Saul stares at the crack in the ceiling until he can hear Sofia’s breaths even out again, and then he creeps off the mattress and into the kitchen, where he begins an elaborate breakfast, moving quietly so as not to wake anyone else before dawn.
Julia is the first one up. She stretches her limbs and drags her blanket into the living room, where Sofia is asleep alone. She crawls into the hollow where Saul’s body had tossed for most of the night and presses herself against her mamma’s back. When Saul next peeks into the living room he sees the heads of his daughter and wife lined up on the same pillow. Julia opens her eyes and says Papa, which is a command and a prayer and a pure, unfettered cry of love, and Saul opens his arms for her, imagines slicing himself open down the middle and enveloping Julia with every power of protection he has.
* * *
—
Antonia is not unhappy in her marriage.
There are many days she has everything she can imagine.
Those days Paolo gets home early enough that she is not run ragged and he is not so grouchy he spends the evening raging monotonously about how much use he could be in a different position. And she does not think about her papa, and she does not wonder if she made the right choice, and her mamma’s voice saying don’t speak to anyone with slicked-back hair does not echo in her mind.
Those days her baking turns out and she feels connected to Robbie, who still needs her desperately, from a wordless place in his small body, and who hangs and drags and claws against her until she lets him in, which some days she feels open and strong enough to do and which some days she is sure will destroy her. But some days Robbie practices his letters and they walk to the park and they joke with one another, and Antonia can see in his flawless face the man who will emerge, strong and sweet like his father, like his grandfather.
Those days she reads, in the patch of light that pours like liquid gold into their kitchen from ten to eleven in the morning as the sun passes overhead. She comes back to herself as the shadow of the next building over crosses onto her page and she feels exquisitely raw and preternaturally strong in those moments.
Those days she calls Sofia and Sofia is home, and she might go over there with Robbie, and drink coffee or wine with Sofia, and watch the sticks of dynamite that have replaced their children go spinning and spinning around the apartment, and she and Sofia might have an hour where because they are together, they can access themselves as children, and they can imagine themselves as old women. Paolo thinks maybe when Robbie starts school full-time, I might look into classes at the college, Antonia says. And so when Sofia responds, I am hoping to be able to take on more work, then, Antonia is having such a good day she does not respond, you leave Julia with me so often it’s as though she’s in school already. And as they leave, Antonia might be able to catch Julia and hold her close and smell her and look in her eyes and see Sofia flashing around their crinkled corners when Julia squeals and tries to get away.
Those days she starts dinner on time and the kitchen is filled with steam and spice, and Paolo rumbles in as she’s chopping and slides his hands around her and pushes his face through her hair to her neck, and Antonia leans into his weight and feels warm electricity pulse down from Paolo’s mouth through the center of her body.
A different life does not enter Antonia’s thoughts.
But of course, the veil between different lives is thin. The alternate path is there. It is creeping up on Antonia; it is catching her scent. And soon, she won’t be able to escape it.
* * *
—
The pox have faded almost completely from Julia’s and Robbie’s legs and Saul finds himself uncharacteristically restless on the fifth day of their seclusion in Antonia and Paolo’s apartment, so in the afternoon he takes a walk. Paolo has gone to his office and Antonia and Sofia are curled together on the couch like tightly furled leaves and Julia and Robbie are wreaking quiet havoc in Robbie’s room.
Saul turns left as he exits Paolo and Antonia’s apartment and walks toward the water. It is one of his privileges: to walk where he wants without fear. Most everyone knows who he works for.
Saul feels the car before he sees it, coasting behind him as he walks. The hairs on the back of his neck and his forearms quiver. He does not turn around: the subtle dance of power in this neighborhood forbids him from acknowledging the car. He dares the driver to interrupt him; to ask for his time; to figure out whether to start with excuse me or Mr. Colicchio or please pardon the intrusion, but—but just then, someone from the car says, “Saul, right?” which is not what Saul was expecting, but which he can use to his advantage, assuming, as always, that there is an advantage to be had and lost in every conversation.
“That depends on who’s asking,” says Saul. He does not turn around; will not bend himself to look through the sliver of car window that has been rolled open.
“My name is Eli Leibovich. I think it’s time you and I had a little chat.”
Saul stops. He is surprised. He has lost any advantage he may ever have had in this interaction. He looks at the car, which rolls to a stop next to him. The door opens. Eli Leibovich is a little younger than Joey, with a dark strong brow and a mouth that turns slightly downward as he looks up at Saul. There are deep lines carved into his cheeks, from frowning and from laughing. He looks as though he has a lot to say.
“Get in,” says Eli Leibovich. “My wife is making lunch.”
Saul has learned about Eli Leibovich the same way he learned every other piece of relevant information for his job: by keeping his mouth shut and listening; by spending his sleepless hours connecting one small scrap of information to another; by replaying conversations.
In this way he has come to know that Eli Leibovich is the son of Lithuanian immigrants who fled the Russian Empire’s increasingly anti-Semitic policies just before the new century. Eli himself was born in a ragged tenement building on Orchard Street. His mother bore ten children, six of whom survived to adulthood, and told fortunes to make ends meet. His father had been a physician in Lithuania. In New York, Eli Leibovich’s father became a foreman in a garment factory. Eli was raised in the bloody belly of the Lower East Side, in a rear-facing three-room apartment with a shared bath. He decided, like so many before him, that he could use the skills he needed to survive there in more effective ways.
By 1940, Eli Leibovich was the coordinator of a citywide gambling syndicate. His games had high buy-ins and high payouts and invitations were widely sought after. Like in any gambling enterprise worth its chips, the house always won. Sometimes, after participants had been plied with snacks so salty they couldn’t help but drink too much, the house won by a lot. And the consequences for being unable to pay a bill at a Leibovich game could be deadly.
Saul once heard a story about a man who showed up after Leibovich sharks got ahold of him with no skin on one of his arms.
In the old country before Eli Leibovich’s parents fled for America, bouncing down a dirt road in a hidden compartment of a horse-drawn cart, Russian Orthodox authorities had stood by and watched while Jewish babies from a nearby village were torn limb from limb. They learned it is possible to tear a baby.
* * *
—
Violence was spawned with human beings in the primordial stew. It makes us less human, and yet.
* * *