Robbie promised to tell Julia if he learns anything but he goes to bed instead, because he has a small sickening feeling that there is something cracking in his family, some foundational beam that until recently had held them all up, held them together. That night he listens to his papa snoring and pictures himself falling deeper and deeper into his bed with every one of Paolo’s rolling exhales. Deeper and deeper until he falls through the mattress. Robbie sinks through the floor. He buries himself in the ground itself.
* * *
—
Spring passes in a flash. Antonia grows. She spends the first truly hot day of summer irritated and alone. She watches Robbie through the front window as he leaves for school and then tries and fails to focus on tidying the house, on balancing the checkbook, on reading, on making a grocery list. She casts tasks aside one by one. She curls into herself like a wave.
Antonia is not surprised when, after a haphazard lunch of toast, her stomach tightens like a vise and she barely makes it to the bathroom in time to throw it up. She is not surprised when she feels a low ache thrumming through her. She calls Lina, but there is no answer. She calls Sofia, who must be working, and then she takes a taxi to the hospital.
* * *
—
In Antonia’s twilight dream she is standing at the edge of the ocean. Carlo is a few paces ahead of her. The water swells toward them and then away, like the whole world is being rocked to sleep. Antonia cannot see Carlo’s whole face; it will not come into focus. But she can see the lines on Carlo’s hands, the five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, the way the muscles of his back ripple as he steadies himself against the wind. Papa, she says, I’m scared.
Here, he says, but he doesn’t move. Take this.
Antonia steps forward. The cold water closes over her ankles. When Antonia looks down at her outstretched palms she is holding a pearl-handled gun.
* * *
—
Paolo and Antonia name their new baby Enzo, after Paolo’s brother who died in the war. Antonia weeps for the whole first week after he is born: poring over his dark brown eyes, his long thin fingers, which are like Robbie’s, like Paolo’s. She weeps in gratitude that her body has stayed whole, the jagged scar from Robbie’s birth still intact, the inside of her body in and the baby out, the miracle of that exchange. She weeps as they leave the hospital, as they settle in at home. She weeps and she knows Paolo doesn’t understand, knows she is pushing him away, knows he is scared, but she does not yet have the energy to call him back to her. She weeps, and she comes back to herself. She weeps in relief, because it is exhausting to be terrified for nine months, because it is exhausting to spend your life scared, your whole life since the morning your papa disappeared, really, but now you are an adult with two children, two perfectly formed human people that you made, and you know, the way some knowledge is given from above or outside, somewhere external and eternal, you know that it is time.
Take the gun.
Walk into the water.
* * *
—
Almost two weeks pass. Saul and Sofia and Julia spend every moment at Antonia and Paolo’s apartment. They rock Enzo and teach Robbie how to hold his brother. Julia watches from a darkened corner, fascinated but uncharacteristically cautious, almost fearful. The seven of them are as happy as they’ve ever been.
On Friday, Saul leaves in the early afternoon for his Fianzo meeting.
He escapes each of these meetings as quickly as he can, but they stain the first Friday of each month like grease, like wine, like blood. The sweetness of his new nephew fills him with loathing toward Tommy Fianzo Jr., who never misses a chance to belittle Saul, to make Saul feel small in the hopes of making himself feel more important. Saul could use his growing family as motivation to be more patient with Tommy Jr. But he doesn’t. Today, instead, he gets careless.
As Saul shoves the front door open like a battering ram, a slip of paper dislodges itself from his pocket. It falls like an autumn leaf down toward the ground. As Saul stalks off toward his waiting ride, the slip of paper lands on the burning asphalt. Saul doesn’t notice as he walks away. His pocket does not feel empty on the drive home.
2 guards today, the paper says. Summer busy for F’s. Shipping season? Winter is quieter.
Tommy Fianzo Jr.’s doorman reaches down and picks up the sheet of paper. He mouths the words on it as he deciphers Saul’s handwriting.
“Get the boss down here,” he says once he reads it.
* * *
—
In her apartment in Red Hook, Lina wakes with a jump, as though someone has shaken her. She has taken a nap because she has been spending nights wide-eyed and sweating, some deep internal disturbance keeping her from dreaming. When she slips into shallow sleep at night she wakes half an hour later, her skin slick and icy.