Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (40 page)

I was handed a baggie with the earrings that guards had confiscated when I got to Capanne. The holes in my ears, new when I went to prison, had long since closed up.

Rocco and Corrado had caught up to me.

It was all happening so fast.

They hugged me, teary-eyed, saying, “We’re going to get you out.” They handed me a new iPhone, still in the box. I’d never seen one. “Use this to call us,” Rocco said.

My stomach was turning over and over, my face hurt from smiling. My heart hurt from beating so hard. I was out! I was free! I was so overwhelmed, I couldn’t talk. I hurt with joy.

I came out the same door I’d gone through four years before. I remembered to brush my right foot against the ground, the prison ritual to pass on freedom to another prisoner. Comandante Fulvio smiled and shook my hand. Prisoners erupted in cheers, banging pots and pans and waving T-shirts and towels through the bars of their windows, screaming, “
AMANDA! LIBERTÀ! E vaiiiiiiiiii! LIBERTÀ! AMANDA! VAI A CASA! LIBERTÀ!
Yaaaay! Freedom! Amanda! You’re going home!”

I was free.

I was going home.

Epilogue

October 3–4, 2011

C
orrado got into the backseat of a black Mercedes with tinted windows and leather seats while I hugged Rocco for the last time. He would be staying behind with Comandante Fulvio. “Thank you for all you’ve done,” I told him, my heart racing. Everything was in a rush.

“Go on. Go on,” he said. “Call me later.” He winked.

I got into the backseat of the car and shook the hand of the uniformed driver, a polite and quiet young man who couldn’t have been much older than I was. “What’s happening now?” I asked Corrado.

The driver started the car and pulled it to the gateway while Corrado quickly explained the plan. “Your family is waiting outside the gate. They’ll follow us to Rome. We’ll pick up your mom along the way. Once in Rome, we’ll drop you off at a safe house for the night. You’ll be flying home tomorrow!”

I wasn’t prepared for the scene outside the car window as we crawled out of the gate. The driver pushed us through, but we were met with a wall of cameras and people. It was so dark out that I could see only from the flashes of the cameras—journalists surrounding the car, faces practically pressing against the glass. I automatically ducked my head, an instinct I had developed.

Once past the horde of journalists, the driver hit the gas and we took off down the road and into the countryside, in the opposite direction of Perugia’s city center. I had never turned left going out on that road before, and only had a vague understanding that we were heading west-ish—I wouldn’t be able to see it in the darkness, but I knew we were passing a hill on top of which was a farmhouse I had often seen during the past four years.

We were driving as quickly as possible, zooming down the curving streets as if in a high-speed chase. I looked behind me and saw a line of cars zooming after us. It
was
a high-speed chase. There were journalists, paparazzi. “You said we were going to pick up Mom along the way?” I asked Corrado incredulously. How could we go anywhere without being swarmed?

“Your mother should be in the car following immediately behind us,” Corrado explained. “Our driver will try to lose these journalists and find a quiet spot to pull up and for her to get in.”

Mom!
I thought. I looked back again and saw the headlights of the car close behind us, leading the string.

“They’re right on us,” the driver said, referring to the journalists. He turned off the headlights so they would have a harder time seeing us, and we started taking fast turns off the road, circling. I couldn’t see anything from the window. We had to do this maneuver a few times before we found a quiet, deserted patch of gravel, and the car that had been on our tail, headlights turned off as well, growled to an idling halt beside us.

I opened the door, and Mom hurtled into the seat next to me, so I ended up in the middle between her and Corrado. She was frazzled, but it took her only a split second before she burst into tears and embraced me. In the meantime, another figure hustled into the front passenger seat, the doors closed, and we were off again, kicking up gravel. The car Mom had gotten out of similarly sped off behind us.

“My baby! My baby!” Mom gushed, and groped my head and shoulders. I buried my face in her neck, almost unbelieving that she was there, that she was in a car with me, that we were racing out of Perugia, racing toward Rome. The driver turned the headlights back on, and we were soon spotted again by journalists chasing us. The car Mom had gotten out of, which she said was being driven by Chris, was meanwhile zigzagging across the length of the already narrow road behind us, trying to keep journalists from getting around him and near our car. At a certain point, Chris told me later, he was even rammed from behind.

