Saul had taken Sofia aside after dinner, whispered I’m sorry, I’m so sorry into her ear and I promise you’ll be okay, it will be okay. He disappeared through the front door of Rosa and Joey’s apartment like he was never there. Sofia’s rage was made of panic, of fear, of a hollow, bitter, wrung-out stomach. Joey hugged her and said put Julia to bed, and wouldn’t engage with her, wouldn’t fight, wouldn’t tell her what was wrong. Saul’s good at what he does, Joey said. Sofia felt sure she would feel better if someone would tell her why Saul had been hurt. I know he’s good, she said to Joey, desperate. So am I. Nothing. Her want, so powerful it rose from her body and filled the room and gnashed its teeth and roared, had no effect on Saul, on Joey, on the big universal machinations guiding all of them.
So Sofia took Julia by the hand and the two of them walked the stairs back to their own apartment. Julia had hidden in the kitchen with Robbie during dinner, their play whispered, their legs crossed and sweating together. Julia curls her fingers around Sofia’s and walks in Sofia’s shadow, as close as she can, as if she might disappear into Sofia’s body. Why won’t Papa tell us what’s going on, asked Julia, but it was more of a statement: asking questions is how Julia knows to participate in collective worry. What Julia wants is more nebulous: not to know what’s happening, necessarily, but rather, not to wonder. To have the people she loves laid out in front of her like candies to choose from.
Last night Sofia supervised toothbrushing and as she leaned against the bathroom doorway and watched Julia watch herself in the mirror she realized, perhaps for the first time, how much she had missed. The nighttime rituals, the place Julia hangs her bathrobe. Which elbow she likes her bear tucked in when—usually Saul, sometimes Rosa—smooths the covers over her before she goes to sleep. And even though Saul was in trouble and Joey was keeping secrets from her and Paolo—Paolo jumped into her head, an apparition—Paolo never showed at dinner, did he, and Antonia must be frantic—Sofia found herself laughing with her daughter. Tucking Julia’s hair behind her ears and pressing a palm to her forehead.
When she left Julia, Sofia couldn’t sleep. She lay in her clothes on the bed and accepted that she would feel the whole night pass her by. Her anger became white-hot. She blamed Saul for stealing her sleep and her youth. She did this with her whole self. She scanned the room for something to destroy. There was a glass of water on Saul’s nightstand. She wanted to stomp on it. She wanted to slam it on the ground. She wanted to throw it against the wall. But Julia was just in the next room. Sofia opened her nightstand drawer to look at the gun there. What use is a gun? What use can a small body of steel and stone possibly be against the tides of time, the suffocating maw of tradition, the withholding of information? Sofia slammed the drawer shut. She climbed back in bed with a raging heart.
She didn’t sleep. But sometime in the middle of the night Sofia woke with the thick air pressing down. She eased herself out of bed and tiptoed into the living room to sit at Saul’s desk. How things have changed, she thought. How young she was, when she first did this, sneaking away from baby Julia and Saul to imagine what it would be like to live for herself. How much she has learned since then.
Sofia sat up straighter. Yes: how much she has learned. She is not the idealistic newlywed, not the untried new mother. She is no one to push around.
Sofia opens each of the drawers in Saul’s desk in turn. The last is locked. She narrows her eyes, slides her hand into the drawer pull and yanks so fast and so hard that anyone awake might have thought there was a crack of thunder. The drawer splinters. Inside are small notebooks. Sofia is opening them before she realizes what she is doing. She is scanning pages covered in Saul’s quick scrawl. T.F. alone, though last time he said he’d bring Jr. this month. Apparently Jr. not as enthused by the opportunity to meet me. One guard, the big one w/ nine fingers who spends all his time smoking. T.F. says things might change now that Joey’s not in charge, now that he’s stepping down.
If this was a journal, Sofia thinks, or a record for Joey, it wouldn’t be locked away. What could Saul have been doing that he needed to hide from his family?
