Still, Rosa stays up nights and pictures what it would be like. To shut the creaking door of her apartment and tiptoe through the halls and out onto the street and to find her way up the dark staircase of Lina and Antonia’s building, where Lina might hug her and say, I was hoping you might come. And where, if they were lucky, they would know once again where their daughters were, and if the daughters were asleep yet.

—

On December 7, Pearl Harbor is bombed. Nothing is spared. The war, which had been someone else’s problem, a faraway tragedy, something unapproachable, enters the houses of Americans. It fastens its hands around their throats. It forces them to look it in the face.

Sofia escapes her house, where her parents are mired in adult worry, a kind of depression that makes her feel like the ground underneath her feet is quicksand. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what will happen. She takes a taxi to Manhattan. She watches the metal cables of the Brooklyn Bridge zip by and remembers being four, on her way to Sunday dinner. Nestled in the lap of her father, the bosom of certainty. How can she focus herself? How can she decide to do anything in a world that is crumbling from the foundation up?

Sofia meets Saul under cover of a dark downtown cinema. The picture has already started when she shuffles in next to him, so she greets him by way of a hand on his shoulder and presses her body toward his in the dark. He offers her a half-empty box of popcorn and she is suddenly ravenous. She scoops up handfuls at a time and lets the salt collect under her fingernails and the grease soak into her skin. Sofia snakes an arm around Saul’s elbow and leans her head against his shoulder. She can feel the bones of his arm, the long lanky way he extends out from his heart. He is solid and sure and breathing. Something in Sofia settles. Something opens.