Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “And that’s where we’re open to legal exposure,” said Joel Brodsky.

  Hollis delicately plucked up a few mouthfuls of what she now assumed was lo mein with chicken and thought before she said anything. Technically, the hospital was not liable for anything Sicily Coyne chose or anything that befell her as a result of the transplant—emotionally or physically. Stacks of forms released the University of Illinois, the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus, the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus Hospital and Clinics, the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus Transplant Clinic, the University of Illinois Chicago Circle Campus Department of Psychology, Dr. Hollis Grigsby … her heirs, their heirs and their assigns, the city of Chicago, the known universe … and, at the end of the day, all of those came to nothing in a situation for which there could have been no planning for this foreseen consequence.

  “Here,” Brodsky continued, “it points out that should Sicily Coyne willingly or unwillingly fail to present herself on the assigned day each month for her injection … and should a pregnancy result from that failure …”

  “She didn’t, though,” Hollis said. “It was the medicine that failed, not Miss Coyne.”

  “But she absolves us of any responsibility for any resulting—” Joel went on.

  “I think in fact she does absolve us for any result,” said Hollis. “Not in legal terms but in real terms. As Livingston said, Sicily knows her medicine.”

  “So our course here is …” Polly Guthrie said. “To counsel when asked? To advise, as Livingston did initially?”

  Hollis shook her head. “Our course is to wait,” she said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When Vincent called, I didn’t recognize the number. It was a Chicago exchange. So I picked up without preparing myself and said crisply, “This is Miss Coyne, Coyne Illustration and Design. Please leave a message. I’ll call back sooner rather than later.” I didn’t try to beep.

  “Sicily, it’s Vincent,” he said, as I put my hand over the microphone opening. “I’m glad that you didn’t answer, because I need to get this all out before we talk any more, and that might be hard, especially since we haven’t talked for a while. Which is my fault. What I want to say is how sorry I am. It sucks that you had to find this out alone and make this decision alone. It sucks that something so sweet turned out so painful. Maybe I don’t know how you feel, but I think I might know a version of it. Like, thinking you won something you never imagined you would and then finding out you could lose more than you ever imagined you could lose. I’m here in town. You know Eliza had the baby. You might be too sad to see me—”

  “I’m not that sad,” I said.

  “What? Who’s there?”

  “I said, I’m not that sad. There’s nothing to be sad about yet. I suppose I will be soon, but not yet.”

  “You sat there and listened to me the whole time?”

  “You were speaking into a telephone, Vincent, to me. It wasn’t like I was eavesdropping.”

  “It feels that way! I completely had my guard down.”

  “So, if I said anything, you’d have put your guard up?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  I hadn’t meant what I’d said either. My big mouth, which still seemed to have a life of its own, after all it has done to me, jumped out like some crazy warrior waving a shield, eager to demonstrate that I would defend the chance to hurt my own feelings before anyone else could. Beyond my unfortunate inability to pass up any opportunity to be flippant in unfortunate circumstances, it was also true that everything about Vincent’s speech, so carefully mournful, pissed me off. So after my first riposte, I held my tongue.

  Finally, Vincent said, “But, Sicily, what could possibly be the upside of this?” As though that wasn’t obvious.

  The first thing that popped into my head was “It’s a normal experience. It’s what might have happened to me in the ordinary way of things. It’s interesting.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen, Sicily.”

  “Neither was any of the other stuff.”

  Vincent sighed. Suddenly he seemed so much older than I. He asked if he could come over, today or later in the week, or if I would meet him someplace.

  Of that, I wasn’t sure. It seemed abrupt. I did want to see him. Of course I wanted to see him. There was no reason that I shouldn’t have wanted to see Vincent, except that he hadn’t managed to intuit by ESP that I was pregnant—when that thought hadn’t even crossed my own mind. I’d known about it for two weeks now. He hadn’t called me or shot me a text or spent a couple of bucks on a greeting card since I’d left California. (Although what would it have said? The story’s always true … a screw is just a screw …) Why avoid Vincent, now that he’d shown up in Chicago for some other reason entirely than seeking me? Why, except that we’d done it like rabbits for six days and then he seemingly forgot we’d ever met?

