Page 8 of Saltwater

Only she’s gone now. We’re all waiting for her—me, my father, my uncle. Waiting for her to come and offer reassurances:It went well; it was easy.Instead, she’s gone. And I realize, my body buzzing, my face burning, that years later, I’ve done it again. I’ve closed every exit, I’ve trapped myself inside.

—

In college, I thoughtit might be healthy to open up about my mother’s death. It was what most people wanted to know about me.Lingate.I could see them searching the flotsam of memory, looking for a place to slot my name. And then—click.I was jealous, even if I didn’t know to put that label on it, that my father and uncle had enjoyed a time when our name only meant one thing—money—if it meant anything at all.

“This is just for background?” I asked Alma. I was twenty, trying to be a painter. On my own for the first time. Or the closest I would ever get. I still lived at home. They had deemed the dorms a safety risk, worried what I might say late at night in a shared space.

“Yes,” Alma said.

We had met in an acrylics class, but Alma was a writer. She sat at her easel, hunched, like she was leaning into a typewriter.

“I’ve always wanted to tell yourmother’sstory,” she said to me one day after class.

For my entire life, hearing the wordsmotherandstoryin the same sentence had made me stiffen. But Alma had a low, gravelly voice. Almost a whisper. I think, now, that it might have been her whispering that made a difference. After a lifetime of having questions shouted at me as I entered school, left the grocery store, or slipped down a step-and-repeat, the whisper felt like a promise.

“If you’d be open to it,” she said.

I looked her in the eye and saw an alternative to theNo commentmy father insisted on.

“Let me think about it.”

Two weeks later, we sat in a recording booth with two microphones hooked up to her computer. I had paint on my jeans, and Alma had brought her lunch in with her, a sandwich that showed the outlines of her fingers, the bread either very soft or her grip very tight. The thought of food made me nauseous. Everything had made me nauseous that morning. I was young, but no idiot. This was a risk. My first.

“We can keep whatever you want off the record,” she said, brushing her fingertips on her skirt.

“How does that work?” I asked. “Do I need to sayoff the record?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“Okay,” I said into the mic. “This is off the record.”

We talked for almost an hour—about my mother’s love of Harold Pinter, her preference for sparse staging—before Alma asked me:

“Do you think she was murdered?”

“No,” I said. And I remember this clearly—I said no.“But I can see how that’s a narrative people might gravitate to.”

“What do you mean?” Alma asked.

I liked that when she spoke to me, she tilted her head. She had these wispy bangs that slipped from her temple to her nose and back again. And I could smell the pickles in her sandwich.

“I don’t want this to sound bad,” I said. “But people are fascinated by my family.”

“They are.”

“But only since her death,” I stipulated.

Alma cocked her head again, and the bangs swished like a metronome across her face.

“Are you saying your mother’s death gave your family celebrity?”

“No, not in that way,” I quickly said. “But the accident, it…” I searched for the right word. It was frustrating to have waited so long to tell this story, only to find myself fumbling the plot. I picked a bit of navy blue paint out from underneath my nail. I tried again. “You know, young, beautiful, talented dead women get a lot of attention.”

That was the headline she would try to run with:Young, Beautiful, Talented Dead Women Get a Lot of Attention.

“Do you find it hard to work in her shadow?” Alma asked me.

“Off the record?”

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