I dream my house has no exterior walls, only the walls between rooms. The roof is afloat. I am on the first floor, open to the elements. An icy wind is blowing. I have no shawl.
I open my eyes and turn to his side of the bed. For the first time I begin to take the actual, physical measure of what I alone have lost. I picture and trace with my index finger his warm chestnut scalp, its furrows, and the seam down the center of his bald brown head. I feel the exact heft of him, his length lying next to me, the small bit of stomach that my hand held when I curled around him, my latch to his body.
I outline his fine nose. I feel the precise bristle of his mustache; note the exact proportion of black hairs to gray, their coil and spring. I look into his eyes, and the blue-gray ring around their brown irises: cholesterol, it turns out, creates that ring. But it is beautiful. I touch his plum-colored, pillowy lips. I see his face as he sleeps. Only I know how his face looks when he is deeply sleeping.
Sometimes in the morning as he finished a dream he would speak in Tigrinya as he began to wake. The boys have seen this when they would come to kiss him in the morning. How we loved when it happened! We’d stay very quiet in hopes the language would continue. He’d soon open his eyes, find us close to his face, and laugh a slurry, sleepy, awakening laugh.
I look for him now in the robust trees and in the custard-yellow magnolia he planted for me that actually bears my name, “Magnolia acuminata Elizabeth.” I look for him in the peonies as big as a baby’s head that he put in the ground for me, look to the small wicker table in the garden where he sat, drank coffee, and read the newspaper. It is fitting that the last photograph we have of him is in his garden. Look at his eyes in that picture, the kindest eyes anyone has ever seen. They still look out from amongst the green vines in his garden, his fagioli and figs. Fichi d’india, prickly pear fruit: I remember when we first saw, and then ate them, in southern Italy at our nephew-in-law Vito’s parents’ home in Ceglie, and we laughed because we called Ficre “Fiki” and now the Italian language rendered him a prickly pear, with the sweetest fruit inside.