Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Vincent blinked.

  “I meant with … the child. Someone I would love. That’s what I wanted. I’m selfish. And I am confused.”

  “That’s what pregnant teenagers think—a live doll of their own.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to have the baby so he or she would love me. I’m not a pregnant teenager. My life is behind me.…” I recognized the truth in what I was saying as it unfurled word by word from my lips. All the life I knew was behind me, a literally burned bridge. There was no direct connection between the Sicily I was then and the Sicily I was now, except perhaps this maybe-baby, which was the child of my inmost being, my substantial self. The raw substance of this caught me in mid-sentence, forcing me up against a metaphysical mirror.

  Was I considering this baby a human bridge back to normal, to a previous self? How dare I do that? But was it wrong if I wanted to build the bridge, not just walk on it? Did it have anything at all to do with Vincent? If it didn’t, which one of us was not such a really terrific person? Did I want to feel that I’d wound the clock for someone, just to prove I could? Even with the best of intentions, what kind of selfish person would use her own … well, flesh and blood to try to prove her life was entire? I had never felt so absolutely alone.

  It seemed plain then. I could see past the thick walls. I needed to be alone to make this decision. Vincent couldn’t hold my arm, nor could Beth or Marie. For nearly twenty-six years I had been a child, cared for, shielded, disabled in the realest sense. Vincent said he wasn’t sure he knew how to love someone who needed him. I was sure that I didn’t. I knew how to be loved. I wanted my own way. Children want their own way. It was possible that I wasn’t woman enough to admit that, just once, having my own way was not only wrong but wrongheaded. I could burn my future down as surely as my past had fallen away, consumed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am being foolish. We played house in California. I guess some small part of me thought we were meant to play Mommy and Daddy. I’m sorry for putting you through this. I guess I made a wish and there you were. At the luggage carousel. The perfect imaginary boyfriend.”

  “So you’re not … you don’t think you’re in love with me.”

  “No. Really, how could I be? It would be almost easier to say goodbye if I thought I was. I’ve always had good luck with being angry. I’m not angry. I want to be your friend. And I mean that. I guess what it comes down to is that I was scared to be on my own. But that’s just one more fear to face. Being this woman I keep claiming to be.”

  Vincent got up fast. “Where is my coat?”

  “I’ll drive you,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’ll take a cab,” he said. “I’m rich. I’m in show business. Right? Didn’t you say that? Mr. Hollywood? Your, in quotes, friend? Your buddy? Plus, in that little confession there, you just treated me like … there was no one else here but you.” There were two spots of dark red on his cheeks, the rest of his face an absence of color, even of pallor, like one of my aunt Marie’s “neutral” outfits.

  “You don’t have to leave either. Stay here, Vincent. Please, Vincent. It’s late, and who knows how long it will be before we see each other again? I don’t want to forget that—”

  “Take care, Sicily.” He kissed my forehead.

  “Don’t go like this.”

  “What other way is there for me to go? I was … It was tearing me up to have to say I didn’t want a kid. Then you say, hey, no offense, but it’s not going on with you. I need to get to know myself. You’re the one who should live in California.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know why you’re angry.”

  “I don’t either. I’m not angry. I’m … just … I got what I came for. And I don’t mean in the bed.”

  I should have told Vincent then that, had I been with fifty men, it wouldn’t have erased the strong intuition I’d had about him, the first time I saw him, standing there at the airport. There would be no way to prove that, ever. But I had no doubt of it back then. In fact, I still don’t. Everything was happening too fast, as though timed by a stopwatch. It was possible that Vincent was playing a role too, because he was used to it, because he’d never seen himself any other way, and trying to do that felt like a dangerous swerve from the known path.

  “Here’s my card,” he said, thrusting it at me. “A machine will pick up. But I check my messages.”

  “Your card? You’re giving me your business card?” I flicked it through the air at his chest. It drifted to the floor between us. “I didn’t do one thing to deserve that. Why don’t you leave a fifty on the pillow?”

