“That’s what she used it on,” he said. “A stranger asks a dy*ng woman for one true thing and she uses it on my address.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not — Willa, that’s not a fact. That’s a message. She wasn’t telling him something true about herself. She was putting something in a bottle.”
He’s right.
I’ve read the whole notebook four times now and I think Rómulo Pereira is the only person who has correctly identified what a substantial number of those entries actually are.
Not confessions.
Messages, handed to the only person still in the room, in the hope that a man with a drugstore notebook was, somehow, a postal service.
Forty-six years.
Eleven hundred and forty bottles.
And a man who kept every one and could not deliver a single one himself, because he was a stranger with no standing and no names to call and nothing but a bag of pull tabs and the discipline to write it down anyway, in case.
In case somebody came.
I’m the somebody who came.
The other three:
A daughter in the next county who had been told her father d*ed in 1988 with “no one there,” and who learned in my kitchen that a man named Alden had been in the room for nine hours and that her father’s true thing was “the girl’s name is Ruth and she was right about the house.”
She was Ruth.
She had been right about the house.
A grandson who did not believe me until I described the pull tab, and then did, immediately, and violently, because his grandmother had one taped inside her jewelry box with a date on it and the family had assumed it was junk.
And a woman named Sister Perpetua, ninety-one, still living, who is in the notebook not as a patient but as one of two people Alden mentions by name in the margins — a hosp*ce nun who worked the same nights he did from 1996 to 2004 and who, when I found her, said, “Oh, the tab man. Is he de*d?” and then cried for ten minutes and then made me tea.
PART 5 — FINAL
Here is what I did with the bag.
Not a museum.
Not an art installation, which two people suggested and which made me want to throw something.
In October, fourteen months after Alden d*ed, I rented the community room of a public library and put eleven hundred and forty pull tabs on eleven hundred and forty index cards, and on each card I wrote a date, a name, and three words.
