During the day, Paolo and Lina and Sofia fold cotton diapers, scrub the stained wooden floor, sing to Robbie when he wails. Antonia’s apartment is filled with the smells of laundry and chicken stock, drying herbs and antiseptic, baby shit and the metal of her own body healing. She tries not to inhale. When they bring Robbie to her, she holds him to her raw breast and turns her face to the wall.

Lina brings lavender tied in a bunch and boils cloves down to paste, to clear the air. She helps Antonia shower. Antonia sits in the tub with the hot water pounding against her back, her spine curved, her stretched and swollen belly resting between her legs. She leans against Lina like a child.

Sofia comes every day. She holds Julia and Robbie in her arms and hums them songs she suddenly remembers from her own childhood. She chatters to Antonia, swaying in the filtered winter sunlight coming through Antonia’s bedroom window. She seems utterly carefree. Her voice always sounds to Antonia like it is echoing from very far away.

Paolo lies beside Antonia while she sleeps, and while she can’t sleep, and while she feeds Robbie. He curls his body protectively around hers, but he stays on his own side, because she can’t bear to be touched. For the first week, he hadn’t been able to help himself from reaching for her, holding her hands in his hands, kissing her ears and her face. But she had leaked tears, muttered, stop it, stop that, no, and Paolo had retreated, circling their old marriage like a hungry animal making tracks around a carcass.

One night, Antonia wakes from a sudden, brief sleep, a sleep closer to unconsciousness than rest. She opens her eyes to see the looming shadows of her furniture. Across the room, Robbie is sleeping in his bassinet, which means Antonia has been asleep long enough for Paolo, who is sleeping next to her, to ease Robbie off of her chest and move him. She feels a wave of tenderness toward Paolo. I’m so sorry, she thinks, sensing the up and down of her husband’s breath as he sleeps. There is no other sound but the white noise of faraway, all-night traffic. I’m not good enough for you. I’m not good at this. Their three children, their spacious future home, Antonia’s rolled-up university diploma nestled against her chest with her children, in the picture she imagines taking someday. It all seems impossible. It seems further away than the moon. You’ve failed, she tells herself. She does not think she falls asleep again that night.

—

The winter passes this way.