One night, Antonia wakes from a sudden, brief sleep, a sleep closer to unconsciousness than rest. She opens her eyes to see the looming shadows of her furniture. Across the room, Robbie is sleeping in his bassinet, which means Antonia has been asleep long enough for Paolo, who is sleeping next to her, to ease Robbie off of her chest and move him. She feels a wave of tenderness toward Paolo. I’m so sorry, she thinks, sensing the up and down of her husband’s breath as he sleeps. There is no other sound but the white noise of faraway, all-night traffic. I’m not good enough for you. I’m not good at this. Their three children, their spacious future home, Antonia’s rolled-up university diploma nestled against her chest with her children, in the picture she imagines taking someday. It all seems impossible. It seems further away than the moon. You’ve failed, she tells herself. She does not think she falls asleep again that night.
* * *
—
The winter passes this way.
When it snows, Paolo wraps Robbie in blankets and stacks two knit hats on top of one another on his head and carries him outside. Robbie sneezes and blinks furiously as snow lands on his face, and Paolo carries him around and around the block for an hour.
On Christmas, Antonia is bundled into a dress; her hair is brushed. She sits through Mass; Robbie on Paolo’s lap on one side of her and Sofia with Julia on the other. At dinner, she picks listlessly at her food.
Antonia spends the dark months germinating; a life sleeping, undetectable in a hard shell. All around her the days shorten and then begin to lengthen again. The old year slips into the new; all it takes is a second. Antonia avoids mirrors, so disappointed in herself she can’t face her own reflection.
It’s not how she thought it would be.
It’s not how she thought it would be.
* * *
—
Sofia remembers this time as a haze of sleeplessness and fear. Antonia lay gray and small in her bed day after day and Sofia held Robbie, rocked him as he cried, learned his smell as well as she had gotten to know Julia’s. Sofia remembers Paolo, helpless, running a hand through his dark hair and saying, I gotta take a leak, I gotta take a walk, I gotta get out of here, and grabbing his coat and going out to smoke, pacing in front of the building; and Sofia, crouching at the bedside, saying, Tonia, I think he’s hungry again, and Antonia opening eyes like tunnels and saying, okay, automatic, empty. Sofia wants to pinch herself awake; this can’t possibly be her life, Antonia’s life. “She’ll be perfectly healthy,” says the doctor, washing his hands after depositing the small snarl of Antonia’s old sutures into the kitchen trash can, and Sofia surprises herself by shouting “What is healthy? What is healthy? Do they make stitches for her mind, for her heart?” so loudly Robbie wakes with an angry scream. “I’m sorry,” she says to the dumbfounded doctor, who has left the water running as he stares at Sofia. “I’m sorry.” She turns to go pick up Robbie. Her heart hurts; her hands tingle.
But mostly, when she goes to Antonia’s, Sofia is cheerful, as cheerful as she can manage. She tells Antonia about Julia’s new facial expressions, about Joey’s new hire, who is, Tonia, you’ll never guess, remember Marco DeLuca? another neighborhood boy sucked into the inescapable vacuum of Family, and unbeknownst to Sofia, Marco has been hired to help Paolo, whose forgery business has evolved to include a print shop in Gowanus, a dressmaker on Thirty-Eighth, a warehouse of school supplies in Greenpoint, and who needs help running errands and managing his workload. All Sofia knows is Marco has turned up at Sunday dinner with a bottle of wine and his best shirt on; that he doffs his cap to Sofia’s father the way he should; that he is possessed of a bigger, stronger body than Sofia would have imagined, given that her most salient memory of him is herself standing over his prone frame on the floor of their kindergarten classroom.
Antonia remembers Marco DeLuca. She remembers the wholeness of her own body, when she knew him. She remembers the day Sofia tripped him. Marco’s face, horror-struck as he tried to reconcile the world he thought he knew with the unfamiliar and dangerous reality where a girl might hurt him, send him tumbling over his own feet, turn him upside down, break his tooth off at the root. And Antonia understands. She, too, is living through a nightmare in a world she thought she chose.
* * *
—
At night, Sofia prays. She doesn’t ever remember praying before but it comes out of her like a flood. Every bit of restless and flammable energy Sofia has ever had, focused. Please, she prays. Give her back to me. She prays as she sanitizes Julia’s bottles, as she waves to Saul when he leaves for work.