My parents, New York apartment–raised privacy-lovers, who hid from the knock at the door in their freestanding houses.
Would Ficre return trim in his army greens, a huge duffel bag slung over his shoulder?
Is he somewhere with amnesia from the blow to his head?
Would I scramble to make his favorite meal while the children pulled off his boots and washed his feet in a tin basin, as he washed the feet on the nuns who made pilgrimage past his home on the days leading up to Easter?
I can see it so vividly, Where have you been?
My life will be a trail of breadcrumbs wherever it takes me until I die.
But lo I have seen his body, so know this is a tricky mind. I have seen it.
Seven
I have not yet learned how to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?
I now learned the DVR and find traces of him in the programming. Under Record Series, Melissa Harris-Perry’s new show. Oh how he loved a smart black girl, and especially a cute one. Kundalini Yoga. Nova. American Masters. Unsung, just for me. I’d binge-watch his offerings (Lou Rawls! Donna Summer! Shalamar!). My Negro wife, he’d say, with the warmest of amused smiles.
Now I erase some of those settings to make room for new things: NBA All-Star Game, Scandal, Chopped. I erase The Big C; that show is over, and on it, the middle-aged wife died. The husband had a heart attack and lived. I watched the end of that show that Ficre and I started together without him, and wept, cursing the living husband who came back from the precipice.
He was never not thinking about us. Everything he touched contained his thoughts of us, including the alien television.
I speak on the phone for the last time I will need to to a cardiologist who explains to me what happened exactly as others have, based on his autopsy report: he was probably dead before he hit the ground, that he may have felt a bit sick beforehand but the event itself was like lightning, and would not have left time for fear or pain.
Then he tells me the story of the priest who had a heart attack on the pulpit while preaching the resurrection on Easter, and the church was next to the fire department, and they came instantly and helped him, and he lived, and then later told of going to the precipice. He saw his mother. It was peaceful and beautiful. He was sorry to come back.
I keep paying his cell phone bill for a year and a half afterwards, because I don’t want to lose the text messages, but I don’t have the heart to read and transfer them. The phone goes dead and gets lost somewhere in the house.
But then I find it, and it is time. Simon cries rainstorm tears when he sees the photograph on the phone of his father blowing out his birthday candles at the kitchen table.
Texts he sent at 2:08 p.m. the day he died, to one of our nieces Luwam about her mother’s medical treatment.
A short bit later, texts with Solo, saying that he was waiting for the boys in the parking lot at school.
What a profound mystery it is to me, the vibrancy of presence, the realness of it, and then, gone. Ficre not at the kitchen table seems impossible. I draft my first meager poem in many months, a re-entry exercise:
FAMILY IN ? TIME
We are now a three-legged table,
a family of three, once a family of four.
We bring ourselves into new balance.
The table wobbles, but does not fall.
We are still a family of four, I think,
when we meet new people, and wonder
if Ficre is visible to them.
I keep the kitchen table set for four
and buy the same amount of food: four
salmon filets, eight thin chicken cutlets,
four miniature chocolate éclairs.
We are ready for when he returns.
I watch a short video the children took on Ficre’s iPhone from the morning of his fiftieth birthday. He is asleep and I am circled around him, pretending to sleep, for I am in on the surprise. The boys bring a tray to our bed: a daffodil (from the garden; it is March 21), espresso pot, toast, white yogurt drizzled with golden honey, and strawberries. All of us in our bed eat together, everything important and true in that image. Solo is the cameraman. Simon tells joke after joke and the boys fall out laughing. One of them sings a song.
Eight