Page 97 of Saltwater

I look down and remember, although perhaps I always knew it, that the dress my mother was wearing the night she died was red, too.

He passes me an envelope. In it is my copy ofSaltwater.

Break them up,Lorna would whisper to me if she were here.

A bell sounds from across the garden, and our host begins the process of ushering his guests toward the amphitheater, which faces the Italian peninsula and the Gulf of Salerno. The view is so sweeping and distracting it seems unfair to the dancers waiting in the wings. I doubt Stan thought about the ballet when he decided to come tonight. I think he just wanted to see me perform.

I look back at Capri, where the Villa Jovis stands—a sentry at the eastern tip of the island—and I can’t help but think of the stories about the emperor who gave his name to those ruins. That he kept a harem of young boys. That he routinely threw discarded lovers from the cliffs. That he hosted lavish parties where all his guests dressed as Roman gods. That he beat people to death on a whim, for fun. Because he was bored.

Wasn’t it always because they were bored? The ballets. The performances. The affairs. The cheating. The obsessing. The drinking. The drugs. The parties. The fights. The shopping. The lounging. The killing. Not much, I know, has changed on the island in thousands of years.

My father lingers at the edge of the garden, letting the other guests pass by while he waits for my uncle to finish a conversation with a woman whose arms are so lined with gold bangles they run nearly to her elbows. I walk up to him and press the envelope into his hands.

“Have you read this?” I ask.

He pulls out the sheaf of papers and looks at the title page.

“Where did you get this?” he says.

He looks around us like an answer might be close by, but Stan is already seated, waiting for the ballet to begin. Marcus isn’t paying attention.

“Have you?” I ask, my voice calm even though my heart is racing.

Because if hehasread it, he knows. He knows that Marcus is my father. He knows and he has kept it from me. But if he doesn’t know, if Naomi is right and my father didn’t kill my mother, that leaves only Marcus with a motive. And maybe he had the same motive for killing Lorna, too.

“Yes,” he says. “She showed it to me once, years ago.” He fans through the pages and pauses in the middle, reads a sentence, maybe two. And he asks me again: “Where did you get this?”

“From Lorna,” I say.

“This is—” He begins to read through the pages frantically, skimming them, folding them back on themselves. “It’s not what you think, Helen.”

In the distance, the music starts.

Helen

Now

The opening chords of Stravinsky’sCapriccio echo sharply through the summer night. The piece is firm and aggressive at the beginning, heavy on the piano, the strings plaintively working their way into an elaborate clerestory. My father is still reading throughSaltwaterwhen the dancers take the stage.

“You told me you killed her,” I whisper. “You can’t imagine I wouldn’t try to find out why.”

He looks down at the pages. He’s started reading them again, but shakes his head.

“This is why, isn’t it?” I continue. “Because your brother and your wife had a child together and you’ve spent thirty-three years living with that mistake. Caring for that mistake.”

They may have pushed the truth underground, they may have even forgotten it some days, but I want to remind him—here, in front of this audience—about what he did. About whattheydid.

“No,” he says. He holds up a hand. I can see from where he is in the pages that he isn’t there yet. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about, Helen.”

I imagine it could be true, that he doesn’t know. Didn’t know. But I saw his guilt on the Salto,how ordinary it was, how all-consuming. Even his treatment of me feels like evidence of their affair, of his anger.

A pair of dancers spins out of the wings and onto the stage as my father looks up fromSaltwater.

“Tell me the truth,” I say. And then, since he’s lived with it for so long, because I know how much heneedsthis cleansing, I add: “This is why you killed her, isn’t it?”

My father starts to laugh. It’s a low, throaty chuckle.

“Your mother would have hated this,” he says, gesturing at the ballet, the entire island. “Can you imagine that there are people out there”—he points to Capri—“who don’t even know this is going on? A private ballet on a private island? All for people who don’t even really love art, they just love the cachet? That’s what used to drive your mother crazy. The fact that most patrons of the arts hardly noticed the art they patronized. There used to be a private hunt in the Hudson Valley that we would go to in the fall. On this large estate. Horses, hot cider, shotguns, foxes, and then, at the end, there would always be a performance by the first chairs of the New York Philharmonic. But it was the funniest thing. We would gather in this four-hundred-year-old Dutch barn, and everyone would do their level best to talk loud enough that they could be heard over the music. In the end, the music was just a conceit, an impediment. Just like this.” He gestures at the amphitheater stage. “It’s because we’re all performing. We’re performing what other peoplethinkwe should be. Your mother saw that. She found the humor and the tragedy in it. But the problem was, she had also seen throughourperformance.”

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