Page 9 of Saltwater

“Off the record.”

“Impossible,” I said. “Because she was so good. I don’t think I’ll ever be that good.” I thought of my mother as an artist. As someone who had been lucky enough to have a life before becoming a Lingate. Not as a dead girl. There was both hope and desperation in that—hope that she lived on through her work, and desperation that I would never measure up. Still, I showed up in front of the canvas every day to try.

Alma shopped the article almost immediately. TheLos Angeles Timespicked it up—a coup, I realized belatedly, for a young writer. Two days before its scheduled publication, someone called my father to let him know.

But my uncle knew the publisher. He had been a friend of my grandfather’s. During one particularly lean third quarter, Lingate money had kept the lights on. That favor still mattered. They only offered favors that mattered.

“She said the entire conversation was off the record,” my uncle reiterated again into the phone in our kitchen, where I sat on a stool, waiting for it to be my turn.

“The recording,” I said softly. “There’s a recording where I say it.”

He relayed the information, followed by some murmuring and the insistence that “it gets pulled from everywhere, immediately. I don’t care if you have to rearrange the whole fucking paper. You should have called us first.”

Two days later, the L.A.Timesprinted a story about an LAUSD budget shortfall on the front page, and in exchange for my mistake, I withdrew from USC. I spent the rest of the semester at home, unsure if I would ever be allowed back. The message was clear—the world could always get smaller.

When they finally wrote the tuition check that allowed me to return, it was accompanied by a driver who took me to campus and picked me up immediately following class. The registrar provided my father a copy of my schedule. The distance between the classrooms and the pickup locations was timed. If I was late, he called.

They no longer trusted me. It would be a year before the reins loosened.

That was fine.

It was harder that I no longer trusted myself. I thought I could tell the difference between kindness and manipulation. I thought I couldidentify the kind of people who were after the one thing my family refused to give: information. But I was wrong.

I called Alma after the fact. She never answered. Girls like her, they couldn’t know what it was like. I waited, instead, for the kind of person who might understand the gravitational pull of family. The way they could suck you into their sun, burn you up.

And while I waited, I learned the most important lesson of all. I learned to play their game.

—

I come down thestairs of the villa, two at a time. I want Lorna to be in the foyer, but she’s not. I want my phone to vibrate and to see her name on the screen. I want her to tell me, right now, before I have to go back out and face them—my family—that we’ve won.

Did she feel it, when we arrived on Capri, how close we were to the end? I felt it. I still do. And as I pass by the mirror in the foyer, the reflection of the gold snakes that wind themselves around my neck flashes. A sharp, bright streak of sunlight hits them, and I touch my hand to their scales.

Snakes—long a symbol of rebirth, but also of deception. Which isLorna?

Lorna

Hours before Lorna’s disappearance:35

I used to think the moneymade you free. And maybe sometimes it does, or it helps you believe you are. But the Lingates aren’t. Even with this garden that stretches to the edge of the Mediterranean, even with these polished terrazzo floors, even with people always waiting to anticipate their needs—they’re not. No one this haunted can ever be free.

Because I feel her here, in this villa. Despite the housekeeper making a big show of welcoming us—kisses on each cheek; a tray of champagne, a sterling silver bowl of nuts, and linen cocktail napkins on the marble table that anchors the foyer—despite the way the Lingates throw back their drinks, despite their laughter, despite how they ignore the whitewash chipping off the walls, I know they can feel her too. How can they not?

But they’re excellent performers. All rich people are.

“This came for you.” The housekeeper passes a package to Helen, the litany of postage across it almost illegible. No one asks the housekeeper’s name, and maybe it doesn’t matter.

“Thank you,” Helen says. I try to catch her eye, but she avoids me. Instead, she turns to her father and asks: “From you?”

“Not from me,” he says, taking the brown box and shaking it gently.

Naomi’s eyes follow every jostle. Naomi, who has said so little since we left Los Angeles.

“Can I show you upstairs?” the housekeeper says to me, putting a hand on the small of my back.

They know the house,she seems to say.Youdo not.

“Yes.” The thought of a minute alone is nearly erotic.

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