“Sofia, Antonia told me how her papa died today.” Saul is whispering as quietly as he can. He has no interest in anyone else overhearing.
Sofia raises herself up on one elbow. “I told you that, didn’t I?”
Saul shakes his head. Sofia can do this: half asleep, she can make it so that he doesn’t even remember whether she lied or not. “You just told me he disappeared,” he says. “You didn’t tell me why.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I guess I was protecting her.”
“You were protecting Joey,” Saul says, more bitterness than he intended stealing into his voice.
“He’s my father,” says Sofia.
“How can we keep doing this?” asks Saul.
“Doing what?” And as Sofia squints through dry midnight eyes at Saul, a familiar sense of purpose steals over her like silk. Sofia Colicchio, talking a nervous Family man down.
“He wanted to leave, so they killed him? They left his daughter and his wife alone? How did Antonia marry Paolo, knowing what happened to her papa? How can you work for Joey? How can I?” Saul’s whisper gets louder as he talks. It’s inconceivable, to be in a world that is so very tangled up.
“Shh,” says Sofia. “Julia and Robbie will hear you.” She pauses. She is good at this when she is talking to a stranger, but she doesn’t think Saul will be impressed by her batting eyelashes, her honeyed voice. She has no choice but to tell him what she really thinks. “I don’t have the answers to all of your questions. When you say it like that, it doesn’t make sense, does it? And you know how many questions I have. You know I can’t ever keep my mouth shut. This ‘don’t talk about it’ thing that my parents do—that my mamma always did—that doesn’t work for me.”
“So how can you—” begins Saul, but Sofia shakes her head.
“Family isn’t so simple,” says Sofia, and Saul can hear his mother’s voice, telling him that God isn’t so simple, and he can taste the darkened mildewed air in the ship on the way to America. “I used to think my papa was a god. And then eventually, I began to understand more of what went on, and I was so angry. Antonia’s papa—Carlo was his name, Uncle Carlo—had disappeared, and we were all pretending like everything was fine, like it hadn’t happened. I was angry at my parents all the time; I was angry at Antonia, even, angry at her for being okay when something so wrong had happened. And then you came, and it was like I learned that violence and war can result in something good, in love, even, which I think is what I had been learning my whole life.”
“So it’s my fault?” Saul finds himself angry. His whisper becomes a hiss. “I barely escaped a war with my life and you’re telling me that’s why you understand the value of violence? You would have left if not for me?”
“No,” says Sofia, “of course not. But you helped me to understand that things are not all good or all bad. Because of war we have Julia. Because of violence Antonia and Paolo have Robbie. I can see both sides when I’m working. The people we help. I can see the good and the bad.”
“You go out to dinner,” says Saul, before he can help himself. “You don’t see the violence.”
Sofia’s mouth becomes a thin line. “I was raised in it,” she says icily. “And there is no changing what has happened already. So, you’ve decided you have a moral objection to the way things work. Do you propose we leave? Explain to Julia that she can never see Nonno or Nonna or Aunt Tonia or Uncle Paoli or Bibi again and flee and start over somewhere, and you can get a job bagging groceries and I can take care of Julia all on my own, and we can just worry for the rest of our lives that someday they would find us and you would disappear too? Because you would, eventually. They wouldn’t spare you because of me.” Sofia is whispering, too, but her words fill Saul’s ears; they drown out everything else. “Do you think that would cause less pain than staying?”
Saul stares at the crack in the ceiling until he can hear Sofia’s breaths even out again, and then he creeps off the mattress and into the kitchen, where he begins an elaborate breakfast, moving quietly so as not to wake anyone else before dawn.
Julia is the first one up. She stretches her limbs and drags her blanket into the living room, where Sofia is asleep alone. She crawls into the hollow where Saul’s body had tossed for most of the night and presses herself against her mamma’s back. When Saul next peeks into the living room he sees the heads of his daughter and wife lined up on the same pillow. Julia opens her eyes and says Papa, which is a command and a prayer and a pure, unfettered cry of love, and Saul opens his arms for her, imagines slicing himself open down the middle and enveloping Julia with every power of protection he has.