  So I gathered my courage to refuse. But my courage was rinsed away by what I could only call the unreason of desire. Softly, I said, “I’ll drive down to see you. I’ll pick you up … You’ll be my pickup.” I was paraphrasing a line from an old movie, one that I loved, and I should have known that Vincent wouldn’t miss something like that. It was maybe one of the saddest movies of all time.

  “That was a great film about very poor impulse control,” Vincent said. “And its adverse consequences.… So, are you going to come with Marie?”

  But I just said a quick goodbye and ended the call.

  He didn’t know I had a car.

  I’d had it for only six days. I bought the car before I had a driver’s license. I paid cash. All that money I’d saved for my wedding and fancy kitchen appliances.

  I GPS’ed Beth and Pat’s town and was surprised to see how far away it was from the city. But that was okay. Driving was a novelty for me. It did not at all intimidate me that my previous trips were precisely two—one to the mall, where I sat in the parking lot and said to myself, You have just accomplished the same thing as most sixteen-year-old people do, and one to the clinic. I would now be traveling, if I counted traffic, a good ninety minutes, straight, up to Harrington, and I did not even really know where that was—just one of those pretend towns somewhere south of Wisconsin. I’d been there only once, with my aunt, and I remembered nothing except the look on Beth’s face as she opened her bright-blue front door. A bright-blue door in a swanky subdivision. That would narrow it down. I could call back and get the exact address, but I would have rather swallowed a handful of straight pins. Luckily, I found Beth and Pat Cappadora in the online white pages. I was actually looking forward to what now seemed as though it would be a sort of journey, a road trip.

  My driving lessons had been remarkable for their succinct and precise nature, eight hours on two consecutive weekends requiring nothing more than twin Styrofoam cups of black coffee, my aunt’s nerves of steel, her stalwart Toyota Camry, and the huge parking lot at T. J. Hintzey. I’d passed my test first try. What amazed me more than the car was my driver’s license picture. How could I stop staring at it? I rearranged it in different places in my wallet as though I was a sixteen-year-old kid, which was exactly what I was in this regard, developmentally delayed by nearly ten years. My driver’s license picture was my first ordinary photo, just a picture like anyone else’s picture. When the woman who took it made me pose a second time, I almost started to hyperventilate—had she noticed something odd about me? But it was only because I wasn’t close enough to the white line and the top of my head would have been sliced out. Smile nice, the woman said. She couldn’t tell and she didn’t care, and her indifference was one of the epic moments of my life to that point. There were plenty of photos Beth had taken after the transplant—photos from California, sumptuous portraits, and even one of Vincent and me together. I kept it next to my bed, near my father’s fire helmet. Before I fell asleep at night, I would sometimes look at it and think, This is how I would feel if I were any other woman looking at the picture. It was co
lor, in that kind of color that’s juiced up, that reminds you of a carnival. On these glacially still and solitary nights, as the dark closed in—light draining from my big windows earlier and earlier each day—I imagined myself a woman looking at a picture of herself and her boyfriend.

  Who loved her.

  Who lived far away.

  Who was … in a war or … law school.

  Or was in the Peace Corps.

  Or was an archaeologist.

  A boyfriend who wanted terribly to reach her by any means and touch her as soon as distance would permit, who took out her letters and got a rush just from looking at her handwriting.

  Then I would put the photo away.

