The Family(19)

And it is here that Antonia has been steadily realizing she wants something different from what she has been offered. That she does not want to end up like her mamma: with nothing but a husband who is no longer there and a child she no longer parents to her name. It is here, in the pauses between breaths, in the raising of her head and opening of her eyes after praying, that Antonia realizes she wants a life of her own design. One where papas do not disappear for no reason and life is not governed by so many immutable, unwritten rules you might be suffocated where you sleep.



* * *



—

Later that night at dinner, Antonia chews slowly, hardly tasting her food. The cacophony of Sunday surrounds her, but Antonia retreats into her chair, making herself as inconspicuous as possible. So, school tomorrow? Sofia’s papa asks her, but since it is not a real question Antonia gets away with saying, yes, and moving her attention back to her plate. Besides the library, where Antonia spends every moment she can, school has been disappointing. Antonia is anonymous, sure. She sees fewer kids from their old school than she would expect. No one has whispered about her father or glanced judgmentally at her mother; no one knows about them. She and Sofia have no classes together, and this has never happened before. Without Sofia, Antonia has been disappointed to discover she is timid, and small, and easily brushed past in the hallway. Just like Mamma, she says to herself, disgust like a scrap of food inhaled, stuck below her throat. She lost her husband, Antonia says to herself, which is what everyone says about Lina when they are trying to engender sympathy or reason away the parts of her that no longer seem to fit into the rest of the world.



* * *



—

Next door, alone, Lina softens into the couch where she spends her days off and feels the emptiness in her apartment buzzing in her ears. How strange it is, to live in an entirely different world from the people with whom you once spent every day. How improbable, to have the same face you have always had, but an unrecognizable soul.



* * *



—

Sofia lies in bed that night and imagines that Antonia has met a new best friend. In her imagination the other girl is taller than Sofia, and thinner, and has brighter eyes. She is quieter and more contained. She does not lash out; she does not lose her temper; she is more like Antonia. The Antonia in Sofia’s imagination is much happier with her new friend. She does not need Sofia anymore. The two of them link arms and share the quiet secrets of confident friendships; they laugh softly; their underarms never smell bitter and rotten. Sofia falls into a restless, untethered sleep, and wakes the next morning feeling like she has forgotten something terrible.

On her second Monday of high school Sofia does not ask Antonia what she did that weekend and Antonia does not know how to tell her bright, beautiful friend that she has been spending her Sundays at Mass. Lately, her papa’s features hover just on the edge of her memory, refusing to come into focus.

And so this year Sofia and Antonia keep their first secrets. They separate. And in each of them something wholly new begins to grow.



* * *



—

Lina Russo is not a ghost. She is still a woman. She feels herself living inside skin that, when she looks in the mirror, looks like her skin.

But she is a woman frozen in time. Her life ended on the morning Carlo disappeared. She had spent her entire life up to that point fearing that Carlo would disappear, or, when she was a child, fearing that someone like Carlo would do something like disappear.

Lina has always sensed that if she built a world around herself, it could be taken away.

There is nothing to be done, she knows, after the worst has happened.

But it has been seven years. And Lina has a secret too. It is that in the last months, when Antonia sneaks away—to church, Lina knows, the smell of the incense as familiar as the smell of her own skin—Lina pulls a shawl over her head and floats as quickly as she can down the block to the very smallest and shabbiest building in the neighborhood. She knocks three times and feels her heart pounding in her chest and in the tips of her fingers and behind her eyes. She enters the home of the neighborhood maga.

She first went to answer a question: where is my husband. She did not know where that question appeared from again, years after Carlo’s disappearance, with such vehemence. But of course, the maga is not there to answer questions as they are asked: she is there to help her clients find the questions they are not asking. Are you looking for a love potion? she had asked. Americans like love potions. They are the maga’s bread and butter, so to speak. Lina was unsatisfied, and went away frustrated. Mamma was right, she thought. It is an ancient nonsense.

The next week, though, Lina found herself on the same doorstep. And she has gone every week since.

There, Lina’s fears are pored over by the warm eyes of an old woman who speaks almost no English. The fears are laid out against the drawn cards from the tarocchi and discussed quietly over tea with flowers blooming in it. Lina learns the rhythm of the full moon and carries rustling bodies of fava beans nestled in her pockets. She learns to feel out the four directions by the height of the sun, the length of the shadows, the tilt of the wind. She situates herself on the earth. Seven years after her husband’s death, Lina Russo, not a ghost, finds herself resting on the breast of La Vecchia. An older and wilder thing, whose stories and rhythms carry her into a place that feels timelessly, strangely, uncannily like home.