Chapter Forty-One
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Emily
The letter arrives in a stack of other mail: a J.Jill catalog, the electric bill, pleas for donations to politicians and the Red Cross, and Maisie’s Highlights magazine.
The envelope is addressed in pencil and the sender lives at a place called Phoenix House in New Britain.
The cancellation stamp across the face of Chief Standing Bear says it was mailed the day before yesterday.
The letter, also written in pencil, is littered with cross-outs and smudges.
Dear Emily,
I hope its okay to call you by your first name.
I’m a better talker then a writer so sorry if this letter has alot of mistakes.
My name is Manuel DellaVecchia (Manny for short).
Corby and me were bunkies at Yates CI for almost three years.
Maybe he mentioned me. First of all, I’m sorry for your loss.
I know it’s late to say that but I didn’t know how to reach you while I was on the inside.
I hope you and your daughter are doing good.
I saw her in the visiting room once when she came with Corby’s mother. She looked so cute.
I’m living at a halfway house until Parole says I can leave the state.
They have a computer in the office here that we can use.
I got your address off of Google. I hope we can meet somewhere and talk.
Corby’s death hit me hard. I have things I need to tell you about that you might not know.
I feel like I owe it to him. I also have a few things of his that I would like you to have.
We could meet here where I live. Or I might be able to get a ride to your house if that’s more conveniant easier.
Or I could meet you at the Westfarms mall.
I work at Cinnabon there and get off at 4 p.m. If you want to get together and talk, the main number at Phoenix House is 860-229-5240.
Have them ring the second floor. The phone’s in the hallway, so it might be a while before someone picks up.
Say you want to speak to Manny in room 4. I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours truly truely,
Manny D
My first thought is: there’s no way I’m letting him come here!
I don’t want to meet him at his group home either.
Or drive to Westfarms for that matter, although I could do a little shopping, something I haven’t done since before the pandemic.
Do I even want to hear what this guy has to say or see what he wants to give me?
I’ve struggled for more than two years to move on from Corby’s death, and things have been going so well with Bryan that I’ve accepted his proposal.
Bryan’s easygoing, owns his own business, doesn’t drink more than a beer now and then.
No children of his own, but he and Maisie have really hit it off.
And because his wife died unexpectedly, he understands about grief and the complicated feelings about moving on.
Meeting with Corby’s cellmate at this point might be like reopening a wound that’s finally begun to heal. I’m leaning toward not calling him.
Still, when I reread this letter, I’m touched by it. Manny says he’s not much of a writer, which I can tell from all the mistakes, cross-outs, and smudges where he’s erased things and written over them. That effort is what moves me. What does he need to tell me?
How many times in the past two years have I thought about our final conversation when I told Corby not to call me again?
By the following week, my anger and disappointment had subsided and I was ready to talk again.
But he didn’t call; he took me at my word.
And then he got sick and died, no more words exchanged between us.
So maybe I should meet with this Manny guy.
Who better than his cellmate to fill in the gaps about what happened between the day I hung up on Corby and the day he died?
Over the next few days, I go back and forth.
My mother is against my getting in contact with him; why upset the applecart?
But Bryan says that hearing him out might be better than wondering what he was going to tell me.
So I phone the number he gave me and ask them to ring the second floor.
When someone picks up, I ask to speak to Manny. “You’re talking to him,” he says.
We agree to meet at the mall on Saturday after his shift is over.
I’m nervous driving to Farmington, wondering now whether I should have taken Bryan up on his offer to come with me.
When I get there, I pull into the Nordstrom garage where I’ve parked before.
Unlike the other times I’ve come here, there are plenty of spaces to pick from—partly due to online shopping, no doubt, but partly, I’m guessing, the result of people’s coronavirus hangovers.
I have a mask in my purse in case I need to put it on, but if Manny’s not wearing one, I won’t either.
Our plan is to meet at the central court’s seating area on the lower level.
I see several shoppers chatting with one another, and one middle-aged man sitting by himself at a small table.