  Before I left, I dressed three or four times, finally settling on black jeans with gray knee-high boots and gray suede gloves. I don’t remember the colors of the sweaters I wore, just that there were a bunch of them, and scarves twisted together to warm my neck. My hair had begun to grow quickly and was trimmed into a long, thick bob with bangs, which made me look like something that wouldn’t be out of place in a documentary about Julius Caesar. So I braided it and rolled it up and stuck one of my pairs of silver-plated chopsticks through the knot. My car was a powder-blue Chevy Cachet, a four-door demo from the previous year that I bought from a guy in our building who worked for a dealership. The car I had planned to buy whenever I got around to learning to drive—which seemed like part of an indefinite future a year before—would have been a Toyota like my aunt’s, only a bit sportier. But I was already making an offer on the Cachet before I asked myself why. I didn’t have to ask myself why.

  I was buying it in case.

  Just as it seemed that everyone on earth was now driving a four-door powder-blue Chevy Cachet, it also now seemed that every restaurant and gym, every coffee store, every lobby, library, local park, and deli was stuffed with pregnant women. There were ranks of them, waddling in step, so many there was barely room for them at a given venue. Some were cute wifeys, athletic and slim-hipped, their planned pregnancies invisible from the view of their tidy rumps. Some seemed to have been caught unawares and now sported a baffling new rim of peripheral flesh around their customary silhouettes, as though a second layer of arm or chin had been drawn around the outline of the original and then colored in. A few had the childlike arms and legs of supermodels with great protuberant melons of bellies sticking out, like the bottoms of hammocks under their long sweaters. Some were alone, holding the wrists of recalcitrant toddlers. Some were proprietary, holding the biceps of big, vaguely bewildered-looking guys. Where had these women been before? When had they come outside? I studied them with an almost indecent interest; but they did not exchange a complicit glance with me. It would have been impossible for anyone to tell that I was one of them. My stomach was still concave and my belly below it taut as a fitted sheet.

  Once I found Beth and Pat’s place, I was surprised to see how ordinary their house looked. Beth didn’t care much about appearances, unlike me, but she was still pretty at her age and had a distinct low-key flair for dressing up anything she wore.

  The house looked like what a kid would draw if you said, What does a rich person’s house look like? It was all wheat-colored brick, with loads of windows and height, on a base structure that was not quite colonial and not quite anything else. The big wraparound porch had gray rocking chairs arrayed along its length behind a gracious sweep of railing. There were rows of arched windows along the front. A ribbon of maroon stonework lapped it like a waistband. The only touch of Beth’s peculiar humor was the bronze fountain in the little side yard at the front, which was in the shape of a crash-test dummy. The house did have a bright-blue door, as I remembered from the first day, literally a lifetime ago.

  I got out of the car and sat on the hood. It was so warm from the drive—which had taken not ninety minutes but more than two hours, forty minutes idling in traffic—that it gave my butt a little start, despite my layers of cashmere and the cold temperature. I sat there for a couple of minutes, finally pulling the chopsticks out and shaking my hair loose so that I could put on the hat I had in one of my pockets. As I pulled it down over my ears, I saw Vincent.

  He was sitting on one of those rockers almost hidden by a porch pillar. His hair was longer and he looked thinner, hunched, his body swimming in a beat-up leather jacket that must have been as old as he was. He was like a savannah creature out of his habitat, tawny and restless, stretching, chafing his hands, shrugging. He also wasn’t so goddamned great as he was when he starred in my fantasies. Just a too-skinny guy with a big nose and a hippie haircut and the only eyes I’d ever seen that exactly matched mine. What was going on with me? Why was I expecting so much of this … hookup? For that was what it had been. A hookup. Fun, intense, voluptuously backlit by the landscape that had launched a million unplanned pregnancies.

  And still, just a fling.

  But did he remember what kind of fling it had been?

  We had lived together for a week, almost … as husband and wife. He cleared a drawer for me. Our showers weren’t necessarily taken together. He had invited me to his production meetings and I’d attended, and not just to gaze at Vincent and be gazed upon by his associates. I’d used his razor and he’d complained. He’d walked into the master bath while I was using the toilet and I’d screamed. (I still don’t do those things in front of anyone over the age of six.) When the paper came, we divided it among us, Beth claiming the arts section, Vincent the entertainment pages, and me the news. He’d prepared his one dish—which we called Vincent’s Wrong Assumption Pasta, because he could not have cooked his way out of a Honduran prison. We’d created a world that was the façade of a suburban town with a concrete box behind it.

