Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Even that did not really change me. I felt like I had such a hard time when I was a kid, I did not owe anybody a thing.

  Then I made my kidnapping film, and that was basically all about me too.

  It was selfish because I was trying to figure out if I was just some asshole or if other families went though the same stuff my family did when they lost a child. It was the hardest thing I ever did. I had to listen to their grief and care about it. I would forget, hey, I’m the guy who only cares about himself. The film was good and it got a lot of attention and awards, but the important thing was that I learned everything good is hard and there are no shortcuts.

  So, the last time I was in Chicago, I was talking to my grandfather, Angelo, who is my father’s father.

  I was trying to explain why we weren’t together—that is, you and me, not my grandfather and me. I was telling him that the world was different now and that a man does not make a lifetime with a woman because she’s having his baby. I said that you saw my point about this.

  My grandfather sits there for a while and at last he says, “Are you like a professional athlete or something?” I have no idea what he is talking about. He says, “You are going to leave babies all over the country that you made and send money to the mothers?” I kept trying to tell my grandfather that was not the point.

  I told him that other than the baby we had nothing in common. He said we must have had something in common, because we made a baby together. He also said, “How much does anyone have in common, and what does that matter ten years from now?”

  I just sort of realized that was true. Like, we made love and that made sense at the time, but loving somebody is not the same as having sex with somebody. Not all the things you feel have to make sense, however.

  The last thing my grandfather said was, Uomini mantenere le promesse, which in Italian means sort of men keep their promises.

  How I see it now is that I made a promise to you, and I do not want to break it.

  You made a promise too and, even though you didn’t know you were making it, you are keeping it. My grandfather is first generation and he is very old-fashioned. Maybe I am old-fashioned as well.

  What this all boils down to is that I have no idea what I can give you except a person who has made a lot of bad choices. The only thing that is good about that is I know when I am making a bad choice, and it feels like I am making a bad choice now.

  When we were together at my house, it felt like I was making a good choice. I insulted you when I said you moved right in. I should have said, It felt like you should move right in. It felt like I was home. Of course, I was home. It was my house. What I mean is, I felt like you were my home.

  Please get back to me on this and advise.

  Love,

  Vincent

  P.S. I hope you are not thinking I wrote this because of what my grandfather said. He helped me put into words what I already felt.

  P.P.S. I hope you are not upset that I did not say this in a phone call. That would be impossible. This is definitely the longest letter I have ever written, and there is no way on earth I could have actually said these words.

  I read it three times.

  I wanted to make sure that I was sure of what he meant and that I was sure I wanted what he wanted. But wasn’t Angelo exactly right? Whatever stood between us was no more than a slope on a learning curve. It might be harder for a man who’d been single for as long as Vincent had been single (which, I guess, had in some sense been since the day he was born) to get used to a house in which there was a shrieking baby and a half-Irish, half-Italian dominatrix. And yet he was made from those same bricks as I, grown in the same soil—with fully as many identity shifts as I had endured, although his did not show on the outside of his body. We might be like two cactuses fighting for water in one pot. We might grow together like a rose and a briar. It might be an opera, complete with broken glass and sword points. It might be a beach picnic on a Tuesday night.

  It would be interesting, in any case. Human life was a dare. You could take it or leave it.

  Was I foolish?

  Absolutely.

  Was I brave?

  I like to think so.

  When Eliza came by that evening, I asked her if she knew Vincent’s home phone number. She reached into the pocket of her monogrammed white lab coat and took out a slip of paper. “Do you know how long I have been carrying this around? Suffice it to say a long time.” She gave me the slip of paper and said, “Mornings are better. Do you know something? When Ben asked me to marry him, I said, Let’s wait. Let’s wait because I’m still a kid. I’m in school. And he said, Okay, we can wait forever. But time is only time. It doesn’t change anything.”

  The next morning, right at the moment of the shift change, I depressed my buzzer. “We’ll be right there, Sicily,” said a weary voice.

  “It’s an emergency,” I said. That wasn’t fair. When I asked for the phone, the nurse on duty pointed out that she had been awake all night. I told her that I had too. I held the phone in both hands and thought, It’s five in the morning in California. And then I dialed.

  A woman answered. She said, “Hi. Uh. Hi.”

  “Is this Vincent Cappadora’s house?”

  “Yes but he’s asleep right now. Do you want me to wake him? Is it urgent?”

  “It’s urgent,” I said. “But not important.” I hung up the phone and lay hugging my child and cursing every sentimental impulse that made me believe in the honor of assholes. But by the following morning, I thought, What kind of dime-store beauty girl answers the phone at five in the morning? I had visited Vincent, and although I hadn’t awakened on Central Time, someone else might. It could have been one of his cousins. He had at least one girl cousin who lived out there, and three or four altogether. What did it matter now? I was all in. Maybe I wasn’t Vincent’s best girl, but I lived next door.

  To know for sure, I made myself wait for four days.

  I filled out more papers, wrote more journal entries, pasted more sonogram pictures into my daughter’s book, wished on stars and flipped coins and did other stuff that only people who are in love or crazy do. And then I watched documentaries. I picked out a baptismal outfit, not knowing that Eliza would give me the one that Vincent had worn. Finally, at a civilized hour, nine in the morning, I called again.

