On Sunday afternoons, Antonia goes to visit her mamma before dinner at the Colicchio apartment. Lina has draped herself so completely in long loose blouses and community legend that she is almost unrecognizable. Antonia regards Lina from a distance. There are moments she is sympathetic to her mamma, who has done what she needed to while surviving cataclysmic loss. But more often than not, Antonia feels separate from Lina. She feels judgmental. If I were in your shoes, she thinks, I would have survived better. I would have parented better. I wouldn’t have needed to become the neighborhood witch to move on. Even Antonia’s forgiveness of Lina is tinged with slight superiority, a see what I can do despite everything. She does not admit any envy of Lina’s freedom, and she does not acknowledge, even to herself, how much she still craves Lina’s attention, how weak-kneed her mamma’s quiet voice can make her feel. But when Lina palms Antonia’s belly, looking for her baby’s kicking feet and pushing hands, Antonia feels, like she did when she was five, as though she might expand and float away without Lina to hold her down.

She has only lived away from home for a matter of months but the still air inside her childhood home has already taken on the quality of something ancient, and more often than not Antonia finds herself grasping a doorjamb for stability, swallowing a lump in her throat, telling the smaller ghosts of herself that they will be okay.

—

In August, Sofia lets herself be cajoled into going to Mass with Antonia and Paolo. She knows Antonia is surprised she said yes. She almost never goes since she and Saul got married, and before that, she went only sporadically, when she didn’t have the energy to argue with her parents or when Frankie convinced her.

The air inside is cool and dry. Sofia wedges her swollen ankles against the wood of the pew in front of them and leans her neck back and feels herself unhinge and soften against the hard bench. A lump rises in her throat. She takes a full breath, and another. The air smells like her childhood. It smells like sitting between her mamma and papa on the bench. It smells like restlessness, like play sparking along her arms and legs, like wanting to be grown up, like wanting to fly. It smells like knowing what she is fighting for: ten more minutes and she can burst out of the seat, home to Antonia, to Mars, to the great expanse of the Sahara Desert, to the horses she and Antonia will sit astride as the day grows older on her bedroom floor.

Antonia worries Sofia’s pointer finger between her palms and feels unsettled. Sofia has been quiet for days, and Antonia does not know how to fill the gaps in their conversations. “Thank you for coming,” she whispers.