“I told him they offered me a job in return for taking care of him,” says Paolo. “He said he would understand. He said, do it.” Paolo puts his empty cup down on the counter. “I punched him. I couldn’t help myself. I hit him again.” Paolo begins to cry. “I hit him over and over again, Tonia, and he wouldn’t fight back, he wouldn’t do anything. Of course I wouldn’t do it. He’s family. He’s a part of us. I could never—does he think I could do that?”
Antonia is at the center of a storm. It is calm and quiet there. “Sofia’s missing,” she says. And then she crosses the kitchen. She buries herself in Paolo’s chest. She feels her heart thumping against his ribs.
* * *
—
Saul is calm as he hangs up the phone. He hasn’t slept in long enough that his swollen lip and blackened eye are singing, his whole body throbbing.
In the middle of the night, after Saul had arrived in Paolo’s office, which seemed to him as good a hiding spot as any, he called Eli Leibovich. He asked for help. And he was refused.
I have to think about my family, said Eli. I have to play a longer game. Eli would not protect Saul. He would not defend Saul. Saul put family on the line for a man who was not, in the end, anything more than a work acquaintance with a familiar accent. And now Tommy Fianzo Jr. will not rest until Saul is gone.
Saul thinks about his wife. He thinks about his daughter. He aches to be tangled under them, Sofia and Julia on either side of his chest, sleeping. Every moment of his life until this moment is washed in gold. Saul realizes how utterly alive he has always been. How full of self his skin. How full of breath his lungs.
Saul wonders what it would be like to be Paolo. To be born into a family that raised you. To have a father. To work each day behind a desk, to go home on time.
And like it did when he was twenty-one, rocking empty-stomached in the bottom of a boat to America, a wave of will, of survival itself, swells toward Saul. Fight, his nature tells him. Fight, from his lungs. Fight, the incessant beating of blinking.
Saul closes his eyes.
He thinks about his mother. Mama, he tells her. Mama, I think I’ll see you soon.
He thinks about Sofia. She will be okay no matter what happens to him. She is a force of nature. If you have to choose, Joey says in his head. Saul knows what he will choose.
* * *
—
Outside people look at the purple sky and pray for rain. The air is thick as water. It hurts to breathe.
It is mid-morning, and Lina Russo is drinking tea when there is a knock on the door.
The knock comes again. Lina sets her tea on its coaster.
There is sadness in the air of her apartment. This is the price for emotional caretaking: the sadness of others lingers. But this particular sadness, Lina realizes, as she shuffles to open the door, is new.
It comes from Paolo and Antonia, who are standing on her doorstep like children. Robbie hovers behind them; Enzo is asleep in the crook of Paolo’s elbow. Paolo’s head is hung like an old tulip on the stalk of his body; from Antonia there emanates a desperate kind of strength; the tightrope balance of staying upright.
“Mamma,” says Antonia, “can we talk to you?” Her face is grave; drawn; Lina can see small, stern Antonia as a child, quiet and measured, doing her homework or folding her clothes, building a foundation around herself.
Lina pulls them inside, hugs Paolo, kisses Antonia, says, “Tea?”
Antonia says, “Sure.”
Lina takes another look at them and says, “Gin?”
Paolo meets her eyes for the first time. There is a wry smile there. “Better,” he says.
Lina beckons to them from the kitchen, holding three clear glasses with an inch of gin and an ice cube and a lemon slice each. She passes Robbie a cookie and he sidles quietly out of the room. “Come, sit,” she says. Paolo and Antonia sit across from her at the kitchen table. The apartment smells of earth, as though Lina has been growing mushrooms in corners, letting moss sprout on walls.
“You have something to tell me,” Lina says.
“We need help,” says Antonia. “But, Mamma—you won’t like it.” She is struck through by an icy rod of fear: how carefully she has constructed her relationship with her mamma around not having conversations like the one she has come here to have. But there is no one else who will be honest with them.
Paolo has thought of a thousand ways to begin this conversation. “When Carlo,” he begins, and then stops.
Lina has raised an eyebrow. She can hear her late husband’s name now. “Yes,” she says.