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“I couldn’t breathe. Does that count?”

Signora Strazza nods. “So much of happiness is circumstances, and that is a matter of luck.Fortuna.”

“Or is all of life mapped out before we arrive at the destination?” I wonder aloud.

“I am an Italian mother,” Signora Strazza announces for an audience beyond just me. “Fate and I are not friends. I went through so much to have my son. I named him Angelo because I prayed so hard when I found out I was expecting him. I had two miscarriages before him, and I almost stopped trying altogether. And then,miracolo. You’re young. You don’t understand this yet.”

“I understand,signora.” And then something I vowed to keep tomyself for the rest of my life would not stay buried. I leaned forward and said, “I lost a baby too.”

Signora Strazza looks at me, her eyes full of understanding. “I am so sorry.”

We ride in silence until I explain. “It was very early. I cope with it, I’m still dealing with it, and maybe this sounds dramatic, but it destroyed me. I was surprised at the depth of the heartbreak. My own mother doesn’t know. I couldn’t tell my sister; she was happy with three healthy daughters and I didn’t want to upset her. My brother and I have never shared pain on that level. So I turned to my Aunt Lil, who couldn’t have children herself, knowing she would understand my grief. I still wrestle with how I could love a soul I had never met. But you can. You do. Aunt Lil understood. She tried to have a baby too, but it wasn’t to be because she had an ectopic pregnancy, and that ended her chances of ever having her own child. I found out I was pregnant one day, and it seemed like I lost it the next day. It happened so fast I hadn’t yet told my husband I was pregnant when I miscarried. I hadn’t had a chance to share the good news when I had to deliver the bad news. The look on his face. I couldn’t bear it.”

“You didn’t try again?”

“Not with my heart in it. And now,signora, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Bobbywasunderstanding, as he was about everything, but my heart and view of him changed when we lost the pregnancy. He moved on very quickly, it felt to me. Bobby struggled with why I would hold on to the loss when we could try again. You could surmise that Bobby was a positive person, and it was a loving suggestion to encourage me to let go of the sadness, because he could see how it consumed me. But I wasn’t ready to let it go. I wanted himto understand how unbearable it all was for me. I wanted him to help me move through it, but he didn’t know how.

“I feel badly that I was so hard on you,” Signora Strazza says.

“You weren’tthathard on me. I’m from New Jersey, and we can take it. But I hope this helps you understand why I need the kitten. I need continuity somehow. I mean, she’s not a baby, or a husband, or a person, but she comforts me.”

Signora Strazza reaches for my hand. “We share this. I wish we didn’t. I’m sorry.”

I know she is truly sorry. I am too. I learned to keep my troubles to myself because sharing them would only deepen the pain, or at least, that was my perception. I pull a book out of my backpack and settle back in the seat. I try to focus on the words on the page, but I can’t.

I close the book and excuse myself. Signora Strazza nods and shuts her eyes. She will be asleep again in no time. She’s grieving her husband, her first Christmas without him, so her sleep is sporadic, like all those with broken hearts who wake up and wonder if their pain is just a dream and find themselves sickened when it is not. I still have those dreams, less as time goes on, but they are never truly gone.

I get up, and holding the luggage shelf, I work my way through the train car. I bypass the ladies’ room and open the door between the cars. A cold wind cuts through me. I need air, as much as I can inhale. I breathe in and out until my breath matches the rhythm of the turn of the train wheels, metal on metal.

I grip the door handles and stand between the cars and cry. I mourn everything I’ve lost, my old life, my grandmothers, my marriage, Uncle Louie, and the pregnancy. I ask the Blessed Mother to help me leave my sadness behind on the tracks that disappear in the mist as if they were never there in the first place. Time becomes athick fog; there is no looking back through it.Take away my pain, I plead. I can’t outrun my sadness for the rest of my life, but I don’t want to carry it either.

Signora Strazza is asleep when I return to my seat. I sit and open my phone. It’s almost Christmas Eve as I remember the Feast of the Seven Fishes. I wipe my eyes and write.

