That Christmas Eve, Daniela and Luca were on the hospital ward because their twins had been born the night before. Boys: healthy, tiny, hairy. My parents hadn’t gone to see them yet. I’d visited my sister-in-law that morning, and she’d cried with me because her parents had been so cold, staying only a short while: they found the twins alarmingly small, and it made them uncomfortable. “Can you believe it!” This was Daniela’s favorite expression. It wasn’t cold and the sun wasn’t out; on the ward, with its ancient walls and warm lighting interrupted here and there by a mirror or the fluorescent glow of some piece of equipment, she felt “suspended and useless” but also “protected in a cocoon.”

At the table, I sat by Gionata and kept one wet towel on his forehead and one on his neck. Actually, for his neck, we were using a clear blue gel pack, like those for keeping wine chilled. The little guy was wearing mismatched clothing and looked a bit like a circus clown; he had crusty cheeks the color of ripe medlar fruit, and sad orphan eyes. I sent pictures to Barbara, and she kept writing back, full of empathy, so much so that at one point she sent me a picture of her eyes tearing up.

My parents started carrying in around ten different plates of antipasti. The dinner hadn’t been scaled back after Daniela’s water broke, at the noon meal on the twenty-third; and now that the dinner was here, the ten courses of fish and shellfish were absurd. My father uncorked the spumante, we raised our glasses to say grace: my mother said this was a depressing Christmas; I told her I thought it was sweet and Dickensian. We’d dressed like it was any other day. My parents started talking together about how the fish had turned out, bickering, not angry, not cold, an inexplicable middle tone, grating at first, then slow and mournful, like they both were sad. We ate the gilthead almost suspiciously, not able to tell if it was any good. It was. The homemade mayonnaise was exquisite, pungent fresh lemon enveloped in the rounded flavor of egg.

We cleared our plates, were in the kitchen. Gionata was happy at the moment, but his eyes were still brimming from his last cry. I wasn’t applying the compresses because he’d had his medicine. With his constant state of emergency, we all knew when he’d taken his various medications, what his temperature was when he’d had his cough syrup, sucking it from two syringes, which I then rinsed and slipped back into their vials, still in their boxes. I wrote the times and doses in my phone notes, to update his parents.

His grandmother took care of him the most, and sometimes she could be thoughtless. While he wove in and out of the chairs pushed away from the kitchen table, she asked him, his back to her: “So are you happy your little brothers were born?”