Sofia comes, beaming, and kisses Antonia’s forehead, and holds Julia, who is three months old and kicking, punching, grasping wildly, up to the small wicker basket where Robbie sleeps, his newborn features still pressed askew by the pressure of Antonia’s body. Julia furrows her brow and reaches out with a round fist and pummels sleeping Robbie in the chest. He awakens with a betrayed expression and opens his mouth in silence for three full seconds before a cry emerges. Fall sunlight shines through the window and Sofia fairly glows. Sofia picks up Robbie and kisses him, passes him to Antonia to feed. Antonia tries not to weep. Why isn’t it this hard for you? she imagines asking.

Paolo’s mother comes, and wraps the baby tighter in his blanket. When she is leaving, she takes Paolo aside and says, the only cure for those blues is to treat her normally. Stop treating her like a broken thing. She’ll manage once she’s back on her feet. But Paolo, in reverence of the fragile and terrible and all-powerful force his wife has become, continues to bring Antonia hot and cold cloths, teas, broths; to insist that she keep her feet up, her eyes closed.

At night, though she is heavy with exhaustion, Antonia cannot sleep. Her body pulls her down, through the mattress, through the floor. Her eyes sting, but won’t shut. Sandwiched between Paolo and Robbie breathing, she cries; her cheeks crack.

After Robbie was born, slickly ejected from somewhere Antonia never knew existed in her own body, she clutched him to her chest, full of fear. She looked at his face and didn’t know him. She grasped him with her hands, but they felt like stranger’s hands. Robbie left a headprint of blood and white smear across her chest, and Antonia couldn’t feel it. He opened his mouth and wailed, and she heard it, but faintly, like he was calling from some distance away.

When she stares down into his crib, Antonia still doesn’t know him. She is blindsided by fear, by something like disappointment. You wanted this, she tells herself. But it is nothing like she imagined.

The doctor checks on her after two weeks. He tugs her stitches out one by one; tells her she is nearly healed. Antonia feels like a steak, scored with a knife where the salt will be rubbed in.

She hadn’t considered it would be this physical. This consuming. This utterly erasing of everything she had been before. Her body is a wrecked ship’s hull and she, whatever had been “she,” was lost in a wide and dark sea.