A hurricane is coming and Ficre is not here. The children tend the property and become men, Solo on his stomach figuring out how to clean the detritus-clogged drains, Simon hoisting lawn furniture upside down and moving enormous holiday pumpkins against the house. Where are you, Fiki, I keep saying. Will this storm bring you back, blow you onto the doorstep, disheveled but here? Early on, Simon dreamed he found you. You had been locked in the box for two weeks and were hungry but fine. It was all a terrible mistake.
I am wondering about the forgetting. I remember my mother visiting when Solo was five months old, watching me change his diaper and dress him. Do you realize how much better you’ve gotten at that? she said, and I could barely remember the first days and weeks, the awkward folding, his baby body slithering in my hands. All I could feel was the moment we were in, in which I knew how to take care of my baby.
Ficre always changed the diapers fast and tidy.
We are doing better, I know.
I am not allowing myself full and deep sleep. I am vigilant. Sleep brings death too close.
You have not come to see me, Ficre.
Will the hurricane wind bring you back?
To be on the verge of tears for seven months straight, all day, every day.
Where are you? You are part of this storm, this wind, this rain, these leaves. Plants will one day grow from your bones in the Grove Street Cemetery, my empty dirt bed next to you.
I imagine your grave one day spontaneously covered with peonies, my favorite flower, the one you planted for me and which bloomed reliably on my birthday, May 30, every year.
Almost always you were strong and well and your step was light. But every few years, you’d contract a burning flu. I’d swaddle you in the fine white cotton blankets from Eritrea called gabi and hold you through the night as you sweated it out. I’d tend you.
Under Amy’s hands, four days before you died, you surrendered when she rubbed your shoulders at the birthday party.
Under my hands, five days before you died, you were the same strong lover as always.
Ficre in the bright leaves that have been falling from the trees in the afternoon light.
Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere.
Ficre in New York City, sitting and watching the lights and writing haiku.
Fifteen
I dreamed we sat in chapel at the children’s Episcopal elementary school. Every morning at St. Thomas’s Day School began with the whole community gathering in that space. I felt the fullness of Ficre’s body beneath his beloved cable-knit gray sweater (“I am an African highlander who loves a sweater,” he would say); he was there next to me. We were singing the hymns with full voices: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”; “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.” Hundreds of origami cranes fluttered over the sanctuary. We made a joyful noise and believed in the power of communal song.
We left the church and walked hand-in-hand to the corner store. I could feel my hand in his, then as now. At the store, there was only a chicken wing and one pork chop in the meat case—out of milk, out of bread, out of eggs, the shelves eerily bare. The light changed. And then he was gone from the dream.
I cried so hard I woke myself. My bed, the bedroom, the house, was suffused with sorrow. Sorrow like vapor, sorrow like smoke, sorrow like quicksand, sorrow like an ocean, sorrow louder and fuller than the church songs, sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go.
Sixteen
What a perfect May morning this is, one where I imagine he would have risen before us, fixed his coffee, and gone out into his garden. He would have stood upon his mount and watered the rows, sorting his head for the day. How will we now plant the vegetable garden? How will we thin the rows? My children knew his love and so did I, always unwavering, always trained upon us. But oh, to have had a chance to say goodbye, to tell him again.
Why did I speak as I did at his fiftieth birthday? I said goodbye.
Why did he buy the lottery ticket with my name on it? Why was he so angry when he lost?
Why was the studio left so tidy?
I run into Father Peter in Whole Foods, which strikes me as a line in a joke: A priest in a T-shirt and a Yankees cap is pushing a grocery cart in Whole Foods. “I thought God brought you your food,” I say, and we laughed. He married us, christened both children, and preached Ficre’s soul to the other side in Saint Barbara church. He always made space for us as outsiders to the flock, as I was not raised Orthodox, and Ficre was a skeptic whose childhood church-going was a part of the cherished memories of his community upbringing, but not a religious practice he wished to continue in adulthood.