Epilogue The Rooms Were Clean #2
I have been trying since Tuesday to find something in myself about this and there is nothing there.
I want to be accurate with you because you have been accurate with me.
It is not grief and it is not anger. It is the feeling you get when you have done a long sum twice and both answers are wrong.
I do not know the word for it. I have looked.
I would have done it anyway. I want that written down somewhere by somebody who is not me, because I have been sitting here for nine days establishing whether it is true, and it is.
If I had known in advance that the appendix would come out I would have walked into that building on exactly the same morning at exactly the same time.
Please put that in your register. Put it in my words and do not improve it.
Three things and then I have finished.
The diocese is the right answer. Paper since 1872 will outlast the state archive and it will outlast granite, and you got there without me.
You have the card. I am not going to tell you what to do with it.
I have told everybody what to do with everything for twenty-two years and it is the only part of this I would take back, and I find I cannot even manage it in a letter, because I have just written you three paragraphs of instructions.
Keep it in the box. If that is wrong, do the other thing.
One question, and it is a real one, which means whatever you say is what happens and I will not ask again.
Has the ground settled?
F.S.
I wrote back the same afternoon.
I told him yes. It settled over the winter, about an inch and a half at the head, and they came and lifted it and re-set it and it is true now and it will stay true.
Card thirty-five is in the box on the kitchen table, at the back, where he left it.
There is a lunch, because Renata decided there would be one and consulted nobody.
Nine at the long table, and Ottavia at the end of it in the chair with the arms, because there has never been a table in this family where she sat anywhere else. Nella brings a boy from her course who is terrified of all of us and whom Tobia interrogates without mercy about football.
Lorenzo cooks. He is bad at it and has been for a year and has not stopped, and nobody in this house has ever said the name out loud while he does it.
Tobia comes and stands at my elbow with a serving spoon.
“Can I ask you a real question?”
He has done it since he was nine, and he does not use the words for anything trivial.
“Always.”
“Is he ever coming out?”
“No. Never.”
He thinks about it.
“Good,” he says. “Because of what he did.” And then, in exactly the same voice: “And I am sorry, because of the other thing.”
And goes off with the spoon.
I stand in the yard for a minute. Lorenzo finds me by the wall and does not ask if I am all right.
“What do you want?”
“Four minutes.”
“With or without?”
“With.”
That night the plates are done, and there is a cup upside down on a saucer on the counter on the side where he sat, which we do not discuss.
I take the shoebox down. Thirty-six cards. Mine at the front, ruled badly. Card thirty-five at the back, in his hand, with the box he refused to fill.
Lorenzo sits opposite, in the chair with its back to the yard door, which he has started using and did not tell me he was going to.
“You said not on your own.”
“I did.” I take the cap off the pen, and put it back on. “I want to say what this is first, or I will have learned nothing.”
“Go on.”
“He wrote not for me to fill in, and then he wrote you turn every page over, turn this one, which is a man handing you a loaded thing and calling it a compliment.” My hands are flat on the table.
“It is his mother. It is his whole life in that box. And I am about to decide what the outcome of it was, on his behalf, without asking him, in ink.”
“Yes,” Lorenzo says. “You are.”
“Do not agree with me quickly.”
“I have been sitting on this side of this table for a year.” He does not move.
“You are going to do the thing this family does. And you are going to do it once, deliberately, in front of a witness, with your initials on it, on a card anybody may read.” His jaw goes. “That is not the same as not doing it.”
So I take the cap off again.
OUTCOME: the boy lived.
Fabrizio Serra, b. 1986. Alive. Cranston. Forty-one. He is on paper now in four places, and one of them is not a crime.
In his words, sent 24 May 2027 and set down here unimproved: “I would have done it anyway.”
This box was left blank by two people who had the right to fill it. It has been filled by a third who did not, who is not going to pretend otherwise, and who has put her initials on it so somebody can hold her to it.
She asked three times and stopped. I have not stopped.
Continued. V.R., 1 August 2027.
Lorenzo turns it round and reads it twice and says nothing, then puts his hand flat on the wood between us, palm up, and waits.
He does not ask. But he waits every time, with his hand open, and lets me be the one who closes it.
So I do.
And he says, “Come to bed, Valeria,” and says my name the way he says it now, which is not carefully at all, and I go.
Whatever happens, you will be taken care of.
She wrote that at the bottom of thirty-four cards in a kitchen in 1995 and died in February, and a nine-year-old took the box out of that house before his father could burn it, and carried it through eleven hiding places and thirty-one years and fifteen bodies, and set it down on this table, and asked one child on one floor in one kitchen whether he wanted to go.
He gave up everything he had to put four words in a place that could not be reached.
They took them out on a Thursday afternoon with a form, and posted them back to the house.
And a woman he tried to manage wrote and told him so, and then put his mother’s name on a stone and in a register and in a diocesan archive, with her own name at the top of it where anybody who dislikes her may read it.
Which is the one method he never tried.
There is a stone on the west side of Providence facing east, and the ground has settled and been re-set and is true.
And you have to go down on one knee to read the last line.
Which is, I have come to think, the correct height for it.
THE END