The Family(48)

Before you know it, a nurse says to her, you’ll have a baby.

There is the needle in her arm. There is the plastic mask descending over her face. Everything narrows to a point. It is impossibly dark.



* * *



—

When Sofia becomes aware of her body again, she is wearing a thin cotton shift, not hers. The lights are so bright they hurt her eyes. She squints and tries to sit, only to feel a colossal unraveling inside herself. Movement will unspool her. Sofia sinks back into the crisp hospital pillows.

Soon a nurse brings a small bundle to her. Sofia tries again to sit up, but this time there is pain, immense, and a weakness that steals her breath, that collapses her. She doesn’t like lying down, surrounded by strangers. She wants a mirror. Instead the nurse wedges a pillow behind Sofia’s shoulders and hands her the smallest person Sofia has ever seen.

The baby is a real human the size of a winter squash. She has two eyes and two ears and a mouth with puckered lips. She has skin like clouds and thin soft fingernails. She weighs seven pounds, they tell Sofia. We’ll get your husband, they tell Sofia. Sofia is left in the empty white room staring at a small womb-shaped animal, surrounded by the smell of wet flesh.

Julia is the name that comes to Sofia’s mind; it is familiar but clean, like fresh sheets or an open window. “It’s just yours,” she says, voice croaking, the first thing Sofia says to her daughter.

When newborn babies make eye contact they use their whole bodies to open their eyes and look at you and this is what Julia does now, she flexes her fingers and her feet and she purses her lips so she can open her eyes and stare at Sofia. Sofia stares back and she wills herself to be courageous. “What are we going to do?” she asks Julia. Her voice is jarring to her own ears.

Here in front of Sofia is incontrovertible evidence of her own power. No one had ever told her motherhood would be like this.

Look, look. Look what you have made.



* * *



—

Her whole family comes. It is not just Saul. Sofia is flushed with relief. She does not want to be alone. “I can give you ten minutes,” the nurse says. “This really isn’t the policy.” Rosa and Frankie push past the nurse and drop to the bed, and then Sofia is in their arms and they are in hers, and Julia is lifted up and passed around in the cacophony of her family. And then Saul and Antonia and Paolo are there, and Antonia asks, “How was it?” and Sofia has to say, “I don’t know,” because all she can remember is waves crashing, the tide of herself, darkness, and she has no words for that, but she knows it is not what happened, really; she knows there is a part of Julia’s arrival that she was not present for. And Saul asks, “Are you okay?” and Sofia says, “Yes,” and she means it, she thinks she means it. Joey tucks a strand of Sofia’s hair behind her ear. He presses the back of his hand to her forehead, like he did when Sofia was feverish as a child. He will tell Sofia later that Julia has his mother’s nose. Sofia looks at the faces of her family and believes that she can do this.

It is a fleeting feeling, but it will sustain her. In the weeks ahead Sofia will have the presence of mind to surround herself with the people who make her feel most like herself. She will learn to swaddle Julia, to change her, to rock her. She will smell Julia’s head and count her toes and stare at her in pure awe. Sofia will let herself be carried along by the changing current. She will feel fully. Motherhood can be the adventure, she will tell herself. It can be something you love.





Some mornings Antonia still wakes up with her fists clenched, remembering Robbie racing through her body like a train.

After he is born, she spends three weeks in bed on doctor’s orders, trying not to think of the ways she has been turned inside out. She holds her mouth closed; holds her legs together. The doctor comes; a man with kindly small eyeglasses who stitches her where she has been ripped apart and tells her she will be fine, fine. Antonia nods when he says this, but she is sure as soon as she stands up she will split in half; her organs will come rushing down and land on the floor; her hair will fall out.

The days are long. Antonia is never alone.

Sofia comes, beaming, and kisses Antonia’s forehead, and holds Julia, who is three months old and kicking, punching, grasping wildly, up to the small wicker basket where Robbie sleeps, his newborn features still pressed askew by the pressure of Antonia’s body. Julia furrows her brow and reaches out with a round fist and pummels sleeping Robbie in the chest. He awakens with a betrayed expression and opens his mouth in silence for three full seconds before a cry emerges. Fall sunlight shines through the window and Sofia fairly glows. Sofia picks up Robbie and kisses him, passes him to Antonia to feed. Antonia tries not to weep. Why isn’t it this hard for you? she imagines asking.

Paolo’s mother comes, and wraps the baby tighter in his blanket. When she is leaving, she takes Paolo aside and says, the only cure for those blues is to treat her normally. Stop treating her like a broken thing. She’ll manage once she’s back on her feet. But Paolo, in reverence of the fragile and terrible and all-powerful force his wife has become, continues to bring Antonia hot and cold cloths, teas, broths; to insist that she keep her feet up, her eyes closed.

At night, though she is heavy with exhaustion, Antonia cannot sleep. Her body pulls her down, through the mattress, through the floor. Her eyes sting, but won’t shut. Sandwiched between Paolo and Robbie breathing, she cries; her cheeks crack.