And then, in an internal voice that sounds like Frankie, what do you even want?
* * *
—
Soon it is 1945. Sofia passes a sleepless winter. She is almost twenty-two years old. She begins waking up gasping for air, like there is an anvil crushing her chest. Each time, she stumbles to the kitchen and runs cold water and stares at the stream of it gushing out of the tap until her heartbeat returns to normal. She looks out the kitchen window and grips the edge of the sink and tries with all her might to remember what has frightened her out of sleep. But without fail, she lies awake for the rest of the night, heart upturned to her bedroom ceiling.
During the day Sofia cooks with Rosa. She takes walks with Antonia, and they watch as Julia and Robbie toddle in their snowsuits. She wipes counters and folds laundry. Saul works longer days, and comes home from God-knows-where talkative and hungry. He wraps Julia into his arms and tickles her and leans to kiss Sofia, who tries her best to bite her tongue: not to ask the questions that arise like hiccups, involuntary, one after another.
But at night, Sofia lies awake, dissatisfaction like water filling her lungs. She searches for air and finds none.
One crisp night in January, Sofia wakes, shaking and sweaty, and moves to the kitchen as a reflex: further from Saul and Julia, the better to find her way back to her body. Outside, the full moon shines, light like milk pooling down into the crisscross of laundry lines and scraggly backyard trees. Sofia heaves open the window in the kitchen and sticks her face out into the moonlit midnight.
Two weeks later, it happens again. This time, she tiptoes downstairs in her nightgown and stands on the stoop of her building, her hair swimming in the night air, her feet hardening against the frigid stairs.
Sofia has found she is living with hardly any concrete responsibilities, but innumerable unwritten expectations. The strange confined freedom of her new adult life suffocates her and makes her feel desperate, hysterical. She becomes short with Saul and Julia; she avoids Rosa’s eyes. Sofia grows bitter, tasting vinegar at the back of her tongue as she scrubs scum out of the sink. It seems like Saul’s life is moving and hers is settling into a rut. Rosa doesn’t understand: she can’t imagine not being satisfied with a pile of diapers and a child, a child whose overwhelming need for Sofia’s attention, for her time, for her body, threatens to pull the whole house down brick by brick. Sofia holds back tears as she bathes Julia, as she hands a wooden block back and forth while Julia cackles, as she listens to the midday silence of her home while Julia sleeps, as she finds herself, more and more often, alone. She can’t complain to Antonia. Antonia, who she almost lost. Antonia, who had risen to the occasion of motherhood like a phoenix, dusting off her near-death depression; Antonia with her ability to find something bigger in parenting than Sofia can imagine. Sofia has always known Antonia would be a better mother than she would. She has always known that.
It is February of 1945 when Sofia wakes gasping, and instead of standing furtively on the frozen stone steps of her building, folds herself silently into Saul’s desk chair and begins to shuffle through the papers there.
It is March of 1945 when Sofia starts getting out of bed regularly to read through Saul’s notes. There aren’t many—times of day written down in a small nondescript notebook and a list of places that Sofia assumes correspond to the times of day. Of course, she realizes, most of this would not be written down. She is awake for the rest of the night. She knows, though it has never been explicitly talked about in her home or her parents’， that Saul is useful for his language skills and his discretion. She knows they are rescuing European refugees, or helping them to get jobs, and homes, or at least helping them get off the boats and onto dry land. And once Sofia starts wondering in earnest about Saul’s work, she cannot stop.
* * *
—
By the beginning of May—her third wedding anniversary with Saul—Sofia decides she wants a job.
“Why would you want to be a part of this?” asks Saul. They are eating expensive steaks under flickering candlelight. Sofia likes her meat bleeding on the plate, soft and red in the middle. She chews. Swallows.
“I know,” says Sofia. “It’s not what I expected either.” She lifts another bite of meat to her mouth. “I’m bored, Saul,” she says. Mouth full. “I need to do something. I need to be—someone. And it’s not like if I don’t do this job, it will go away.” She takes a sip of wine. “It’s not like you’ll stop. It’s not like you can stop. And I mean, you’re helping people. You’re helping people.”