Epilogue The Rooms Were Clean
VALERIA
It takes eleven months and eight days to get a woman out of a common grave.
I want that on the record, because I thought it would take six weeks.
There is a form. There is always a form.
It assumes you are next of kin, and the next of kin is in Cranston serving fifteen consecutive sentences, and the moment you put that on paper every office in Rhode Island stops answering the telephone.
So I did it the other way, which took a year, and which I was extremely good at.
They lifted her on a Tuesday in June. Nobody there but me, a man from the diocese, and two grave-diggers who were kind and did not talk.
The stone went in three weeks ago.
ANNAMARIA SERRA 1964 – 1996 Two rooms off Chalkstone Avenue. She worked nights at the laundry.
I would like the record to show that the rooms were clean.
Four masons. The first three all wanted to improve the last line.
There are more of us on the path than I expected.
Ottavia at eighty-seven on Lorenzo’s arm, who informed me in the car that she has buried better men in worse weather.
Renata with a stick now, which she is furious about.
Nella Moro, twenty, halfway through a nursing degree she pays for herself.
Tobia, ten, with Soldo in the crook of his arm, because Soldo has decided at nine that he is a kitten again, and only for this child.
And Lorenzo, with his hand at the small of my back, not steering.
Tobia asks what the last line means, and Lorenzo goes down on his heels to answer him, so his eyes are lower than the boy’s.
He does that now. He does not know he does it, which is how I know where he learned it.
Here are the real numbers, because I promised a room with nobody in it that I would write them with my name at the top and not improve them.
Eight kitchens. Three said yes and went. Two said yes and stayed, because a woman can take the papers and the name and use none of it and keep the folder in a drawer. Both told me the drawer was the point.
Two said no.
And one is Dorotea Pace, card eleven, seventy-one, of Sackett Street, who has opened her door to me six times in eleven months and who is the reason I do not sleep well.
The sixth time was three weeks ago. She let me stand in the porch eleven minutes and did not offer me tea.
“You have not understood what you have done.”
“Then tell me.”
“He paid me for fifteen years and I did not know his name and he did not know mine.” Arms folded.
“If a man had gone through every drawer in this house, he would have found an account with my name on it and no explanation, and no explanation is a wall, Mrs Rinaldi. I have lived behind that wall since 2011 and it is the only wall I have ever had.”
“Mrs Pace.”
“And you have written it down. You are very proud of it. You have told me three times about your name being at the top and how anybody may read it, and you say it as though it were a gift.”
Her chin comes up. “I had a son. He is not dead. He is in New Bedford, he is fifty-one, he is his father twice over, and he has been looking for a reason to find out where my money comes from since the day it started. Now there is one. It is a document, and it has an index.”
The porch is very cold for August.
“You did the honest thing. I am not arguing with you about honest.” She looks at me a long moment. “I am telling you what honest costs, and that you did not ask me before you spent it.”
“There it is,” she says. “Now you have got it.”
I built a second register after that. No names, only card numbers, the key held by one person who is not me and not anybody in that family. I wrote to all eight and asked which they wanted to be in. Dorotea Pace has not answered, and I am going back in October.
She has never once said no in eleven months. She has said get off my property and you have not understood and now you have got it, and every one of those is a door open about an inch, and Isabella D’Amato never got so much as that from anybody, because Isabella D’Amato stopped at three.
Bruno Loffredo is alive.
He still works nights at the plant on Allens Avenue. He got up at eleven on the twenty-fourth of August and every day since, and he does not know that on a Friday morning last summer a man sat at his kitchen table for fifty-one minutes deciding.
Nella asked me about it in the winter, in a café on Wickenden Street, with her coat still on.
“Did I stop him?”
“I do not know.”
“Guess.”
“No,” I said. “Not on that.”
“Because he went in four days later,” she said.
“He was always going to go in. It was typed, it was ninety-one pages, he did not do that in four days.” Her voice is flat.
“So either I said the words and it mattered, or I said the words and he was already finished, and there is no way on earth to tell those two apart.”
“No.”
