited every morning at 10:35. It was the kind of thing where seeing someone’s face several days a week added up to something like knowing a person, and then we ran into each other on a trail and she started talking. I liked listening. Listening was how I ended up on that trail in the first place.

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