Page 77 of Saltwater

“He wouldn’t have told me if he didn’t think he could control the situation,” I say. Then: “I’m safe with them.”

I’m surprised to discover I believe it.

“We don’t always know people as well as we think,” Ciro says. He says it slowly, as if it might take me a minute to fully grasp the meaning of what he’s saying. But he’s wrong.I know them.

“Do you think he ever loved her?” I ask. I mean my mother. “How can someone who loves you do something like that?”

“We are always both people,” Ciro says. He runs a finger down my back, like the idea is painful. “The person who loves and the person who does terrible things.”

We are always both people.

And before I can think about how this applies to my father, Ciro says: “You are also both people.”

I can hear it. The accusation there. It’s gentle, but I know he’s right.

“You are the Helen I know and a different Helen for them. You have to be. But to love you means that I love both of you.”

For the first time since seeing my father on the Salto, I can feel my skin prickling with panic, a flush running up from my chest to my neck and face. It’s unfair what I’ve done to Ciro. We both know it. I always thought I would make it up to him. If only I could get the money, get free. But then, he never cared about all that. I did.

“But neither of me has killed someone,” I say.

Ciro shrugs like the distinction doesn’t matter.

“We all do bad things,” he says.

“You don’t.”

It’s true. As far as I know.

“I love a woman who is with someone else,” he says. “I put her needs ahead of my own. I keep secrets for her. I will continue to keep secrets for her. Those are bad things.”

I wonder what else he has done for me.

“I can’t turn him in,” I say.

We are always both people.

I can’t turn him inyet.My mother’s death was always academic. She was here, and then she was gone. My mother had always been an idea to me, an ideal. Not a flesh-and-blood person who was with me as I grew up. I was haunted by her, never comforted. But Lorna is different. Lorna’s death, what Lorna was doing, for herself, forme—Iknow I can’t let them go another thirty years without consequences.

“Would you still love me,” I ask, “if I did something that bad? If I could never go home?”

I’m afraid to ask this question, but then, even as I do, I know what the answer will be. Ciro is not two people, Ciro is only one person. IhopeCiro is only one person.

“Of course,” he says.

—

I slip out ofbed and through the garden, padding into the villa’s kitchen and up the stairs. When I reach our bedroom, Freddy is still tangled in the sheets. It’s not yet midday, but he stirs and says:

“Did you have fun?”

“What?” I say.

“Your dad said you ran into some friends from school. Was the dinner fun?”

I look up at the ceiling of our bedroom, and I can see the thinnest crack where the white paint has separated with moisture and time and age. And I think:It will be a very, very long time before I have fun again.

“Yes,” I say, “so much fun.”

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