Sicily

Sicily is one of the destinations Dessa visits alone after Angela’s death, part of a journey that exposes the distance between her effort to face grief and Dominick’s fear of what their shared future might require. The trip was first imagined as something the couple would undertake together; her return brings them back into physical intimacy, though the account does not present travel as a simple cure for their loss.

The Trip and Its Circumstances

Dessa anticipates how painful Angela’s first birthday will be and makes plans to leave on a trip to Greece and Sicily by herself. She has resigned from her job at the day care center, turning her leave of absence into a permanent departure, and proposes using the life-insurance money they received after Angela’s birth to finance the journey. She had wanted Dominick to go with her, making the trip an attempted shared response to their bereavement before it became a solitary one.

Dominick refuses, saying he cannot leave until the school year is over. When Dessa presses him to consider going for her sake, he loses his temper over the idea of spending money associated with Angela’s death. He recognizes, however, that this argument conceals a more personal fear: traveling together would mean being confined with Dessa, and the possibility that they might make another baby frightens him. He urges her to go without him; she accepts the challenge and leaves.

Dessa’s Absence and Return

While Dessa is away in the Mediterranean, Dominick undergoes a vasectomy, a decision he keeps secret from her. The timing makes his private response sharply different from the journey she had proposed: while she travels without him, he acts to prevent the possibility of another child. The evidence establishes Sicily as one part of her itinerary, but does not specify what she does there or distinguish her time on the island from the rest of the trip.

Dessa returns looking tan and rested. On her second night home, she and Dominick share a bottle of wine in the kitchen and look through her travel photographs. As she tells him a story about a passport mix-up, he takes her hand, kisses her, and draws her into his arms for the first time in a long while. They go upstairs together; when Dessa pauses outside the baby’s room, she directs them inside. Their renewed closeness occurs in a space bound to their loss, rather than apart from it.

Narrative Significance

Sicily belongs to a journey shaped by two opposed responses to bereavement. Dessa plans a trip the couple might have taken together and, after Dominick refuses, goes alone; Dominick answers the same crisis by secretly choosing sterility. The contrast makes the trip more than a change of setting: it marks the separation between them while revealing what each is unable to say directly about grief, parenthood, and the prospect of another child.

The return creates a limited reversal. The photographs and stories from Dessa’s travels give way to touch and a shared movement toward the room that had belonged to Angela. Yet the renewed intimacy follows Dominick’s undisclosed vasectomy, so the scene’s apparent reconciliation rests alongside a consequential secret. Sicily is thus associated with Dessa’s independent passage through a period of grief and with the couple’s tentative reunion, not with a resolution of the conflict that divided them.