Antonia spends the afternoon at Lina’s, where Julia and Robbie have to be watched every second so they don’t pull glass jars down from shelves or dip their small fingers into hot candle wax. Lina is making jam, boiling Sicilian oranges in sugar, and the whole kitchen is filled with fragrant air. Antonia finds a set of wooden blocks for Julia and Robbie and then rolls up her sleeves and works with Lina, alternately dipping glass jars into a pot of boiling water and setting them to steam-dry on a towel on the counter with glances over her shoulder to make sure Julia and Robbie have not abandoned the blocks for electric sockets or haphazard bookshelves or tiny glass beads.

“The world seems so much more dangerous now,” she says to Lina.

“Yes,” says Lina, “because you’re looking at it through his eyes and yours all at once.”

“Were you scared?” Antonia asks. She still shivers, hot and cold hysterics, when she thinks of Lina after her father died: the way she would look at Antonia and see right through her; Lina’s volatility, her fragile face.

“All the time,” says Lina. “And I used to be ashamed of that.”

“You’re not anymore?” asks Antonia.

Lina swoops down and moves a lit candle out of Robbie’s reach. “Fear is a tool,” she says simply. “I have learned how to use it.”

Inside Antonia’s body she can feel herself, in this very kitchen, at sixteen, the war just beginning, her life an outline, yet to be filled in. Anything could have happened, she thinks. The impossibility of ending up here. The strangeness of it. The luck and the tragedy.

Other people who were sixteen when the war began had their hands blown off; their faces burnt and twisted. Their mothers were killed by roving bands of soldiers, or their villages were ransacked. They escaped, like Saul, in the watery, mildewed holds of boats. They floated across the ocean away from everything they had ever known. They starved, their stomachs twisting in prayer, clenching at nothing. They died. Again and again, they died: the lives lost (lives! As vivid as Antonia’s, as real) rattle Antonia’s hands so she drops a jar onto the floor, where it splinters with a loud crack. She finds a broom.

What do you have to show for yourself? she wonders as she sweeps glass shards off the floor of her childhood apartment. Her hands have not been blown off. She has survived. The debt she owes fate seems too heavy to bear.

Something, thinks Antonia, has to change.

—

New York City spins along with the rest of the world, but it is also an eddy in the river of the universe: turning and turning in its own current.