Page 57 of Saltwater

She takes my hand in hers, and I can’t help it. I examine her cheek to see if he left a fingerprint. But there’s nothing there, just clear, flushed skin—a gloss of sweat.

Ciro.

This is why he was so quick to save her. Would he have killed me if I had held her under longer? Does he know about tonight?

“Lorna,” she repeats. “Did you pop a stitch?”

I pull the paper towels back and look at the wound—all three black stitches are still in place.

“No.”

Helen laughs, and when there’s a gap in the line, she slips into a bathroom stall, pulls me in with her. The space is tight and our knees knock together.

“He said tonight, didn’t he?” she asks.

Her voice is a whisper, her lips pressed close to my ear. I thought they might have told her, that they might have discussed it as a family.

I nod. “He’s on his way back,” I say.

I have less than thirty minutes to decide if I trust her. Or if I trust Stan. Or if I should leave them both and walk away, with or without the money. But at least with my life.

“Do you have everything you need? You know the address?”

I repeat the address in Naples back to her.

She’s flushed, her pupils dilated.

“Then after,” she says, spreading her hand wide, but her knuckle connects with the metal wall of the stall, “we can go to Rome, we can go to London, we won’t ever have to go back to L.A. Not if we don’t want to.”

“You’re getting loud,” I say.

Because she is, and because it makes me jumpy to see Helen like this: loose, like things might spill out of her mouth, her dress, her past. I know people like her, families like hers. They don’t understand consequences, only punishments.

“It’s finally here,” she says, her voice a hiss.

I nod.

“They deserve it,” she says.

They all do.

Someone bangs on the bathroom stall door and Helen calls out:

“Momento per favore!”

We’ve been over the mechanics of this a hundred times: the money, the boat, the drop. There was always going to be a night when I had to choose.

Helen unlocks the stall door and drags me back through the club, past the celebrities, past the dark corner where Ciro stood minutes before, and onto the dance floor, where one of the girls—Martina—grins at me. I join her for a few bars of the song, literally trying to shake off the evening, the trip, my life. Our hips and feet move at the same time. She rests a pencil thin forearm on my shoulder and yells the lyrics at me in thickly accented English. I yell them back.

You can forget anything if you work at it hard enough.

Another song goes by, and then another. After the fourth, I retreat to the table, where the bottle of vodka is floating in a bath of cold water, the ice long ago melted. I lift it up, just to feel the weight of it sloshing around in the glass. And even though I’m close to the dance floor, I can no longer see them through the haze—Helen and Freddy.

That cloud of smoke and heat is also the reason I don’t see Stan, who barrels toward me and then spins into the chair next to me.

“You owe me,” he says, passing me a bag. “Marcus left this for you.”

He’s leaning in close so that I can hear, yelling so that I can feel the pressure of his breath. It’s funny, I think, that he’s the one passing me the cash. Marcus, too, must have liked the irony of the gesture.

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