It is a fleeting feeling, but it will sustain her. In the weeks ahead Sofia will have the presence of mind to surround herself with the people who make her feel most like herself. She will learn to swaddle Julia, to change her, to rock her. She will smell Julia’s head and count her toes and stare at her in pure awe. Sofia will let herself be carried along by the changing current. She will feel fully. Motherhood can be the adventure, she will tell herself. It can be something you love.
Some mornings Antonia still wakes up with her fists clenched, remembering Robbie racing through her body like a train.
After he is born, she spends three weeks in bed on doctor’s orders, trying not to think of the ways she has been turned inside out. She holds her mouth closed; holds her legs together. The doctor comes; a man with kindly small eyeglasses who stitches her where she has been ripped apart and tells her she will be fine, fine. Antonia nods when he says this, but she is sure as soon as she stands up she will split in half; her organs will come rushing down and land on the floor; her hair will fall out.
The days are long. Antonia is never alone.
Sofia comes, beaming, and kisses Antonia’s forehead, and holds Julia, who is three months old and kicking, punching, grasping wildly, up to the small wicker basket where Robbie sleeps, his newborn features still pressed askew by the pressure of Antonia’s body. Julia furrows her brow and reaches out with a round fist and pummels sleeping Robbie in the chest. He awakens with a betrayed expression and opens his mouth in silence for three full seconds before a cry emerges. Fall sunlight shines through the window and Sofia fairly glows. Sofia picks up Robbie and kisses him, passes him to Antonia to feed. Antonia tries not to weep. Why isn’t it this hard for you? she imagines asking.
Paolo’s mother comes, and wraps the baby tighter in his blanket. When she is leaving, she takes Paolo aside and says, the only cure for those blues is to treat her normally. Stop treating her like a broken thing. She’ll manage once she’s back on her feet. But Paolo, in reverence of the fragile and terrible and all-powerful force his wife has become, continues to bring Antonia hot and cold cloths, teas, broths; to insist that she keep her feet up, her eyes closed.
At night, though she is heavy with exhaustion, Antonia cannot sleep. Her body pulls her down, through the mattress, through the floor. Her eyes sting, but won’t shut. Sandwiched between Paolo and Robbie breathing, she cries; her cheeks crack.
After Robbie was born, slickly ejected from somewhere Antonia never knew existed in her own body, she clutched him to her chest, full of fear. She looked at his face and didn’t know him. She grasped him with her hands, but they felt like stranger’s hands. Robbie left a headprint of blood and white smear across her chest, and Antonia couldn’t feel it. He opened his mouth and wailed, and she heard it, but faintly, like he was calling from some distance away.
When she stares down into his crib, Antonia still doesn’t know him. She is blindsided by fear, by something like disappointment. You wanted this, she tells herself. But it is nothing like she imagined.
The doctor checks on her after two weeks. He tugs her stitches out one by one; tells her she is nearly healed. Antonia feels like a steak, scored with a knife where the salt will be rubbed in.
She hadn’t considered it would be this physical. This consuming. This utterly erasing of everything she had been before. Her body is a wrecked ship’s hull and she, whatever had been “she,” was lost in a wide and dark sea.
During the day, Paolo and Lina and Sofia fold cotton diapers, scrub the stained wooden floor, sing to Robbie when he wails. Antonia’s apartment is filled with the smells of laundry and chicken stock, drying herbs and antiseptic, baby shit and the metal of her own body healing. She tries not to inhale. When they bring Robbie to her, she holds him to her raw breast and turns her face to the wall.
Lina brings lavender tied in a bunch and boils cloves down to paste, to clear the air. She helps Antonia shower. Antonia sits in the tub with the hot water pounding against her back, her spine curved, her stretched and swollen belly resting between her legs. She leans against Lina like a child.
Sofia comes every day. She holds Julia and Robbie in her arms and hums them songs she suddenly remembers from her own childhood. She chatters to Antonia, swaying in the filtered winter sunlight coming through Antonia’s bedroom window. She seems utterly carefree. Her voice always sounds to Antonia like it is echoing from very far away.
Paolo lies beside Antonia while she sleeps, and while she can’t sleep, and while she feeds Robbie. He curls his body protectively around hers, but he stays on his own side, because she can’t bear to be touched. For the first week, he hadn’t been able to help himself from reaching for her, holding her hands in his hands, kissing her ears and her face. But she had leaked tears, muttered, stop it, stop that, no, and Paolo had retreated, circling their old marriage like a hungry animal making tracks around a carcass.