The figure in the front seat of our car finished strategizing with the driver and then turned around in his seat. “Hi. I’m Steve Moore.” He shook my hand and smiled. “We can get to the pleasantries later.” He turned back around and kept an eye on the road as we roared down the streets, eventually merging onto the highway. He must have been around my mom’s age, and had the build of a retired baseball player—strong, padded. He was actually a retired FBI agent who had presumed me guilty until he looked into the case at the urging of his wife. As a result, he became an advocate for my defense in the United States, and wrote online about the evidence from a professional investigator’s perspective, criticizing the prosecution’s claims and explaining why they were wrong. He had written to me in prison, and I had written him back to provide ideas for the name of his daughter’s new pet pig—my favorite idea, even if it was obvious, was inevitably Hamlet.

When Mom and I finished embracing, we clung to each other’s hands as if for dear life. It had been years since I had seen her anywhere but in the prison visitation room and the courthouse. It almost seemed like the setting couldn’t be real—more like a revolving two-dimensional backdrop on a stage.

I wasn’t used to being in different environments anymore. Indeed, in retrospect, I think my memories of the four years I spent in prison are so clear precisely because the background never changed. It was always the same echoing hallway; the same bleached cells; the same desolate yard; the same dark, windowless innards of the prison van; the same bright, crowded courtroom. These settings served as the blank piece of paper upon which the changes in character and feeling were more starkly revealed.

These completely new things—a changing, moving landscape; a car with windows; my mother; my freedom—were overwhelmingly overstimulating. I was bouncing up and down in my seat with pent-up excitement. I hadn’t felt so much energy in years—not within the prison, in which I’d so often felt lethargic because of my sadness and the emptiness of purpose I tried so hard to fill on my own.

I wanted to know how the family was, how everyone had reacted, where everyone was, if we would be able to meet up with them soon.

Mom, still crying, told me that as soon as the verdict was pronounced, everyone burst into tears and started hugging. “Of course,” she said, “getting out of there was a mess. The journalists were going crazy, pushing each other over to try to get interviews. Your sister made a beautiful statement outside the courthouse. You’d be so proud of her.”

I was proud of her.

“Do you want to call them?” Mom asked, excitedly offering her BlackBerry to me.

I didn’t hesitate a moment, but I fumbled with the device, unable to make it work. I couldn’t figure out how to get to the contacts.

“It’s touch-screen, honey.” Mom laughed. She scrolled through the phone. I hadn’t picked up a cell phone in years, and never a touch-screen. This device was as good as sci-fi to me. But more than that, I was struck by how automatic it was to place a simple call. In prison, I had had to make a request a week ahead of time, ask to be allowed into the booth when the time came, wait for the prison official listening in to place the call, and say as much as I could in the ten minutes before the same official dropped the line. I recognized the names on the contact list my mom was scrolling through. I could now call any one of them, and talk for however long I wanted!

“Who do you want to call first?” she asked me.

I ended up spending the rest of the ride to Rome making call after call, to family and friends both back home and in Italy. I squealed loudly into the mouthpiece, too excited to keep my voice calm and the volume appropriate for the interior of a car.

By the time we pulled off the highway and into Rome, the paparazzi had long since lost our trail. I looked out the windows to view the city through the darkness, but my eyes kept falling on Mom, who was still clutching my hand and touching my cheeks. We drove through the streets, finally pulling up in front of an old town house on a street of town houses.

Steve got out of the car and surveyed the empty street before motioning us to follow. In the meantime, Corrado and the driver unloaded our bags. “We’ll be back tomorrow to take you to the airport,” Corrado said, smiling.

“Thank you so much for doing this,” I said, hugging him.

“Are you kidding? I haven’t felt so much excitement in a long time.”

Steve led Mom and me up into the town house, where our host, a quiet, older man—a supporter of both mine and Raffaele’s—greeted us with gestures more than words. He pinched my cheeks and showed us upstairs into his tight quarters—Mom and I would sleep on a foldout bed in the study; Steve on a cot in the kitchen. The rest of my family was staying in a hotel.

Mom and I put our bags down and headed for the bathroom together. I was carrying the toothbrush I had used in prison, but then remembered the insistence of my fellow prisoners that I was to break it and throw it away, to sever my last bonds with the prison and ensure that I wouldn’t return. “Do you have an extra toothbrush?” I asked Mom.

“Of course. Let me go get it.”

