The Family(9)

Carlo pulls Sofia up by the arms and her legs wrap around his waist. He cups her face in his hands and says something Antonia cannot hear.

When all three of them are onshore again, he says, “Never turn your back on the ocean, girls. She’s tricky, and she’ll sneak up on you the moment you stop paying attention.” His face is creased with worry and Antonia is seized by an urge to say, it’s okay, Papa, but she doesn’t.

Sofia, for her part, can’t stop reliving the instant she was somersaulted under the waves. The ocean had been so much bigger and more powerful than she could have imagined. The water had rushed past her face and into her nose and eyes as though it already knew her. And how odd, to be suspended and turned that way. To have up and down made so thoroughly irrelevant.

The rest of the day passes in a slow haze. The girls are absorbed in themselves, and their parents, slightly tipsy and sun-drunk, chalk it up to the laziness of vacation. Supper is fish with boiled potatoes, and afterward, the innkeeper takes, with a wink, a brown bottle out of a locked cabinet. Sofia and Antonia are sent to bed, where they can hear the bones of the inn creak in the evening breeze, and the melody of their parents’ murmuring on the porch. So it is that Sofia and Antonia fall into the sound sleep of children at the beach, both feeling strangely powerless, and strangely free.



* * *



—

Carlo Russo is awoken sometime in the middle of the night by a soft knock on the door. It is the innkeeper, who apologizes profusely for disturbing him and tells Carlo he’s needed on the telephone.

Carlo pulls a robe around himself. There is only one person who would call him so late at night. Only one person who could summon him at a moment’s notice, call him from his sleep and his family.

And there is only one reason Carlo can think of that Tommy Fianzo would call him right now.

“Yes, boss,” says Carlo into the hallway telephone. He stands up straight as though Tommy can see him. Inside his body, fear rises. It fills his lungs. Carlo pictures the sea. He is drowning even as he stands in the hallway. She’ll sneak up on you. The moment you stop paying attention.

“I need you to come outside,” says Tommy. “I need you to take a little walk.”



* * *



—

And soon it is morning. Lina Russo wakes later than she normally does. She stretches her arms and legs under the covers and rolls over. She remembers she is on vacation, and when she rises she will drink coffee and watch the sun climb higher over the ocean. She thinks she will reach for her husband if Antonia is still sleeping.

But then Lina sees the long rectangle of white morning sun blazing in through her window. She notices Carlo’s empty side of the bed. And she feels, with a terrible force like every skyscraper in New York City has collapsed in unison, like acid has been poured down through the hollow places in her bones, like God himself has descended to tell her, that Carlo is gone.



* * *



—

Antonia is downstairs eating cereal with Sofia when she hears the scream. It is unrecognizable as her mamma until her mamma enters the screened-in porch where they are eating, still keening. The scream rattles the dishes on the tables. It makes the hair on Antonia’s neck stand on end.

This is how Antonia feels the loss of her papa: a light connecting her to the rest of the world suddenly goes out. The path forward is shrouded in darkness. Antonia drops her spoon and a long crack like a hair appears on the inside of her cereal bowl. Dread crawls like a thick slug down her throat.

And before Lina has managed to get the words out, Antonia knows that both of her parents are gone.





The day Carlo disappears is a nightmare. It isn’t in focus; it feels like it must be happening to someone else, but for the few isolated moments that appear crystal clear, real as sun, as concrete. For the rest of their lives, the girls will know that Lina was convinced to take a draft of hot whiskey with a pill the innkeeper draws from a cabinet, saying, my wife used to—this will help. They will remember Joey and Rosa, faces like ice.

There is a moment Sofia and Antonia are alone in the room they shared. They are packing to leave. They are each absorbed in the process of picking up things—a sock, a camisole, a doll—and placing those things into their suitcases. When they make eye contact across the room, they both want to speak. But they cannot hear one another over the roar of the old world as it turns into a new one.



* * *



—

When they get home, Joey kisses Sofia on the top of the head and tells Rosa he has to go out for a meeting. Antonia releases Sofia’s sweaty hand and takes Lina’s cold one and they walk up the stairs to their own apartment. Rosa makes a thick minestrone that fogs up the kitchen until she opens the window and the steam escapes with a gasp into the evening air. While it simmers she makes meatballs, unable to keep still.

She uses a closely guarded recipe involving beef, veal, pork, and, Rosa swears, and her mother swore before her, a tear from the jar her grandmother filled when she sent her children to America. The meatballs are a cure-all, the centerpiece of christenings and birthdays, but are also applied as a salve for failed tests and broken hearts and the unnameable melancholy of November.

Rosa is no stranger to the risks of the life she was born into, and so as she kneads the meatball mixture she is visited by a memory of her own mamma making dinner, waiting for her papa. Joey puts himself in danger, and Rosa holds the fear that something might happen to him. She holds it for Joey, who has no time to waste on fear, and for Sofia, who may someday need to hold a family’s worth of fear but who for now is spared. Her heart aches for Lina, who always felt fear but never knew how to contain it within herself, to use it as fuel. Rosa does not feel paralyzed in the face of Lina’s catastrophe; instead, she feels herself expand to hold every note and tremble of worry. She will protect her family. She will fight for them. She will do this at the cost of everything else.