Page 98 of Saltwater

At this, he stops and looks at me with sadness, his eyes drifting to the necklace around my neck. He shakes his head.

“Your mother was always too good for me,” he says. “I should have known that from the beginning. I should have found myself someone like Naomi. Someone appropriate. But I was so committed back then to proving howdifferentI was. To proving that I wasn’t like Marcus. That I was interested in other things. That I could expand what it meant to be a Lingate beyond business and a little bit of philanthropy. She always made that seem possible, your mother. But she was so unhappy.”

I want to ask why she was unhappy, how she was unhappy. I want to know if I can see myself in it, in those outlines of despair. Were wesubjected to the same control? The same management? Or am I alone in my unhappiness?

“That night, your mother asked me for a divorce,” my father says.

In the background, the strings pick up a frenetic allegro. The dancers move themselves into a frenzy, bodies dipping and bending so fast it seems like they’re being blown by the sirocco, whipping off the coast of North Africa.

“People get divorced,” I say.

My father shakes his head. “Your mother and I had a prenup,” he explains. “It was arranged by my father’s personal attorney while he was still alive. It was generous, but not overly so. Your mother would receive child support and a monthly payment of forty thousand dollars. There would be bonuses for every year we were married. When she asked for a divorce, I panicked. I thought of the number of public filings we would have to make. The fact the press might be able to access our financial information. I thought of the prenup and the amount of money I would owe her. That I would have to tell her…”

He drifts off, looks up at the stone pines that form a gentle, fragrant canopy above our heads. Takes a breath and starts again:

“Do you know what it would be like to lose all of this?”

“Lose what?” I ask.

“Nights like this. Trips like this. All the things that come with being a Lingate—the invitations, the assumptions, the prestige.”

He’s right, I don’t know what it would be like. And I know, despite all the times I’ve told Ciro I can imagine leaving everything for him, despite all the times I’ve considered leaving my father’s house in the morning and never coming back, that I am terrified to learn what it would be like.

Isn’t that why Lorna is dead? Because I was afraid to lose it? Because I’ve never been able to walk away, not from them, but from the money? Haven’t they always been the same thing in my mind?

When I admit this, I feel close to him in a grotesque way. As if he’s revealing to me, through all of this, that I’m more like them than I ever thought. Maybe that’s what Lorna knew all along, maybe it’swhy she made contingency plans, with Stan, even with Marcus. Maybe she knew I was one of them. Bile rises at the back of my throat.

“No,” my father continues, “you don’t know what it would be like. And I hope you never have to find out. But you are old enough now to know that the reason I couldn’t divorce your mother was that there was no money to pay her. No assets. No child support. No alimony. No accounts to be split. None of it. When we moved to Los Angeles from New York, it was because your grandfather was sick. No one knew how long he would live, so we came, and we stayed. But when he died, we discovered that everything had been a lie. Your grandfather had taken the inheritance left to him by his father—almost five hundred million dollars—and had squandered it. Spent it. Misinvested it. He was weeks away from selling or mortgaging the house. He never told any of us. Even that necklace”—he flips up the collar at my neck with a single finger—“is a fake. A reproduction. It’s tin, Helen. We discovered all of it when your grandfather died. That’s why I couldn’t let your mother have a divorce. Our divorce filings would have made all of that information public. It would have revealed to the world the truth—that we’re broke. That the Lingates have been living off Naomi’s largesse for years while your uncle attempts to find the right kind of investments that will restore us, restore our name. Don’t you see?”

He reaches for me, but I move away. It was always there, in the outlines of my mother’s play—the family that came apart, that lost it all, that were violent in their desire to ruin one another. Themselves. It was there in the necklace, in the way the jeweler saidben fatto,the way he wrote outpinchbeckfor my records.

“Did she know?” I ask.

“She started to figure it out,” he says. “At first, I think she guessed. Or suspected. We wanted to fix it before you found out. Beforeshefound out. We did it for you, for the next generation. We thought we just needed to keep it secret long enough to find a solution. We thought it would be easy. But your mother, she wouldn’t give us the time. She wanted to produce this play—” He shakes the pages.

“I should have let her, but I was worried what people would say.That’s why she asked for the divorce. I didn’t mean to kill her that night. I just wanted her tounderstand.But she didn’t. I got so angry. There was a steep slope, and while we were arguing, she fell. I didn’t catch her. I don’t think Iwantedto catch her. I heard her head connect with that rock. The sound—”

The piano chords pulse again as the short ballet crescendos.

“Like an egg cracking,” he says. “The worst thing I’ve ever heard. I still hear it, in fact. When the room is quiet, I can hear her head hitting the stone.”

“Did you check to see if she was still alive?” I say. Surely he must have checked. Surely he must have waited next to her body until he was certain. But he shakes his head.

“She never would have survived something like that.” Then he looks up at the canopy of pines again and says: “That sound. I just knew.”

In a matter of minutes, my father has neatly dismantled everything I thought I knew about myself, about my life. And I feel an urge to throw myself into the fray alongside the dancers, to let my body be jerked to and fro by the staccato piano and howling strings. I feel, even, an inexplicable pull to the cliff behind the stage. For the first time, I wonder what it would be like to topple over the side. If it would make me closer to her, if it would help me adjust to this new reality.

Lorna had always seen it in me. How dependent I was on this. On them.

Only I remember then where my mother’s body was found—just below the house. Not in the gardens my father has described. I hear an echo of Naomi’s voice:He’s wrong. He didn’t kill her.

I ask him: “Did you carry her body back?”

He shakes his head. He seems like he might not answer, but then he says, low, apologetic: “Marcus helped.”

I almost find it tender in some strange way, the idea of Marcus helping my father take care of my mother’s body. Carrying her back. Throwing her over the edge. But it’s not tender, not if what Naomi said is true.

He’s wrong. He didn’t kill her.

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