Page 40 of Saltwater

She wouldn’t admit to him that itwasabout them. That in the first draft, she hadn’t even bothered to change the last name from Lingate. A new name had been applied in revisions, the details rearranged. But itwasthem on the page. All of them. Even Richard.

“It’s just a play,” she said.

“A play written by my wife about a family that looksverysimilar to my own. How am I supposed to explain that? It will be called a roman à clef!”

“It’s not even a novel!”

“That doesn’t matter. People will gossip. Our name means something. Don’t you get that?”

Sarah never heard him talk like this when they lived in New York, but his family—his father, his brother, even these houses—seemed to exert a gravitational, hypnotic pull. He slotted back into the family structure seamlessly, without protest. It was the lack of protest that most upset Sarah. Richard never once seemed to chafe against the limits of this world. She did.

“Richard, there’s always going to be talk about a family like yours,” she said.

“Do you understand the lengths we go to in order to keep that kind of chatter to a minimum?”

There were so many rebuttals—It’s not gossip, it’s art; It’s not your family, it’s fiction; You need to relax; It’s not your decision—but Sarah could feel it, the way he was digging in, hardening against the idea. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t imagined this might be the outcome. She had been certain, actually, that it would be.

“It’s embarrassing enough,” Richard said, his voice low, “that your work is so public.”

Sarah stiffened. It had never bothered him before that her plays were public. If anything, he liked the attention.

“What happens if I go ahead with it anyway?” Sarah said. She picked up the stack of pages on the floor, the top half soaked a rich burgundy.

Richard sighed and looked at her for the first time that evening, the first time, really, since Helen had been born. In a way that said he still knew who she was, he knew and he hated it.

He said simply, “We’ll sue. You’ll lose everything.”

What Sarah didn’t tell him was that she already had. A fact that, he’d yet to realize, only made her more dangerous.

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance:10

We’re back at the villa—afterI nearly drowned Helen, after lunch, after the slushy lemon ices we ate on the Belvedere di Tragara on our way back from the beach club—and the sun is finally behind Monte Solaro. Freddy tips a pitcher of sangria the housekeeper has left for us into a glass. It’s that in-between time I didn’t know existed until I met rich people: cocktail hour. Drinks before dinner. An hour to ease themselves into the labor of conversation. Here, on Capri, it’s sacred. Like church.

Usually it doesn’t bother me to be around alcohol. But today, I envy them the anesthetizing flush that spreads across your face after the first sip, the way the liquid softens your thinking, makes life more palatable. Because without it, a loop from the afternoon keeps playing in my mind—me pulling Helen under, Helen gasping for air, Helen whisperingLet’s not tell Freddy,and the two of them laughing on the way back to the villa, sipping their lemon ices like nothing had happened. Like nothing hadeverhappened.

She’s sitting next to me at the table, wearing the necklace. The snakes twisting around her neck. Their red eyes match the flush of her cheeks. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’re watching me, doing the work on Helen’s behalf. It’s unnerving how calm she seems after what happened. Like she washed it off with the saltwater.

It must be a consolation to her father that she’s not a complete clone of her mother. She looks like him, too. The way her nose turns, the distance between her eyes.

I was told once that all daughters resemble their mothers more than their fathers.It’s in the genes,they say. That extra helping of my mother’s genes still terrifies me. I know I have her addiction; it found me early. It’s the rest of her I’m afraid I might see in the mirror one day: the weakness and poverty and helplessness. Or the violence. Maybe that’s what came out of me in the water—her.

Did she ever think that I would go from the filth of her apartment to this? Not that I’m sure this is better. At least at my mother’s house, it was easy to know what to worry about—avoid the bottles, her boyfriends, and the expired milk. Naomi has the same orange bottles on her bedside table my mother did; their labels readlorazepam,Dazidox.The size and shape of the pills familiar.

That’s the thing about people like the Lingates, like Stan, and even places like Capri. You can’t tell what’s truly bad. Was it the boat of Italians pulling up the ladder? Or is it this family, drinking and nibbling on snacks?Is it me?

When I first started going to parties, I used to think the older men—the ones with white hair, who seemed to be doting and slow—would be the safest place to start. They were a father, sometimes a grandparent. And that made it worse, somehow, when it turned out they were the roughest. The cheapest. The most perverse.

They like that you can’t tell. That’s the whole point. Helen knows it, too.

When I first met her, it was easy to mistake the material facts of her life as evidence of care—the house, the allowance, the driver, the way she was shielded from the outside world. But I once dropped something off at Richard’s house and saw it—her hesitation. Recognized it immediately. When I asked if I could use the bathroom before I left, she stilled, if only for a second. But long enough for me to realize this wasn’t Helen’s house, not really. It was the same hesitation of other pretty young girls who answered doors around the city.

I’m sorry, he’s not home.

No, I don’t know when he’ll be back.

She said, “Of course,” and let me inside. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen.” She motioned to the bathroom at the end of the foyer, and then to the kitchen, which was through a large living room.

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