The Family(11)

“It’s up to you,” says Tommy, as he stands and ushers Joey out into the hallway. “If you’d prefer to move, to start over, you can try the Bronx. You can try Chicago. But it looks best when Family sticks together. And it’s hard, just starting out, all on your own. It would be hard.” Joey interprets this to mean Tommy would make it hard. He dons his hat. He turns to go.

“Hey, Colicchio,” calls Tommy from behind him. Joey turns. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”



* * *



—

Sofia watches Joey come home from her seat at the kitchen table, where she is supposed to be folding napkins. Joey is so big the kitchen is dwarfed by comparison. He hangs his hat on its hook and runs his fingers through his hair along the little streaks of gray and white that line his temples. He sidles up behind Rosa and cups the twin domes of her shoulders with his big hands and buries his face in her hair. She leans her weight into his hands and bends her elbow to hold his fingers with her own. He says, “I dealt with it,” and Sofia says, “Dealt with what?” from the table and he says, “Nothing, cara mia.”

So Joey Colicchio stands in his kitchen. He watches his wife stir soup and he watches his daughter stare, brow creased and lips pursed, at a stack of wrinkled place mats. He is glued in place.

He feels utterly alone.



* * *



—

Next door, Antonia and Lina Russo are in the silent eye of a hurricane.

Antonia is in her room. She is sitting at the edge of her neatly made bed, and she is scared.

Everything has turned upside down, inside out. Everything is the quick skipped-heartbeat sick-stomach feeling of being in deep trouble.

Cara mia, Antonia imagines her father saying. She longs for the smell of him, for the wide soothing warmth of his hands, for the gravitational pull of her body toward the spot where it fits, curled into his chest.

Of course.



* * *



—

As the table is set around her, Sofia chews on a pencil eraser. School starts in a week. Her mamma puts bowls on the table with no tablecloth. Her papa pours deep glasses of wine from a jug at the back of the pantry. Antonia and her mamma come over from next door and the five of them crowd around the table. Lina Russo is always small but tonight she is almost translucent in her chair. She sits the still, calm vigil of someone to whom the worst thing has happened. Her soup steams, untouched in front of her.

At their corner of the table, Sofia and Antonia eat quickly, messily. Sofia is filled with a restless discomfort, and wants simultaneously to break the tension at the table and to sink down and flatten under its weight. Antonia watches her mamma out of the corner of her eye. Lina is not eating. Antonia feels like she has woken up on another planet. She wants to be anywhere else. So when Sofia speaks, she feels relief pour down through her body and she shakes with adrenaline, with dread, with the shock of her old body being thrust so viciously forward through passing time.

“I have new dress-up clothes,” Sofia says.

Antonia looks up from her soup. Thank you. “What are they?”

“Tonia,” says Sofia, who wants to fill the room with anything, even the sound of her own voice, “YOU HAVE TO SEE!” This comes out too loud. She knows immediately.

All three adults look up from their steaming silent bowls and her mother glares and says, “That’s way too loud,” and her father says, “Why don’t you girls go play in your room,” and so Sofia and Antonia get up meekly and grit their teeth against the scraping of wooden chair on wooden floor and run down the hall together. The air gets lighter as they go, as if their parents’ moods can only dampen a certain radius. Both girls are breathless with escape. How often have they done this, running like wildfire through a meadow, so eager to make something new together.

“We can play adventure,” says Sofia, digging through her toy chest for a pair of leather-rimmed goggles.

Antonia ties a scarf around her neck. She is free. She is free. She is going somewhere else. “We’re arctic explorers!”

Sofia looks at her disdainfully. “You are wearing a royal gown, not an explorer’s uniform. You should tie that around your head,” but Antonia looks at her with a quiet, wild venom and Sofia acquiesces. “Maybe you are a royal explorer.”

“We’re arctic explorers,” says Antonia, climbing onto Sofia’s bed and holding her hand to her brow to shade her eyes as she surveys the terrain, “and we have run out of food.”

Sofia jumps up next to Antonia. “We’re weak with hunger!”

“We are hunting a polar bear!”

“But it won’t come out of its cave!”

“We have written letters to our families to tell them we love them.” Antonia is solemn, just barely on the wrong side of the make-believe reckoning with mortality. “They will find our bodies in the springtime.” Her voice trembles.

“Maybe we should play something else,” says Sofia. She sits on the edge of the bed.

Antonia acts as if she does not hear. “Our souls will be in Heaven,” she says quietly.

“Antonia, I think we should play something else,” says Sofia. She twists a corner of the blanket in her fingers.

Antonia turns around, eyes on fire, arms raised. “I am an arctic explorer,” she says loudly, towering over Sofia.