I was kneeling in front of Gionata. At his grandmother’s words, he sucked in his cheeks with a solemn expression. He narrowed his eyes, and his gaze seemed sharper, yet hollow. He pointed to the oven, which stood at his height. He was pointing it out to me, and I knew I’d been enlisted into his diversionary tactic: I opened a nearby cabinet, pulled out an aluminum pie tin, got the big pair of oven mitts sitting next to the burners, and I slipped them onto the baby’s hands, then entrusted him with the pan. The solemnity at his grandmother’s question never leaving his face, Gionata put the pie tin and an invisible main course into the oven, then pulled them out, saying, “Burning, burning!,” blurring his consonants.

Gionata’s pain touched a part of me I hadn’t known existed before he was born. We kept playing ovens for a few minutes and I took my phone off the table to snap some photos that I went back to the entire night, when his crying and his grandmother’s attentions would wake me. Being woken up like this, getting out of bed, phone in hand, seeing if I could help, I felt exposed to a blind limbo, suspended between life and death. Every reawakening showed me a reality that was unbearable: the baby’s crying so counter to my senses, sluggish from lack of sleep; the docile willingness of the baby’s grandparents; the fact that those grandparents were my parents, that they knew the secret to my loneliness and had never revealed it to me.

At night it was even harder to get him to take his medicine from the syringes, by propping up his head. He rebelled, squirmed in his sweaty clothes, wet blond curls, disdainful look. His eyes were gummy, his eyelids, eyelashes, crusty.

How strange it was to wake up in my brother’s marriage bed, while the baby’s grandmother slept next door, and his grandfather, that mysterious man (nervous around my mother, incredibly gracious to me, almost a stranger), lay abandoned to the twin bed in the guest room—too tired even to put on pajamas, sleeping in his undone, corduroy pants …

I thought about that Christmas for weeks—I still do: me and Gionata in our role as children; my helpless parents, upset, withdrawn, kind. In early January, terrorists bombed the editorial offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in Paris, throwing Europe into chaos. Shortly after, I spent three days in a hotel in Rome’s historic center where I instructed the regional promoters on the new books they’d be proposing to bookstores. That experience and the attacks are linked for me—we were scared the hotel might be a “real target.” After the final book to be promoted, the editor in chief, sighing, laughing, ordered the packed room: “Everyone, fall out! ISIS has spared us.” As he stepped away from the PowerPoint screen, I approached him, and he looked at me, eyes completely blank, and I said: “Sorry to tell you now, like this, but I’m leaving—I quit.”