His voice cracked as he went on, “He—he told me once that he had never seen anything like the look she got on her face, the first time she saw his villa there. It really is beautiful, it’s right on the coast and there are ruins all around it, and at night you can hear all these wild birds, and the wind on the water. But my father said that he had never seen anyone look as beautiful as my mother did when she first saw Keftiu. He said that from then on, all he wanted was to get her to look at him like that, just once.”
I smiled, but when I glanced at Dylan I saw that his face was sad.
“And did she?” I asked softly.
“I don’t know. My father never told me. He didn’t like it out there as much as she did. There’s no running water or air-conditioning, it’s rather primitive. He never wanted to stay very long—he preferred our villa in Florence, or the Milan apartment.
“But Mom loved it. She never wanted to leave. But after he died there, and her father… she’s only gone back a few times since then.”
We turned and left the pool, walking down to the formal gardens, where swallowtails and tiny hairskipper butterflies fluttered everywhere, so that it looked as though someone had shaken all the rose petals from their beds. The air had a sweet, powdery smell. Beneath our feet the grass was lush and damp from hidden sprinklers. A woman held a baby out to admire a huge rose, and the baby laughed. For a long time we wandered in silence, Dylan stopping now and then to watch the butterflies on the roses, or bending to sniff delicately at a dianthus blossom like a fragrant pink spider.
At last I said, “How did they the? Or—never mind, you don’t have to—”
“No, that’s okay. It was a while ago. We were at Keftiu, my grandfather had come for the winter and they were out sailing, my father and him. It was kind of strange. My grandfather was this great sailor, and my father was too, he never had any trouble in the water. He used to take us sailing at night, in the middle of winter, anytime; but he was careful, he’d never go out if there was any danger, if there was a storm brewing or something. And he was very careful with my grandfather, because Grappa was so old—almost ninety.
“But anyway, they went out, just for a few hours. It was morning, a beautiful perfect clear day, there was nothing on the weather about a storm or anything. Then out of nowhere this gale came up—there were people out on the water who saw it happen, they said it was like these clouds just boiled over the horizon and overtook them and that was it. Their boat capsized, they couldn’t get to their life jackets, and—”
He stopped. He was staring at the broken stalk of a yellow daylily, the flower’s long petals wilted in the sun.
“Oh Dylan,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I’m sorry—”
He turned to me and shook his head. “It just makes me sad, that’s all. They never recovered the bodies. Some people—friends of my father, who never really liked my mother—they said it was like in Rebecca. That Hitchcock movie…”
I looked away, stunned, and pretended to examine the broken lily. It wasn’t the notion that Angelica might have killed someone. I could imagine that; I could imagine almost anything of her. That golden faithless creature, beautiful and amoral as a fox, having another man act as father to Oliver’s child (and had her husband ever known? had he even suspected? had Dylan?), dreaming her mad dreams of apocalypse in her million-dollar houses…
But killing her own father! One of the Benandanti?
“I—I—”
Suddenly Dylan grabbed me by the shoulders, so hard that I gasped.
“‘Rebecca? I hated Rebecca!’” he hissed, then laughed sharply as he let me go, his face bright red. “Forget I ever said that! You must hate me, for having said that about—”
“No—really, of course not! It’s—I should never have brought it up. It’s none of my business, I don’t even know you—”
“But I want you to know me,” he said, with that same wistful earnestness. He took a deep breath, smoothed his hair from his face, and stared at his feet before looking up at me sideways. “I know this might sound strange. I know I just met you this morning and I know that you’re—well, I know that you’re older, okay? But—
“But this is really weird, Sweeney. I just have this amazing feeling about you. This incredible feeling that I know you. I mean, really know you.” He tugged imploringly at my wrist, his eyes wide and beseeching. “Does that sound ridiculous?”
He sighed and gazed at the neatly clipped lawn, then shoved his hands disconsolately into his pockets. “Shit. I guess I should have gone to Nantucket.”
I stared at him: his lanky body slung into its chinos and neat white shirt as into a prison uniform, the late afternoon sun glinting off that tiny constellation of gold and silver in one ear, his long hair slipping from its ponytail to spill across his shoulders. In the golden light he looked like someone who was melting, a wild boy poured into one careful upright mold but now slowly reverting to his true self. Not Angelica’s Good Son, with his museum internship and Visa card and italicized list of contacts and places to go; but a wild boy, like Oliver himself had been. Maybe not truly crazy as Oliver was, but fey enough to be talking to me like this. Fey enough to sense the same eerie quality that had colored our afternoon together, that made me so reluctant to leave.
Unless, of course, it was all my imagination. Unless he was so much Angelica’s child that she had put him up to this, to fit into some mad scheme of hers that I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
But Dylan didn’t look like he was playing a part. He looked stricken and lost, almost angry.
“No,” I said at last. “You’re supposed to be here, Dylan. I don’t know why, but I feel it too. You—you remind me of someone I knew once, a long time ago. Someone I—somebody I was in love with.”
“Oliver.” The word was barely a whisper, but whatever anger had been welling inside of him spilled now into his eyes. “You just never got over him.”
“Yes,” I said, abashed. “How did you know?”
“Because my mother said that after he killed himself your life was ruined. And just now you had this look…”
“My life was ruined?”
“…like maybe you were thinking about what it would have been like, not to have thrown your whole life away.”
“My life? She said my life was ruined?”
“Well, you never got married. Dr. Dvorkin says you’ve been living alone in his carriage house for almost ten years—”
“Eight years! And I didn’t want to get married. I mean, I could have married a lot of guys—”
“Oh yeah? Isn’t that against the law?”
I stopped, my hands clenched at my sides, and realized that I was furious; that I was ready to pop him one. But then I looked up and saw him starting to laugh.
“Not too defensive, huh?” He shook his head. “I always thought it was romantic. I mean, nobody ever killed herself for me.”
“He didn’t kill himself for me, Dylan! He was crazy! Nowadays they’d probably have diagnosed him as some kind of latent schizophrenic. Back then we all just thought it was too much drugs.”
“Well, still, no one ever carried a torch for me for twenty years—”