That had been many months before, in the wake of the last miscarriage, when I’d been desperate to find something, anything, that might explain why I couldn’t have a child. I had seen specialists, none of whom had answers for me. The idea struck me, as I watched Mrs. Thomas search through the M filing cabinet, that it wasn’t a coincidence that I had taken a genetic test when I did. I had been in mourning. My marriage, the baby, my parents, my studies—I had lost so much in the previous years. Sadness and disappointment had subsumed me, ripping out the seams of every part of my life, even the parts I thought were tightly bound. Without Luca, I was alone in a way I had never been before. There were moments—late at night, after drinking too much—when I felt that the universe, with all its billions of life-forms, its bacteria and protozoa, its plants and animals, was broken somehow. How could the world be teeming with life when I felt so utterly alone? I wasn’t going to get into it with Mrs. Thomas, but I had needed that test. I needed to believe that a scientific breakdown of my genetic composition—a clean, color-coded pie graph that demonstrated my family heritage scientifically—would tell me something profound about who I was and why I was floating untethered, no family to steady me.
As it turned out, my test results never came back. I guessed they had been lost in the mail, and sent an email to the site’s customer service address, asking for information. But then things came to a head with Luca, and I forgot all about the genetic test.
“Here we are,” Mrs. Thomas said, pulling out some certificates and bringing them to her desk. “I didn’t know you had an uncle,” she added, fanning the papers out so I could see them.
“He died before I was born,” I said.
There weren’t many Monte birth certificates. Just three: my father, Giuliano, who had been born January 17, 1961; his brother, Frank, born March 22, 1966; and me, Alberta, born March 20, 1988. My grandfather Giovanni had been born in Italy, so there would be no birth certificate for him on file. My mother was born in Dutchess County, and her certificate would be there, filed under her maiden name.
Before I could ask her to photocopy them, Mrs. Thomas was off on the other side of the room, hunting through the filing cabinet holding death certificates. While I waited, I pulled my birth certificate from the pile. My Social Security card had the initial “I” as my middle name, as did my driver’s license. I read the birth certificate. Family name: Monte. First name: Alberta. Between those names were three others: Isabelle Eleanor Vittoria.
“Hmm,” Mrs. Thomas said, her head bent over the cabinet. From the sound of her voice, something wasn’t right.
“There should be five death certificates,” I said. “My grandparents, my parents, and my dad’s brother.”
“Come here a sec, hon,” she said, lifting the file from the cabinet and carrying it to the back of the office. “Take a look at this.”
Mrs. Thomas spread the death certificates out under the light of a lamp. I could see there were more than five. Significantly more. She arranged them into two piles on her desk. The left pile had the five certificates I had expected to find. On the right, there were ten others.
“What are those?” I said, taking the pile on the right. I sorted through them, one by one. The first eight certificates were dated between 1942 and 1969. The parents were listed as Marta Monte and Giovanni Monte, my grandparents. On the line where the names should have been typed, there was an abbreviation: N/A. Not applicable. The last two certificates were from the eighties, and the parents were listed as my mother and father. Each of those two certificates had a name: Rebecca Monte and John Monte. At the top of each document were the words “Certificate of Death.”
I sat down in the chair at Mrs. Thomas’s desk, stunned, and looked at them all again.
“Names weren’t mandatory with these older ones,” she said, pointing to the eight nameless certificates. She picked up the newer certificates. “But these two came after new regulations were put in place. Names were required on all certificates in this county after 1978.”
I stared at the death certificates, the typed words and official signatures, my heart heavy. “What does that mean?”
She looked at me, suddenly cautious. “You see here,” she said, pointing to the dates. “The day of birth and death is the same. These are all stillbirths.”
A heavy, suffocating weight pressed on me. Stillbirths. That was what the last miscarriage had been, technically. The first three had happened early, before the eighth week, nothing but blood and some cramping. But the last pregnancy had been twenty weeks along, a boy, fully formed and small as a kitten. I’d held him for a moment, looking at him, knowing it would be the last time. I wrapped him in a cotton swaddle blanket and kissed his forehead. When they took him away, it was as if they took a part of me, too. Luca had taken care of everything at the hospital, and I never saw any of the paperwork. Our baby—our son—must have a certificate there, under Luca’s family name. I wondered what name Luca had given him.
“You all right there?” Mrs. Thomas asked.
“I just don’t understand how there can be so many . . .” I couldn’t say it, the word “stillbirth”; it stuck in my throat like chewing gum. “So many of these in my family.”
“You didn’t know about any of this?”
I shook my head. “I knew that I was an only child, and that my father had a brother who died young. But I didn’t know about . . .” I glanced at the papers. “Them.”
Your family has had such trouble. Such tragedy.
“Well, sometimes when you start digging into family history, this shit just comes out of the woodwork,” Mrs. Thomas said. She patted my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Let me make you some copies.”
“Thanks,” I said. As she walked back to the copy machine, I remembered why I had come there in the first place. “Hold on a sec,” I said, pulling my grandfather’s Certificate of Death from the pile and taking it back to her desk. Giovanni Monte, born 1931 in Nevenero, Italy. Died July 1993 in Milton, New York. Running my finger down the page I found what I was looking for. Cause of death: suicide.
Four
I knew I was being followed the moment I pulled out of the parking lot. There was the same prickling sensation at the back of my neck that I’d felt at the Monastery, the same eerie presence lingering behind, only now I could identify it: a black Porsche with New Jersey license plates.
The car arrived like a sheet of fog sliding over the moon: there was a sudden darkening of the atmosphere, a tremor in the air. It pulled out after my Honda, slowed, and drove carefully, too carefully, behind me. I checked the rearview mirror, saw the car trailing me, noted its tenacious proximity, and continued onward, trying to ignore it. But a new Porsche in the hamlet of Milton was an anomaly nearly as great as a letter from noble relatives in Italy. I fixed my eyes on the road and drove, determined to get home without having an accident.
A parade of emotions had marched through me that day, but for the first time I was really, truly angry. What in the hell was going on? Why had my parents kept Rebecca and John a secret? Or the other eight stillborn Monte babies? Hadn’t they thought that maybe one day I would discover the death certificates and figure out that there was some kind of medical issue in our family? What hurt the most was that my mom and I had spent so much time together when she was sick, so many afternoons watching television, so many mornings walking by the river, talking about everything under the sun, and she had said nothing. Not one word about Rebecca or John. Not one peep about the name Montebianco. Not a whisper that Grandpa Giovanni’s family had a fancy title and a castle and probably a shitload of money.