  The woman who answered this time had an accent. She sounded like a cartoon villain or my old pal and client Dr. Joshi. “I will find him. He is across the street. At the neighbors’ house. Who may I tell him is making this call?”

  I said, “Skip it.”

  She said, “Well, does this mean you want to talk to him or you do not want to?”

  “I don’t want to talk to him anymore. Tell him I said so.”

  “Tell him that who said so?” A mark, I thought. A naïve dipshit. I made you a promise and I don’t want to break it, Sicily. Really? Vincent was right about one thing. He knew his own texture exceedingly well.

  “I will say goodbye then. Spaseba.”

  I said, “Dob ryy d’en.” There was an audible silence.

  “You are Russian?” she said.

  “Yes. Vincent is a fugitive. Tell him that we found him now and it’s just a matter of time. We’re watching the house.”

  “Nevozmozhnoe.”

  I had no idea what that meant. But it sounded like some form of refutation. “Da,” I said. “On yest. Dasvidaniya.”

  Until next time.

  But there would be no next time. What would time matter? It didn’t change anything, as Ben Cappadora said.

  The phone rang that time. I counted the rings. Eleven.

  Then it stopped.

  On the morning of May 8, I woke to see my aunt smiling spectrally at me over her mask. “I brought chocolate,” she said. “You’re getting too thin for a pregnant person.”

  “They suck your blood, these parasites. I’m not hungry, Auntie.”

  “Well, you need to eat anyhow. That’s what I hear. It’s
a beautiful day. I wish I could bring you a breath of air. The lilacs will come soon. And then the roses. You’ll be out in time for the roses, Sicily.” Marie gave me a hard look. “What the hell is wrong with you? You look like someone punched you.”

  “That’s what happened last night. A crazy escaped transplant patient.”

  “Have you been crying?”

  “It’s my new second job,” I said. “Auntie, it’s just biology.”

  I shifted my position ever so slightly and that’s when time ran out, along with enough warm fluid to soak the bed. A contraction so brutal and swift it made me grunt seized my gut, and I grabbed my aunt, who reached around me to the call button.

  Within five minutes, I was out of isolation. Assessing my condition came first, someone said. Resterilizing the room would come afterward. The obstetrical resident, a woman so tiny she made Eliza look statuesque, came running in without even a mask, checked me, and paged Dr. Setnes. Dr. Setnes came, wearing blue jeans and Dansko clogs. By the time she thrust her arms into the gown the staffers held out, tapping her foot as they tucked her braids under a paper cap, I was yelling like a three-eleven alarm.

  “Sicily,” she said, as hands slipped warm clean sheets onto the bed in place of the soaked-through linens, “try not to worry, because we’ll get an IV going and administer …” She paused as the resident tucked a pillow under my back, then, with every confidence, Dr. Setnes leaned in and began a cursory exam. “We’ll administer … Nope. Okay. We’ll administer surfactant. Because we’re going to have a birthday. Let’s get Miss Coyne down to a labor and delivery—no, not an operating room. I think just a regular birthing suite will be fine.”

  And along everyone trotted, the IV bag swinging next to my head like an udder. At the elevator door on three, the neonatologist, Tom Cook, listened to Dr. Setnes describe his patient, who would be born at thirty-one weeks and one day and might be smaller than the expected three pounds because of the effects of maternal medication or an abruption or a combination of the two.

  There was every reason to fear that I might hemorrhage. I’d given my own blood, weeks earlier, against that possibility. The cramps were violent by then and I was breathing too hard.

  “Sicily, settle down now, long breaths, like the yoga coach taught you,” said my aunt. We’d seen precisely one birthing video on the closed-circuit hospital channel. We never got past breathing. But my aunt remembered the power of those long, cleansing breaths. “You’re going to hyperventilate, Sicily. Listen to me.”

  “Something is tearing,” I told my aunt. “This isn’t how they’re supposed to feel. I don’t feel waves. Something is tearing me apart.”

  “It’s going very fast,” Dr. Setnes said. “But it’s not going so fast that we don’t have time to think and settle down. And nothing is tearing, Sicily. Do you feel sharp pains in a band across the lower half of your belly, below your navel, on both sides?”

  “Yes!” I roared in her face, as though something was about to pop out of my chest and rip off Dr. Setnes’s glasses, along with her face. “When is the break?”

  “Usually there are intervals of up to two minutes. Do you feel a lessening of the pain between those sharp pains?”

  “No!”

  “I’m here, Sicily,” said Eliza. “I’m right beside you. You’re going to have a beautiful baby. My little Charley’s baby cousin. And everything will be just fine.”

  “Hi, Eliza!” I screamed.

  “Do you feel as though you need to go to the toilet?” Dr. Setnes said.

  “I have no idea.” The nurses laid warm blankets across my thighs as I began to shiver.

  “Let’s have a mirror,” said Dr. Setnes, as Eliza and the labor nurses helped position my stockinged feet. What I saw looked nothing like my dainty nether parts. It was blue and engorged and stippled with mess. I decided at that moment I would tell Kit and all the friends I would have one day to send their husbands out of town during the birth.

