Sofia, Sofia

“I never lie,” Sofia’s grandmother would say as she leaned over the demitasse cup. “I only speak what the coffee says.” The thick residue that trickled down the inside wall carried the same pakhd, the same fortune, for everyone. A little birdie is going to bring you some news. You’re going on a long journey. You’re going to meet a man. Your heart is dark.

No one ever complained, it was always true, but Mrs. Mariam hoped her granddaughters would be the first to prove her wrong. She’d ask Sofia and her sister Suzy to poke at the heavy deposit at the center of the cup with their index fingers.

“Now your heart is illuminated,” she’d say, satisfied. She’d then take the palm of her hands and graze them slowly over their foreheads, marking their skin, Sofia’s first.

“My girl, your destiny is here.”

Sofia Hagopyan O’Rourke is desperate to drown in her Egyptian cotton sheets. Just once, she wants to wrap her body, close her eyes. She wants to deafen her ears and drift away. But Eugene’s hand rests on her heart and the rain that hits her metallic flowerpots outside makes soft tings. Sofia can hear their daughter’s muffled snores from the next room, her constant shifting in bed, the sharp groans of the mattress.

Sofia has had trouble sleeping since she was a child, and as a child, she tried to fight it. She counted her sheep, drank milk before bed, read until her eyes burned and her body gave in. Now she escapes into her daughter’s bedroom and sits in the rocking chair in which she used to nurse Janet. Sofia stares at her, making sure of the rise and fall of her chest. There.

Sofia thinks of her mother washing her grandmother’s dead body.

It has been four years since then, since she has spoken with her mother. Four years since Sofia left Los Angeles and her family to start a new one with Eugene.

If Sofia were lucky, she’d get two, three hours of sleep. But she usually isn’t. As is the luck of the Hagopyan women.

Sofia’s grandmother died cleaning her husband’s shit from her hands.

The manager of the affordable housing complex on Sunset & Normandie where Mrs. Mariam and her husband lived found her slumped over on the bathroom floor, her blue and white hands bent awkwardly at the wrists, her swollen legs showing from underneath her black dress. The faucet was running. Two pairs of smudged latex gloves hung over the lip of the open trash bin.

The manager had come to collect the rent that Tuesday. When Mrs. Mariam didn’t open the door, the manager said she knew something was wrong. Mrs. Mariam was her most loyal tenant. After she discovered the body, she called Sofia’s mother, Ruzan, at work. Ruzan, in turn, called her husband to pick her up, for she was in no condition to drive herself.

The drive from Ruzan’s workplace to her parents’ apartment was supposed to be a short one—ten, fifteen minutes at the most—but it took three times as long for them to get there.

“She kept fainting in the car,” their father explained when Sofia and Suzy arrived, breathless, just minutes after them. “I thought she would’ve been better prepared for it. She knew it was coming.”

But Sofia knew that her mother believed the body she’d be burying first would be that of her father.

It was he Ruzan had checked on first, Sofia’s father confirmed. Running past the bathroom and into their bedroom, Ruzan uttered a cry of relief when she caught his steady breathing. Her father was alive.

But then the manager called from the bathroom. “In here.”

Sofia and Suzy, just a year apart, were both in class at UCLA when they got the call from their father. They arrived at their grandparents’ place in time to hear their mother ask the manager to leave. This was a family matter.

And it was, really, though Ruzan didn...