* * *
—
Paolo is sitting on a bench in the middle of the pedestrian overpass on the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun rises. He hasn’t been awake for a full sunrise in a long time. It is cloudy; it is as cool as New York ever gets in July; as still. There are thick, heavy thunderstorms predicted for this week, Paolo remembers. He read that in the newspaper, nine hundred years ago when he sat at a kitchen table for breakfast with Robbie and Antonia, with Enzo, this new person.
Paolo is sure he is tired, but he doesn’t feel it: the achy limbs, the scratchy, sticky eyes. If he is still enough, he feels like he is shimmering, detaching from his body. As the air thickens Paolo feels himself as something insubstantial and disconnected from the world. Later he will admire the power of this: to have an essential core, something unchanged by the chaos around him. To be a self, battered and bolstered by the tides of time.
Below him, cars begin to speed across the bridge. Big trucks with cargo for grocers and furniture and bags of concrete rumble over the East River. Commuters file across, jostling for space, honking. Paolo can feel his back begin to sweat against the wooden bench. He should have called home last night, he realizes. Antonia will be furious. She’ll be disappointed. Antonia is so often disappointed in Paolo. He never intended to be the kind of man that would cause such regular, small-scale domestic depression. You are not the man I thought you were, he says to himself.
The sky has darkened as the sun has risen, the pronunciation of morning thunderheads against the horizon becoming sinister. Green and gray. Paolo stands. It’s a long walk home, and he wonders if he will make it before it rains.
* * *
—
It is the first dawn after the longest night of Sofia’s life.
Saul had taken Sofia aside after dinner, whispered I’m sorry, I’m so sorry into her ear and I promise you’ll be okay, it will be okay. He disappeared through the front door of Rosa and Joey’s apartment like he was never there. Sofia’s rage was made of panic, of fear, of a hollow, bitter, wrung-out stomach. Joey hugged her and said put Julia to bed, and wouldn’t engage with her, wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t tell her what was wrong. Saul’s good at what he does, Joey said. Sofia felt sure she would feel better if someone would tell her why Saul had been hurt. I know he’s good, she said to Joey, desperate. So am I. Nothing. Her want, so powerful it rose from her body and filled the room and gnashed its teeth and roared, had no effect on Saul, on Joey, on the big universal machinations guiding all of them.
So Sofia took Julia by the hand and the two of them walked the stairs back to their own apartment. Julia had hidden in the kitchen with Robbie during dinner, their play whispered, their legs crossed and sweating together. Julia curls her fingers around Sofia’s and walks in Sofia’s shadow, as close as she can, as if she might disappear into Sofia’s body. Why won’t Papa tell us what’s going on, asked Julia, but it was more of a statement: asking questions is how Julia knows to participate in collective worry. What Julia wants is more nebulous: not to know what’s happening, necessarily, but rather, not to wonder. To have the people she loves laid out in front of her like candies to choose from.
Last night Sofia supervised toothbrushing and as she leaned against the bathroom doorway and watched Julia watch herself in the mirror she realized, perhaps for the first time, how much she had missed. The nighttime rituals, the place Julia hangs her bathrobe. Which elbow she likes her bear tucked in when—usually Saul, sometimes Rosa—smooths the covers over her before she goes to sleep. And even though Saul was in trouble and Joey was keeping secrets from her and Paolo—Paolo jumped into her head, an apparition—Paolo never showed at dinner, did he, and Antonia must be frantic—Sofia found herself laughing with her daughter. Tucking Julia’s hair behind her ears and pressing a palm to her forehead.
When she left Julia, Sofia couldn’t sleep. She lay in her clothes on the bed and accepted that she would feel the whole night pass her by. Her anger became white-hot. She blamed Saul for stealing her sleep and her youth. She did this with her whole self. She scanned the room for something to destroy. There was a glass of water on Saul’s nightstand. She wanted to stomp on it. She wanted to slam it on the ground. She wanted to throw it against the wall. But Julia was just in the next room. Sofia opened her nightstand drawer to look at the gun there. What use is a gun? What use can a small body of steel and stone possibly be against the tides of time, the suffocating maw of tradition, the withholding of information? Sofia slammed the drawer shut. She climbed back in bed with a raging heart.