Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Well, I will not do this procedure, then,” Dr. Neville said, “although I am concerned and think it would give us necessary information about what needs to be done if this baby should be born in distress.”

  “We’ll monitor it very closely,” said Dr. Setnes as Dr. Neville, syringe aloft, made his exit.

  When he was gone, Dr. Setnes, far from handing me a folder of readings about parenting the challenged child, endeared herself to me for life by saying, “I have always had difficulty taking anyone seriously whose first name is Wayne.” I started to laugh and she continued, “It’s like naming a baby girl Lula or Nettie. It’s asking for trouble.”

  On the following Monday morning, my buzzer sounded. I’d requested and been given blackout shades in my room, so I could sleep in the cocoon of darkness I needed. It felt like it was freaking four in the morning. My sleep since the second episode had not been the best. I got up, looking like a Japanese drawing of a girl demon—all ratty hair and nasty breath—and pulled open the inner door.

  There was Julia Cassidy. It was only the second time I’d seen Emma’s mother since the transplant. I hadn’t heard from her since Hollis laid the pink quilt with the screened photos of Emma across the foot of my bed.

  “Sicily,” she said. I didn’t hold out much hope for a great chat. The look on her face was grim. She was rightfully pissed at me for not getting in touch, for her having had to read about the pregnancy in the paper and hear it on TV from my aunt instead of in person and from us.

  “Mrs. Cassidy.” By habit, I placed my hand palm out on the plastic, my prison way of greeting people I couldn’t truly touch. Mrs. Cassidy didn’t respond. She looked different, in a good way, dressed in a short skirt and a little jacket, her hair in a thick layered bob with tiny stipples of blond through the brown. She stood formally, one of her hands looped around her wrist. I said, “You look wonderful.”

  “I’m married,” she said. “Eric and I are moving to Myrtle Beach. This week.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I’m very happy for you. A new life. It’s good.” I had thought that Eric, Mrs. Cassidy’s stylist partner, was gayer than Christmas. Maybe he’d had a conversion experience. Maybe they were fabulous business partners. Maybe—I had personal experience of this—loneliness was the most potent aphrodisiac. In any case, whatever Eric did with Mrs. Cassidy had revived her. She appeared ten years younger—buoyant but also quieter somehow, as though she were a haunted house that had surrendered its ghost, cleansed in light when it departed. Maybe she had let Emma go, I thought. It’s difficult to understand how I could have thought that, how raw and shallow I was even then. I smiled at Mrs. Cassidy and said, “I’m sorry for how I look. I hadn’t gotten up to dress. I thought it was earlier. I tend to sleep a lot in here.”

  “How could you do this?” Nothing on my face betrayed the shock I felt. Annoyance, I’d expected. Some part of me waited for her to go on. I thought I knew what she meant, and I did—but not to the degree she meant it. “How could you take Emma’s sacrifice so lightly?”

  “I never did, Mrs. Cassidy.”

  “You could lose your face! You could lose the face Emma gave you!”

  “I could die, actually, Mrs. Cassidy. But I’m betting against that and so are my doctors. I think the odds are on my side this time.”

  “You accepted Emma’s beautiful face and then went and got yourself pregnant.”

  This is one of the most troubling turns of phrase in the English language, and I’m sure people say it to women in German, Urdu, Amharic, and Portuguese. I’ve never known exactly how to counter it effectively, not that I’d ever had to. Careful was the way to go. Careful and thoughtful and acknowledging and respectful both of her loss and her renewal.

  “I’m sorry you’re upset,” I said. “And I’m sorry for the way this seems to have happened. But it didn’t happen that way, Mrs. Cassidy.”

  “There’s only one way it can happen, Sicily.”

  Careful. Respectful.

  “Yes. Of course that was unwise of me. But you and your husband were young and in love, and if you had been expecting Emma before you were married, you would still have wanted her, right?”

  “We were expecting Emma before we were married.”

  “It wasn’t a planned pregnancy?”

  “No. But I wasn’t a woman who’d made the choice to give that up.”

