Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Come on,” I said. “Come on. This is too sappy even for me.”

  On the other side of the plastic from the feast, from plates prepared for people in isolation, I ate three helpings and drank apple juice. (I didn’t know if you could irradiate food and decided not to think about it.) All the nurses took their turns at the table as well. My aunt unwrapped my presents, including a leather bag tooled in Italy with inlaid patterns of gold and green; it was the size and shape of Utah. I could literally feel its silky heft on my shoulder.

  That night, after the last person had left, I noticed my lower belly was protruding over the waistband of my scrubs.

  I’d eaten far too much. But it was still that way the next day.

  It would never be flat again.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  My life was en pointe at the end of the diving board.

  Finishing my projects, which numbered precisely four, took up all of three weeks. It was astonishing how much you can accomplish if you don’t have a life. I watched so much TV that my aunt pointed out that I was speaking in phrases that sounded like commercials. “Put your trust on wheels,” I caught myself telling Marie, quoting a tire commercial, one night when she had to hurry to the TV station during a snowstorm. (I would have given my molars to feel and breathe a snowstorm.) Dr. Setnes came daily, and I got to know her better. She was as mellow and given to random positive statements as Dr. Glass had been to flat, dour disclaimers. A hippie in her late forties who’d been a doula before she was a doctor, she said that the way she figured it, there would be plenty of time to feel bad about things. There was no use doing it in advance.

  “Here’s what I know,” she said, one day not too long after Christmas. “Nature is always contriving, the way Thornton Wilder said.” Great. A quoter. “Most babies are born healthy. Most babies are born healthy even if they don’t get prenatal care. Most babies are born healthy even if the mothers don’t take care of themselves. Most birth defects are correctible. I’m betting on Dr. Sherry. He said this baby wanted to get here.”

  “That was Dr. Haryana,” I told her.

  “Everyone says it.”

  “Is there a betting pool?”

  “You want the truth? Or the classy, professional answer? If there was a pool—and I’m not saying there is—well, the bettor who says the baby won’t make it would get a lot of money and the people on the other side would each get two dollars. If there was a pool about your face transplant, the odds would be about three to one on you too.”

  “AT UIC, every delivery is a special delivery,” I told Dr. Setnes. She burst out laughing, asking if I’d been watching the hospital’s closed-circuit channel. I not only had been watching it, I knew exactly what I’d do if I ever needed a knee replacement, treatment for diabetes, surgery for a detached retina, or pediatric immunology (for that, I’d go to Seattle).

  The room quickly filled with nothing.

  I had to beg for the few sticks I got, things that were my equivalent of an oxygen tank—my computer, my iPod, my drawing pencils.

  My ballet barre.

  After a portable barre had been baked, I began to stretch and do light ballet drills. From behind the plastic sheeting, Beth photographed me, the ballerina who ate the softball. Then the soccer ball. “How much are you exercising?” she asked as we sat down on opposite sides of the curtain and I turned on my little intercom. It was like prison, except you didn’t have to touch a phone that someone might have spit tobacco juice on. Or some smeary substance a lot worse.

  “One hour. Sometimes two hours. It helps me to sleep.”

  “I think that’s too much,” she said.

  But I’d seen the commercial. I reminded her that working out was making love to your heart, according to the National Heart Association. In Hollis’s opinion, anything that didn’t make me feel a cramp was okay. Dr. Setnes agreed. My heart was indeed healthy, although still as a sleeping bird. The protocol with oral SM965,900 was effective and my pregnancy uneventful. Everything was uneventful.

  When Eliza stopped by, I asked her about Stella and Charley. I asked her how it was to be back at work. Finally, she made a face and said, “Don’t you want to know about Vincent?”

  “I was afraid I’d never ask.” Beth hadn’t caught Vincent at the airport that Christmas Day. By the time she reached him, it was days later and he seemed to have overcome his distress at his altercation with his father and grandfather. Of course, the Cappadoras, with the exception of Eliza, who had been at the hospital during the argument, didn’t realize that the risk to my face was a risk to my life. Their understanding was the understanding of most people. Beth tried to get a word in, but even she didn’t truly grasp the gravity of the situation until later. Apparently, the argument had been much worse than Beth let on, and Vincent had walked out in a rage. Beth kept telling me that Vincent told her he would be in touch with me, but Eliza was dubious.

