Devil. Monster. Beast. Suicide.
These words circled my mind as I walked through the parking lot. Devil. Monster. Beast. Suicide. Nonna Sophia had left Italy nearly seventy years ago, and yet her fear remained hard and tactile, so solid I could feel it there beside me as I kicked through the snow to my car. What on earth had she seen that had scared her like that? An animal? A person? What did she mean by “the legends were true”?
Try as I might, I couldn’t put her words out of my mind. The way she held my hand to her heart and the beseeching look in her eyes—she had been terrified. Don’t be fooled. Whatever that family gives you is nothing compared to what you will lose.
At my car, I looked out over the vast grounds of the Monastery. It was three thirty in the afternoon, snowing heavily, the sky a fog of indigo against the river. The days were at their shortest, and dusk had fallen, darkness rising from the river to the heavens like watercolors seeping into paper. I brushed a layer of snow from the windshield, wishing that Luca had come with me. Surely, he would have known what to say to calm Nonna. He was always better at these things than I was.
Yet, even Luca would have found Nonna’s reaction to the letter extreme. I leaned against my car, feeling unbalanced, dizzy. Had my grandfather really committed suicide? Why would my parents have kept that from me? Had they, like Nonna Sophia and the older generation, tried to protect me from the truth?
As I got into my Honda, I heard something behind me. I turned, expecting to find a visitor, maybe even Luca. There was nothing but the empty parking lot, the wash of darkening light, the snow swirling in the wind. And yet, I felt a presence, an eerie human presence, close as breath on the back of my neck. Something wasn’t right.
I locked the car door, turned on the heater, and called Luca, telling him everything. After he promised to come to the Monastery to check on Nonna, I threw the car into reverse, did a U-turn, and headed back toward Milton. It was three forty-five. The town hall closed at five.
Mrs. Thomas, head of the Vital Records office, was my friend Tina’s mother. In high school, there had been weeks when I had slept at the Thomases’ house more often than my own, partially because Tina and I played softball together, but also because, being an only child, I loved Tina’s brothers and sisters, the big chaotic family dinners, and the sense that there was always something exciting happening at the Thomases’ place. I’d compared her house with mine and, finding life quiet and dull with my parents, chosen to be with Tina.
The Vital Records counter was abandoned, but I could smell coffee from somewhere beyond the rows of metal filing cabinets, so I knew someone must be back there. I rang the bell and waited. Office hours were 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, but even if Mrs. Thomas had left early, someone would help me.
“Well, hello there, Bert Monte!” Mrs. Thomas said, stepping out from behind a cabinet. She was a tall black woman in her fifties with an abundance of gold rings stacked on her fingers. “You looking for Tina?”
I was glad to see Mrs. Thomas. She had a way of putting me at ease. Maybe Tina had told her about my troubles at school, or my crippling shyness, because Mrs. Thomas always made me feel welcome. “Isn’t Tina in the city?” I asked.
“Brooklyn,” she said, shaking her head. “That girl left the day she graduated and is never coming back.”
“I heard you’re a grandma,” I said, aware, suddenly, how much time had passed since high school. I could hardly believe Tina and I had graduated ten years ago.
“Blessed many times over,” Mrs. Thomas said. “Three grandbabies. Two boys and a girl.”
Mrs. Thomas reached for a framed photograph on her desk, but I was too preoccupied to see her grandchildren. “I know you’re closing soon, but I was hoping to take a look at the Monte family records before you leave for the night,” I said. “Birth and death certificates. I’m doing some research.”
“Not you too,” she said, flipping up a square of countertop and letting me pass into her domain.
“You’ve had other requests for Monte family records?” I asked.
“No, silly,” she said, swatting my arm. “We are totally overrun with genealogy requests. I have been photocopying and mailing records all over the place. Just last week I priority-mailed twenty-three birth records to a lady in Florida. She took a genetic test and realized her dad—the man she grew up with and whose name she carries—wasn’t actually her biological father. Her mother told her the name of her real father is Joe Johnson, from Marlborough, New York, so I went through every one of these cabinets hunting down that name. There were twenty-three Joseph Johnsons born between 1899 and 1935.” Mrs. Thomas gave me a look of exhaustion. “I know I shouldn’t complain. Vital Records revenue is up by about a million percent.”
She walked back into the maze of filing cabinets. “Are you making a family tree? Everyone I know has one going on ancestry.com. Or they’re doing genetic tests from that other site. What’s it called? Two-three something. I just did a spit test and found out I’m not even African!”
“What are you, then?” I asked, surprised by this. Her skin was a dark caramel brown.
“If you ask me, I’ll tell you I’m African American. But according to my test, I’m thirty-nine percent Hispanic, forty-one percent Middle Eastern, twelve percent Irish, and eight percent African! I’m more Irish than African? I couldn’t believe it, so I took it again. I paid another hundred dollars to get the same result!”
“That is crazy,” I said. Maybe I wasn’t the only one with family secrets. “What a surprise.”
“It changes everything and nothing,” she said, shaking her head, as if she were ready for whatever life might throw at her. “I mean, I am still me, but jeez, it’s hard to get your mind around something like that.” She went to her desk and pulled out a piece of paper. “Here it is, all official.”
The words “Genetic Profile” were written across the top. Below this, there was a sequence of ancestral groups—Northwestern European, Middle Eastern, North African, Southern European, East Asian, Sub-Saharan African, Native American, and so on, with percentages next to them. There were “Maternal and Paternal Haplogroups,” a section titled “DNA Family,” and another column called “Neanderthal Variants.” A chart outlined the ancestral group results Mrs. Thomas had described.
I knew exactly what kind of test this was. Some months before, I had bought a genetic testing kit from the online company Mrs. Thomas had mentioned. The site promised to give a complete profile of my ancestry, including the countries of origin and the ethnicity of my ancestors, all for ninety-nine dollars. I had spit into a plastic tube, mailed it to a lab, and awaited my results.
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.