  “Give up … I didn’t give up wanting to be … to have … I had the face transplant in part because I wanted a normal life as a woman.”

  “I thought it was so you could function,” Mrs. Cassidy said bluntly.

  “It really helped with fully closing my mouth and eating,” I said. “And breathing normally. I could do those things before, but I had difficulties.”

  “I didn’t think it was to get men.”

  Whoa. Wow. I was caught hard and breathless by that. Dozens of retorts popped up and were flipped away or crushed, like bad attempts at a love letter. It was, in fact, Mrs. Cassidy’s sacrifice that had given me my face. Emma was past the point of being able to make that decision. I had to remember that and remember that a basic bluntness was part of Julia Cassidy’s personality. She didn’t mean to make me sound like some cheap slut for whom Emma had given the whole tortilla.

  I finally said, “Mrs. Cassidy, you care more about your appearance now. You look wonderful. That’s part of being alive, isn’t it?”

  “I think a transplant should be for a higher purpose.”

  And I did too. For weeks and months, I had agonized over Emma’s loss measured against my gain, wondering if I was worth it. And now I realized that this baby might be the purpose. I had prayed to change my life but not specified how that change must be manifest. I had wanted to feel passion—to feel, altogether—but those feelings didn’t come with guarantees on parts and labor, like toaster ovens. I had gotten my heart’s desire, albeit in a way that was different from anyone else’s way. It might be that my way—my parts, my eventual labor—would always be different from anyone else’s way. Standing there in silence, separated by my barrier from Mrs. Cassidy, I began to see that I was only beginning to use Emma’s face, now my own, for a purpose beyond my own happiness. Even my way of making my living had been nearly reclusive, tailored to my disability; it did not take full advantage of all that I could do or be or care about. My life with my child, I decided at that moment, would be lived on roads I had never risked. There was no other choice, so I might as well seize the one in front of me.

  “You’re right, I think,” I told Mrs. Cassidy. “You’re absolutely right to remind me of that. And I can’t ever be grateful enough to you. All this, even my child, is part of what my parents would have wanted for me, and you made that possible. Please don’t be angry. If I risked Emma’s face for this reason, well, that’s what Emma would have wanted. It’s part of the whole tortilla, isn’t it?”

  Seemingly baffled, Mrs. Cassidy paused for several excruciating minutes, during which I knew it would be disastrous to say anything more. Then she quietly told me goodbye. At the last, just before she disappeared out of sight on her way to the elevators, she also wished me good luck.

  ——

  Five more weeks (and ten long novels) crept past.

  In my journal I wrote, Now it’s really spring. Outside, there are children in a playground I can almost see. If I could open the window, I would hear them being mean to one another and forgetting it an hour later. Someday that’s going to be you. Hang in there. Love, Mommy.

  The aches and pains I experienced now were from inactivity. I was getting too big to really move, much less do a plié. I wanted my joints to stay nimble, so I did my stretches lying down. Each day I waited for an email from Upstart Productions. When one came, I waited until I had written ten letters of comfort to other fire victims, or studied the book Renee brought me, or eaten as much raw fruit as I could without become the monster of flatulence (there were benefits to living in a sealed room). The notes were innocuous.

 
; You must be going buggy inside. Vincent

  and

  It’s so hot here I envy you in Chicago. V.

  and

  My mom sent me a picture of you in your leotard. That must be why they created stretch material. She says it will all pop back into place. Vincent

  and

  Busy. Will write more later.

  I wrote to him to congratulate him on the success of the film, which no number of lukewarm reviews could stop from making a wad of money. My aunt asked Beth for a pirated copy of the movie. The animation was crude but the actors were pretty believable, especially the head terrorist. He was truly frightening—a fanatic of the first order. That night, I dreamed of him trying to take my baby. Sleep was uneasy. The twingey things—the hardenings of my belly that were called Braxton Hicks—came and went, but that night, because I was restless, they clenched closer than they had before.

  In the morning, when Beth arrived, she was surprised to see how much care I’d taken with my appearance. I had showered and braided my hair and dressed carefully—well, as carefully as I could given that I had no real clothes except leggings and men’s shirts, which comprised my entire maternity wardrobe.

