From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(17)

“I don’t know if I can do this.” My voice echoed in my head.

“You can, you will,” she said. She struck me as the kind of woman who could perform field surgery in the trenches of war under a starless sky. “Do you have someone to help you? Family?”

“Yes, sister, dad, stepmother. They’re here,” I said.

“Then you can.” But she wasn’t done; she had more. “And I know this sounds morbid. But you need to take a picture of your husband after he has died. Not with your daughter and him. But of him. Take the picture of him.” Her repetition was deliberate and direct.

“I don’t understand.” I hunched over, unsure if I still had bones in my body.

“Then I want you to put that picture away.” She said it as though it would be as easy as pulling a pie from the oven. “And here’s the good news. You may never have to see it again. But one day you might need it. And you’ll be glad you have it. One day when she’s sixteen and all her grief is new and fresh, triggered by all the ways he is not in her life, she will be angry and hurt and confused. And mad at you, mad at life. She may say, ‘And you never let me say good-bye to my dad’ or ‘I never got to go to his memorial service.’ And she won’t be making it up. It will be real to her. Children can bury what is too big to bear. That is why you will have the picture.”

Margaret was flashing forward ten years into a future without Saro. To Zoela as a teenage girl who was angry and hurt. To me as a single parent. She was describing a world I had not yet even dared to consider.

It was only days earlier, before we had brought Saro home, that I had told Zoela that her father was dying. A friend had gone to get her from school while I had rehearsed the words in my head the way I did while learning lines of dialogue for an audition. I tried saying “Babbo is dying” three different ways. With three different intentions. With three different approaches. Comfort her. Be clear with her. Empathize with her. But this was no acting exercise. Each time I choked on the words in my mouth. No amount of rehearsal could prepare me.

When she got home, I invited her into my room. She played on my bed, and I told her she could sleep with me that night. I asked her to tell me about a recent school trip to the California desert. She spoke of coyotes, desert squirrels, and six-foot cacti. They all sounded like words from another planet. The planet of the living. Not the world I had been inhabiting in hospital corridors. I tried to focus on her eyes as she spoke. I took in the fall of her pigtails. I wanted to cup her face, kiss her. Then I said, “Sweetheart, I need to tell you something. It’s about Babbo.”

“I know,” she said, her voice registering neither surprise nor distress. Prescience.

Seven years old, and she said, “I know.”

“I know he is dying, and it’s breaking my heart,” she continued. Her eyes didn’t leave me, as if there were a possibility that this wasn’t happening. A possibility that I could pull her close and say “Oh, no, baby, not that.” Instead, I said this.

“Yes, mine is breaking too.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, but soon.”

She looked away then, lost in thought, in irreconcilable thoughts. She stared, unseeing, at the drawn curtain behind my bed. The look on her face, her composure, gnawed at my heart. It was too much for seven years old. “Your heart is breaking, and so is mine,” I said as I reached to take her. “Come here, sit with me.”

She curled up in my lap and began to cry. I caressed her head. We let ourselves fall back onto the bed in an embrace. We lay there for a long, sacred moment, tethered to what we still had. Each other.

I was shaking as I hung up the phone with the social worker. All I wanted was to be near Saro. I picked myself up from the floor and went to him. I pulled back the pocket doors of the room that, just a few days earlier, had been our study. Friends who had learned of the latest news had been dropping by with flowers. Buds and blooms filled the room. On the table next to the hospital bed was a candle, his favorite book of poetry by Rumi, a prayer card from Nonna in Sicily, and a crystal. Where my desk would normally have been there was now the oxygen machine, humming low and steady. Our study was now a hospice womb.

Saro’s head was turned away. He was lost in thought.

“Ciao, tesoro,” I said, coming around the foot of the bed to face him. Zoela’s stuffed animals were on top of the coverlet at his feet. She had lined them up in formation to face him. Tied to the bed’s side rail was a WELCOME HOME balloon from the supermarket, a silver Mylar heart that Zoela had picked out and then decorated with her first-grader print: “TI AMO.”

When I settled on the edge of the bed, he met my eyes, paused, and then looked past me.

“Just me,” I said. “Nurse Cathy is outside.”

A smile came across his face.

“Apple juice?” I offered the plastic cup with a rainbow straw that Zoela had left at his bedside before going to school that morning. We had all agreed a normal day for her was best. But she had wanted to have breakfast with him. The apple juice had been her parting gift.

He nodded, and I bent the straw and held it to his lips. When I did, he shifted and motioned for me to draw closer. His skin was warm, I could still smell his signature earthy mix of salt and spice over the scents of medicine, iodine, and baby wipes. I kissed him long and hard on his forehead.