Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Oh, roasting chestnuts on an open fire, which I’d like to put certain people in,” she said. “I was halfway to Brook Park.”

  “You don’t have to mess with me today.”

  She did have to mess with me that day.

  The brief bubble of satisfaction I’d felt as the anesthetic cleared abandoned me with a declarative pop—as Dr. Ahrens explained the next not-few days of my life.

  Just down the hall, equally irritated nurses were preparing a double room for negative isolation, which meant sterilizing all the surfaces and covering the ones closest to the door with replaceable sterile film. They would use police meters to test the room for various obvious contaminants and install a heavy clear-plastic door (not unfamiliar on a transplant floor).

  What would go into that room was me.

  Period.

  I could have my computers, if they could be wiped down with antiseptic cloths and covered with the computer equivalent of full-body condoms. I could have a TV with movie channels and a new iPod and an e-reader that would also have a condom. I could have my aunt, if she wore, like, a level-four biohazard suit, and no other visitors except for mime-guests through the plastic—as though I were doing twenty-five-to-life at the Supermax in southern Illinois.

  “After the medication does its thing, how long until I can go home?”

  “If there are no complications with the baby … well, you’ll have to ask Dr. Setnes about that,” said Dr. Ahrens.

  “So, after the nuchal translucency screening—”

  “Sicily, I mean after the baby is born. If we get your rejection under control, there is no way you are leaving this hospital until you get wheeled out to a four-door with an approved car seat in the back.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “I am absolutely serious. And, yeah, yeah, you can bring up MERSA and staph infections and anything else you want to, but the fact is, this staff is going to bend over backward to be triple-careful and keep that baby where it is and that … pretty face right where it is, and you’re just not going home. So get someone to water your plants. Get lots of great novels. Long ones. Get life insurance and hire a nanny. Learn Japanese.”

  “I’ll go nuts,” I said.

  Dr. Ahrens smiled and said, “You’re already nuts.”

  “This is like a punishment for trying to be responsible!”

  Dr. Ahrens paused to consider that. “Yes, it’s kind of like that.” She left, presumably to mix up a batch of the Strauss-McManus drug, the alternative protocol, called only SM965,900, and a nurse in a sterile gown and gloves brought me a turkey sandwich. I wondered if the turkey was at least kosher. I also wondered how long it would be—how long a seemly interval—before I could call Beth’s house and speak to Vincent. Not that I wanted to call Beth’s house and speak to Vincent. As complete idiots go, I was the gold standard that early Christmas morning and knew it. I could easily visualize the sweet gathering under Beth’s designer Christmas tree being interrupted by a phone call pointing out that she should forget I’d shown up at her house the previous evening enceinte and decided to become unexpecting by the next morning. The dopey ironies of the season were just too cringy, and visualizing Vincent’s stricken face after having seen the baby’s face and hearing my announcement made me want a mask and headgear like the nurses wore when they came back to take away my untouched turkey.

  “You have to eat now, Sicily, okay?” one said. “Not this minute, but now and regularly.”

  “I will.”

  “Would you like some soup?”

  “Yes, please.”

  It was cream of celery, which would have been just below cream of raw gizzard on the list of soups I absolutely hated—which was almost none at all. I liked soup. How could they pick the only one that savored of icky church suppers, and not special Catholic suppers, like St. Joseph’s Table but supper with Jell-O at nondenominational churches? I ate it anyway, gagging at the pasty texture and the sticky cool temperature. Then I chased it with two cups of cranberry juice and brushed my teeth with my finger in the washroom, which also was draped like some sort of place of execution. Bloody execution. By then it was … 10:00 a.m. Ten? Four hours since I woke up? That was it? I knew that my aunt couldn’t bear to be there for the abortion and would show up very soon, figuring it was all over but the sobbing. It cheered me slightly to think that she would be pleased—at least someday, if in a bittersweet way. Where was she, anyway? Where was my aunt and mother?

