VITA WAS ANNOYED. SHE CALLED THE GIRL AND SHE DIDN’T answer. “Nunzia,” she bellowed, like she would in Bernalda just before dinner or at the start of the hot hour, when it was time for all children to come inside.
Nunzia had been playing on deck, but Vita lost sight of her.
“Nunzia!”
She took a deep breath and yelled again, “Nunzia!” She searched the deck, calling, calling her daughter’s name. She searched below deck. Calling, calling.
But after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, which then turned into a half hour, the panic started to rise like high tide inside Vita’s chest. “Nunzia!” she screamed, with more urgency, her throat becoming soar. “Nunzia, vena qua.”
Vita again searched the upper deck, back down to steerage, in and around their berth, and back up again, pushing people out of the way as she called, “Nunzia, Nunzia!”
Vita tore at her clothes and her hair as she frantically searched, then wrapped her arms around her chest, rocking back and forth and feeling the imprint of Nunzia there between her chest and her armpit, where she had been, safe, only a few hours before. Vita would get lost herself, between decks, with her bad sense of direction, searching, searching for her daughter. She looked over into the waves, wanting, but not wanting at the same time, to find her daughter there, floating away from the ship. Could she have survived a fall? But she was not there.
Vita wrung her small, pretty hands, her dark eyes brimming over. Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen my Nunzia? The terror rising, rising in her chest.
Young Leonardo heard his mother’s shouts and came running. He searched and searched for his little sister, too, running between decks, looking in the same crawl spaces, three, four, five times, the ship growing ever closer to its destination, him running his hand frantically through his thick black hair. Eventually crying, shouting through his tears, “Nunzia! Nunzia! Where are you?”
When I find her, he thought, she’ll get the beating of her life. How could you worry Mama like that? How could you worry me? He imagined chastising her when he finally found her. If he finally found her. But he knew he would hug her first. He was a good big brother, an adoring big brother, a protective big brother. How could he have let this happen?
Vita grew more and more worried, and then hysterical, slipping into one of those immobile states, the trauma too much. Then the ship-wide search, halfheartedly done by the weary crew, as the Neustria pulled into New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty not a welcoming face, but a sign that Vita would have to leave the ship finally without Nunzia beside her. Without her only daughter. Without her small hand in hers.
There’s thirteen-year-old Leonardo crying, too, but lifting his mother up off the floorboards of the deck and dragging her away, onto the gangplank. But her resisting, screaming Nunzia’s name, swearing it was all her fault, payback for what she had done back in Pisticci. Payback for her sins. For taking up with another man while her husband was in prison. It was her penance. The price she would pay. Another child, lost. Gone like Domenico and poor Rocco and the first Nunzia. The score etched on Vita’s heart was no longer three dead and three living. There was only a 50 percent chance of survival before the age of five in Basilicata. Vita had thought she had beaten the odds with seven-year-old Nunzia. But now she was gone, too.
Vita’s shrieks died down to sobs and eventually to moans and then silent heaving as Leonardo carried her from the Neustria.
Leonardo would whisper through his own tears. Quiet, Mama. You still have me. And Valente. Valente is waiting.
And so she would stop. Vita would stop screaming her daughter’s name, a name not found on the passenger arrival list for 1892, a name completely forgotten by her family for the next century, until it was found again deep in the archives of the dusty province of Matera at the instep of Italy’s boot.