Prayer is an acknowledgment of fear, of that which cannot be controlled or contained or even understood. It is a surrender and an attack, all at once. Please, Sofia prays, thinking about Antonia, the darkness in her expression, the lifelessness in her breath. I can’t do this without you.
But during the day Sofia understands that it is her job to fill Antonia’s home with light, with space, with sun, and so she opens the shades and does not fall at Antonia’s bedside to beg. She brings books; she turns the radio on so softly Antonia does not notice she is listening to something other than Robbie’s disconsolate wails. She wipes the kitchen counters, humming like Rosa.
Paolo and Saul arrive each day after work, whenever they finish, so that Saul can take Sofia and Julia home. Each day Paolo asks Sofia, is she better? as though Antonia is broken, when nothing is wrong with Antonia. She is not broken; she is lost. Sofia runs out of ways to tell Paolo this, and it is one of the reasons she is grateful for Saul: he does not ask for progress to be chopped up into measurable pieces. There are moments she’s there, Sofia tells Saul. She’ll laugh, or she’ll go for Robbie before I do when he cries. And then the next moment—Sofia stops, because she is describing Saul too: the way his sadness can settle over him like a coat for a few days and then pass.
Saul understands. His mother hasn’t written in over a year. And he has faith that the light of Sofia will be as much a balm to Antonia as it is to him. He slings an arm around Sofia and leans, as they walk, to kiss the top of Julia’s head. And then he falls quiet, wondering about the language of Antonia’s trauma. Wondering whether it is the same language he can speak so well. And wondering, though he is grateful every day for Sofia’s relentless heat, what it would be like to sit with someone who understood.
* * *
—
One morning in February, Antonia wakes early from a dream of playing dress-up underwater with Sofia. Their hair and clothes floated around them and when Antonia looked down at her fingers she realized she was a child. She reached her hands out for Sofia and the two of them leaned away from one another, the circle of their arms holding them as they began to spin up toward the sun.
Paolo and Robbie are sleeping. It is dark; only the faintest purpling of the light in their bedroom tells Antonia it is almost dawn. She pads into the living room and hears, as if for the first time that winter, the whisper of the radiator against the cold outside. She sits on the couch. She thinks about Sofia, who has come every day all winter to tell Antonia you exist, you are here, you are in your body, you are in the world. Sofia, who has her own new baby to take care of, her own marriage, but who has spent months with Antonia, watering her like a plant, waiting for her.
Antonia stifles a sob. She stifles a thousand sobs a day. But this one turns into a hiccup. A strange cough. A sound wants to come from the center of Antonia. She buries her face in a pillow.
It takes her several moments to realize she is laughing. The laugh tingles along her arms and legs. It reaches, thumping, into her throat. It settles in her belly, descends smoothly into the void where Robbie once lived, into the parts of Antonia she no longer looks at or touches, the parts that have betrayed her with their fragility, the ease with which they were destroyed.
And Antonia does not break. She laughs and her whole body moves quietly, as one piece, into the dawn.
There it is. Buzzing in the deepest pit of herself, resilient beyond measure, the very smallest bit of Antonia insisting itself back to life.
* * *
—
She begins going on walks: short ones, she promises Paolo, just around the block. Once she gets outside she walks as far as she likes, and tells Paolo she lost track of time. Antonia, who had been so hungry for the companionship and consistency of motherhood, finds that she is only strong enough to be a mother if she spends an hour a day completely alone. Young Antonia would have been disappointed: foolishly, of course, because young Antonia, sneaking off to Sunday Mass, knew well the power of keeping part of her life secret. But mamma Antonia is just grateful for survival, for sunlight, for the excitement of jumping away when a car splashes through a black and slushy puddle.
When she eats, Antonia’s food has taste again. When she listens, and speaks, and looks, sounds and sights don’t seem like they are stuck behind dirty, thick glass. The world, slowly, begins to make itself known to her. And Antonia, just as slowly, begins to remake herself as a part of it.
In March, Antonia walks all the way to Sofia’s apartment. Sofia opens the door and hugs her and then goes into the bathroom and gasps and shudders and heaves for air. She presses her palms, her forehead, against the closed bathroom door and for the first time in months she trusts that Antonia is on the other side.