  Why wasn’t she right here, to be with me when I woke up? Why had she left at all? I pulled the hospital phone cord to its fullest length, because my cell phone would never work in here and, in any case, had not yet been sterilized. The telephone had a full, clear-coated skin on it, the hole in the receiver barely pierced. I decided to call her.

  “Merry Christmas, Auntie.”

  “Sweetheart. Is it over?”

  “Yes, it’s all over. Auntie, I have to tell you something. Wait, where are you?”

  “I’m at home.”

  “You’re at home? You went home? Why did you leave me?”

  “I needed a change of clothes, and I didn’t want to sit in the waiting room crying and listening to the nurses singing Christmas carols.”

  “Aren’t you even going to go see Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “I’ll see them later. Sicily, nobody had the heart—or the stomach—for presents and turkey and bracciole today. As far as they knew, Ernest and Annette were on the verge of losing their only granddaughter and their only great-grandchild, all at once.”

  “Well, Auntie, I didn’t have it.”

  “Didn’t have the abortion? Hmmm.” Uh, hmmm? What was hmmm?

  “I decided against it. For sure now. Forever.”

  My aunt didn’t say a thing. I thought she must be crying quietly. Shock and grief. Hope and forgiveness. Let nothing you dismay, Auntie, I thought.

  “Well, that’s great, Sicily. You’ve put your life in real danger now. Thank you for that. You’ve stuck pins in hearts all over town.”

  What the hell? I thought.

  “I will love your baby, and I’m sure that I’ll get over wanting to pinch you ’til your arms bleed. Sicily, I hope I live a long time, because you have to be the most immature, flighty person, and your child is going to need some stability.”

  “That’s so not fair! The stakes are pretty high here!”

  “They’re damned high. They’re the highest stakes in your life and, I might add, my own. And you’re trusting in things that no one knows will work. Not for sure.”

  I sighed. “The best things can go wrong. Nothing is for sure, Auntie. That’s why I didn’t do it. Not one thing is for sure. You’re always telling me to stop busting Christina’s chops for believing things that I’m actually pretty sure are not real. I’m not taking a damned-fool risk. I’m doing what a firefighter would do. Like my dad said. I’m taking a measured risk. If no one ever took a measured risk, no one would ever start a fire, even to cook. No one would ever go near a fire to put out one out.”

  A nurse came into the room, garbed as an astronaut, one giant step for womankind. She didn’t bother to knock—although knocking on a plastic sheet might have presented its own challenges. Earlier, someone had told me I would soon get a buzzer, a loud bell that would announce a visitor so I could go sit on the other side of the door and they could view me. Things had not yet progressed to that point. Just considering myself sealed in a blue-walled, two-windowed Tupperware container for six months made me want to keen with self-pity and anguish. And here my aunt was, cussing me out for the very thing she’d wept in mourning over the night before! A promenade of deprivations paraded before my weary mind’s eye. A barre. Live music. Fresh air. Air of any kind, even exhaust! Spring. The smell of spring. Cologne. Rain … when was this baby going to be born, anyhow? June? Makeup. Deli. Coffee from Lotta Latte. Hello? This was incubation hell.

  “Auntie! Do you realize that I have to be stuck in here for … until the baby is bor
n? I can’t even go outside for a walk? Don’t you think that made the decision even harder for me?” (I hadn’t known about the isolation at the time, but I was definitely not getting my propers here.)

  “You’re not on bed rest,” Aunt Marie said. “You can prance around. You can try reading, for the first time in your life. Maybe it will cross over the placenta and the baby will be literate—”

  “Stop it!”

  “Sicily, don’t overdo it. I spoke to Dr. Grigsby this morning. I already knew you had decided to have the baby. That was probably a violation of your rights, since you aren’t a minor, but she wanted to tell me that I didn’t have to hurry to get to the hospital. I will hurry, though. I had to sort something out here. And I’m happy, but it’s difficult to be entirely happy. I feel the way Grandma does. Your life is the important life, for all of us. It’s also no fun to be on the sidelines of this emotional tug of war, although I know—”

  I hung up on her.

