Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Marie considered this. Possibly Vincent was right. Eventually Sicily’s molten heart would harden against a man who had made soap bubbles of her dreams and popped them. What could Vincent tell Sicily that would make her believe anything except that she’d fallen short in his eyes, in his arms? Distance could be overcome. Age could be reduced to a comic issue. Even men, Marie knew, weren’t immune to the ambush of love. What they meant when they said they cared too much to call was that they couldn’t be bothered.

  Those very words were probably written in charcoal on the walls of caves.

  Sicily came in from the terrace.

  “Beth,” Sicily said. “I thought you’d given up on me.”

  “No, just … Eliza’s been feeling really lousy at night, but she won’t stop working no matter what anyone says.” Beth shifted her gigantic purse to her other shoulder and crossed her arms. “Actually, Sicily, I kept waiting for you and Vincent to talk before I starting working with you again. I feel like a silly ass. I don’t know what to say.”

  Kit thoughtfully freighted the food inside and, expertly accustomed to Sicily’s cabinets, measured out coffee.

  “There isn’t anything to say,” Sicily told Beth. “It’s not your fault.” She sank down into her absurdly cushy sofa. “It is what it is.”

  In a gesture Marie recalled from Sicily’s childhood—and, in truth, her niece looked reduced, no more than twelve—Sicily rubbed the backs of her hands against her forehead. Gia had preached to Sicily that the surest way to get pimples was to put your hands all over your face and, instinctively, Sicily still tried to finesse that.

  “If I don’t feel better soon, honest to God, Marie, I will let you take me to the doctor. I’m totally dizzy. And cold. And I could throw up from the smell of the coffee.” Springing to her feet, Sicily did barely make it to the sink, where she delicately heaved up her bite of croissant and teaspoon of tea. She grabbed for a dish towel and said, “Oh, this is totally humiliating.”

  “That’s it,” Marie said. Now Sicily was exhibiting three of the five or six symptoms of rejection. Furious, she stood up and rang for Angel to bring her car to the front from the garage.

  “No, not now,” Sicily protested weakly. “We don’t even have an appointment. It’s Sunday.”

  “Sicily, you need to go. Call me later,” Beth said. “If you have flu or something on top of all this, I may kill Vincent.”

  Kit insisted on riding along. It was a measure of how punk Sicily felt that she’d worn no makeup and hadn’t even changed out of her scrubs and an ancient knee-length sweater that Marie thought had once belonged to Jamie. Sicily usually dressed more thoughtfully to sleep alone than she had today.

  At the clinic, Hollis Grigsby’s lieutenant, the young Brit they all called Livingston, breezed out of the sprightly lavender hall at UIC’s Urgent Care.

  “Sicily Coyne,” Livingston said. “How pleasant of you to pop over!”

  “I’m hardly popping,” Sicily said.

  “Ladies, why don’t you come back here and wait in one of the offices and we’ll do an inventory. I have to say, Sicily, you look a bit done in. Too much party?”

  Sicily shook her head.

  “Well, if I had to guess, I’d say maybe a bit of anemia. We’ll get you stuck with a few dozen needles and do you right up.”

  Sicily disappeared with Livingston and a nurse Marie vaguely recognized. Left alone, Kit and Marie made a few rapid-fire stabs at small talk: How was work? Crazy. Christmas shopping started? Not one bit. They then seemed to mutually agree to occupy themselves with seeing how fast they could flip through magazines that promised they could take ten years off their look with one fashion trick and walk forty pounds off for the New Year. There were more than a dozen magazines in the office. By the time the nurse returned, absent Sicily or Dr. Livingston, Marie and Kit were down to trying to find the hidden comb and the kite in the Highlights drawings. Marie glanced at the clock. Sicily had been with the doctor for ninety minutes. Sweet Christ! Some of that blood work must have shown an alarmingly high—or was it low?—white-cell count. Something was terribly wrong.

  “Dr. Livingston will be out in a moment to speak to you,” the nurse said. “Sicily’s just resting.”

  “Resting?” Marie said.