  “Let me know what happens, huh? Or tell my mother, so she can send me a text if it’s door number one? Or a sonogram, if it’s door number two? Or some goddamned thing?”

  “That’s what they are called. Sonograms,” I said. “Ultrasound pictures.”

  “Sicily, I know that. I do have friends who have children.”

  “You do have friends, then. Despite not being a nice person. Come on, Vincent. Please. Stay here with me. It’s cold and I don’t want you to go. I really don’t want you to go.”

  “I’m halfway out the door. Don’t say anything else,” Vincent told me.

  “I had one—my second ultrasound. For them to make sure how to proceed.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing. Only a dot. You couldn’t tell anything. It’s too soon.” It had not been too soon. I had seen a strong, fast fetal pulse and the faint tracing of a spine. Just what you would expect, if you were expecting. It looked alarmingly like something I would draw for a textbook on gestation. The pulse was the worst. It was such evident proof of potential life. The nonstarter had a forming heart. I had to wrestle down the impulses of my own heart.

  “Well, that’s good. Isn’t it? Everything that should be bad news is good news. Take care, Sicily.”

  “You too.”

  After Vincent left, there was nothing I wanted to do more than to go downstairs and start my car and lie in the backseat. The upholstery was soft cushy pale-tan leather and reminded me of my father’s old Crown Vic. My father had been near-psychotic about safety, but somehow neither he nor my mother ever thought I was in danger lying down on the backseat of the car, with or without a belt, as they drove home through the purple summer night. And I had never felt safer anywhere as a kid, every muscle languid, in that delicious interval between consciousness and sleep, my father’s scanner chattering away on the dashboard. I knew I couldn’t do that, though. Talk about nuttier than nuts. If my aunt had come home from this glitzy restaurant opening she was at, parked her car next to mine, and found me in the backseat of my car, she would have thought I was trying to commit suicide, even though I could have let my car run for two weeks in the three-story cathedral that was our parking garage and have absorbed so little carbon monoxide that I’d still enjoy perfect health.

  The last thing I wanted was to worry anyone.

  Anyone else.

  Instead, I slid out of my clothes and into the stupid T-shirt Vincent had left on my bedroom floor when he did his reverse strip. I put on my scanner and took out the framed photo of Vincent and me. When that photo was taken, I already was pregnant, I thought. Already, the only going back was strewn with broken glass. Exhausted from too much sex and emotion, I fell asleep with a pillow held tight against me.

  I don’t know when I pulled the picture off the shelf. I woke up and it was beneath me. I rolled over and somehow, although I lunged to grab it, the glass smashed against the corner of my bookshelf. Carefully, I picked up the pieces and then inspected the photo. The glass had cut a crease right through Vincent, so that his face was no longer pressed against my neck but scratched half away.

  Holy symbolism, Batman.

  Gently, I tried to smooth the image and massage that silly, sidelong gesture of confidence back into place. In my playhouse of life, it was a family picture of all of us, maybe the only one there would ever be, because Vincent and I would not last, and the baby would
not last. I would last.

  I would ask Beth to make another copy for me, but I decided I would not set it up again, framed among my relics. It had been too big anyway, bigger than the others, putting out of balance the family that had been real—a mother, a father, and a child. Missing was a picture of Marie and me. One did not exist, because through all those years with Marie I had been faceless. Beth might take one for me, and there it would go, one more among the others, with plenty of room left for time to bring what it genuinely could.

  I kissed Vincent’s messed-up forehead and put it under my dad’s helmet, tucking all the corners in carefully so nothing showed. I got up and stripped the bed and put on clean sheets and resolved to be like Kit, starting my twenty-one-day diet of losing Vincent.

  I decided to forget that picture was there.