And then Sofia begins, like anyone would, to replay moments from the last year. Why can’t we sit together like a real family? Saul had been touchy, angry, sure of what a real family would do. Implying, Sofia realizes, that he didn’t have one. He has been unhappy, she realizes. And I have not been listening.
There is a phone number written on the first page of the notebook Sofia is holding. She picks up the phone on Saul’s desk and dials.
“Whoever is waking me up for the second fucking time tonight had better have a good fucking reason,” says a male voice on the other end.
“Who is this?” asks Sofia. She asks with the same certainty she had once asked Joey why. She asks, and she expects an answer. She calls it out of thin air; she demands it.
“Ma’am,” says the voice on the phone, “I think you might have the wrong number.” It is softened, now. It is off guard.
“I can assure you,” says Sofia, “I do not. Who are you?”
“My name is Eli,” says Eli Leibovich, “but I am certain you’ve dialed—” Sofia doesn’t hear the rest of what he says, because she has put the phone on the table. There is only one Eli whose number Saul would need to lock in a drawer. The way Saul has gotten into trouble becomes crystal clear.
Like she is in a dream, Sofia leaves the phone buzzing off its hook and floats downstairs to stand on her porch in the night air. As a child, she was scared of Lina’s helplessness, the way a part of her disappeared when Carlo did.
The part of Sofia that lives in Saul will disappear if Saul does, but Sofia, standing in her nightgown in the warm predawn air, is not going to let that happen.
* * *
—
As daylight grays the sky it reveals a building which stands alone at the edge of the Red Hook dockyard. It is a Monday, so the longshoremen are arriving in quiet pairs, with their lunch pails and their thermoses of coffee. The building looks like it must once have been grand, but soon the sky will be light enough that the cracks and missing chunks in the fa?ade will all be revealed.
If the longshoremen look closely, they can see something strange there. Something like a specter, a fairy tale. Something about which their mothers would have said, don’t get too close.
Did you see? one might ask the others. No, the others will reply. It’s best not to see.
But some of them will be sure they saw her. Lying in wait: a barefoot woman with wild hair, sitting on the steps to the building as dawn brims over.
* * *
—
Antonia wakes with a shooting pain running from the crown of her head down the side of her neck. Serves you right, she thinks, getting up from the floor of Robbie’s bedroom, for sleeping. And then: where is Paolo.
Antonia pads into the kitchen on soft feet. Her boys are sleeping, still as windless water. Paolo is not in the kitchen; he is not in the living room.
When Antonia was a teenager, she resented Lina for reminding her, again and again, about the pitfalls of Family life. Her mamma felt she married into a trap. Antonia can feel the metal teeth biting into her own leg now.
I should have listened to you, Mamma, Antonia thinks as she sits on the stool near the phone in the kitchen. She hovers her hand above the phone. She wills Paolo to call. Antonia’s worry has settled down into the throbbing of her neck, her back. It sits like lead in her intestines.
And then the phone rings.
Antonia answers before the first trill dies down. “Paolo.” A prayer.
“It’s Saul.”
“Saul.” Antonia’s neck twinges. Her hips are connected to the top of her head by a live wire of pain.
“Sofia didn’t answer. Have you talked to her?”
“Saul, what is going on? Where is Paolo?”
“I don’t know,” says Saul. “I’m sorry. But, Antonia, I can’t reach Sofia. I’ve been calling all morning.”
Antonia’s boys are still asleep. She can feel them through the walls. Somewhere, something rumbles: thunder, or her own self. Antonia grips the phone. “Did you try downstairs?”
“I don’t want to worry Rosa and Joey unless I have to,” Saul says.
“Saul, why don’t you go home? Go check on her? Where are you?”
“Just keep them safe,” says Saul. “Just tell them how much I love them.”
“Saul, please,” says Antonia. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
“I’m not, Tonia. I promise.”
“Saul,” says Antonia. “Are you going to be okay?” She does not say, I promised Sofia.