  “Dr. Livingston?” Kit said. “That’s his name? Like, Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

  “Bingo,” the nurse said wearily. “You’re the only one who’s ever said that.” She smiled. “Someday there’ll be a whole generation of people who’ve never heard that line and Stan will be happy.”

  From every deathwatch of the famous she’d covered, from the night her sister Gia died, from every receptor in her palette of senses tuned up to the highest frequency, Marie knew that good news in a hospital travels fast. Indeed, when Livingston approached, he seemed almost to stroll, noticing the scenery, as though deliberately placing each step on some invisible path.

  Kit stood up.

  Marie stood up.

  “Mrs. Caruso,” the doctor said. “Sicily is not in rejection. Her vitals are great and we don’t think there’s any kind of disease process going on from what we can determine. We are going to run a few more tests, and for that, we’d like to admit her overnight. So, in a moment, I’ll take you back to see her and then you and …”

  “Kit. Katherine Mulroy.”

  “You and Miss Mulroy can go and get her some trashy mags and the things she might want from home.”

  “Dr. Livingston, what are you worried about?” Marie said.

  Livingston examined his immaculate hands. “This is potentially an extremely sad situation. Let’s hope not. At best, it’s an unfortunate inconvenience. Sicily’s life is not in danger.”

  “What is?” Kit said.

  “Doctor. This is my kid. There’s a very heavy shoe that hasn’t dropped in this room,” Marie said.

  “Yes. There’s that. It seems that our Sicily is pregnant.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  How many nights had I lain gazing up at acoustical-tile ceilings of hospital rooms and wondering if acoustical tiles were simply cheaper or were intended to muffle the cries? I didn’t even look at Dr. Livingston when he asked me if I wanted my aunt to stay with me while Kit went back and got me an overnight bag. I did not want my aunt to come in just then. Aunt Marie would pretend that she was angry, when she actually was heartsick, but beneath her concern she would be thinking that I was a half-wit and the female version of Jonah, her own personal bad-luck charm.

  I was my own bad-luck charm.

  Pregnant? I thought.

  Pregnant?

  Of all the things I had been fearfully yet grimly prepared to hear Dr. Livingston say, this had not been on the list, or even in the vicinity of the mental paper on which I’d written the list. When Vincent and I made love, the condoms weren’t linked in my mind to any real possibility of … pregnancy. They were like a courtesy, like a hook-and-eye latch on a screen door, truly preventing nothing, a barrier that even a little … a little kid could defeat.

  A little kid.

  I couldn’t be pregnant. I could not be. But they’d taken enough blood from me, it seemed, to transfuse every trauma patient admitted that night to the hospital. They’d run that test over and over. The results were conclusive. And so was my fear, a kid’s fear. I’d only felt this way one other time, the first time Eliza and I talked transplants—a thousand years ago—disoriented, like Alice through the looking glass. There must have been a terrible accident. There had been. The accident was within me, the size of the head of a pencil.

  I wanted it out.

  Out now. Even when Joe and I were first thinking about marriage, Joe was talking kids long, long before I was ready to consider them in anything except—please excuse the expression—a conceptual way. In hindsight, I knew that the kids were Joe LaVoy’s beard, not just his mother’s obsession: If he had pretty kids, it would blunt the impact of being shackled forever to the girl who had no face. It would give him somethi
ng to show off, the way guys showed off their wives. As I lay there, curled on top of the covers, I wondered if I ever would be meant to be a mother.

  And I decided I would.

  But not now.

  Then I thought about Vincent and was surprised by the awful wave of hunger that barreled through me when I considered that this … this accident was a product of my one week as someone’s beloved.

  Well, as someone’s pretend beloved.

  As someone’s roomie with benefits.

  As for the abortion itself, I wasn’t at all frightened. I wished I could have it tonight. I wondered how it was possible at this stage that there was not some medical remedy, like a long-acting morning-after pill. All I could think was, Hold on. You have been through so much worse, this isn’t even a blip on the screen. Tomorrow this will be all over. All over.