“He could tell me.”
“He could.”
“He would tell me it was me,” Nella Moro says. “Wouldn’t he? Whichever it was.”
And I did not answer that, and Renata Alba has been sitting in a room on Hope Street with the same arithmetic since March of last year.
Two women, sixty-two years apart, doing the same sum with the same missing number, because the man who has it will not give it to either of them straight.
Nella has never written to him. She says she is not going to.
I think she will, and I think it will be on a fourteenth of March, and I have not said so.
He pleaded.
No trial, because a ninety-one page document that answers every question before it is asked leaves a Detective Sergeant with nothing to do but confirm it. Marisa Padovano confirmed it for five months, and told me at my own door that she had sat with him nine times and that he is not sorry.
He declines every visit, in writing, individually, in the third person. The subject does not wish to receive visitors and asks that this not be taken personally, as it is not personal, and is in fact the opposite.
The envelope came on the twelfth of May.
A padded envelope from the Office of the Attorney General, addressed to The Estate of Isabella D’Amato, care of this house, and I opened it standing at the hall table because I open everything standing at the hall table.
There is a compliment slip. There is a property receipt with a reference number.
And there is card thirty-five.
The original. Ruled by hand in 1995, in her writing, attached to a confession as Appendix A with an instruction that it was not to be separated from it.
Returned as unclaimed. Item was not entered in evidence: matter concluded by plea. Item identified as the property of the estate of the original author. No next-of-kin nomination on file for the defendant.
I sat down on the stairs.
I am a lawyer. I understood it in about four seconds, and it took me the rest of the day to stop understanding it.
He pleaded guilty, so nothing was ever entered into evidence. His statement is in the file, because a statement is a statement. But the appendix is an exhibit, and an exhibit that is never entered is property, and property goes back to the estate that owns it.
He had no next of kin to nominate. He has never had one.
So the State of Rhode Island took the only surviving document with Annamaria Serra’s name on it out of her son’s record, put it in a padded envelope, and posted it back to the house he was carried into when he was nine.
His mother’s name is not in that file.
It is in the statement. He wrote it in the body of it, twice, and that survives, in his own words, in a document that will be indexed and kept and read in fifty years.
But the card is not there. The thing in her handwriting. The thing he could not put anywhere else. The thing he traded fifteen people for.
An assistant in Providence made the correct decision on a form, and I have read the regulation and I would have advised the same, and it undid the entire purpose of a man’s life in about ninety seconds on a Thursday afternoon.
I could not get it back in.
I tried for months. There is no mechanism, and every answer I got was courteous and correct and final.
So I put her in the register instead. Card one, before all of it, my name at the top and my initials at the bottom, in three places, one of them a diocese that has kept paper since 1872.
And I put her on a stone, which is granite, and which will be there when every filing system in this state has been digitized twice and lost once.
And then I had to decide whether to tell him.
I took nine days over it. On the ninth evening Lorenzo sat down opposite me and said, “What do you want?” and I said, “To be talked out of it,” and he said, “I am not going to do that,” and got up and made tea badly.
Because there is a version where he never knows.
Nobody in that building is going to explain the evidentiary status of Appendix A to him, and he will die believing his mother’s name is in a file with a number on it, and that it worked.
And it would have been the most merciful thing anybody ever did for him, and I would have been choosing which true thing he was allowed to have, because I had decided he could not carry the other one.
I wrote on the tenth day.
I told him plainly, from the front, in the order it happened. The plea. The exhibit rule. The regulation number. That the card is in this house, in the shoebox, and that I will not put it anywhere he has not agreed to.
I did not soften any of it and I did not tell him what it meant.
Then I told him where she is instead. The register, the three places, the diocese. And the stone. I described the stone again, and I did not improve it.
I posted it on a Wednesday.
He answered in eleven days, which is the fastest he has ever done anything for anybody.
Mrs Rinaldi.
I have read it four times. It is correct. I checked the regulation in the library here and you have the number right and there is no remedy and you should stop looking for one, and I would like you to stop today, because you will keep going and it will take a year.