  It was noon and I had the rest of my Christmas to spend alone, me and my fetus, with some more nice cream of celery soup. (What kind of mind would ram cream of celery soup down the throats of sick people on Christmas? People who hated their lives because they had to spend the day at work in an institutional kitchen, no doubt.)

  I sat up suddenly. It was gone. My morning sickness was gone. I felt … spectacular, the itching in my palms already subsiding, my woozy febrile state clearing like morning mist under the imperative gaze of the sun. How long had it been since I’d thrown up? People had told me that my nausea would get better after the first trimester, but I hadn’t expected it would quit as though nature were holding an hourglass. If my aunt was going to come to see me, couldn’t she possibly bring a nice antiseptic Reuben with sweet potato fries from Myzog’s? Mr. Herzog (Mr. Myzog had been dead these seven years) would be working on Christmas. Didn’t I deserve at least that, not having been able to keep down a mouthful of anything redolent of garlic for months? I picked up the (encased) hospital phone to call Aunt Marie back. No texting for … six months? I would email! I would email! Forgive me, St. Jude, my patron. I would email every day. My dance clothing and pajamas, my ballet shoes, my pencils—all things that would have to be laundered here for me with something like lye.

  But I was too proud to call Marie back.

  I was too sad to call Vincent.

  That lasted for an hour.

  Just before two, I called Beth’s house. Probably because she didn’t recognize the number, she answered.

  “How are you, Sicily?” she asked evenly. Disturbingly evenly.

  “I’m fine. Do you know …?”

  “Vincent told us last night. We are all very sad. I’m as sad as I’ve been in … a very long time. For you and for us. But we’re happy for you too. This is the right thing. You come first. But Vincent is … I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “Beth, I have to tell you—”

  “It was the right choice, Sicily. I think we all just held out hope. Which was foolish. I think Vincent did.”

  “May I please speak to him?”

  “He’s gone, Sicily. He left a few hours ago for the airport. He didn’t have his heart in it.”

  Super. This was getting better by the moment.

  “There was … His grandfather Angelo is put out about Vincent’s views about the baby. Or at least his actions toward you throughout this. Pat is too.…”

  There was no way I could abort myself—not the baby but my adult self—although the thought crossed my mind.

  “I didn’t have the abortion.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, Beth. I feel awful. I mean, I feel physically much better. But awful. I decided at the last minute that I couldn’t go through with it.”

  Long, pregnant—if you will—silence.

  “I decided that I wanted my baby even though it means that I can’t leave the hospital at all until the baby is born. I have to stay in isolation.”

  Nothing. No sudden geyser of contrition and sympathy. Her son had taken it on the chops, on one of the few days of the year all of them were together, for not wanting to marry a girl he’d seen three times in his life. It must have sounded like soap-opera extortion. Beth was following her son down the sterile, echoing glassed skywalks of O’Hare, where none but the world’s restless lingered today.

  Finally, I drew my last card. “Did you open my gift?”

  “I did. I opened it before Marie called to tell us not to. I kept looking at it all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Beth, I’m sorry.” And she could bite the tailpipe too! What in the hell was I apologizing for? Did I decide to get my face burned off and have my parents go down like milk bottles at a carnival in a pitiless one-two punch and find out that my fiancé went into a chapel conveniently filled with votive candles and watched his best friend move one to the worst place his small evil brain could imagine … and then, all that behind me, have the most beautiful moment of my life end in a colossal awkwardness, after having the person responsible offer me the personal equivalent of his business card? Joke her.

  Beth could send this grandkid postcards. I was moving to Australia.

  “Don’t you dare be sorry, Sicily. Don’t you dare!”

  I hesitated. This could be taken two ways.

  “None of this is your fault at all. I love Vincent and … I think you do too, you poor kid. I’m very happy that you’re having the baby, and the baby will be fine. And you will be fine. I know it. I know you will. And optimism isn’t my strongest trait. This is the best gift you could have given us.” She covered the phone and I could hear the sounds of people exclaiming. “And I’ll come to see you every single day.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Beth.”