  And I did.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Those who think that callous women can have abortions on demand have never demanded one. I was a special case. Not only was I a transplant recipient, for whom urgency was key, I also would be in a real operating room, medicated with IV Versed so that I remembered nothing. Still, it took two weeks to get an appointment. Perhaps it was the Christmas rush, the time college freshmen bite the bullet before they go home for break. Perhaps it was the fact that I’d made and canceled four appointments, including the one I’d scheduled for just after Vincent left Chicago. That was juvenile and rude to the staff. And masochistic to me. Still, I waited. There were whole parts of days I willfully shunted the decision out of my conscious mind. Weeks passed like playing cards flicked into a hat by a restless child.

  At last, I couldn’t ignore my body changing. That was too much to bear. I scheduled the termination.

  When the appointed day arrived, 1 drove myself to UIC. Marie had a story to work on. I would call her when it was over so that she could come by taxi and drive me home in my car. When she objected, I was firm: There was no need to further alarm or involve her. I was sad—that was expected—but also relieved by the relative peace conferred by the new ability to do private things on my own.

  In the parking lot, I sat for a moment in the car.

  The classical station that was one of my seven settings played “Claire de Lune,” which had been one of my favorites since I was a child. As I listened, I admitted that I should have done this sooner, before the noticeable small changes in my body. The pregnancy was a pregnancy. I’d wanted to experience an annunciation. What a selfish fool I was to let the inevitable conclusion drag out week after week. When Dr. Ahrens explained the possible alternative protocol for anti-rejection drugs to me should I proceed, I’d allowed a sliver of my rational mind to hope. Dr. Ahrens had also, and firmly, made sure I understood that it was experimental, a last resort with no guarantees, and that if it failed to protect me from rejection, I might have to have a late-term abortion that would require a court order. All the days and nights of considering and reconsidering pointed me toward this inevitable conclusion. I needed to arrange what was incontrovertibly—to me at least, despite everything I knew about viability—a death. I could still have an abortion legally in Illinois and I would be able to for nearly two more months. Now the doctor’s time was booked and the room reserved yet again. I had to choose life, as all those cruel billboards proclaimed. I had to choose my life.

  As I clipped my keys inside my purse, I saw that it had begun to snow. I’d worn what the physician, a Dr. Thorpe, had suggested, loose and comfortable clothing and flat shoes. As I hurried, the wind plucked at my thin wool coat and forced my hair across my face like a veil. I had waited too long. The anguish I now felt was only what I deserved.

  I didn’t notice the car that came peeling around the corner into the circle at the revolving door. In the front seat, an elderly woman was strapped, slumped forward, listless and agape. I later learned that she’d had a stroke at her great-granddaughter’s fourth birthday party, and, because the family lived just five blocks from the hospital, her son had decided to drive her to the emergency room himself. He had, however, missed the ER entrance, half a block behind him, the way he had come.

  All he saw was a hospital with a door and he made for it, one hand on his dear mother’s shoulder.

  I probably hadn’t needed to leap quite so athletically as I did. At the last millisecond, I sprang away from the nose of the old car aimed at my rear end. But I, along with the old lady (who did recover), ended up in the ER. My butt was unscathed, but I hit my head on the patient-loading sign and went sprawling on one side, my cheek scraped, my knee bloodied, and a bump that would swell to the size of a tennis ball on the back of my head. I was never unconscious, but I was dazed.

  The contrite driver, Kobena, who had moved to Chicago the year before from Ghana, not only kept poking his head around my curtain to apologize ever more earnestly but came to see me the next day, to assure himself that “God was watching.”

  When I fully came around, a resident was leaning over me, asking the usual questions: Are you taking any medication, Mrs. Coyne; do you know what day it is; are you here by yourself; could you be pregnant? All of my answers were true, but they were also enough to prompt the resident to hotfoot it for his attending. A nurse quickly put an IV in my hand and started a drip; I held an ice pack on my head while I waited for a doctor to whom I could quietly explain why I was at the hospital that day. Then a nurse came back with a portable ultrasound machine, that zippy kind that fits right inside the vagina, and before I could stop her she said, “Let’s just quickly have a look-see and make sure everything’s copacetic here.”