  “You have to understand that he feels dumped,” she said.

  “He feels dumped?”

  “He came at Christmas thinking he would try to ask you that day not to marry him but to consider a future. He put himself out there.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I think he told Ben.”

  “You think he told Ben? Why aren’t you sure? Does Ben keep that stuff a secret?”

  “No. That’s what Ben thinks Vincent said the last time he talked to him before Christmas.”

  How could someone not be quite certain what another person, especially his own brother, had said? “Do men communicate with clicks and grunts?” I asked.

  “Yes, they do,” Eliza said. “But that’s not why. Vincent doesn’t tell things straight out.”

  “Who knows Vincent best?”

  “Beth thinks she does. My mother knows him pretty well, more than Beth does. My mother is like Angelo—she’s crazy about Vincent. But Ben knows him most.” Eliza paused. “But the truth is? Nobody really knows Vincent. He keeps his cards under his shirt.”

  “You mean close to the vest.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the expression. So other people won’t see your cards.”

  “Of course,” Eliza said. Her pager sounded and she consulted it. “It’s a hysterical person with a grafted finger. I don’t have to run right now. I think it might be good for you to get in touch with Vincent.”

  “Okay.”

  “Send him an email and … let it kind of grow, Sicily. Things grow better with a lot of space.”

  “You’re a philosopher, huh?”

  “No. But I like this idea of you and Vincent. I saw you that night in the kitchen.”

  “That was just biology, Eliza.”

  “Don’t knock biology.” She went to visit her hysterical grafted finger.

  That night, I wrote to Vincent.

  If I was a serious kind of person, I would say I’m sorry for being such a ditzy woman. That would reveal that I’m a ditzy woman instead of a serious person. But I never wanted to lose the baby, Vincent. I never wanted to hurt you. You have to understand the confusion I felt. Imagine choosing between a baby you didn’t know and a face you would have your whole life if you were lucky. Imagine a much worse choice, your baby or your life. I’ve never had a child. I don’t know what it’s like to have a child. I assume parents would give up their lives for their children. But it’s not a child yet. My face is something I saw only in dreams or old pictures. Except for right after the fire, I never wanted to die, even when my face was disfigured. People say all the time, I’d rather die than be blind; I’d rather die than be in a wheelchair. But it’s not true. If you’re a sane person, you always want to live. Inside that face, I always was that woman you met at the airport. I just got to find myself finally. Somebody said once, it was like pizza. If you didn’t have anything else in your life, sometimes it was enough to have a good piece of pizza. I guess you can’t imagine that. Things here seem to be going well. I hope you’re fine. Don’t worry about me. Call me anytime. I’m alw
ays here.

  I signed it, Gestationally yours, Sicily. I tried to joke.

  Even in my trash and my junk pile, there was no return mail from Upstart Productions. From my aunt and from Beth, I learned that Germinators (please) opened to a huge audience and was a big box-office draw. On the third Tuesday of January, before it officially opened, Vincent had flown all the family out there for the premiere, which was one of those slinky, sultry California affairs that I imagined Vincent attended all time, although Eliza swore that Vincent said he avoided them like prostate exams. That cracked me up. What she said next didn’t.

  “I did write to him,” I told her.

  “I don’t think he’s with anyone,” Eliza said. She let her stethoscope swing like a pendulum on an old clock.

  “But he brought someone to that party.”

  “He had to. That’s what he told Grandma Rosie. He had to so that people wouldn’t think he likes boys.”

  “Tell me about the girl.”

  “No, Sicily.”

  “Okay,” I said. I reached over and switched off my side of the transmitter, which I did when I wanted to sleep without hearing nurses discussing novels and divorces and patients gabbing with their relatives. After about thirty seconds, Eliza mimed for me to turn it back on. I made a motion that said, Come on, give it up. She nodded.