“Emily?” He’s short, rounded, wearing his work clothes: tan cap, tan apron over an aqua golf shirt.
He says he recognized me from the pictures Corby had.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. “Hug?” His arms are extended so it would be awkward to refuse. He smells like cinnamon.
“Have a seat,” he says. There are two paper cups on the table and a large manila envelope. “Are you a tea drinker?” he asks. “I drink tea in the afternoon. I got you one, too. Is chai okay?” He seems nervous and I am, too.
I tell him chai is perfect. We sip our tea and exchange pleasantries.
When he asks how Maisie’s doing, I show him a recent cell phone picture.
“Getting big,” he says. His thin hair, strawberry-blondish, looks dyed.
He’s wearing clear fingernail polish and a stud in one ear.
“Do you want something to eat? A scone or something? A muffin?” I shake my head.
What I want is for us to cut to the chase.
“What’s in the envelope?” I ask.
He pulls out a pencil sketch on legal-sized paper.
“Corby drew this,” he says. “When he was getting ready to paint his mural.” In the drawing, three boys—two of them Black, one white—are tossing stones in the water.
All three are smiling. The boy in the hoodie looks like that innocent kid down in Florida who was shot and killed by the neighborhood vigilante.
“He did a bunch of those practice drawings, fifteen or twenty of them. I forget what he called them.”
“Studies,” I tell him.
“Yeah, studies. After he finished his mural, he started tossing them in the trash. I grabbed this one and another one that had me in it, floating down the river in an inner tube. I kept that one for myself, but I thought you should have this one. I don’t know who the other two are supposed to be, but the white kid was at Yates for a while.
He had killed some dogs at a dog pound.”
“Solomon,” I say. “I saw him once when I visited. He was giving his stepmother a hard time, causing such a ruckus that the COs pulled him out kicking and screaming. Then they made the rest of us leave.”
“Yeah, that kid was mental. And he was a real pain in the ass, too. Excuse me. Pain in the butt. But I had to hand it to Corby. He took him under his wing because the kid was getting bullied. But then the bullies started messing with Corby, too. I used to tell him, ‘Corbs, don’t stick your neck out too far over that kid or it’s gonna get whacked.
It’s not like you’re his father.’ But it went in one ear and out the other.
Anyway, I don’t know how he did it, but Corby got the kid transferred to a mental hospital so he didn’t have to stay stuck at Yates. ”
It’s news to me that Corby went out on a limb for Solomon, but it doesn’t surprise me.
He hated bullies. I’ve always suspected his motivation in trying to stop people from being picked on was connected to his father’s treatment of him when he was a kid.
And who knows why, as Manny says, he stuck out his neck to defend Solomon?
Maybe he was trying to atone in some way for Niko’s death.
I thank Manny for the drawing, slip it back in the envelope, and remind him that in his letter he’d said he needed to tell me things I didn’t know.
His face turns serious. “Well, first of all, Corby talked about you all the time. He loved you very much.”
“I loved him, too, Manny. Still do. But things got very complicated.”
“You mean after your son died,” he says. “Corby never talked much about it, but I could tell the guilt he felt never let up. I’d hear him crying down there on the bottom bunk, sometimes even when he was asleep. He told me once that he was never going to forgive himself for the pain he caused you.”
I look away from him. Look back. “We were having problems before Niko’s death, too.
” For whatever reason I’m sharing this with someone I’ve just met, I keep going.
“When he lost his job and became a full-time dad, he assumed it would be temporary. We both did. But when he couldn’t find another job in his field, he became depressed.
Anxious. He had trouble sleeping. It was my idea that he should see a doctor and get something for his anxiety, but I didn’t know the medication he was taking was addictive, or that he was overdoing it.
And drinking during the day when he was watching the kids. He kept it from me so I had no idea.”
Manny gives me a skeptical look. “Huh,” he says.
“What?”
“No, nothing. It’s just that I’ve known a lot of addicts. Been in relationships with a couple of them. And even if they hide what they’re doing, they usually give themselves away in one way or another.”