  Renee Mayerling had sent me a book about the great circus fire in New Haven, which arrived at almost the same time that Beth did. As Beth and I chatted, I opened it and tried to sit cross-legged on my bed to read it. The comforts of sitting with my legs folded under me were about as available to me then as they would have been to a sweet potato. I felt more cramps and one pain that was decidedly unpleasant. “Wow,” I said to Beth. “I better not try for contortions. Is it okay if I look at this stuff for a minute? And then we can talk.”

  “It’s fine,” Beth said. She was checking out a drama about two gay men who could not manage to impregnate their affable next-door neighbor, who’d offered to be their surrogate.

  “I just have to lie back to read, because it’s too uncomfortable.” I lay down and tucked the white shirt like a little diaper between my legs. There’s no way around the fact that growing a person and gaining thirty pounds in seven months tires you out. It’s also true that you tend to invest moments that turn out retrospectively to be huge in your life with contextual meaning—as though the stars lined up to inform what was in fact a just-daily moment. It’s unbearable to think that our destinies are random. I knew—I would always know—it was only chance that Mrs. Cassidy had come to see me and that her visit had prompted my certainty that my child truly was part of a beginning life, not a mistake I was trying to live with because I couldn’t correct it. I knew that, and yet I would never be able to extricate her visit and that determination from what came next.

  Beth said, “Hey, Sicily. Where’s the buzzer to call the nurse?”

  Reading, I said, “Wrapped around up there. It gets in my way.”

  Beth pressed it.

  “Yes, Sicily?”

  “This is Beth Cappadora. We need a doctor here right now. Right. Now.”

  “Beth, what’s wrong?” I said, struggling to sit up. Beth held my shoulders, easing me back against the pillows, but not so much that I could not see the blood, the big delta of staining on the shirttails.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  So long, so far. It was not far enough. I knew of dozens of times that people had lost babies late in pregnancy, beautifully formed babies, tender and downy as peaches, still as effigies. Among Italian women, the peculiarities and perils of gestation were the equivalent of a sports channel. But I had never known of any baby coming so far, against such a tide, against such Himalayan odds of happening in the first place, only to leak away on an uneventful Monday morning not long after March blew through town.

  “Beth,” I said. “The baby’s going to die, right?” My voice was so small, it didn’t even sound like me. It was the voice of a child, at the top of a staircase too dark to be safe even to run for the mellow haven of the light.

  “No, no. It’s going to be okay. If only I hadn’t been here …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s because I’m here and I’m related to the baby. Something that just can’t happen has to happen. It’ll be all right. Don’t move.”

  I was alone and bleeding in an isolation room with a crazy person.

  Within minutes there was another crowd in my room, all in haphazard versions of their space suits. A sonogram tech wheeled in a familiar machine with its blind TV eye. I sought out Dr. Setnes’s wide brown eyes. “Can’t you sew the cervix closed?”

  “Too late now,” she said, and told a nurse, “Please start an IV, stat. Sicily, take some deep breaths and let me see what’s going on in there.” Gently, with a tiny gloved finger, she examined me and sighed. “Well, honey, you are in labor. But we are going to stop it.”

  I raised my chin and keened. I howled in rage and entreaty at those thousands of holes in the acoustical tiles.

  “Sicily, hush now,” said Dr. Setnes. “It’s too soon for this kiddo to have a fighting chance in the world. Your baby needs to stay put, so we’re going to stop the labor. You just do everything I say, okay? Let’s see what the monitors say and the sonogram shows us.”

  While there was no mistaking the cold ultrasound conductor on the round-topped timpani of my belly, I could not bring myself to open my eyes. I didn’t want to see any anything sweet, furled, and immobile.

  “There you go,” said Dr. Neville, whom I had forgiven for being named Wayne. “The baby is very active.”

  “I put this at a two,” said Dr. Setnes.

  What’s a two? “What’s a two?” I called out.

