Sofia and Saul pass notes when he comes to her house. They arrange meetings in other neighborhoods. They duck into small restaurants and try foods from places they have only ever seen on maps: Morocco, Greece, Malaya. Saul doesn’t know which are the bad neighborhoods and he doesn’t treat Sofia like she’s fragile. They walk as far west as they can without stepping into the Hudson, and as the sun sets they watch the lights come on in New Jersey and Times Square and they find themselves on an island, an impenetrably dark patch of industrial wasteland at the edge of the world.
With Saul, Sofia feels there is room for her. Saul asks Sofia who she is, who she wants to be, and there is never the threat of disappointment, of Sofia not fitting into a preordained space. I think I want to be powerful, like my father, she says to Saul, but I will never do it the way he does it. She does not know what she will do but she understands that it will be something. As the summer passes, Saul is on her mind more and more often, despite her resolve that they are only having fun, only breaking rules.
Saul, who is in love with Sofia despite it being unbearable to fall in love when you have lost your country and your family, understands contradictions. He understands standing in the presence of something impossible. And Saul begins to feel like he is coming out of a long hibernation, a lifetime of winter, the soft thump of his heartbeat speeding up as Sofia grows warmer and warmer in front of him, bathing him in heat. He begins to understand the value of sensation, the burning necessity of the present. Where once he had lived in memories, in speculation, in profound worry, Saul begins to claw his way toward his life as it unfolds in each moment.
* * *
—
In the fall, Sofia and Antonia do not start school again, for the first time in their memory. September yawns open and they fall in headfirst. They feel themselves borne along in the river of their lives. They are rushing toward what feels like a cliff, staring down a waterfall over which there is only marriage and children, sensible dresses, the business of running a home. They wage separate, silent battles with themselves: what they want; what will happen regardless of what they want. Love, they realize, is something that might happen regardless of whether they want it. They cannot tell whether it is the river itself or a life raft. They have to readjust how they thought it would be.
Joey Colicchio has been working too hard. He has been overextending himself, stretching himself taut between the world where he is a parent to two girls with long legs and discerning eyes, and the world where he is violence personified, the terror in the room, the reason men wake sweating in the night. In both worlds, his very best is demanded, taken from him, drawn out. In both worlds, he is the center. The beating heart.
Joey had imagined that the wartime smuggling operation he had spearheaded would relieve him of some of the guilt that sits like a rock in his intestines. He had imagined that enabling other families to feed off of the sizzling, decadent, fat-bellied American dream would help him to justify the relative opulence of his own lifestyle, compared to so many of the families he knows. Joey wants to believe he pays his men as much as he can. He wants to believe he uses violence as sparingly as possible.
But some part of Joey knows this is untrue. You chose this life, he remembers. There would have been less violence in the bricklayers’ union, if he had kept quiet and paid his dues. He would have perpetrated less fear if he had stayed in his parents’ house until he was married, brought ten or twelve grandchildren into a tenement hovel. He would have disintegrated into mud next to his father in the graveyard. Dust to dust. Joey finds himself wondering whether he is a good man.
* * *
—
Rosa stopped looking to Lina for comfort years ago, but recently—Sofia disappearing all day, secretive and defensive about her plans, Frankie bursting into flames at the smallest provocation, Joey rarely home and restless when he is there—she has found herself picturing, in the quiet hours of the night, padding next door in slippers and her robe and sinking into the familiar old rhythm.
She knows this is impossible. Lina has turned into a spectacle, a cautionary tale. Aside from her brothers, from the wives that show up each Sunday, Rosa is left to muddle through her weeks alone. And just like she always does, Rosa understands this. She knows why it is so. She understands the structures that make it necessary.
Still, Rosa stays up nights and pictures what it would be like. To shut the creaking door of her apartment and tiptoe through the halls and out onto the street and to find her way up the dark staircase of Lina and Antonia’s building, where Lina might hug her and say, I was hoping you might come. And where, if they were lucky, they would know once again where their daughters were, and if the daughters were asleep yet.
* * *
—
On December 7, Pearl Harbor is bombed. Nothing is spared. The war, which had been someone else’s problem, a faraway tragedy, something unapproachable, enters the houses of Americans. It fastens its hands around their throats. It forces them to look it in the face.
Sofia escapes her house, where her parents are mired in adult worry, a kind of depression that makes her feel like the ground underneath her feet is quicksand. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what will happen. She takes a taxi to Manhattan. She watches the metal cables of the Brooklyn Bridge zip by and remembers being four, on her way to Sunday dinner. Nestled in the lap of her father, the bosom of certainty. How can she focus herself? How can she decide to do anything in a world that is crumbling from the foundation up?
Sofia meets Saul under cover of a dark downtown cinema. The picture has already started when she shuffles in next to him, so she greets him by way of a hand on his shoulder and presses her body toward his in the dark. He offers her a half-empty box of popcorn and she is suddenly ravenous. She scoops up handfuls at a time and lets the salt collect under her fingernails and the grease soak into her skin. Sofia snakes an arm around Saul’s elbow and leans her head against his shoulder. She can feel the bones of his arm, the long lanky way he extends out from his heart. He is solid and sure and breathing. Something in Sofia settles. Something opens.
After the film, Saul and Sofia wander through the tree-lined paths of Washington Square Park, trying their best not to look like good targets for pickpockets. They stop in a dingy artists’ bar on MacDougal and Saul buys them half pints of dark beer, which they drink standing, leaning together at a tall corner table. Sofia likes the light and foolhardy feeling it gives her and drinks another while Saul nurses a cigarette. She makes conversation about the movie; she makes up stories about the other patrons (a mistress, the woman with the too-tight dress and the carefully arranged curls; a journalist, notebooks in tow, twisting a wedding band around his finger, who doesn’t want to go home yet; an artist, who moved out of her parents’ home in New Jersey and has only milk crates for furniture). She fills the empty space in their conversation, all the while thinking about the bones of Saul’s arms, the jut of his knuckles against the skin, his dancing dreaming eyelashes. Inside of Sofia, the thing that has yawned open paces back and forth. It is hungry. Saul is quiet; his eyes look through her.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks, and Saul opens his eyes wider and focuses on her, as though he has forgotten where he is. He makes a twisted face; an inside joke, one he throws over the shoulders of men he is talking to when Sofia is standing just outside the room, watching. I’m right here, is what that face is supposed to say. But I would rather be just over there, with you.
“Nothing,” he says, which is what he says when he is thinking about his family, and Germany, and the layers of unspeakable mystery surrounding his life in Europe.
Sofia reaches for Saul’s hand, and he takes it, but his gaze stays neutral, focused somewhere above her shoulder. She doesn’t know where he goes, but she wishes he would come back.
“You’re somewhere else,” she says.
“I’m right here,” he says. He isn’t, though. And Sofia, who often falls back into her own thoughts when her conversations with Saul reach this impasse, sets her mouth and puts her hand on Saul’s chest. “Tell me,” she says.