  Dr. Livingston returned, and the nurse everyone called Derry—although her given name was Adair—helped me get as comfortable as you can get in a hospital bed. “I see you won’t need to change for surgery,” Dr. Livingston said. “You can just scrub in.”

  I didn’t answer.

  He let out a gusty breath and said, “Sicily, I apologize. That sounded wrong. I didn’t mean that. Frankly, I don’t know what to say. This is a bit unprecedented and all too tough for you. I suppose that the best-laid plans …”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Alas. I’ve got both feet in my mouth now. You did use a second form of birth control.”

  “Yes.”

  “And so both a condom and the shot failed.”

  “Well, there was a second form except once.”

  “Which is, as they say, all it takes. And you know, Sicily, this is a bit of a non-starter.” He drew himself up. “It’s more than that. I know you have read all about the fellow you refer to as the Canadian crazy. Well, he died a horrible death.” I began to speak and Dr. Livingston held up a stop-sign palm. “He died a horrible death because of being off his medication. At any point, perhaps he could have been saved, but he still might have died from sepsis as his transplanted skin became necrotic. A slow death. As Americans say, we aren’t messing about here, Sicily.”

  “What they say is, we’re not messing around, Dr. Livingston.”

  “Just so. I know that this must be very sad for you—”

  “It’s not. I wasn’t planning to have a baby.”

  “But for all women, having an abortion is sad.”

  “How do you know all women? Aren’t you thinking only of your wife or your sister? And what if your life was at stake? Or theirs was?”

  Dr. Livingston placed his immaculate hands on his knees and studied them. “Well, Gwen and I are only now trying to adopt a child. We couldn’t conceive,” he said. “And perhaps I should not have used the term ‘very sad.’ What I meant, really, was … unpleasant. Unavoidable unpleasantness. I’m grateful and happy that you’re being so reasonable in a situation that might shatter another girl. You really must be careful.”

  “Dr. Livingston, this was a mistake, not a plan to defeat my transplant. I’m not nuts and I’m not a schizo and I’m not suicidal. Don’t you dare suggest that I sabotaged myself,” I said. “I won’t put myself in danger. I won’t put my face in jeopardy. This is my fault. But you don’t have to rub it in.”

  Livingston said, “I’m sure there’s not a person in the world who would say this is your fault. You have been a model patient. If anything, the fault is utterly our own for not considering the factors that could pertain to a woman so young and, if I may say, so very pretty as you are now.” He narrowed his eyes. “Disneyland apart, I would not, uh, have explicitly prescribed a theme park.”

  “And yet that’s not where I got in trouble. Gosh, that’s what they used to call it. Back in the day.”

  Livingston stood up. He said he’d paged Hollis, who would be along presently. Oh, great, I thought, great. Another disapproving mother-age figure who, as an added bonus, never said anything argumentative, so you couldn’t disagree with her. Hollis bent you to her will simply by being aloof, withholding the approval you somehow wanted from her so badly. Eliza had told me as much, that the interns and residents fell all over themselves like performing seals, trying to win a brief nod and a “just so” from Dr. Grigsby.

  Dr. Livingston left. I crossed to the bed and lay down.

  To my utter disbelief and breathless rage, I realized that I was … sad.

  I wanted to call Dr. Livingston back and tell him off.

  And then I recognized that this had everything to do with the truth that the body, as I had told myself so often, has a head.

  Oh, Vincent, I thought, I did it with you, with all the feelings you’re supposed to have when you do that for the purpose it’s intended. Maybe one of those feelings somehow got into the slipstream of reproductive destiny, and biology decided that I was the woman from the neck down who I can’t ever be from the neck up. Does everyone have regrets, the way Dr. Livingston suggested? Even in California? What if all the chips were not stacked on the side of my face? Would I tell you right now? It would have sounded like the antediluvian ploy for snagging the guy. Surely I had more chops than that. But I didn’t need to have chops. In this fix, I didn’t need to be pro-choice; I was already no-choice. And if there had been a choice? If we were just two mokes who experienced a technical failure? Why would I tell you and make you suffer too? And what if you didn’t care? What if you thought of this like … having your hard drive blow up? Did I really want to know that either?

