The Family(42)

There is what feels like an exhale—from each person in the room, from the room itself, from the very bones of New York—as the Colicchio family makes itself into something new.



* * *



—

Saul is sent home with a foil-wrapped tin of leftovers.

By the time he gets there, he is so exhausted he can hardly lift his feet up the stairs. He draws the shades tight and stuffs two spare shirts along the cracks between the windowpanes. In bed, he wriggles his body around along the length of his icy sheets until he can feel his heartbeat quicken and the sheets start to warm up.

He counts his breaths—in, and out—and tries not to think about Sofia. He tries not to think about what it means that she is pregnant, and that his mother is missing, and that he will be a father in his new country. He feels swollen with a responsibility bigger than himself. And he feels guilty, too, because a part of him is relieved to accept Joey Colicchio’s offer, to disappear completely into a new life.

Saul’s eyes are heavy and his breath is slow and he is nearly asleep when the door of his room explodes open. He sits up in bed, heart beating in his head and chest and fingers, blinking furiously in the dark.

Before he can focus his eyes, Sofia’s father has grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, picked him up, and pinned him against the wall. Saul’s head slams against the brick and stars burst in front of his eyes. He can hardly draw a breath.

“I thought I could trust you,” growls Joey Colicchio. “You sneaky sack of shit. How dare you.”

“I didn’t mean—” says Saul. His feet are barely touching the floor. Adrenaline courses through him like lightning.

“You didn’t mean what?” There is whiskey on Joey’s breath. “You didn’t mean to ruin my daughter’s life? You didn’t mean to take the job I gave you? You didn’t mean to set foot in this fucking country?” He looks right into Saul’s face. “You bet your figlio di puttana Jewish ass you’ll wish you didn’t do any of those things.”

Suddenly, Saul realizes he is looking at a different Joey Colicchio than the suave and charismatic man who sends him upstate or to the dock at Ellis Island to collect terrified German and Austrian and Hungarian refugees. The Joey Colicchio steaming in front of him, hands around his throat, is the murderer—the one who has watched men shit themselves and beg for their lives and has sent them sleeping into the Hudson with bricks tied to their ankles. Saul realizes that Joey could kill him. He might die.

“I love her,” he says. “I know you don’t believe that, but I do.”

Joey Colicchio loosens his hold around Saul’s neck. Saul crumples to the floor. Joey reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a pistol. He points it at Saul.

Saul stares down the barrel of his own mortality and wonders if maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be. It would be so simple. For a moment, Saul considers the luxury of surrender with relief and gratitude.

“You love her,” says Joey, without lowering the pistol. “You fucking love her?”

“I love her,” says Saul. They aren’t bad last words, he thinks.

“Stand up,” says Joey, and gestures with the gun.

Saul stands. Joey levels the gun at Saul’s chest. Saul closes his eyes.

“Open your eyes,” says Joey.

Saul opens them.

“First rule of fatherhood,” says Joey. “You don’t get to die now. It’s not about you.”



* * *



—

When he gets home, Joey Colicchio pulls the pistol out of his jacket pocket and wraps it in muslin, slides it into his desk drawer.

Joey kisses Rosa. He peeks into Frankie’s bedroom and tells her, “Lights out, now.” And then he turns down the hall to Sofia’s room. She is brushing her hair and in her stark face Joey can see the baby he cradled in the hospital, the five-year-old he brought along to Manhattan meetings, the fourteen-year-old who stood, so mad she almost levitated, and told him—told him!—she wouldn’t come with them to church. He doesn’t know what to say, but he aches for her, so Joey clears his throat before entering his daughter’s room. She looks up at him and he bends and cups Sofia’s face in his hands. “La futura mamma,” he says, like it is easy. And Sofia says, “Papa,” softly, and Joey Colicchio folds her into his arms and for a moment is filled with unadulterated wonder.





Antonia marries Paolo as the winter air loses its sting. Lina sits tearless and erect in the frontmost pew, looking straight ahead. In the back of the church, Paolo’s work associates line up neatly, and in a surreal coincidence, in order of height, like a matryoshka doll of criminals and smugglers. Lina can count the hairs on her head, so alert is her skin. So strong, her resolve not to acknowledge the Family men.

Joey walks Antonia down the aisle and is astonished that the little girl he watched learn to swim on a Long Island summer day is the capable, intelligent young woman he is giving away to be married. He nods as graciously as he can manage at Lina, but a nod cannot bridge twelve years of sorrow, the gaping vacuum between them where Carlo should be, the ways they have both evolved to survive.

Sofia and Saul do not sit together; they are not married yet; Sofia has stuffed herself into her nicest dress, which zipped when she stood with her stomach sucked in but which now seems to accentuate the expansion of her belly. When she stands she looks perfectly normal but when she sits she spills over her waistband. She does not fit in her dress; does not fit in this wedding, where she sits with her mamma and Frankie and covers her midsection with Frankie’s scarf. She does not fit with the women here; she cannot sit with the men. She is neither a child nor, truly, an adult. Sofia squirms. She can feel Saul’s gaze from the back of the room, where he stands with the other Family men. In the back, in deference to Lina. Present, in deference to Paolo and Joey, to the connections that bind all of them. There is no easy way to untangle what is Family and what is family. There is no clean separation of professional from personal. Sofia understands more of this balance now, because of Saul. Saul is connected to a wider world, where a girl’s anger at her father or frustration with her mother or adherence—or lack thereof!—to the rules is not the biggest thing. Where sometimes, Sofia is beginning to understand, you have to do things you wouldn’t have expected to protect the people you love.