Sofia and Antonia begin to fill the space between themselves with stories about the future. Antonia decides during her first year of high school that she will go to college. She has realized that reading, which has always been an escape from her immediate surroundings, could be an escape from her entire life. She will leave Brooklyn, she will leave the Family forever—not the way her mother did, by retreating into her own skin, but by bursting forth, by achieving something altogether new. And then, Antonia decides, she will meet someone who has never heard of the Family. Her children will never know about it. They will never feel isolated at school; their father will never disappear one day, never to be seen again. Antonia the arctic explorer, the knight on horseback, the safari adventurer, will rescue herself and her future family from the untamed landscape she has been marooned in since Carlo died.

In Antonia’s daydreams, she buys a house with a wraparound porch. She fills it with children and a husband and Lina comes for holidays and Sofia visits on weekends. No one goes to work. No one talks about the past.

Sofia can sense the sea change that must, must, must be on its way: she will end up on an unpredictable adventure. She will have a life that hasn’t been dreamed yet. She will throw off the constraints of womanhood she can already feel tightening around her future.

It isn’t lost on Sofia that, like Rosa, she is using those same constraints to her advantage, when she can. Sofia learns a lowered eyelid, an imperturbable stare. She lets Lucas Fellini take her out, but of course, the rumor about her unbuttoned blouse, his clammy hand, is untrue.

Sofia does learn, this year, to run her hands over her own body. She stands alone in front of her bedroom mirror and finds a softened place at the center of herself. This must be the thing Rosa tells her to protect. This must be the fragile heart, the thing that makes her breakable. This the cause of wars, the source of life.

It is almost enough.

—