I was eightyears old as I stood at the bay window in my parents’ house and watched the biggest snowfall of my lifetime blanket the neighborhood on Christmas Eve. The snow was so heavy I couldn’t see the lake. I had all the fears a child might have about Santa Claus traveling through the storm and down a chimney. I was afraid the holiday would be ruined. On the Baratta side, in our southern Italian tradition, Christmas Eve was a night of fish, family, and faith that culminated in Midnight Mass at Saint Catharine’s. The Cap side threw themselves into the tradition because they would never stand in the way of a good party. Furthermore, a blizzard would not cancel the Feast of the Seven Fishes. We would proceed and persist. Mom lined up our Wellies by the door and placed scarves, mittens, and hats on the bench for each of us to brave the trek from house to house. Dad put chains on the tires of our station wagon so we would not slip into a ditch on the way to Spring Lake for Midnight Mass. Despite my doom, I felt safe, as though no harm could come to us.

The feast had been planned for weeks. On Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, the women of the family gathered inGrammy B’s kitchen and drew the fish they would prepare out of a hat. Nobody wanted to draw the smelts, because the scent of the fried sardines stayed in the curtains until Easter.

Connie even drew a map so the families on the block would move in order from house to house, appetizer through dessert. Seven homes, including ours, would serve one fish dish, with the eighth stop, Aunt Lil and Uncle Louie’s garage, foril finale, the Venetian dessert table.

They transformed their immaculate garage into a party room, with lights, a tree, and a dessert spread, including a chocolate fountain, a build-your-own-sundae bar with hand-cranked gelato, and a stuff-your-own-cannoli table. Anything your heart desired, you could have, but what we didn’t know was that we hadla dolce vitaall along. We were together, every side of the family, in-laws including extended family that included Sicilians, Neapolitans, and the random Irish, all celebrating together. Our southern Italian side celebrated Christmas Eve, but the Tuscans, instead of fasting, as was their tradition, went along for the ride. The feast was a tradition long before Mom sent Louie to the Island, and yet beautiful memories of Christmases past weren’t enough to save it. The Feast of the Seven Fishes was abruptly canceled whenever my mother feuded with her brother. And, as these things go, the feast was reinstated when Mom decided to make up with him. The loss of those holidays was never addressed. We were expected to rewrite history and move on as though the pain had not been inflicted in the first place.

“Buon appetito!” Uncle Louie raised a glass of eggnog in the garage to toast. “Tola famiglia!” He sipped along with the rest of the grown-ups. “Tastes like Carrara.”

“Carrara. Carrara. Louie talks about that place like it’snothing but heaven. I wouldn’t know. Never been there.” Aunt Lil sipped her eggnog. “And don’t ask me, Lou. I don’t want to go traipsing all over the world. I like New Jersey.”

“You’re Sicilian, Lil. A different set of traditions altogether. Island people.”

“I go along with yours, don’t I?” Aunt Lil said pleasantly.

I went up on my toes and dipped a spoon in the chocolate fountain as Uncle Louie told a story about his time in Italy. The family gathered around him on their folding chairs, leaning in to listen.

“There I was, in the same quarry as Michelangelo. Blinding white-hot light as far as the eye could see. I’m not kidding, the exact same place where Michelangelo got the marble to sculpt the statue of David. I’m a kid from New Jersey on hallowed ground. I do whatever they tell me, and soon they see I’m serious, and they teach me to cut the stone. I’m on the mountain, dangling off the face of the marble—not just me, there were maybe a dozen of us. We are suspended in air, wearing these leather harnesses. They told me to hold on to my tools; if you drop one, you’re screwed. You have to wait for another guy to swing over to you, which can take hours because we’re up there to measure and cut. The sun is beating down hard on us; we’re frying in the heat. But the marble is always cool, it doesn’t heat up, so in a way, you learn to love the marble because it gave us comfort. My Italian wasn’t great when I got there, but I learned quickly. There was a brotherhood on that mountain. Now, you all know I love my sister, but there was something about being accepted by these guys who had no reason to take me in that taught me the meaning of family. And maybe a little about courage.”

“You are so lucky to have been born a man,” my motherpiped up. “You got to go to Italy and have an adventure. The summer you were gone, I washed cars, cleaned my mother’s house, and put up raspberry jam.”

“That’s how it was for girls back then, Phil. Don’t blame me; I didn’t create the system,” Uncle Louie said.