“We’ll have to make sure we’re selling something they can’t get by without,” says Joey. A line appears, north to south on his forehead. Sofia watches his thoughts churn. It’s hard to hold on to her anger while she is looking at the familiar face of her papa. Sofia is too stubborn to ask herself whether her anger is a flimsy mask for something deeper and more complicated, but looking at Joey, something in her knows she is not just angry. She’s not ready to admit it, but Sofia is wildly curious. This makes her feel like a traitor: to Antonia, who has been hurt so profoundly by the machinations of Family. To her mamma, who only ever wanted for Sofia to be happy with the space carved out for her in the world.
It doesn’t make her a traitor to Joey, though. It makes her closer to him than Sofia ever imagined.
* * *
—
In the time it takes Antonia to kiss Rosa, close the door to Sofia’s apartment, walk down Sofia’s stairs, and walk up into her own building, Antonia lets go of her dream of a college degree in a town where no one knows her name. Without the Family, without her history, and without Sofia, she is an empty shell. She’ll never make it on her own. This is what she tells herself, but of course, the truth is more complicated: Antonia is suddenly not sure she wants to make it on her own. There has to be a way, she thinks, to get out from under the Family’s thumb without abandoning the people she loves. There has to be a way to get everything she wants.
* * *
—
As night settles over Brooklyn like a silence, Sofia and Antonia plant their hands against the brick wall between their apartments and they each know the other is there. They know they will not abandon one another. They give in to the strength of the bonds that have made them.
Outside a war is growing. The whole world churning. No one goes to bed on time and the radio stays crackling on until there is nothing but canned music and then static. Still, as the night passes, someone is always hovering near the radio, listening. Waiting for information, or for a reason. For proof the world is not ending. To hear a long-lost relative’s voice, or a message from God.
Until the morning broadcast, all there will be is static.
The first time Antonia lays eyes on Paolo Luigio, he is a red-eyed, saggy-shouldered blur on his way into Sofia’s building, and she is not looking where she is going. When she crashes into him, a brown paper parcel tumbles out of his arms and spills passports—stiff, red, unused, full of promise and obligations—all over the floor. Paolo and Antonia stand stunned for a moment.
Antonia bends to the ground, sweeps up some of the passports, and hands them to Paolo. “Excuse me,” she says, as she nearly runs down the street. And then stops, and turns, and says, “I’m late for school,” and feels heat prickle across her cheeks and down her back.
“Morning, miss,” he says, and touches the edge of his hat.
It is as simple or as infinitely complicated as that.
It does not occur to Antonia until she is sitting in her social studies class, sweating through the seams of her starched school dress, to wonder what a man she had never seen before was doing delivering passports to Sofia’s apartment.
When she sees him again, two weeks later, she says, “Good morning,” and he smiles. She spends the rest of the day squirming each time she remembers their interaction. Her words tumbling, louder and harsher than she meant them, out of her childish lips. His gracious eyes, his nod. Antonia, trembling and suddenly much more uncomfortable than ever in the confines of her body.
Antonia finds herself waiting for the sight of Paolo’s hat making its way down the sidewalk each morning. She rarely says more than hello, but she thinks she can smell him on her clothes each day. In his presence she is butter melting. She is molten lava. She is a small green plant unfurling toward the light.
* * *
—
Paolo Luigio was born on Elizabeth Street, in the kind of boxy tenement apartment with more walls than it was built with and more inhabitants than it was meant to house. He is the youngest of four brothers, and the first to leave for work in Brooklyn, where his impeccable handwriting and meticulous craftsmanship can be of use forging paperwork—passports, birth certificates, letters of reference—that Jewish refugees need to find legitimate American jobs. He doesn’t mind the odd hours or the moral ambiguity of the work; he dreams of wearing a suit as beautifully tailored as the ones his bosses wear; of walking into a room and feeling it hush in his presence. Greatness, that ever-elusive standard by which some boys are born judging their lives, had whispered in his ear early on.