  “She was like this dumb B-movie girl you see in vampire movies,” Eliza said. “About sixteen years old and about ninety pounds. She had blond hair that she kept brushing away so she could see you, and she was—”

  “Really tall.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmmmm.” I was already loving this. It was as funny as canned farts.

  “But it got bad.” For me, it had already been bad. “She was hanging all over Vincent all night, and Grandma Rosie marched up there and said, ‘Vincent, you never told me: What did you buy your baby for Christmas?’ His date was upset. She sort of went over to the bar. Vincent told his grandmother that he knew what she was up to, but couldn’t they have just one happy night without discussing the issue.”

  I knew what he’d given his baby for Christmas. It had arrived last week. Ten shares of Disney stock, which I considered extremely thoughtful. “But Rosie said, ‘The issue? That’s what it is? An issue? You would pick this … hat pin with rubber lips over the girl who’s risking her life to have your child?’ ”

  “What did Vincent say?”

  Eliza hesitated again, checking her pager, although I knew it had not sounded.

  “Come on.”

  “He said, ‘She’s not doing that for me, Grandma.’ ”

  Oh. Well. Technically, Vincent was right. And still, I could imagine his discomfort and defensiveness on what was supposed to be his night, not to mention the embarrassment of his date, from whom I hoped that Vincent had contracted a slight and curable STD.

  “Then Rosie called Vincent sciocco, which means—”

  “I know. I took Italian in college. It means fool.”

  Rosie had left then, and Vincent got drunk, which he never did, and everyone was sort of pretending to be happy. There were lots of movie stars.

  Eliza offered to bring me her pictures the next time she visited. I said that would be nice.

  After that conversation, I did start to read. I read right through Dickens. I read right through Hemingway. That brought me to February 5. I lost my appetite. Polly Guthrie visited and made a ritual plea for the baby’s health. “It’s got to be lousy being stuck in there.”

  “I’m not good company for myself,” I said. “Here’s the problem. I have a case of unrequited love. First I loved him and he thought I was fun. Then I got over him and he loved me a little. Then he got over me.”

  Polly sighed. “Sounds like the story of my life,” she said. Big help. “Time changes everything, Sicily. You have a strong will, but you can’t will someone else’s emotions.”

  One picture that Beth took around that time shows me with my hands outstretched, pressed against the transparent door, as though I were trying to break out of one of those cryogenic machines I’d described to my aunt. Everything is flat except my nose and my belly.

  Life settled into a dull routine—soap operas on TV and the windows in my room my only conduit to the real world. I loved the soap operas because they provided a daily drip of misery, the dramatic portrayal of the worst that could happen, even worse than my life. Plus, on soap operas, people had children in every conceivable fashion, literally, even while they were amnesiacs and trapped on desert islands. (My isolation suite at UIC was sort of a desert island, although it lacked a ruthless and handsome criminal and palm trees.) I’d watched The Young and the Restless in college and was astonished to see that the adults hadn’t aged a day, while the dreary-eyed toddler actors, who never seemed to really get why they were there, were already dating. I’d been out of school for only four years! Aunt Marie teased me about shopping the soaps for names for the baby. She wondered if I’d be so utterly saturated with TV by the time of the birth that I’d end up with a daughter named Destiny or a son called Ransom.

  At night, like somebody’s reclusive aunt, I listened to my scanner, that deadpan tragicomic patter that still was my urban lullaby. “Two two-six responding to the box at Twelfth and Washington … Ladder Thirty-eight, we have repeated reports of a structural fire with a child trapped inside, address one three seven Freeland, cross street Twenty-ninth … Ladder Thirty-eight to base, we are en route … Ladder Thirty-eight on scene, rescue operations commencing … We have the child, Medic Sixty-one is in radio contact with Methodist Hospital … continuing resuscitation efforts … Thank you, Medic Sixty-one, let’s make this a happy ending.…”

  The apricot moon rose and swelled and waned in the upper right corner of my bedside window. I slept and woke and checked on Cricket, Rafe, Sabrina, and Lucas. I read six books about Henry VIII’s six wives. I ate pretty much all the time. When I stepped onto a scale, I weighed 141 pounds. I could have sat on Vincent and crushed him without trying. Dr. Setnes’s assurances that most of this was fluid could not stop me from thinking of those waif girls with their short black dresses and biceps the size of tamales.

