She has only lived away from home for a matter of months but the still air inside her childhood home has already taken on the quality of something ancient, and more often than not Antonia finds herself grasping a doorjamb for stability, swallowing a lump in her throat, telling the smaller ghosts of herself that they will be okay.
* * *
—
In August, Sofia lets herself be cajoled into going to Mass with Antonia and Paolo. She knows Antonia is surprised she said yes. She almost never goes since she and Saul got married, and before that, she went only sporadically, when she didn’t have the energy to argue with her parents or when Frankie convinced her.
The air inside is cool and dry. Sofia wedges her swollen ankles against the wood of the pew in front of them and leans her neck back and feels herself unhinge and soften against the hard bench. A lump rises in her throat. She takes a full breath, and another. The air smells like her childhood. It smells like sitting between her mamma and papa on the bench. It smells like restlessness, like play sparking along her arms and legs, like wanting to be grown up, like wanting to fly. It smells like knowing what she is fighting for: ten more minutes and she can burst out of the seat, home to Antonia, to Mars, to the great expanse of the Sahara Desert, to the horses she and Antonia will sit astride as the day grows older on her bedroom floor.
Antonia worries Sofia’s pointer finger between her palms and feels unsettled. Sofia has been quiet for days, and Antonia does not know how to fill the gaps in their conversations. “Thank you for coming,” she whispers.
Sofia offers a wan smile, and then, because she needs a distraction, plucks the Bible from its shelf in front of her. Its pages are impossibly thin and waxy, glossed with the oil from thousands of hands. She lets them slide through her fingers, catching phrases that run together and then disappear as soon as she reads them. She is seven years old, nestled in the space between Rosa and Joey. The whole world ripples out from the center of their family.
Suddenly Sofia, an adult woman at nineteen, and so pregnant she barely fits in the pew, cannot be there. She cannot sit next to Antonia. She cannot face the memory of her own old self. Sofia lets the Bible shut with a clap and stands up and begins, without breathing, to shimmy her way out of the pew.
“Sofia? Sofia!” Antonia stage-whispers and it echoes around them but Sofia is worried she will be sick and does not answer and presses her lips together. “Sofia!”
Sofia pushes against the crush of starched and perfumed Catholics. She bursts out into the street and sucks the noxious summer city air all the way down into her lungs over and over. She leans against the wall. The city spins. You’re stupid, she realizes, and she is surprised it took her this long. She knew this could happen, and did it anyway. It was old knowledge, one of the first things she learned. Anything could happen, Sofia, says Rosa in her head. Be careful.
Anything could happen, Mamma, Sofia realizes. She is not invincible. She cannot go back in time and be less impulsive, less carefree. She cannot turn around and yell at her younger self, the world will catch up with you!
“Sofia!” Antonia is next to her, holding her hand, pressing her shoulder against Sofia’s to avoid the crowd, and Sofia can smell her coffee and the heat from her iron and the must from the hall in her apartment building. Antonia is solid and regular and serene and once, just once, Sofia would like to be the even-tempered one and so she resolves to say nothing, to be okay by sheer force of will, to contain her monstrous, traitorous, unappreciative, heretical doubts and move on and be happy, and normal, like her friend, like her mother, like all mothers before her. She presses her mouth tight as a sewn seam and will not make eye contact with Antonia. Her determination feels flimsy.
Antonia walks Sofia home. She sits Sofia on the sofa and cups Sofia’s white face in her hands. She tells Sofia silently, if you are okay, I am okay.
In the kitchen, Antonia boils water for tea, but when the kettle whistles she turns the burner off and reaches instead for a bottle of whiskey she knows is hidden in the cupboard above the sink. She pours two drinks, and tucks the bottle under her arm, and carries it all to the living room.
“Here,” she says to Sofia, who silently takes the glass. Antonia sits next to her and feels bulbous and huge. Sofia’s normally captivating gravitational field has shrunk to almost nothing; Antonia, used to ascertaining her own size and shape compared to Sofia, feels as though she might swell until she pops.
“I don’t think I can do it,” says Sofia, her voice small and wavering. There, of course: she feels better, she feels worse. She has not succeeded in keeping this small dark part of herself hidden.