The Family(75)

When she wakes from these dreams she is angry. With herself, because Antonia often directs her frustration inward. But also, with Paolo. This is something she won’t explain to him. I’m angry because you got me pregnant is a shameful sentiment, and Antonia cannot voice it. But Paolo knows. He can see the way Antonia shields herself from him, the way she holds herself slightly more erect in any room he enters. He is kinder in response, but he also works longer hours, lingering at the office, calling Joey to ask for extra tasks.

And so the rift deepens. The winter wind strengthens. The dark, cold months pass. And the valence of Antonia and Paolo’s divide takes on a certain seriousness. They begin to forget their way back to one another.

Robbie knows all of this without actually knowing it. He can feel that there is a deep and deadly chasm in any room both of his parents are in. It is populated by silence and apathy. Later in his life, Robbie will know this was a dark time in his household because he will retain almost no memories of his mother while she was pregnant. He’s old enough to notice it, and he is sensitive, so he feels it. But in his memory, this year will be blank.

For everyone else, it will be unforgettable.





Robbie and Julia know exactly what their family business consists of but not how it is accomplished. Their families, of course, would like to keep it that way for as long as possible. But as they hurtle toward their sixth birthdays they notice what seems like more closed doors than usual. More late-night whispers in the walls of their homes, as their fathers shuffle quietly back and forth, planning. Plotting.

Curiosity grows in Robbie and Julia, beanstalks of it sprouting in their stomachs and pushing up and out of their mouths. Where are you going, Papa? Julia asks Saul as he leaves on a Thursday night. The Empire State Building, Saul responds. He is distracted. Julia loves the Empire State Building. You’re not, she says. What are you doing? Saul adjusts the collar of his shirt in the hallway mirror. It’s too late for you to be up, Jules, he says. Should I ask Nonna to come read you a story? And then, I love you. And then Saul is gone, and in the click of the front door shutting Julia finds she is hungry, and frightened. Information might have fed her.

Julia cannot sleep that night. She twists and turns so she sweats damp spots into every inch of her bedsheets.

Robbie, gifted with slightly more stealth than Julia, creeps along the middle rooms of his apartment. His papa came home from work and shut the bedroom door and his mamma is in there now, too, the low hum of her voice against the sharp crackle of his. Stuck here, Robbie hears. Half-assed . . . legacy. And then nothing, and then, Minchia! which if Robbie said, his mamma would chase him around the apartment with a bar of Ivory soap to wash his mouth. And then his mamma’s syrup, the tone she uses to calm Robbie down too. And then footsteps. Robbie flees to the kitchen table and has to pretend he has been practicing writing the alphabet the whole time. His mamma comes into the kitchen, where she braces a hand against her back and holds herself up against the counter with the other. She breathes, shhhh, a loud soothing sigh. The bigger she gets, the more inaccessible she seems to him.

Robbie promised to tell Julia if he learns anything but he goes to bed instead, because he has a small sickening feeling that there is something cracking in his family, some foundational beam that until recently had held them all up, held them together. That night he listens to his papa snoring and pictures himself falling deeper and deeper into his bed with every one of Paolo’s rolling exhales. Deeper and deeper until he falls through the mattress. Robbie sinks through the floor. He buries himself in the ground itself.



* * *



—

Spring passes in a flash. Antonia grows. She spends the first truly hot day of summer irritated and alone. She watches Robbie through the front window as he leaves for school and then tries and fails to focus on tidying the house, on balancing the checkbook, on reading, on making a grocery list. She casts tasks aside one by one. She curls into herself like a wave.

Antonia is not surprised when, after a haphazard lunch of toast, her stomach tightens like a vise and she barely makes it to the bathroom in time to throw it up. She is not surprised when she feels a low ache thrumming through her. She calls Lina, but there is no answer. She calls Sofia, who must be working, and then she takes a taxi to the hospital.



* * *



—

In Antonia’s twilight dream she is standing at the edge of the ocean. Carlo is a few paces ahead of her. The water swells toward them and then away, like the whole world is being rocked to sleep. Antonia cannot see Carlo’s whole face; it will not come into focus. But she can see the lines on Carlo’s hands, the five o’clock shadow darkening his jaw, the way the muscles of his back ripple as he steadies himself against the wind. Papa, she says, I’m scared.

Here, he says, but he doesn’t move. Take this.

Antonia steps forward. The cold water closes over her ankles. When Antonia looks down at her outstretched palms she is holding a pearl-handled gun.



* * *



—

Paolo and Antonia name their new baby Enzo, after Paolo’s brother who died in the war. Antonia weeps for the whole first week after he is born: poring over his dark brown eyes, his long thin fingers, which are like Robbie’s, like Paolo’s. She weeps in gratitude that her body has stayed whole, the jagged scar from Robbie’s birth still intact, the inside of her body in and the baby out, the miracle of that exchange. She weeps as they leave the hospital, as they settle in at home. She weeps and she knows Paolo doesn’t understand, knows she is pushing him away, knows he is scared, but she does not yet have the energy to call him back to her. She weeps, and she comes back to herself. She weeps in relief, because it is exhausting to be terrified for nine months, because it is exhausting to spend your life scared, your whole life since the morning your papa disappeared, really, but now you are an adult with two children, two perfectly formed human people that you made, and you know, the way some knowledge is given from above or outside, somewhere external and eternal, you know that it is time.