There is a time when the summer sun is at its peak where Antonia, Sofia, Saul, and Paolo seem to live in two apartments each: their belongings scattered evenly, their sleep interrupted often by the ring of buzzer or trill of telephone.
* * *
—
At night Antonia promises with a hand on her stomach that she will do a better job than her mamma did. I’ll take care of you, I’ll take care of you, she repeats as she falls asleep. Antonia makes lists. Glass bottles, stacked diapers, fresh knit hats in a row. A memory that is all sensation, all wordlessness, of Lina cradling her on the couch when she was a baby. I’ll take care of all of us.
With her hands pressed to the cool brick at the head of the bed she shares with Saul, Sofia feels the same as she did when she was six, when she was eleven. She lets fear make a home in her throat, in her chest. It steals her air and chokes her. I can’t even take care of myself, she prays. In response, the animal in her belly presses against her lungs.
* * *
—
Sofia wakes in the middle of the night. There is a low ache in her back that pulses in time with her breath. It rises and falls, spreading out across her hip bones and then receding to a bright point at the base of her spine.
She watches the long summer sun rise and glow against the morning clouds. The room around her is painted with shadows. The pain grows. It stretches its arms around her belly and it holds her so she twists the bedsheet between her hands. She breathes. The pain crawls up her spine, around her hips, locks the bottom of her rib cage in its fierce hands. Exhale. The pain fades. The blood pumps in her fingers and face. Sofia, lover of big feelings, is not surprised by the beast of labor. She feels herself swell toward the dawn and then away. Sofia is made of a roaring heat. She breathes the sun over the horizon. And then she wakes Saul. “It’s time,” she tells him.
* * *
—
In a private room at the hospital, Sofia wishes she could have brought Antonia with her. She wishes she could smell her mamma’s hair. She wishes she could kneel on the roof of her apartment building and howl. The room is all spinning figures in white, all stainless steel and well-intentioned bustle. Sofia feels small.
Before you know it, a nurse says to her, you’ll have a baby.
There is the needle in her arm. There is the plastic mask descending over her face. Everything narrows to a point. It is impossibly dark.
* * *
—
When Sofia becomes aware of her body again, she is wearing a thin cotton shift, not hers. The lights are so bright they hurt her eyes. She squints and tries to sit, only to feel a colossal unraveling inside herself. Movement will unspool her. Sofia sinks back into the crisp hospital pillows.
Soon a nurse brings a small bundle to her. Sofia tries again to sit up, but this time there is pain, immense, and a weakness that steals her breath, that collapses her. She doesn’t like lying down, surrounded by strangers. She wants a mirror. Instead the nurse wedges a pillow behind Sofia’s shoulders and hands her the smallest person Sofia has ever seen.
The baby is a real human the size of a winter squash. She has two eyes and two ears and a mouth with puckered lips. She has skin like clouds and thin soft fingernails. She weighs seven pounds, they tell Sofia. We’ll get your husband, they tell Sofia. Sofia is left in the empty white room staring at a small womb-shaped animal, surrounded by the smell of wet flesh.
Julia is the name that comes to Sofia’s mind; it is familiar but clean, like fresh sheets or an open window. “It’s just yours,” she says, voice croaking, the first thing Sofia says to her daughter.
When newborn babies make eye contact they use their whole bodies to open their eyes and look at you and this is what Julia does now, she flexes her fingers and her feet and she purses her lips so she can open her eyes and stare at Sofia. Sofia stares back and she wills herself to be courageous. “What are we going to do?” she asks Julia. Her voice is jarring to her own ears.
Here in front of Sofia is incontrovertible evidence of her own power. No one had ever told her motherhood would be like this.
Look, look. Look what you have made.
* * *
—
Her whole family comes. It is not just Saul. Sofia is flushed with relief. She does not want to be alone. “I can give you ten minutes,” the nurse says. “This really isn’t the policy.” Rosa and Frankie push past the nurse and drop to the bed, and then Sofia is in their arms and they are in hers, and Julia is lifted up and passed around in the cacophony of her family. And then Saul and Antonia and Paolo are there, and Antonia asks, “How was it?” and Sofia has to say, “I don’t know,” because all she can remember is waves crashing, the tide of herself, darkness, and she has no words for that, but she knows it is not what happened, really; she knows there is a part of Julia’s arrival that she was not present for. And Saul asks, “Are you okay?” and Sofia says, “Yes,” and she means it, she thinks she means it. Joey tucks a strand of Sofia’s hair behind her ear. He presses the back of his hand to her forehead, like he did when Sofia was feverish as a child. He will tell Sofia later that Julia has his mother’s nose. Sofia looks at the faces of her family and believes that she can do this.