When she had gone, I wrenched at the toothbrush, managing to bend the handle. Good enough. I flung it in the trash.

Mom returned with a new toothbrush for me, and toothpaste, which we both shared. It was strange, to stand there brushing our teeth together, and made even more awkward precisely because we couldn’t say anything with our mouths full. We met each other’s eyes instead, arching our eyebrows up in recognition. This was like home again.

Mom was exhausted and crawled into bed immediately. But that first night, I couldn’t sleep. My heart was still pounding. I wasn’t remotely tired. I got up and slowly walked around the study, trying to read the titles of the books cramping the shelves around the walls. It was surreal to be in a place like this, when only hours before I had been sitting on my bed in prison, quivering with nerves and uncertainty.

I listened to Mom sighing in her deep sleep the entire night as I sat in an armchair, staring out the window until it became light.
This isn’t prison
, I marveled to myself.
This isn’t prison!

Just after sunrise Steve was up and dressed, gathering our baggage in the foyer. He asked how I’d slept.

“Not at all!” I replied cheerfully.

Our host returned from his morning errand, offering us pastries and espresso. I gulped down the coffee and some water, but couldn’t eat. I wasn’t hungry. He then offered me the morning paper, tears in his soft eyes.

The front page showed a large, zoomed-in picture of me being escorted from the courtroom after the pronouncement of the verdict, my face contorted by crying.
Oh God
, I thought.

“You’re so photogenic,” Steve wisecracked.

We barely had time to gulp down the espresso before Corrado and the same driver from the evening before pulled up outside. After a long, reflective night, the rush was starting again. We said a quick good-bye to our host, who embraced us all with more strength than I would have expected from him.

We had some time before we needed to be at the airport, so we decided to stop by my family’s hotel. Steve thought it would be a good idea if I changed clothes. “No offense. You look nice,” he said, “but the paparazzi are looking for you in that outfit. We’ll have a better chance of avoiding drawing attention to ourselves if you can borrow something from Madison or your sister.”

It was early enough that when we pulled up outside the hotel there wasn’t yet any movement around the building or in the lobby. Steve got out of the car first and looked around furtively. “We shouldn’t stay here long,” he said. “The paparazzi will have followed us here.”

I pulled the hood of my coat up over my face and quickly approached the entrance to the lobby. I put down my hood and walked quickly toward the elevators with Mom and Steve, trying to look casual. Just then, a photo of me came up on the large-screen TV in the lobby, announcing my release from prison. I was still wearing the same clothes. We raced to the family’s rooms, where we quickly greeted, squealing; and I changed clothes. Then we were off again.

Corrado had arranged for us to wait in the airport’s VIP Lounge, and for even more than that. We drove in through a side entrance to the airport, went through private security, and, when we finally had to come out to face the public, had an escort through the airport hallways. We were a large group, walking quickly through the various terminals. But airport security surrounded Corrado, Mom, Steve, and me all the way to the lounge. In the meantime, people took out their iPhones and took pictures. I embraced Corrado.

My family gathered in the lounge. I ordered my first legitimate cappuccino in years, as I explained to my baffled little sisters how, in prison, to create foam for a cappuccino, we’d pour boiling hot milk into an empty two-liter bottle and shake it furiously. It never worked all that well.

Chris and a supporter who worked for the airline had secured us three business-class seats, so that I would be safe to relax on the plane, and family could be up there with me. Many journalists had managed to book last-minute seats on the flight, but the flight attendants, alerted to our situation, kept them from approaching the upstairs part of the plane.

Once on the plane, Deanna and I giggled together like little girls, poking at each other across the armrest. She fell asleep, but I still couldn’t even doze. I was wired. I spent a lot of time catching up in my mind with what had happened to me so far, since my acquittal. Everything was different. Everything was not prison. I had viewed the same countryside for years without ever seeing anything else, and now I could open my window shade and watch the clouds foam beneath us. The flight attendants were smiling and considerate. I watched Deanna sleep, curled up awkwardly even in roomy business class. Chris was across the aisle.

I searched for something to watch on the video screen on the seatback in front of me, and came upon a news report about my case. I felt myself go numb. This was a British report, and I was suddenly reminded of how big this was, of how many people knew about this and were following what was happening. I watched myself being led from the courtroom after my acquittal, and immediately my chest tightened. I took off Chris’s headphones and turned off the channel, struggling to breathe.