From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(54)
Taking the small wooden box from my pocket and opening it, my hands shook just a little. I removed the clear plastic bag meant for small jewelry and opened the seal. If I had planned better, I would have had a prayer committed to memory, ready to recite. But it didn’t go like that. Standing in this sacred space of nature was the only form of prayer suitable to consecrating Saro to terra firma.
The ashes left the bag easily, falling gently but slowly to the earth. I watched them disappear into the grayish sienna dirt. Then the last almost imperceptible bits were carried away by the wind.
He was back, returned forever to the soil of his childhood, free between the sea and the mountains.
When I finally stood, my shirt was stained with sweat and spotted with tears. The cicadas had never stopped keeping time. They were a Sicilian symphony. Then a tractor engine sputtered in the distance below. Life in Sicily went on.
Part Three
SECOND SUMMER
Casa quantu stai e tirrinu quantu viri.
Home for as long as you need it to be and land as far as the eye can see.
—Sicilian proverb
HEIRLOOMS
Two days before the first anniversary of Saro’s death, I felt woozy as I stood outside Stage 7 on the Paramount Studios backlot in Hollywood when I was struck with a surge of grief. I was about to audition for a police procedural, a television pilot. And I could barely hold it together.
It had now been fifty-two Wednesday mornings since Saro had died. Enough Wednesdays for Zoela to get taller, her baby teeth to become fewer. Enough Wednesdays for her to ask me again and again, “Why did Babbo die?” and have my answer still not satisfy. Enough Wednesdays to see just a little more peeling paint on our hundred-year-old house, enough Wednesdays to watch the apartment building next door empty and fill again. I had seen Wednesdays when I couldn’t get out of bed and Wednesdays when I couldn’t fall asleep, so weary and bereft I had asked other people to drive my daughter to school, pick up groceries at the store, stand at my dining room table and help me fold clothes.
I had stacked fifty-two Wednesdays on top of one another, at the base of which was that Wednesday morning that had changed everything. In that time, I had been guerrilla grieving—stealthily mourning out of public view, using any tactics necessary to get by. Moreover, I had an unspoken belief that if I just pushed through and kept everything from falling apart, at the end of the first year things would get easier. They hadn’t, and I felt duped.
Instead, I had come to think of my grief as a character in my life, something I had to get to know, befriend, make peace with, because it was bigger than anything I had ever known. It pulled me down and sometimes propelled me forward. That day, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was capable of doing.
As I walked across the lot to the casting office, I rehearsed my lines in my head once again: “I found the body,” then “Perp never saw it coming.” Later in the script: “I’m not sure I want to be on this job.” There was a singular, personal truth in that last line. One year out, I still felt unsuited for the job of widow.
I looked up at the looming water tower above the fabled Hollywood backlot. I loved the Paramount Studios. It had been the home of my first television series, and I never tired of its Italianate and Art Deco architecture. But the water tower gave it a small-town feel. The first time I had ever driven onto the studio lot, I had used the water tower as the landmark to find my way back to my car. It was emblazoned with the Paramount logo—a mountain peak surrounded by stars. As I headed to the audition, I wondered what it would feel like to stand at the apex of a mountain. To have climbed so far and be able to stand above it all, above the mist and the clouds. I wondered what a reprieve from the hard work of grieving might feel like.
A golf cart passed me with a twenty-something assistant on NCIS: Los Angeles talking on a headset; a messenger dumped his bike by a palm tree before disappearing into the commissary. For a moment, I thought to stop inside and get an espresso. Then my cell phone rang. It was my mom.
“Have you landed?” I asked. She was set to arrive later that day from Houston. My dad and Aubrey were also coming to town to help mark the first anniversary. I had planned a gathering of friends at the house. No one wanted Zoela or me to be alone. Least of all us.
“What can I pick up from the store?” she asked. “I wanted to call now in case you’re busy with Zoela later.”
She knew I didn’t usually answer my phone in the evenings. The end of the day was still unpredictable for us. Some days were still hard, especially as the anniversary neared. Zoela had returned to sleeping in her own bed, but we needed lots of lead time for her to feel safe and secure enough to fall asleep. Then I slumped into bed myself, worn down by single parenting while grieving. Often I would lie awake. When I did finally fall asleep, I was visited with a recurring dream of Saro and me making love on the beach, as we had done in Greece and Elba. In the dreams, there were sand dunes that formed around a tent on the beach where we met daily to wrap our bodies into each other. He entered me and I cried out, and then I’d look out to see the waves approaching. I could see that the shelter would be washed away. Us included. And in the dream I’d say, “Hurry, hurry, let’s do it.” Then I’d awaken to silence.
“I don’t know, Mom. Can we think about groceries tomorrow? I’m actually walking into an audition.”