  The solar system inside me resolved into a clear picture after a few little nudges. And then I saw the sole of a foot. It was a perfect, actual human foot, with a high arch, and as I watched, it poised and launched itself through space like a swimmer off the blocks.

  The attending leaned in and said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Coyne. The baby’s fine and active and you’re going to have a headache the size of the Hancock Center tonight. I, uh, pulled up your chart? And, given everything, you might want to consider letting us admit you overnight to be on the safe side.”

  And that was all she wrote. I couldn’t turn my back on someone who was swimming that hard for the shore.

  I was asleep, at around two in the afternoon, when Hollis arrived in my room.

  “You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

  “I didn’t intend this.”

  “But evidently your pal in there did,” she said. She sat down in my bedside chair and told me that, before she and her husband were wed, she became pregnant with their first child, unplanned, and she had called her mother in Louisiana to ask how to know if it was the right time. Hollis’s mother had said that the only time a woman could be sure if it was the right time to have a baby was when she knew for sure that she was too old to have one.

  “And so?” I said.

  “One day at a time, Sicily.”

  That was how each of us lived. We never stopped long enough to completely consider the possible alpha and omega of all our choices. In my situation, I had to. From that day on, each day was a page.

  When Marie arrived for a fleeting visit before hurrying back to the station for the news, I told her, “I thought you’d be offended to be a grandma so young, Auntie. But I got stuck in traffic.”

  “ ’Tain’t funny, McGee,” she said. “There is still time.”

  “I don’t feel I should.”

  “Do you think you’re the only person who’s ever had to do this?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not. I wasn’t the only person either. I was three months’ pregnant before I knew I was pregnant. And the guy said he would marry me.”

  “Then you didn’t want children.”

  “Oh, yes, I did. I even wanted the guy, at least at the time.”

  “Why then, Auntie?”

  “Well, his wife wanted him too. She wasn’t with him when he was working in the London bureau, where I was for two months. He was going to wa
it for me back in New York. He sent me a letter instead.”

  “Couldn’t you have raised the baby yourself?”

  “Maybe if I’d stayed in Europe, bought a wedding ring in a pawnshop. Not here. Not with my parents. Not in my world then. Not broke and starting out and twenty-four years old.”

  “I’m not broke.”

  “You’re not rich,” my aunt said, standing up and deftly looping her scarf around her neck. “I’ve been careful with the money your parents left you. I’ve been careful with my own money. But have a sick child who won’t get better?” She snapped her fingers. “That’s gone, Sicily. You’ll knock the cap off your insurance like that. I can’t raise a child. I’m too old. What if something happens to you?”

  I’d expected Marie to be worried. I hadn’t expected her to jump down my throat.

  “I’d … have a guardian.”

  “Do you know how the world treats disabled children whose parents die?”

  “Yes. I was one.”

  “Where are your brothers and sisters, Sicily? Who’ll raise this child? One of your cousins on Jamie’s side? Don’t count on it. No one ever loved her kid more than I love you. But it was no picnic.” Marie kissed my eyes and turned to leave. “I have to get to work. Think this over. Hard.”

  She left then. I made handles of the parts of the sheet I could gather up—every hospital bed I’ve ever been in is short-sheeted, like a cruel camp joke—and tried to hold on. I had not considered a handicapped adult, a grown person who was still a child. A good foot didn’t guarantee a functioning brain.

  One of the nurses brought me a phone. “There’s a call for you, Mrs. Coyne.”

  “It’s Miss Coyne,” I told her. The call was from Marie.

  “Sissy, I’m sorry. What I said when I left was just plain cruel. This pregnancy might end up being your kid. But you are my kid. When you’re terrified for your kid, it can make you say things that seem cruel. I did want you to end this, here and now. You’d be safer. But if you won’t, I will love your child more than anything on earth, except for how much I love you. We’ll get through this together. On the way to work, I got desperate and called Christina. My sister now has the whole convent, the whole school, the whole order, and several very well-placed contemplative nuns praying twenty-four-seven. I know how you feel about God. But let’s say, for shorthand, it’s in God’s hands now.”