  “I want to do that, Sicily,” she said. “Can I ask you normal questions now?”

  “I guess,” I said. What did I expect from Beth? So far as she knew, really, they’d given me some cough syrup and I would be all better in a few days. She didn’t understand even as much as Marie did—and Marie didn’t entirely understand—that I was still walking a tightrope on a blustery day.

  “Do you hope it’s a boy or a girl?”

  I had never even allowed myself to consider that. “I hope it’s not a mutant. I hope I don’t turn out to be one too. Or worse. I hope we both make it with ears and noses and functional brains. That’s all I hope.”

  “How is your face?” Beth asked the question as though she’d asked, How is your rash?

  “They gave me a massive …” I paused as Hollis pushed her way through the plastic door. My surgeon sat down in the steel rocker and patiently regarded the ceiling, as if counting the holes in the acoustical tile. “Beth, someone is here and I have to go. Do you mind telling Vincent? I feel very awkward.” She said she would try to reach Vincent before he boarded the flight—that maybe she could even turn him around and get him to come back. He was to have stayed four days at home. My heart folded on itself. If he was to come back … I put down the phone and faced Hollis.

  “You didn’t open my presents,” she said. “Now you can only see them. These are sterile. You cannot touch them.” They were encased in individual envelopes of clear soft plastic. There was a yellow sleeper with a bright crescent moon on the minuscule breast pocket; the embroidery beneath it read, Once in a Blue Moon. The leather-bound journal was the kind I liked that I could lay open flat, to draw and write in with ease. “They’ll bake it or something so that you can have it in here,” Hollis told me. In sturdy block print, the deep red cover was embossed with What I Wondered, As I Waited.

  “They’re so sweet, and so appropriate. Thank you.”

  “I guess I knew the way this would go,” Hollis said. “I knew on some level you’d end up in isolation too.”

  “The journal is such a clever idea. Though most people are so busy, it’s almost like it was made for someone in a situation like me, with nothing but time.” There was no reason to believe I had anything except oceans and valleys and hig
hways of empty, empty time.

  “It was made expressly for you and engraved expressly for you. For only you.”

  “I thought it was an artisan idea. It means even more now.”

  Hollis stood and, as was her custom, stretched one and then the other arm overhead. “I believe that I will go home now and make myself some hot chocolate with a generous, generous amount of Kahlúa in it and read a few novels. How does that sound? No one to bug me or get in my face. No teenage James working so hard to ignore me that he has to stand right in front of me to do it.” I smiled at her. “You enjoy your day. Get some sleep if you can.”

  After she left, I planned what I would write after they autoclaved the journal. I would write, Christmas Day. The first day of me and you. I’ll explain later.

  I would explain.

  Once I knew what to say.

  I would leave space, in the journal, in my given life, for the man I … once loved. I used my teeth to rip away a shred of sacred lip and tasted the penny tang of my blood. If I had not been pregnant with Vincent’s maybe-not-that-great baby, he would still have been the man I loved. Eventually, because of Beth’s photo exhibit, I might have met him in any case. By then he would have been engaged to a German actor who had formerly been a model and tennis pro, six feet tall, with a sexy mauve mouth, jonquil hair cut long over her eyes.

  And I would have had her whacked.

  In the hall there arose such a clatter, well, I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter. (How dare my aunt call me illiterate just because my idea of fun wasn’t reading four books a day, like hers was?) While Hollis occupied me, my Caruso relatives had set up one of those long metal tables in the hall, covered it with a cloth, and laid out the Christmas china, the china my mother Gia had painted—which, if we used it more than once a year, would probably kill us all with the lead content. The nurses had brought chairs. The turkey sat in the center, and beside it were a steaming casserole of my grandmother’s gnocchi, braided bread, and melons with lime and prosciutto. Kit and Minister Anthony were there. Everyone lifted their wineglasses at the same time and my Grandpa Ernest said, “To Sicily and our bambino …”