Page 32 of Saltwater

I can’t hear whatHelen and Ciro are saying over the engine, but I feel the eyes of Lorenzo and Giuseppe on the side of my face. When I turn to catch them, they aren’t watching me. They’re chatting, laughing, hands braced against the waves.

Ciro drives us around the Faraglioni, where boats are queued up to pass under the rocky archway.

Just relax,I tell myself.Go with the flow. Have fun.

But then, that advice has only ever taken me bad places.

The crush of boats is behind us within minutes. We motor around a finger of rock with a house built on it—low, rectangular, inexplicably red—and then we’re alone. I feel it in my body, the distance that is growing between us and the bustle of the marina, the beach club.

“The Casa Malaparte,” Ciro says, pointing at the house.

I know the name. It’s where she was the night she died.A dinner at Casa Malaparte,the articles read.

We’re approaching the end of the island now. The Amalfi Coast is just beyond us—Positano, Sorrento. Ciro idles the motor and lets the boat drift into an inlet, one of the dozens we’ve passed. All crystalline blue and white rocks. The cliffs tower above us—hundreds of feet up to the top, maybe more. I want to take Helen aside, to ask her if she can feel it too, how alone we are, but there’s nowhere on the boat to have a conversation like that, no scrap of space big enough for the two of us to get away from them.

“The Villa Jovis,” Ciro says, gesturing to the top of the cliffs, where I can see the edge of a structure. “It used to be the home of the Roman emperor Tiberius. A pleasure palace where he was free to do what—or who—he wanted. When someone disappointed him, he would simply throw them from these cliffs.” He makes a pushing motion and a whizzing sound through his teeth.

“Nice guy,” I say.

He nods. But then says: “A monster.”

Aren’t we all.

“We swim,” Ciro says. He doesn’t ask.

Neither Giuseppe nor Lorenzo has said anything since we left the marina, but now, in the quiet of the inlet, their silence feels outsize. Their bodies, their legs, seem like they’re growing. Inching farther and farther into my space. I make myself smaller.

“No,” I say. “I’ll stay. I’m getting hungry. Helen, are you hungry?”

I realize she doesn’t feel it. The feeling that creeps up your throat and spreads its fingers around the back of your skull, the feeling thattingles. The feeling that says:Strangers, outnumbered, alone, trapped, danger.Maybe she has never felt it. I’ve long suspected people like the Lingates can’t. Money is a surprising insulator against fear.

“We don’t have food,” Ciro says. “But beer, it’s like food to us.”

He passes me another bottle, and I just hold it, look at it.

This is why I stopped drinking. It allows moments like these to slip, frictionless, into something worse, something achingly bad.

Ciro moves to the front of the bow and pulls out an anchor, throws it overboard. The sound of the chain against the deck is a sharp clatter. I look at Helen, but she’s entirely at ease. It’s possible, I know, that I’m reading it wrong. But the risks are clear to me.

“We only swim for a little bit, okay?” Ciro says.

Giuseppe stands and stretches his arms overhead, throwing his cigarette overboard as he does so. I flinch when he reaches around me to retrieve a towel. Lorenzo, who sees my reaction, laughs and says something in Italian to Ciro, who, for the first time, doesn’t bother to translate for us.

Helen smiles at me and begins to wrap her hair back up.

It’s fine—relax. Go with the flow. Have fun.

There’s no swim platform on the boat, just a ladder that drops down off the back. But none of the men use it. They throw themselves off the bow with such force that I stumble, hit my knee against a bench seat, and wince at the pain.

“They’re just Italian,” Helen says to me once they’re in the water. “It’s all bravado.”

She’s noticed, I realize, that I’m watching their movements the way I might watch a snake coil.

If you act scared, it will only get worse.

I walk to the front of the boat and make a big show of diving into the water to the sound of their cheers. Helen follows and we all swim, the knot of us, into the inlet where the water is crystal clear and turquoise, nothing like the navy of the deeper Mediterranean.

“This is why you need more than a week,” Ciro says, splashing Lorenzo. Who, I notice for the first time, has a scar running from the crease of his eye to his chin.

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