  I glanced at the giant schoolhouse clock and, as I had become adept at doing, immediately corrected for the time it was in California. Five in the evening. A sunny Sunday at the little blue clapboard house across the sandy street from the beach that stretched away to the end of reckoning, so that the mind had to conjure what the eye could not observe.

  The silly-assed music began to swell: There we were, Vincent and me, dragging the picnic basket between us, a chunky little kid running ahead, too close to the tickle of the tide … No.

  I didn’t want a child. I wanted … maybe a new job. Maybe to be a professor. To go skiing in Utah. Maybe—someday—that kid.

  Damn it!

  Why in the hell did they give me a whole night to lie here without a good sedative and think morbidly mopey thoughts about a guy?

  I sat down on that beach. It was late October. Even the surfers, too dumb and stoned to feel the cold, had gone off to Mexico or Hawaii. The little stand that sold ice cream was boarded up for the winter.

  There wasn’t a single person on that strand except one woman, her shoulders lost in a big old stretched-out sweater, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees, her long hair snarled by the rising wind.

  She sat looking out to sea. You couldn’t see her face.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Vincent,” Beth said. “Are you awake?”

  “Now I am,” he said. “What time is it?”

  “It’s eight o’clock on Monday morning.”

  “Wait,” Vincent said.

  Beth listened, not patiently. Something metallic clanged and something heavy, like a thick book, thumped on Vincent’s end.

  The sounds made Beth want to scream. She was not a terrifically neat person herself. Still, it drove her over the edge when people on TV knocked the phone off the nightstand and mumbled, “Yuh,” even when it was the detective calling to say the woman buried alive had only one hour of oxygen left. What was that about? Were people who slept heavily supposed to be more virile and serious, unlike Beth, who could be awake and cogent in one second? Were these shows written by the same people who thought it was sexy if women ate meat?

  “Vincent, are you there now?”

  “Yes, I am. I am. You do know it’s six o’clock here—in the morning.”

  “Well, I’m not calling to ask about the weather.”

  “Ma, is something wrong? Is Eliza okay? Is the baby okay?”

  Beth thought, Is this possible? Of cou
rse not. Why would this be the first thing to spring to Vincent’s mind? Now what could she say? She could say that she dialed the number by accident when she knocked the phone and the lamp off the nightstand. She could say she was lost in South Dakota.

  “It’s about Sicily Coyne,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Is Emily there?”

  “No.”

  Beth tried to gather and sort her thoughts, but they were fragmentary. She could not even match up the emotions with the various slices of fact: One thought was about the baby, but not Ben and Eliza’s baby. Another was the fact that Sicily was pregnant but, by tomorrow, she would not be. Sicily did not want Vincent to know. Beth was refusing to honor Sicily’s privacy (guilt). Vincent was a gutless, self-centered egoist whose behavior with Sicily made Beth ashamed, despite the fact that she fully intended to defend him to Marie Caruso at lunch just a few hours from now (ambivalence), and his brevity at this moment was indicative of some strain of Vincent’s personality that Beth had known well, twenty years ago, and wanted to believe had improved with time.

  “So,” Vincent said. “If this is about what happened between Sicily and me, I’ve told you, Ma, I feel terrible about it. But it would have never worked. She’s so young—”

  “Gee,” Beth said. “How could a girl whose father burned to death in front of her and whose mother died in a car wreck and who lived with a horrible injury for more than ten years be such a ninny? I can see why that was stressful.”

  “What’s going on? I can tell you’re mad. Like, irrational.”

  “Sicily is pregnant.”

  “Wow.”

  Wow? Beth thought. “Despite whatever form of birth control was used, nothing is foolproof, and, yes, Sicily is pregnant.”

  “You’re saying she’s … I’m the father?”

  “Are you stupid?”

  “Well, how long has it been?”

  Beth realized she had been married too long. She had become her mother-in-law. “Vincent, do you think there is any reason on earth I would be calling to tell you this, especially at six in the morning, if you were not the father?” Beth said, and immediately repented. She did not want to say “the father,” because that implied there would be a child, and there would not be a child.