Page 5 of Saltwater

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance:36

I join the Lingates on thedock. I don’t have a choice. Not really. None of us look back. Ahead, the Marina Grande spills toward the sea. Cafés are bloated with tourists and Italians who soak up the sun. Workers and visitors wait on ferries, clustered under what little shade is available. I try to enjoy it, but also to memorize it—where the boats pick up, the location of the ticket kiosk, the areas that are most crowded. Only the unforgiving sun distracts me, softens my bones. As if with the next step, I might buckle onto the stone. Surrender.

And as much as I don’t want to admit it, he was right—Capriisbetter than I imagined.

Marcus loosens himself from the knot of Lingates a few feet in front of me and waits until I catch up.

“You handled that well,” he says. “Naomi can’t stand the sight of blood.”

“Most people can’t.” I don’t mean to stick up for his wife, but I have.

“Not you,” Marcus says, as if I should add this information to my résumé, as if it’s an achievement. But then, people like the Lingates want to know you’ll be able to clean up any mess.

I catch his profile: a Roman nose, tan cheeks, painfully white teeth against the blinding glitter of the Med. This man whose email I read and whose prescriptions I fill. Marcus Lingate takes oral minoxidil to maintain his full head of hair (and itisfull, a bit wavy and long,with streaks of gray at the temples), as well as Crestor. His doctor asks him, regularly, to clean up his diet and get off the statin, but he refuses. He’s thick, but not in an unattractive way. He likes his coffee black and from the Pacific Rim. His dinner reservations are always for 7:45p.m.,and the table must be secluded but never near the kitchen or bathroom. He insists charitable donations never be made anonymously, and he rarely communicates with his family via email or text. Just on the phone. I don’t join those calls.

It’s a strange thing, knowing so much about a person when they know so little about you.

“Must be your nursing background,” he says absently.

“What?” I say. I’m not really listening. I’m watching a group of men gathered around a tarp covered in caught fish, their jelly eyes bulging. I know better. Little distractions can lead to big mistakes; I pull my eyes away from the catch.

“Didn’t you say you worked briefly as a nurse?” he asks.

I did say that. I’ve said a lot of things over the years that I didn’t think people would remember. But then, that’s the strange thing about Marcus Lingate: he remembers everything.

I will need to follow up about the refund.

“It was mostly administrative work,” I say, gambling he won’t push for details. “Surprisingly little patient care.”

I’ve had lots of jobs before I started working for the Lingates. Odd jobs and no jobs, jobs that never made it onto my generously padded résumé. Jobs that put me at the fringes of people like the Lingates—bottle service, party girl, a few other things that stretched definition.

He doesn’t press. In any case, I didn’t need to work in a hospital to learn how to handle harm. The Lingates, in particular, are surrounded by it.

At the end of the marina, a car is waiting for us. It’s Illy red with a sawed-off top; a striped awning in lieu of a roof flutters in the breeze. All the taxis on Capri are like this, convertibles that can never be converted back. I know this because I googled the island before we came. People like to be surprised—delighted!—on their vacations, but this isn’t my vacation. Marcus and I load in after the rest of the family,and the man who met us moments ago closes the door and summons a separate taxi for himself.

It’s not far from the Marina Grande to the town of Capri, but itissteep. We climb up a road clogged with scooters and e-bikes to the soundtrack of an Italian summer, tinny pop hits I can’t understand.

I try to keep my hair from twisting in the wind, but it pulls free. Already a tan is blooming on my arms and chest. I’ve always preferred that my skin change with the seasons. If I pay for it later, it won’t be the only thing. Next to Helen, I imagine, I look as tan as the men on the docks.

My father, my mother always said, was from Buenos Aires. Who knows if she remembered that correctly. My mother wasn’t great with the details. I never met him, never saw a photo. She gave me his last name. It would make it less obvious that I was her daughter.This way,she said,it’s like we’re just friends.She didn’t even want us to seem like sisters. Maybe she always knew it would make it easier to leave me behind, too.

We curve around another hairpin turn. My shoulder presses into Marcus. We arrive at the center of the island—the swale between the two high points—and the cars stop. The rest of Capri is for pedestrians only.

Our doors are reopened, and bottles of water, dripping with condensation, are passed out.

We aren’t even to the center of town yet—the Piazzetta—but already I can feel the eyes following us, their weight unmistakable. It feels like they leave marks. The Lingates, however, love it. The once-over at an entrance, the quick sidelong glance—Are you someone I should know?The irony is that the most powerful people are often the most unrecognizable. It’s a fact that defines the Lingates’ entire life—be unknowable, be the richest.

Marcus and Richard cut ruthlessly through the crowds of visitors, past the Capriotes slouched around tables in the Piazzetta, down a long pedestrian street dotted with the first clutch of luxury boutiques and gelato shops. We follow the outline of their linen-clad bodies. Richard in all white, a pair of flowing pants, a cuffed button-up, likea guru. And Marcus in the pink shorts Naomi laid out for him before we left L.A. I’ve spent two months preparing for this trip, but I couldn’t have prepared for the way the island smells—of figs—or the way the light kisses the agaves and the pines. I couldn’t have prepared for the scene—the jewelry, how everyone wears their fabric draped loosely but has insisted their plastic surgeon pull their skin tight, the personal security that follows at a safe distance.

Maybe the incident on the boat was only a distraction. Maybe it’s this that the rich have taught me—how to ignore anything unpleasant. How to bat it away with beauty. A bouquet of lilacs to erase the scent of urine, a gate to keep out poverty.

Usually I’m the one on the street.

Off this main artery spider narrow streets and hidden doors. I hear the thin sound of techno music, but also, incongruously, church bells. Every few feet people seem to be on the come up. Behind them follow others already worried about the come down. That, at least, I recognize.

We enter the heart of the shopping district—Hermès, Gucci, a massive Ferragamo storefront—where two strikingly beautiful women and one man, dressed in pastel linens and straw fedoras, swan through the flow of tourists and shoppers.

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