  And then I left. The set was struck. Mutually, without the need to say so, we’d faced facts. At least, he had. If I’d faced facts also, I had no right to be so angry with him. Why was I so angry? Why did I feel every right to be so angry? That time together was, in the moment, so much more than, and afterward was so much less than. I still feel that it was probably something that happens to everyone once in a lifetime, but it certainly hadn’t happened to me. Had there been a single plan exchanged, a commitment to meet again? Had there been any terms to our endearments? There had not. And, still, I was left with the awkward and painful need to regard what read like the opening of a story as a sentence that began and ended in parentheses.

  Vincent had been perfectly appropriate.

  Vincent had been nice, in a callous, guy sort of way.

  It seemed then that he couldn’t have participated in the same moments that I had and behaved with such pragmatism. But that was the appropriate response. It didn’t come easily to him; he was working at it. You’re either calibrated to do a one-night stand or you aren’t. He was probably calibrated for a one-night stand, but not with me.

  At the time, I had a whole litany of hypotheses about why Vincent and I became the soundtrack of my life thereafter, for quite a long time thereafter: It was hormones. It was my quasi-filial attachment to Beth. It was transference—the wish to replace my imploded presumptive future life with something handy and easy-to-install.

  Only years later could I admit what it was: Love. Of a kind. Not every love is meant to last forever.

  As I sat there on my car hood, watching Vincent on his porch and wishing feverishly to run into his arms and have him carry me upstairs, I realized that he thought I was someone else: He didn’t recognize me as the pilot of a car. I have no idea of what Vincent’s image of me was at that time, but I would venture he thought of me as fragile-but-plucky. I stood up.

  Vincent did the same. “For Christ sake! Sicily!”

  “It’s my car,” I said.

  “You’re skinny,” Vincent said.

  “Not really. I was going to say the same thing to you.”

  “Just busy. I forget to eat.” Not busy and preoccupied thinking about you, Sicily, and wondering what the next chapter of your story will be. Busy. Busy with my wor
k and my friends and the bar at the Peninsula and Emily, probably.

  “Me too,” I told him. “Too much work! I have, like, fifty unfinished projects. And for me it’s a holdover from the days when I couldn’t taste food. At first it was like the world festival of eating, and now … half the time I get sick, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” Vincent said, and tried but couldn’t stop himself from glancing down at my midsection, his eyes coins to a magnet. “Do you want to come in? One of my aunts that you haven’t met is here.”

  Maybe not so much, I thought. What would he say to introduce me? Miss Sicily Coyne, the girl who previously had no face? You’ve seen her in a bunch of Mom’s photos? She’s the one who came out to California, the one I hardly know who’s a little pregnant with my baby? That sounded not so convivial.

  “Another time,” I said. “Let’s go someplace.”

  We couldn’t decide where to go.

  Vincent had just finished a massive brunch, and I didn’t want to be one of those couples at the chain-store coffee place, unable to look each other in the face but staring into soup-bowl-size coffee cups as if they were oracles. People went to have coffee to break up. How could Vincent and I break up? We’d never been a couple.

  After driving and driving, we finally landed at the Milton Arboretum near his grandparents’ house, near where I grew up. There was an evergreen garden there. The firs and spruces and pines looked over-bright, spray-painted against the metallic sky. There was a place where an old bridge spanned a skating pond. My father used to take me when I was little. I learned to skate on chunks of wood that he tied to my snow boots—the way, my father said, he learned to skate. The pond wasn’t yet frozen, but Vincent soon was. I kept tromping along the avenue between the evergreens, and he kept shuffling along behind me. Neither of us said a word. I handed one of my scarves back to him and was surprised when he accepted it, turning up the collar of the coat and winding it around, California style.