The Family(49)

After Robbie was born, slickly ejected from somewhere Antonia never knew existed in her own body, she clutched him to her chest, full of fear. She looked at his face and didn’t know him. She grasped him with her hands, but they felt like stranger’s hands. Robbie left a headprint of blood and white smear across her chest, and Antonia couldn’t feel it. He opened his mouth and wailed, and she heard it, but faintly, like he was calling from some distance away.

When she stares down into his crib, Antonia still doesn’t know him. She is blindsided by fear, by something like disappointment. You wanted this, she tells herself. But it is nothing like she imagined.

The doctor checks on her after two weeks. He tugs her stitches out one by one; tells her she is nearly healed. Antonia feels like a steak, scored with a knife where the salt will be rubbed in.

She hadn’t considered it would be this physical. This consuming. This utterly erasing of everything she had been before. Her body is a wrecked ship’s hull and she, whatever had been “she,” was lost in a wide and dark sea.

During the day, Paolo and Lina and Sofia fold cotton diapers, scrub the stained wooden floor, sing to Robbie when he wails. Antonia’s apartment is filled with the smells of laundry and chicken stock, drying herbs and antiseptic, baby shit and the metal of her own body healing. She tries not to inhale. When they bring Robbie to her, she holds him to her raw breast and turns her face to the wall.

Lina brings lavender tied in a bunch and boils cloves down to paste, to clear the air. She helps Antonia shower. Antonia sits in the tub with the hot water pounding against her back, her spine curved, her stretched and swollen belly resting between her legs. She leans against Lina like a child.

Sofia comes every day. She holds Julia and Robbie in her arms and hums them songs she suddenly remembers from her own childhood. She chatters to Antonia, swaying in the filtered winter sunlight coming through Antonia’s bedroom window. She seems utterly carefree. Her voice always sounds to Antonia like it is echoing from very far away.

Paolo lies beside Antonia while she sleeps, and while she can’t sleep, and while she feeds Robbie. He curls his body protectively around hers, but he stays on his own side, because she can’t bear to be touched. For the first week, he hadn’t been able to help himself from reaching for her, holding her hands in his hands, kissing her ears and her face. But she had leaked tears, muttered, stop it, stop that, no, and Paolo had retreated, circling their old marriage like a hungry animal making tracks around a carcass.

One night, Antonia wakes from a sudden, brief sleep, a sleep closer to unconsciousness than rest. She opens her eyes to see the looming shadows of her furniture. Across the room, Robbie is sleeping in his bassinet, which means Antonia has been asleep long enough for Paolo, who is sleeping next to her, to ease Robbie off of her chest and move him. She feels a wave of tenderness toward Paolo. I’m so sorry, she thinks, sensing the up and down of her husband’s breath as he sleeps. There is no other sound but the white noise of faraway, all-night traffic. I’m not good enough for you. I’m not good at this. Their three children, their spacious future home, Antonia’s rolled-up university diploma nestled against her chest with her children, in the picture she imagines taking someday. It all seems impossible. It seems further away than the moon. You’ve failed, she tells herself. She does not think she falls asleep again that night.



* * *



—

The winter passes this way.

When it snows, Paolo wraps Robbie in blankets and stacks two knit hats on top of one another on his head and carries him outside. Robbie sneezes and blinks furiously as snow lands on his face, and Paolo carries him around and around the block for an hour.

On Christmas, Antonia is bundled into a dress; her hair is brushed. She sits through Mass; Robbie on Paolo’s lap on one side of her and Sofia with Julia on the other. At dinner, she picks listlessly at her food.

Antonia spends the dark months germinating; a life sleeping, undetectable in a hard shell. All around her the days shorten and then begin to lengthen again. The old year slips into the new; all it takes is a second. Antonia avoids mirrors, so disappointed in herself she can’t face her own reflection.

It’s not how she thought it would be.

It’s not how she thought it would be.



* * *



—

Sofia remembers this time as a haze of sleeplessness and fear. Antonia lay gray and small in her bed day after day and Sofia held Robbie, rocked him as he cried, learned his smell as well as she had gotten to know Julia’s. Sofia remembers Paolo, helpless, running a hand through his dark hair and saying, I gotta take a leak, I gotta take a walk, I gotta get out of here, and grabbing his coat and going out to smoke, pacing in front of the building; and Sofia, crouching at the bedside, saying, Tonia, I think he’s hungry again, and Antonia opening eyes like tunnels and saying, okay, automatic, empty. Sofia wants to pinch herself awake; this can’t possibly be her life, Antonia’s life. “She’ll be perfectly healthy,” says the doctor, washing his hands after depositing the small snarl of Antonia’s old sutures into the kitchen trash can, and Sofia surprises herself by shouting “What is healthy? What is healthy? Do they make stitches for her mind, for her heart?” so loudly Robbie wakes with an angry scream. “I’m sorry,” she says to the dumbfounded doctor, who has left the water running as he stares at Sofia. “I’m sorry.” She turns to go pick up Robbie. Her heart hurts; her hands tingle.