Saul, who has barely touched his own food, stares down at the lake of butter in his baked potato. “We’re helping some people,” he says. “And that will stop when the war ends.” When the war ends, he repeats to himself. It echoes in his head. The war will never end, it seems. And when it does, what will he have? Who will he be? What will be left of Saul, once he reaches the other side of the war that made him? Saul doesn’t regret taking the job Joey Colicchio offered him. He loves Sofia. He loves Julia. （And regret, says a voice inside of him, a voice that sounds like what he remembers of his mother’s voice, isn’t German. A pause. She’d touch his chin or ruffle his hair. Regret isn’t Jewish.） Saul isn’t stupid, but he makes the best of things. He adapts.
“Do you mean you wish you could do something else?” asks Sofia.
“This isn’t what I imagined for myself,” says Saul. Has he been fantasizing about driving west, or sailing east? About disappearing into the ever-changing tapestry of the wide world, and starting over? About throwing off the rules and expectations of Family life and becoming a painter or a historian or a pediatrician?
“What did you imagine?”
“I imagined sitting in the driver’s seat of my own life,” says Saul.
“So did I,” says Sofia. “That’s why I want this.”
“You can’t see everything you already have,” says Saul. “You can’t see that the world is laid out in front of you. You can’t see that you have everything. Julia—your family.” Your life has been so easy, he almost says.
“You can’t see everything you have either.” Sofia longs to walk out of her front door and have no one know where she is going. She longs to be watched, but not corralled, not limited, not contained. She longs to swing from the rudder that steers the world and change its direction. But she does not know how to say this to Saul without blaming him.
“I lost everything. How could you say that. I lost everything.”
“You have us,” said Sofia. “You have this job.” And then, before she can stop herself, “Will that always be an excuse for everything that isn’t the way you want it?”
She and Saul look at one another over the blood and butter remains of their dinner. There is surprise and reproach in Saul’s eyes. “I would give anything,” he says, carefully, “not to have this—excuse.”
“I want this,” Sofia says, from her belly. “I want this.”
The night ends in silence. Sofia and Saul curl away from one another in their bed.
* * *
—
The want grows inside Sofia like mold. First a little dot of it, inconspicuous, but before she knows it, it is everywhere.
Julia and Robbie hardly fit together in a pram any longer, but Antonia slides them in like cannelloni against one another and tucks a blanket around both of them. They are both tired, and their limp bodies and half-closed eyelids rock gently as Antonia walks.
It is May 9, 1945. The radio and the newspapers have announced that the war is won. But in three months, the United States will drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions of people have already died: a faraway abstraction on most days, or, on the days Antonia lets herself expand out into the worlds around her, an unbelievable aching undercurrent. A whirring, gnashing, stone and razor-blade storm; a sickness rushing and wailing across the globe. It makes Antonia sick. It makes her sleepless. It makes her fearful, so she avoids the radio, even as she cannot help but glance at the front pages displayed in newsstands. She returns her focus to the children in front of her.
Julia and Robbie are slack-faced and sound asleep under a thin white rain of cherry blossoms. More pressing than war, today, is the fact that Sofia was supposed to pick up Julia an hour ago. She had exploded into Antonia’s living room earlier, all smiles and laden with supplies for Julia, dripping with diapers and a change of clothes and promising, promising to be back by lunch, just for a few hours, Tonia, I’ve just got to get some air, you know? And Antonia had scooped Julia into her arms and smelled her squirming hard toddler head and said, of course, Sof. We’ll be fine here.
And they are fine, she tells herself. Her day isn’t much different with two children than it was with one, and they’re sleeping now, and she has had time to wipe the jam from the floor and scoop the spilled rice from their lunch into the trash and brush her hair, and she has left a message for Sofia with Rosa that they are all going to Lina’s for the afternoon.