Last Dance, Last Chance

didn’t think she could. She was terrified—but she did it. “I was so afraid I’d hurt her,” Caroline recalled.
     
    Ralph and Lauren couldn’t understand why they couldn’t come back home full time, but the court order said they had to stay with Carmine and Patti. “I could only see them one hour per week,” Debbie said. One hour…
    Anthony never came to see Debbie after the day Denis Scinta threw him out of her hospital room. Oddly, he didn’t fight his banishment. It was as if he was waiting for the ax to fall and didn’t want to draw attention to himself.
    “Anthony went to court and got visitation rights with Ralph and Lauren,” Debbie said. “Sometimes the kids were with me and he came to pick them up. If he stepped inside the door, he was in the same room with me because my hospital bed was right there. But we barely spoke—maybe we said a few words about the kids.”
    Debbie was shocked when she learned from the children that Anthony was working on them, trying to get them to believe wild stories and to believe his excuses for himself that were far beyond their ability to handle.
    “He was telling them that the person who gave me arsenic was someone in Sarah Smith’s family. And then he told them that his mistress’s ex-boyfriend did this to me,” Debbie recalled. “Finally, he even accused a neighbor from across the street!
    “My kids were scared and confused—very upset. There wasn’t anything I could say to help them. The things he told them weren’t true, and they were totally inappropriate for a father to say to children who were only ten and twelve. Anthony was only interested in saving himself. He had never put the children’s needs first, and he was still playing with their minds.”
    But Ralph and Lauren knew that their mother was the one who had always been there for them. The three of them had formed a bond that none of their father’s wiles could weaken. Frustrated, Anthony gradually began to plead with Debbie. That had always worked before. Debbie had always taken him back, no matter what.
    “I can’t live with my mom,” he said urgently. “She’s driving me crazy. Deb, I want to come home.”
    For the first time in twenty years, Debbie didn’t want him to come home. She never wanted to live with him again.
    “He would still work on the kids, too,” Debbie said. “He’d ask Ralph, ‘Why don’t we all go to the Buffalo Bills game?’ As if somebody could load me into a wheelchair and take me up the stadium steps. I couldn’t even get upstairs to the bathroom. Shelly’s husband teased me and said, ‘Sure, Deb, you go to the game. He can push you right up to the top row and send you over the edge,’ and we all laughed. I was actually getting to the point where I could laugh about things that used to make me cry.”
    While Anthony Pignataro worked to get back into the good graces of his wife and made certain that he was observed being an excellent father, Debbie was learning that it was quite possible to live without him. The men who tracked him were jumping over all the hurdles they had to clear before they could hope to get an arrest warrant. They knew they had an essentially circumstantial case, but a solid circumstantial case can be as strong as, or stronger than, one based on physical evidence or even an eyewitness if it is constructed flawlessly.
     
    Sharon Simon was still visiting Debbie or calling, Shelly and Rose and her mother were taking care of her, and Debbie was as happy as a paralyzed woman whose beloved children could not live with her could be. She tried not to think about what would happen if her paralysis was permanent. She focused on each day, thrilled when she continued to make tiny steps toward recovery. Debbie’s doctors couldn’t tell her what her prognosis was. They had never treated anyone with such profound arsenic poisoning before.
    Anthony’s mother never asked how Debbie was doing. One of Debbie’s neighbors, an older woman they all called “Virginia, the Italian Kitchen Lady” because she was such a wonderful cook, was ill. Lena stopped by Rose Gardner’s house to ask about Virginia, but she didn’t even mention Debbie, who was only a few houses down the street, struggling to feed herself and to get up on her feet.
    On one occasion, Lena picked Ralph and Lauren up from Shelly’s house. Shelly welcomed her with a smile and said, “Hi! Would you like to come in while they’re getting their stuff?”
    “Anthony’s