I laughed, too.

Barbara spent Christmas in Anzio: supper on the twenty-fourth with her mother and the noon meal on the twenty-fifth with her father. Though it was painful for her, she felt she needed to go home for Christmas, and so she spent three days and two nights planning everything out, like someone afraid of flying yet preparing for a flight: rituals, wary distractions, silence, alcohol and anxiety meds, and constantly adding up how much time was left, like she was responsible for pushing the boulder of time into the future. If I went with her, she’d feel forced to be more open, more vulnerable.

I didn’t mind being on my own at my parents’ for Christmas, like a teenager unable to see his girlfriend.

My parents were working away in the kitchen while I kept my nephew company in the dining room. The four place settings were for me, my parents, and Gionata, two and a half years old, who had his strange recurring fever that evening. For a couple of days now, if the cough syrup wasn’t working, he grew despondent. As soon as his temperature dropped, he went back to being sweet. With the final dinner preparations, he had a high fever and was crying, sometimes enraged, sometimes confused. His eyebrows weren’t sure whether to arch or knit: it was so unfair—no, it was madness—that his mommy wasn’t here when he was sick, plus it was Christmas, the first Christmas when he seemed to understand its significance.

You couldn’t leave him alone for a second because a few times this past year, his temperature had shot up to a hundred and four within fifteen minutes, and his eyes would roll back in his head, he’d grow pale, and start to convulse. His health problem, still unexplained, and lasting half his little life now, consumed his grandparents. According to his pediatrician and a succession of doctors at admissions, it wasn’t anything; it might go away before we even discovered what it was. The pediatricians’ approach was one of magical thinking, with the baby something less quantifiable than an adult.

Ever since the day my sister-in-law, Daniela, fled outside carrying her lifeless son, running into a Chinese coffee bar, screaming, “He’s dead!,” then racing by cab to the emergency room, her baby’s care had become a collective effort. When he had convulsions, we needed to remove all his clothes and lay him on the floor, to lower his temperature. He had to be propped on his side so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue.

Daniela and my brother moved to our parents’, into one side of their apartment taking up the entire fourth floor of a building with long balconies and shaded by the pine trees in the public park below. Each place had a separate steel door on the landing, and then an interior glass door connected the two. The apartment overlooking the street had been rented out for over ten years but wasn’t under lease when Gionata started developing fevers every two weeks. Our parents gave it to Luca and Daniela free of charge; they moved there, from a small house with a yard in a former working-class neighborhood near us to an upper-middle-class neighborhood, with its empty nights and expensive food markets.