From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(49)

But my anxiety was bigger than my National Geographic musings. It grew into a free-form amoeba, attaching itself to all manner of doomsday possibilities—from the boat sinking to Zoela getting seasick to my being incapacitated by heat to losing my American Express card and having to wash dishes to pay for our boat fare back to Cefalù. Suddenly all I wanted to do was get back to land, back to Aliminusa, back to the safety of Nonna’s house. Then it hit, a reckoning of who this widowed me might be. I was either willful or naive or, worse yet, both. What in the hell possessed me to do this? I wasn’t twenty years old anymore, I didn’t have a partner to back me up. I was taking a young child for a long adventure with no adult companion. No extra set of hands. Suddenly I was hyperaware that we were away from Nonna’s kitchen and community. We weren’t surrounded by people who knew us, nor in a place where we instinctively felt protected. Where Zoela’s whole well-being didn’t depend exclusively on me. If anything happened—illness, accident, loss of documents—in Aliminusa I had a town at my disposal to help remedy it. And I’d certainly have to entertain Zoela at times, ply her with gelato when she bumped up against the inevitable boredom, and possibly carry her when she got tired. I had taken a grand adventurous leap and then panicked once my feet left the ground. So much so that I lifted Zoela’s head off my lap, reached for my bag, and popped an Ativan.

German and French families sat around us on the boat along with some young Italian couples eager to brown their skin while lying on black volcanic sand. Zoela and I were among a handful of Americans, mostly young college kids with greasy hair and wrinkled shorts they had pulled from the backpacks they were using to hike through Europe. We were the only people of color.

Out on the open sea, in a boat full of strangers, I became acutely aware of my vulnerability and in turn Zoela’s—the structural rawness in our lives and our inability to handle any additional upset. I pulled her closer and sent a prayer out into the horizon.



* * *



The first thing I noticed when we got to Stromboli was the port. It was much more built up than when I had been there twenty years before. The second thing I noticed was Rocco, my one-night stand, now two decades older. It wasn’t hard to miss him. He was positioned near a bar at the port. The identifiers were all there—the Vespa, the same frame, the same face, each a little more worn. I let out an audible cackle. Saro, you are heckling me from the heavens.

Seeing Rocco at the port greeting throngs of tourists was like peering through a looking glass into an audacious parallel universe. In that universe, the twenty-year-old me had made different choices. I had chosen Rocco, my one-night stand, and that romp on a black sand beach at midnight had turned into a life serving beer to tourists in the summer season and ironing his underwear in the off-season. Rocco was a 3-D, bronzed-by-the-sun, cautionary tale. For every romantic cliché—nice girl forever crushing on unattainable bad boys, Italian gigolos on the prowl for American coeds—we had been both. Only he was clearly still at it. One look at him, and I drew Zoela closer.

I wanted to warn her that men perched on a Vespa are like gelato that looks like pistachio but tastes like anchovies. But I decided that was a conversation for another time, a future way off.

Instead I was surprised by a feeling that crept over me, a subtle, almost indecipherable sense of injustice. How was this man still there after twenty years? A lifetime had passed for me with a breathtaking love, a marriage, a child, and death. So much sweeping change. Yet here he was, as fixed and constant as the volcano behind him. I felt a ping of vague resentment in my belly as I stared at Rocco. He was a sore point, a visual demarcating my life before Saro and my life after. His presence was a reminder of Saro’s absence.

I took a deep breath, trying to relax and take it all lightly. Okay, Universe, I get it. You are mercurial.

Then I steered us along the length of the port hand in hand, away from any possible eye contact with Rocco. Within a few steps, I suddenly felt emboldened, invisibly stronger. I had brought my daughter this far. I had done it. Alone. My earlier doubt melted away, I felt capable. As though maybe, just maybe, I could navigate the complexities of my new life and not get completely lost. Or, at the very least, I could get Zoela and me onto and off of an island far from home. Or maybe it was the Ativan talking.

I squeezed her hand and pointed to the top of the volcano ahead. “Sweetheart, that’s an active volcano. The first one you’re ever seeing.”

She took one look at it and then turned to me. “How long are we going to be here, Mommy? I’m hungry.”

Of course, children have priorities that don’t include volcanoes and memories of one-night stands.

I promised pizza and gelato, magic words that can shift the mood of any reasonable person. Then we started our way into town, following the narrowing ascending street that I remembered from years before. I knew there would be places to eat along the way because of the smattering of tourists headed in the same direction. If nothing else, we’d have a great meal on the island. Now that I was here, it didn’t much matter to me that we actually trek the volcano. The trek, at least the one I was navigating internally across the landscape of loss, had already begun.

Half an hour later, we were seated at a restaurant perched in the foothills of the volcano with a head-spinning view of the Mediterranean. Zoela ordered spaghetti alle vongole—pasta with clams, fresh parsley, and red pepper flakes. When I was seven, on trips to East Texas, I had eaten canned Vienna sausage and drunk Tang by the gallon. She was her father’s child, in all her culinary sophistication.