  “It’s a stage-two placental abruption. The placenta is beginning to detach from the uterine wall,” Dr. Setnes said soothingly. “My heavens, with the number of ultrasounds we’ve done, this should have been obvious. This is why the baby is small-sized.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Dr. Neville. “I didn’t observe this. It could have just begun.”

  “What’s going to happen?” I said.

  “Well, short-term, you’re not going to move,” said Dr. Setnes. “The contractions have slowed down already. Long-term, you’re not going to move. We’re going to have you waited on hand and foot.”

  “So I can’t walk around or exercise? Just go to the bathroom and shower?”

  “You can’t go to the bathroom and shower,” Dr. Setnes said. “The nurses will take care of that.” She whipped a calculator out of her pocket. “You’re at twenty-six and a half weeks. Term is forty weeks. That means that your job is to stay still and keep that baby in there for about—”

  “I can add,” I said in wonderment. “More than … two months?”

  Giving my shoulder a light tap, Dr. Neville put in his two cents. “The baby is in no distress and the heart rate looks good. Actually, it all looks good. Hang in there, Sicily.” He glanced at the screen. “Hang in there, kiddo.” Then Dr. Neville left, promising to return after he attended to a baby “in more trouble than this.”

  “Sicily, I’ve had patients on complete bed rest for eight months,” said Dr. Setnes. “They got bed sores. They got rashes. They hated my guts. They wanted to cut their husbands up into pieces. But they had healthy babies and they got up and the rashes went away, and I’m not going to say that they forgot, but it was time well spent. It was time well spent.” She smiled. “The good news is that there’s a placenta delivering oxygen and nourishment to your baby. And the bad news is that it’s starting to pull away from the uterine wall.”

  “That sounds like the bad news and the bad news,” I said.

  “Not if it doesn’t pull away any more. We’re not going to know if this is a little critter by nature or because of the drug protocol or because …”

  “If the baby is not receiving oxygen, he is going to be retarded or die in utero,” I said.

  “But the baby is receiving oxygen. Look. You can’t do cartwheels if you can’t breathe.” Obligingly, the baby did a forward roll. “Do you want to know the gender? It’s plain as
the nose on your face.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve come this far. Is he breathing?”

  “Yes. And you’re fine. You keep breathing. We’ll get a yoga coach up here.”

  “Tonight,” said a nurse.

  “And teach you some breathing exercises. Now you sit tight. I’m going to step out and I’ll be back in a couple of hours. That monitor is connected to the nursing station. If there’s a problem, you won’t have to call us, we’ll call you.”

  Beth crept to my side as the doctors dispersed, leaving behind nurses who moved as silently and efficiently as … well, as nuns and monks in a cloister. “What do you feel right now?”

  “I’m terrified. And I’ve never been terrified in my life for anyone else more than for me. As much as for me, yes. But not more. I would die gladly.”

  “You won’t have to do that. It’s going to be fine, honey. It’s like having the baby here since they put that screen up. Kind of like a virtual cradle. I didn’t call Marie; I’m going to go and get her myself. I don’t want her to drive, and it’s early in the day. I’ll bring her back. What you want to do is try to sleep.”

  “Be real, Beth,” I said.

  She pulled the blackout shades, extinguishing the sun. When I asked her to, she pushed my bed closer to the door, so I could reach up to turn on the faucet and brush my teeth. Spitting in a basin and letting it sit there would be too nasty. The swishes and beeps of the monitors were like those sounds far away, a dog barking, a child calling to another, bike to bike, a bird settling down to sleep …

  When my door buzzer sounded, the shades were up and the room was dark.

  My aunt was not there and neither was Beth. I was still so steeped in sleep that it seemed that Vincent, standing there in a black T-shirt from the Hong Kong Film Festival, was just part of a drawn-out dream in which everything was connected, strung out like a rosary I didn’t yet know how to repeat.

  Through the transparent wall between us, Vincent said, Sicily, I’ve come to my senses. You are the love of my life. I knew it the moment I saw you. You and the baby belong with me. I’ve purchased a small compound in Northern California. Marie can live in the coach house after she retires. I hope you can forgive me.…