  The baby and I liked tamales.

  We liked brownie sundaes and bracciole and hot bagels fresh from Hardenny’s. The pernicious combination of my belated discovery of recreational eating, pregnancy, and boredom would leave me with two hundred crunches a day in my future. At least I would be able to look after the baby for a few months without a frightening pressure to hit the bricks looking for clients. Aunt Marie’s zest for work guaranteed that. The only thing she liked more than a juicy story was the sight of me, a little rounder every day. Her love for me probably surpassed anything I could ever have expected from two parents. She was my everyday heaven and earth.

  Beth also spent days with me—not every day as she’d promised, but many, a few hours a few days each week. Given that she was the baby’s grandmother, the doctors had conferred and made an exception for Beth. I had no idea what they did with Marie and Beth before they came in, in their white gowns and hats and little surgi-booties and face hoods like semi-space garb. Did they put them on tanning beds? Run them through a shower that had six nozzles, all spouting bleach?

  When she was allowed in, Beth brought her camera in a box thing meant for scuba divers, and after we talked or ate together, she would gently raise her camera and begin to shoot. By then I was so used to Beth taking pictures of me that I would have drawn the line only at the toilet. She photographed the lonely Madonna, in my leotard, twirling a strand of my hair, sitting in a hump up on top of the nonfunctional radiator. My favorite from that time is of me pulling up my T-shirt and giggling at my reflection in the mirror of the closet. (Beth sent Vincent an image to his computer. Vincent emailed me, Is this what is called showing?) He was on the road, everywhere. Sometimes he dropped me a line:

  Opening in London. No queen.

  Weekend in Las Vegas.

  Opening in San Francisco. Quee
n did attend.

  I wrote back:

  Ninth-floor isolation. Chicago.

  In the journal Hollis had given me, I wrote, I miss you. I don’t even know you. I’m sure that you’ll take after Vincent and me, which means you’ll be the sort of distilled essence of difficult people. That’s okay. I need to keep busy. My job is a little dull. My life right now is a little dull. I’ve been reading aloud to you, but from Virginia Woolf. Don’t get bad ideas. I’m going to have Grandma Auntie bake me a book of children’s poems next week, and then I’ll read to you about the moon that is a griffin’s egg. Love, Mommy.

  Mommy.

  I covered a whole page with names. Bonnie. Anne. Claire. Natasha. Kelsey. Sylvie. Daniel. Gray. Owen. Martin. Francis. And James, of course.

  Then I covered the rest of the page with Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. I drew a memory portrait of Charley Cappadora, asleep in Eliza’s arms. I drew things I liked: butter-colored horses, day lilies, Montrose Beach.

  Kit was loyal and called daily. The advent of a phone call was like getting flowers. It was coarse of me, but her calls were absorbing because she had become very twitchy and curt, as the thing with Anthony, which had passed the Kit equivalent of a silver anniversary, was now on the wane. She told me they’d had sex only six times in the past two weeks. I replied that was better than one time in the past five months. I got real flowers, which I could not keep because of the rules of isolation (nurses showed them to me and then trundled them away to other wards), by the wheelbarrow after my aunt did one of the little essays with which she sometimes closed her show, called “The Last Minute.”

  Sitting in a plain chair and leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, in a way she never did (in her publicity pictures, Marie’s head was always tilted curiously, thrown back in amusement, or resting studiously on one hand), Marie had concluded, “In her lifetime, my niece, Sicily Coyne—whom I adopted as my daughter after both her parents died, her father while saving the lives of children, fighting the Holy Angels fire—has endured every kind of loss. Except two. She has never lost a child. And she has never lost hope. I love Sicily, and tonight, as my old friend Gale Sayers once wrote, I want you to ask God to love her too.”