Page 43 of Saltwater

“And would you mind talking to Naomi tonight? I know she can be difficult, but earlier, while you were out, she was telling me how much she would like to get to know you. You understand, don’t you, the delicate balance between a wife and an assistant? Particularly an assistant who looks like you.”

I smile. I use my uninjured hand to pat his knee. I’ve gotten quite good at offering privileged men absolution. The service isn’t free, but it’s in high demand. I learned that from them.

“Of course,” I say. “She has nothing to worry about. I’ll make that clear.”

Marcus nods, satisfied.

“Just be sure,” the doctor says, “no alcohol or blood thinners. And try to keep your heart rate down. It will only make it bleed more.”

Helen

Now

The villa is empty. Andeven though I didn’t expect Lorna to be here, some part of me hoped she might be. Waiting in the kitchen with a knowing smile, a wink. An acknowledgment we had won. But she’s not. She’s been missing for eighteen hours. Perhaps my father and uncle are alerting the police. Perhaps they’re there right now.

I know what the police would think—another missing girl, the Lingates. No. The police don’t know about Lorna. Only we do.

Freddy kisses me on the cheek and says he’s going to swim before dinner. He leaves me alone in the foyer, and I watch his progress through the garden to the pool, where he drapes a striped towel over a chaise and dives in. It sounds delicious but I don’t have time for a swim.

Instead, I take the stairs two at a time. On the second floor, I pass my father’s room, his door open, and pause. He doesn’t let the housekeeper in to clean while we’re here, but even so, his room is spare, as if inhabited by a monk.

He didn’t used to be that way, at least that’s what I’ve gathered. My parents used to live in the Bel Air house, hung with contemporary art and stacked with Imari plates, handmade wicker furniture and antique kilims, a housekeeper and nanny and gardener, all of whom were full-time. On staff. Gradually, he got rid of it all.

An aspiring Buddhist monk,one paper called him.Ascetic,said another. I had to look that one up. But all of it added up to the samething: pretend poverty as penance. The art came down with the dishes. The walls were washed white. The staff became occasional contractors. His meals became regimented, Ayurvedic. He meditated every morning at six. The schedule, the cleansing, the fixation on purity, became just another form of control, of rigidity.

Orguilt.That was what everyone thought.He’s guilty.

But it wasn’t like that. It was almost like he thought he could touch her—my mother. Like she was just on the other side of this veil. And that everything else needed to be pared down so that he could devote all of his energy to this—to reaching her. Maybe, if he closed his eyes, emptied his mind, starved his body of anything processed, she might tell him what happened that night.

He has been guilty of so many things, but not murder. He isn’t strong enough for something big like that. His actions too small, too tight, too paranoid. He wouldn’trisk it.

I continue to our bedroom and shower quickly, washing away the salt. I brush my hair back, severe and tight to my scalp, and pull on a simple white dress, which I pair with the necklace. All day it has been calling to me, exerting this strange pull that I could feel even when we were on the boat, like an echo or a reverberation reaching me at sea. Fitting for Capri. It was near here that the Sirens supposedly lured sailors to their death. The chatter—the song—stops when I close the clasp at the back of my neck. It clicks into place, the metal cool, almost damp against my skin—and everything goes silent.

I try to imagine what my mother would tell me to do, whatshedid that week on the island. It would have been easy, over the years, to become obsessed with her death. The reason for it, her motivations, thehowof it. I chose instead to focus on the woman she was when she was alive. The artist, the writer. There were always enough people fixated on her death. But now I worry it’s her death—this necklace—that might explain Lorna’s disappearance.

Beyond the French doors of the balcony, I can see Freddy asleep by the pool, his head listing to one side. I slip down the hall and into Lorna’s room. I pull open the dresser drawers and paw through her toiletry kit. I want to know what she’s taken with her—clothes,medication, jewelry, even her passport. But I find everything here. Her suitcase, I realize, isn’t even unpacked, as if she didn’t want to bother to hang things up, as if that kind of permanence might have been too large a commitment. Bedside, I find an abandoned cellphone charger. I wonder how much life she has left in her phone, if it’s really dead.

In the bathroom, I pull open the glass cabinet. Everything is where it should be—except for her toothbrush. I can’t find her hairbrush, either. A bottle of ibuprofen rests on the counter next to an empty glass. But nothing, really, has been taken. It’s a room that says,I’m coming home,I never planned to be out this late.

Her carry-on is on the floor, and I rifle through that too, finding her passport nested in the front pocket. I set it on the floor next to me and pull out everything else: receipts and cords, a box of gum and a pair of earplugs—the classic detritus of travel. But I feel something else through the pocket, something in the interior. I shake it out, emptying it onto the ground, and with the second strong shake, it comes out, a rectangular box, still in its plastic—test di gravidanza,it reads across the front.

A pregnancy test.

“What are you doing?” Naomi’s voice is silky, each word sliding into the next, and even though I am surprised to hear her, I take my time before turning around. I do my best to keep the pregnancy test behind my back.

“I was just checking to see if Lorna’s phone is here,” I say. I lean back so she can see the bag but not the pile of refuse behind me. I didn’t even think about Naomi. Naomi, who was probably asleep while I showered, while I rifled.

“Why would she leave her phone?” Naomi asks.

She’s dressed for dinner: a pair of wide-legged white linen pants and the smallest of blue camisoles. Huge pearls circle her neck and wrists, dangle from her ears. Even now, she still looks like a child—birdlike and wondrous. Her progressively aggressive surgeries have helped maintain that scrubbed-clean look, despite the drinking. She takes a step into the room.

“She’s been leaving it here,” I say. “I don’t know why.” It’s the truth.

Naomi moves her body in a way I’ve never seen—quick and sinuous, like a snake striking—and suddenly she’s past me and looking at the contents of Lorna’s bag, scattered on the floor. She nudges the pregnancy test with her sandaled foot, and the plastic crinkles against the terrazzo floor.

“Oh.”

It’s all she says. A sad little slip of a word—oh.

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