I want to describe for you what it looks like from the window in my bedroom. The city of Macerata out in the distance, beyond the other apartments in their stucco walls. In their yellows and reds. Past shutters wide open, past the noises of the evening, up to that ancient city with her bell towers, her palaces, her honey-colored bricks, crumbling. I want to describe the curtains that Antonello put up, long and linen, light beige, that he taped at the ends with double-sided tape because we didn’t know how to sew. The doors with their big glass panels, the balcony with the new tiles, redone, like the way you once put in each tile for the bathroom wall that summer of my senior year of college: I came home to Lesley Avenue and found you crouching in the bathtub, placing diamond-shaped tile after diamond-shaped tile—one long frame of them, clicking into place. You show me your work: your eyes proud, smile beaming. Here in Italy, I painted the bedroom myself, a mix of mint and pistachio. The little strip of tape that we put at the edge between the wall and ceiling so the paint wouldn’t get everywhere, one long piece, pressed sticky into place, as if I’d seen you do these things a thousand times. As if I had learned, even in just the watching, how to do it all myself. 

I want to describe for you the shape of my youth. The feel of it, on the days with you, when we walked from the car carrying grocery bags from Cub Foods. I hopped up each single step, up up up, and the path to the porch and then the screen door swinging, the noise as it slammed shut in little endless puffs. I remember that kitchen, that living room, the mail that we kept in stacks on the dining room table, how it was slippery, ready to tumble over. The way the sun hit the cedar cabinet in the hallway and left tiny dappled stars all along its side. The way that one room led to another, room after room—one long breath that closed the front door and opened the back door, blew right through it. The flowers that Dad cut for you, zinnias and daisies and purple coneflowers. How he’d look for you on those days he came home through the backyard. How he’d peer into the kitchen window, and you’d be there, smiling back at him.

I remember when we sat in the living room, and you apologized for the dance lessons. Every Thursday afternoon of my childhood, we went to Jordan Dance on the north side of town: 45 minutes driving to and from, and I never did like it one bit. I never learned how to do the splits, but we practiced together on the yellow linoleum floor in the kitchen, that floor you hated, the one you wanted torn out. I cried every time, every failed plie, every pirouette gone wrong. You bought me pink lemonade Jolly Ranchers—long slabs of them—after each Thursday lesson, and I ate them on the ride home, my cheeks stained in tears. We didn’t talk about it. I didn’t know. You never said what it meant to you, and I never thought to ask. But this was something you had loved once. Your tutu. The soft fuzz of it, the crinkly tulle. Your own pink shoes and the satiny ribbons that tied up the back. The picture I found of you, years later, do you remember it? You dancing in the living room of your home in Logansport, Indiana. The blue carpet, the slate gray curtains behind you, creased and heavy, closed tight. And you on your toes, arms out, chin high, that look in your eyes like you were meant for this very thing. Who taught you to dance like that, Mom? Was it your own mother, when you were little? Or your grandmother, with the mango groves behind her, stretched out on hillsides to the edge of the sea, back when home was a distant island and you were so so young? Who picked you up and lifted you so that you could fly, leg out, toes pointed? And your arms: how they held something empty in them, but they held it close. Poised and proper and fingers reaching out, embracing the invisible.

I want to describe for you the places where I think you might be. Where I go looking for you. In the churches on this side of the world, there are so many of them, I get lost just walking up the cobblestones to find them, to push doors open, to light candles and say your name, watch the smoke as it rises in silver ringlets till it disappears. I say prayers in English, in Italian, in languages I haven’t learned yet, in words I wonder if you can say—why you never taught me any of them, the entire garden of a language in your lap. I seek you out in the questions I cannot answer, in the what ifs, in the wishes, in the how does it go, this moving on without you? 

Can you imagine—I looked for you in Rome the other day, moved from Baroque church to Baroque church trying to find some wish of you, some sign—on your birthday—that you could hear me. That you were fine. Some heaven where you still exist. I walked out the doors of a busy Termini station as the rain was starting to fall (it never rains in Rome, Mom—we both know that) just to get to Santa Maria Della Vittoria, duck into the quiet corner of the tiny church, crowded with every manner of angel, every painted saint. Happy birthday, I whispered, soft like a prayer. Where were you? I cannot say, but maybe you can tell me. Sometimes, I wonder if you are somewhere on the other side of these lost things. If we are climbing the same hills, you and I, looking down the same roads, haunting the same nothings, the shadows in the corners of each darkened room. Sometimes, I wonder if I am your ghost as much as you are mine. Maybe you are waiting for me, too. Picking up the softness of our conversations. Our footsteps, the stones of Rome. The pink lemonade Jolly Ranchers, so sticky and sweet.

Maybe, in that version of us, you don’t apologize. You don’t need to, Mom. We laugh instead. I learn to do the splits. You teach me the steps, and I follow you, spend the whole day together on any side of the world—wherever you are, I will be. Each dance move, each lesson in form, in balance, in grace. Each soft curve of the leg, toes pointed. Each pirouette. Each stretch and pause and holding—torso long, arms wide open, fingers reaching out toward something, someone. One breath, then another. Slow and steady. Don’t let go.