Sofia has powdered her face and re-lined her lips and gritted her teeth. She has stifled all of her fear. She has turned it into anger, she has turned it into a uranium core. She has climbed upstairs with trays of ravioli, with the braciole sitting in its own fragrant juices. She has opened bottles of wine for Rosa and laughed at a small joke Frankie made. Sofia is a china plate. Any hairline fracture could shatter her.
Saul manages to laugh off his injuries (last time I deal with business after I drink a bottle of wine at lunch, am I right, boss?) but Julia says but, Papa, what what what HAPPENED to you loudly enough to draw the attention of everyone in the room and Joey stays disarmingly quiet and Saul feels his lies all pounding at the windows, the ceiling, the front doors, trying to get in.
* * *
—
Antonia makes it through the cleanup and the goodbyes and she hugs Sofia tight and says, “We’ll figure all of this out in the morning, okay? I will call you in the morning,” and then she leaves, accepting Saul’s offer to have his driver take her home. As she is being driven away it occurs to Antonia that her husband is missing, and Sofia’s is right there, right there where she can see and touch him. In the back of the car she stares through the space between the two front seats and holds Enzo close to her and squeezes Robbie by the hand until he squirms away. Mamma, Mamma. That’s too tight.
When they arrive home, Antonia stands still at the bottom of the stairs to her building until Robbie says, Mamma, come on, and then she moves, one leaden leg after another. The windows in her apartment are blank, black. Darkened. Paolo isn’t there.
Antonia puts her boys to bed with shaking hands. She feels herself settling into a role she knows all too well: petty criminal missing, idiot wife surprised. Antonia and Paolo have been drifting apart, neither of them possessing the energy to pull themselves back together. Antonia’s body remembers the rattle of Paolo’s key in the lock. The way a part of her would tense, steeling herself against the fug of depression, the moody cloud Paolo would surely drag through her living room. Antonia prays for Paolo’s key in the lock now. She remembers it and she wills it to happen. The rattle of metal in metal. Antonia’s want pulls goosebumps up out of her skin, but there is only silence outside the front door of her apartment.
She pictures Paolo’s feet sunk into a bucket of hardening concrete, his body dragged through the far reaches of Canarsie, dumped flailing off the Belt Parkway into Long Island Sound. She pictures Paolo tied to a chair, swollen, beaten, while a faceless Fianzo brandishes bloodstained garden shears. Antonia spirals into panic. Mamma, are you crying? Robbie asks, as Antonia, a warm hand on his back, soothes him into sleep. No, caro mio, Antonia responds. She turns her face away. She hums an old song.
When Enzo and Robbie are both breathing deeply, evenly, their dreams inaccessible to watchful Antonia, she tiptoes into the living room and folds herself into the couch. Deep inside of Antonia, her organs are shifting back to their original places. The parts of her that carried a human being are shrinking, throbbing smaller and smaller so soon it will be impossible to imagine that anyone else ever lived inside her body. It will also be impossible to imagine that she had ever been alone. She clutches a small pillow and feels herself strain against it with every inhale. Somewhere, a clock ticks.
* * *
—
After dinner all it takes is a quick jerk of the head and Saul follows Joey into his study.
Rosa watches them go, and then tries to return to the cleanup. But she cannot focus: of course she can’t. She shuts her eyes and feels out into the wide world for Antonia’s fear, for Sofia’s, for Julia’s. She realizes that Antonia and Sofia will have to face whatever catastrophe is unfolding on their own.
Saul finds his hands are trembling.
The study has achy French doors which Joey shuts now, so the end-of-dinner din sounds like it is coming from a different world. Joey hands Saul a drink, which Saul grips until his fingertips go white. Joey runs a hand through his salt-and- pepper hair, as if he is trying to rake up a solution to whatever catastrophe Saul has wrought.
“You’re in trouble,” says Joey.
“I’m fixing it,” says Saul. He is twenty-three and he is promising Joey he loves Sofia. “I can handle it.”
“I’ve retired,” says Joey. “I will take your word for it.”
“Thank you,” says Saul.
“But I need you to promise me something.”
“Anything.”
Joey crosses his arms. “I once told you that you don’t get to die when you’re a father,” he says.
“I remember,” says Saul.
“I lied,” says Joey. “If you have to choose between you and them—”
“I know,” says Saul.
“I trust you can get yourself out of whatever predicament you’ve found yourself in,” says Joey. “But, Saul, if it comes down to it.”
“I know,” says Saul.
“Promise me.”
“I promise,” says Saul.
How can anyone move forward when their lives are increasingly full of ghosts that demand their time and attention? The ghost of Carlo, who haunts them all, and the ghosts of their former selves, the exoskeletons they all try to shed and bury, to lock in a closet, to repurpose. Their houses are full to bursting.
* * *
—
Paolo is sitting on a bench in the middle of the pedestrian overpass on the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun rises. He hasn’t been awake for a full sunrise in a long time. It is cloudy; it is as cool as New York ever gets in July; as still. There are thick, heavy thunderstorms predicted for this week, Paolo remembers. He read that in the newspaper, nine hundred years ago when he sat at a kitchen table for breakfast with Robbie and Antonia, with Enzo, this new person.
Paolo is sure he is tired, but he doesn’t feel it: the achy limbs, the scratchy, sticky eyes. If he is still enough, he feels like he is shimmering, detaching from his body. As the air thickens Paolo feels himself as something insubstantial and disconnected from the world. Later he will admire the power of this: to have an essential core, something unchanged by the chaos around him. To be a self, battered and bolstered by the tides of time.
Below him, cars begin to speed across the bridge. Big trucks with cargo for grocers and furniture and bags of concrete rumble over the East River. Commuters file across, jostling for space, honking. Paolo can feel his back begin to sweat against the wooden bench. He should have called home last night, he realizes. Antonia will be furious. She’ll be disappointed. Antonia is so often disappointed in Paolo. He never intended to be the kind of man that would cause such regular, small-scale domestic depression. You are not the man I thought you were, he says to himself.
The sky has darkened as the sun has risen, the pronunciation of morning thunderheads against the horizon becoming sinister. Green and gray. Paolo stands. It’s a long walk home, and he wonders if he will make it before it rains.
* * *
—
It is the first dawn after the longest night of Sofia’s life.