From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(48)
VOLCANIC SAND
Two weeks into this monthlong Sicilian trip, our first without Saro, I boarded a ferry with Zoela in tow for the four-hour ride to Stromboli, a volcanic island and the farthest point in the Sicilian archipelago. I had been desperate to leave Aliminusa. The near-constant reminders of Saro—at Nonna’s house, in the town square, at the bar getting espresso—became dizzying. Being in town elicited a twin experience, by turns soothing and then triggering big waves of grief. A couple of days at the coast and a trip to a remote cluster of tiny islands seemed just the thing to satiate my growing wanderlust and give Zoela and me time outside the confines of the tiny town.
I suspected that Nonna needed a little time alone as well. The three of us had settled into a quotidian routine of abundant meals, long naps, and early evenings spent on the bench in front of her house, retracing our loss. In the kitchen, Nonna and I talked over coffee. I watched her dry fresh oregano from the garden, then sieve it by hand using the same plastic colander she had used since the days when Saro was a bachelor in Florence. Summer was ripe with flavor and memory. And the only time either of us had away from each other was when she went to Mass in the afternoon.
The line of tourists boarding the boat was two deep. I grabbed Zoela’s hand as we crossed the dock. “Sweetheart, we’re going to sit inside the cabin, not on the deck. The winds will be too strong, and it’s a long ride to see the volcano.”
“Can I watch a movie?” she asked, grabbing hold of the straps of her daypack just as I had taught her.
“No, it’s not like a plane, there are no movies on board. You can read or better yet, try to take a nap on my lap.”
Halfway into our time in Sicily, and she had not developed any discernable sleep pattern. The jet lag was crippling. Since Saro’s death, we had been sharing a bed. At Nonna’s house it was no different. Zoela needed it. I needed it, too. At night, she hooked her body close to mine. Maybe she was afraid that if she migrated to the opposite side of the bed, she’d lose me, I’d die in my sleep like her dad. So she stayed close. And her small form kept me grounded. I reached for her during those nights just as much as she reached for me. We were testing each other’s permanence. So having her sleep on the boat meant she would be less cranky when we arrived and I’d maybe have time to shut my eyes as well.
As we settled into our seats, I sensed that this was an important first, testing my ability to step into the old me, my adventurous self, the person who had traveled so much before cancer and caregiving. Did she still exist? Could I awaken that old self? With Saro, I had seen nearly every corner of Sicily, but there were some places, special places, that he and I had longed to go to but never could due to his illness. I had visited Stromboli twenty years prior as a single coed but never with Saro.
I told myself that in my new life, I would be the one to show Zoela the world. I would have to show her that we could still find kernels of joy or excitement in the midst of grief. I didn’t yet know it to be true, but I wanted to test the idea. Stromboli seemed a symbolic, epic first step. But once we were on the boat and the engines turned and the underwater propellers set us into motion, I realized I had miscalculated.
My anxiety swooped in like a cleaver hacking down on a chicken bone. Five minutes into a nearly four-hour ride, and I was riddled with fear of the things that could go wrong, aware that I was now alone with Zoela on the open sea without cell reception until we reached land. Also, I had no real plan as to what we would do when we arrived. I had never traveled with her like this alone. In her daypack there was an envelope with the emergency contact info I had typed up back in L.A. It held copies of our passports from both nations, in case we got separated or something happened to me. If all hell broke loose, I wanted people to know to whom she belonged, whom to contact, and that this little girl with pigtails and brown skin was not alone in the world. I had spent hours on the Internet looking for tips on how to travel abroad as a single parent. That’s how I had learned that when traveling abroad, solo parents who have different last names from their children, which I did, can experience challenges. I needed some document that united us on paper, something that reconciled our different last names. So in addition to the picture of the two of us together, I hyphenated my name to “Locke-Gullo” on the emergency contact list. Then I typed, in bold, “PADRE MORTO 2012—FATHER DECEASED 2012.”
I didn’t want to transmit all of my fears to Zoela, so as she fell asleep on my lap, I whispered into her ear, “Sweetheart, we’re gonna get to climb a volcano and see lava.”
Then I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the geological wonders of Stromboli, the memory of molten earth, sea, wind, and Mother Earth coughing up her inner core. The magnitude of a volcano and its constancy in the face of so much human frailty fascinated me. There was something so primordial about it, something about the way its aliveness contrasted my grief. The island was a magnet for a widow, adventurer, curiously creative like me. Or so I tried to tell myself.
As I caressed the top of Zoela’s head, I conjured up joyous images of us happily trekking up a volcano, spending an afternoon on the black sand beach, watching lava set against the backdrop of the setting sun in a faint blue sky. I fantasized about the two of us being transformed as we set out on a kind of pilgrimage to a place where humanity had managed to make peace with the impermanence of life. The people of Stromboli lived at the base of an active volcano, for fuck’s sake. Though it hadn’t done damage in hundreds of years, if there ever were an emergency, there’d be no easy way out. Yet these people carried on their lives with that ever-present awareness, accepting throngs of seasonal tourists, then living in relative solitude in the off months. The idea of this place was both alluring and vexing. I tried to lull myself with the hum of the boat’s engine.