  “Let’s not have the mirror,” I said, and pain like hot tongs, mindless but precisely aimed, hauled down on my belly.

  “No pushing yet,” said Dr. Setnes, as though studying a particularly vexing bit of stitchery. “We just want a little more time here.” I saw her glance behind her at the big, bright warming bed in the corner, where Dr. Cook and another man—a huge dark-skinned man I would come to know well—waited with the open, soft-kneed, easy stance of tennis players.

  The tongs seemed to open, but only for an instant, and then clench harder at me, lower in my belly. Who the hell thought this shit up? Pain was no stranger to me, but this pain was something even I had never experienced—relentless, destructive, personal. There was nowhere to escape. My aunt said, “Try to put yourself out in front of it mentally, Sicily. Try to concentrate on what’s happening. Think about progress and that the worst of this is behind you. You’re making progress.”

  “You never did this!”

  “I wanted to,” Marie said.

  I was afraid that if I clenched my teeth harder, I’d break one. “Can’t I have something for pain?” I asked. They offered me Tylenol. If I could have gathered enough breath to laugh, I would have.

  Eliza told me, “Try to think about the best moment of your life.”

  “The best moment of my life since about age ten is what got me here,” I told Eliza. Still, I pictured that beach. There was a little girl with me, young but tall and skinny. She had done her own hair, with about twenty different barrettes and elastic bands. She looked up at me, with my father’s cloudy eyes.

  “Then try to concentrate on one thing. Think about me and your aunt and everyone who loves you holding you; plenty of people have gone down this road before and, as scary as it will feel, it is safe. Just hold on to us. Hold on as hard as you can, and before you know it, you will be in a park with a carriage and your daughter and I’ll be there with Charley.”

  So I gave up my body and held on and howled and tears sprang from my eyes, and Eliza was right. There was no going back up that path, but in an amazingly short time, my body gathered itself and, with such propulsive relief as I had not believed possible, I burst her into the world. She was yelling, but so small she was like the rough sketch of a human being.

  “Not much there,” said Dr. Cook, “but what there is is doing just what it should and looking good.”

  Cook had his obligations, of course. He who would later describe my child’s chances for a normal life like the warnings for a medication to treat migraines, which could result in shingles, acne, bronchitis, seizures, arrhythmia (occasionally serious), uncontrolled bleeding, liver failure, gastrointestinal distress, and death. Since everything else had already happened, it was impossible that these things also could happen, so I exercised Dr. Ahrens’s prescription for some everyday denial. I decided she would be fine. She weighed three pounds precisely and she breathed on her own. Her Apgar scores were seven and eight. Not as good as, but better than most kids, even as little as she was.

  “Every delivery is a special delivery at UIC,” I said. “Right?”

  “This one is,” said Dr. Cook.

  “Every day after this day will be a good day for her,” Hollis said. She had materialized from the ventilation system like a genie. “Every day you will cross one catastrophe off the list. She will go from strength to strength.”

  “I expect that,” I said. “I fully expect that.” I did fully expect that.

  For a moment, just before they whisked her to a receiving bed under warming lights as if she were the main course at a buffet, they let me hold her. She fit in my palm. I saw only that her head was the size of a tangerine, her eyes the color of blueberries, inquisitive and unblinking. I wished Vincent had experienced that moment. Whatever I had construed as an understanding of love or lust or drink, drug, vanity, victory, courage, cowardice—it all disappeared under a great drift of immaculate peace. How had I ever considered ending her? My daughter. Shuddering and covered in glistening slime and dark blood, she was the solsti
ce of my life. She was a little girl who had my father’s face. Jamie Coyne’s jaw, square as a sugar cube. Maybe she was not mine. I would love her long enough to let her go someday.

  But I would always be hers.

  Alone for hours, while the NICU poked and assessed her, I gave strong thought to my child’s name.

  I had always known what it would be, but now that she was here, corporeal, with a presence, I had to give her the chance to claim another name. For half an hour, I called her Natasha, Nat, Natty, Tasha. For an hour I called her Maria—Mimi and Mia for short. I thought of calling her Jamie, short for nothing. I actually flirted with the idea of Elizabeth, but Beth already had enough tributes to her walking around. The primary value of that name was that it would have made Vincent feel guilty.

  Abruptly, I sat up and called his number. No one answered from Russia with love or even from La Jolla with silicone. The machine picked up. I hung up. I called back. He answered then: “Huh … hello.” I hate it when people answer the phone as though they’re drugged. Then again, maybe he was. Why not just sit up and act like a person and realize that people don’t call you at dawn to talk about good avocado recipes.

  “This is Sicily Coyne,” I said and thought, I will say, The results of our misconception arrived this morning. Instead, I said, “Vincent, I need …”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Our baby was born this morning—your daughter.”

  “It’s way too soon! It’s, like, not even thirty-two weeks.”

  Absurdly, my heart turned at his calculation of the weeks. I began to cry, not sobs but soft, salty, unceasing sheets across my cheeks and down onto my neck that soothed me.