The Family(82)

It comes from Paolo and Antonia, who are standing on her doorstep like children. Robbie hovers behind them; Enzo is asleep in the crook of Paolo’s elbow. Paolo’s head is hung like an old tulip on the stalk of his body; from Antonia there emanates a desperate kind of strength; the tightrope balance of staying upright.

“Mamma,” says Antonia, “can we talk to you?” Her face is grave; drawn; Lina can see small, stern Antonia as a child, quiet and measured, doing her homework or folding her clothes, building a foundation around herself.

Lina pulls them inside, hugs Paolo, kisses Antonia, says, “Tea?”

Antonia says, “Sure.”

Lina takes another look at them and says, “Gin?”

Paolo meets her eyes for the first time. There is a wry smile there. “Better,” he says.

Lina beckons to them from the kitchen, holding three clear glasses with an inch of gin and an ice cube and a lemon slice each. She passes Robbie a cookie and he sidles quietly out of the room. “Come, sit,” she says. Paolo and Antonia sit across from her at the kitchen table. The apartment smells of earth, as though Lina has been growing mushrooms in corners, letting moss sprout on walls.

“You have something to tell me,” Lina says.

“We need help,” says Antonia. “But, Mamma—you won’t like it.” She is struck through by an icy rod of fear: how carefully she has constructed her relationship with her mamma around not having conversations like the one she has come here to have. But there is no one else who will be honest with them.

Paolo has thought of a thousand ways to begin this conversation. “When Carlo,” he begins, and then stops.

Lina has raised an eyebrow. She can hear her late husband’s name now. “Yes,” she says.

“When Carlo wanted—to get out.” As Paolo speaks he drapes the name of his wife’s father over his tongue, holding it out to Lina like an offering, entering himself into a tragedy which has never been named explicitly but which sits at every dinner with them, follows Robbie out the door on his way to school, hunching Antonia’s shoulders as she sits on the side of their bed to brush her hair at night. The work Antonia must have had to do to love him all these years strikes Paolo like a bag of cement to the chest.

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

“Well,” says Lina. She leans back in her chair. She raises her drink to her lips. “My husband,” and here she tips the drink to the sky, a toast, “didn’t do a very good job, getting out. So. Why do you bring this up?” She looks at Antonia, whose face is a map. And Lina understands.

“It’s Saul, Mamma,” says Antonia. The words bloom in the air around them like tea leaves; they settle. “Saul has been working for Eli Leibovich. He’s been sneaking—”

Lina waves a hand. The same mess. The same men, getting themselves into inescapable trouble without thinking how they are going to get themselves out.

“I never thought it would be Saul,” she says, looking straight at Paolo. Paolo stares at his glass. He tries not to take it personally.

“Sofia is missing,” says Antonia.

Lina smiles. “How do you know that?”

“I can feel it, Mamma,” says Antonia. “I can just—” She doesn’t know how she knows, really, except that when Saul told her he couldn’t reach Sofia something clicked into place, something caught flame.

“Well,” says Lina, “she might not be missing. She might just be solving the problem.” This feels oblique even for Lina because what, thinks Antonia, could Sofia do? Even Sofia would not be able to solve this inherited problem, this problem every woman who enters into a Family family knows she might someday face.

“I don’t know what you mean,” says Antonia.

Lina looks at Antonia and Paolo. “You know there is nothing you can do. That’s why you came, right? So that I could tell you there is nothing you can do. You are out of options. Saul has made his choices, and he will suffer. We will all suffer,” she says.

“Mamma,” Antonia says, but then falls silent.

Lina drains her cup. “Because there is nothing you can do—there is no right choice—there is no way to get out of this unscathed—there is also no reason for you not to fight for him.” The air in the apartment sits, waiting.

Lina leans forward to look at Antonia. “Don’t let him do to her what your papa did to us. You fight for him. You use everything you have.”





When Sofia and Antonia were nine years old, they made a blood oath. This is what they called it.

It happened one evening when Antonia slept over at Sofia’s house. Antonia was supposed to sleep on the floor, on a nest Rosa made for her near Sofia’s bed. But every time she slept over, Rosa would come in to wake them and find Sofia and Antonia with their brown limbs tangled together in Sofia’s bed.

On this particular evening they had gone to bed early because it was November, and the city had gone dark and quiet earlier than they were used to, and Rosa had served steaming bowls of soup that made them sleepy. Sofia was in the middle of a ghost story about a sailor forever looking for his missing foot when her hand, idly tapping along her bedframe, came upon a loose nail. Tonia, look, she said, working it out of the wood. It gleamed in the lamplight when she held it up.