Second Nature (25 page)

“His whole family lives in Chicago. You could have been anyone.”

“That’s true. But, really, it was me. I was the one who started hoping. He kept saying that it was a crazy thing to do.”

“Didn’t stop him, though.”
The little rat’s ass
.

“I’m not sorry. I thought that what I felt for Joey was as big as it got. But I felt more in seven days about Vincent than I felt about Joe in three years. Vincent’s funny and smart. He saw things sort of twisted, the way I do. He’s solid. I know that sounds impossible. But he cared too. He couldn’t have faked all of it. He made me feel protected and safe.”

“I’m so sorry, Sissy.”

“Well, I’m not sorry I felt that way. I just wish I could stop it, now that it’s over.” Sicily’s eyes closed. Within two minutes, she was breathing slow and deep, her lips slightly parting as she murmured something from a dream.

The next morning, when the temperature outside climbed into the fifties, Sicily sat shivering in a hooded sweatshirt from the Tower of London, with a robe over that, and sipping hot tea. Marie made a mental inventory of the signs she’d been warned to look for that signaled rejection—fever, chills, muscle aches, redness, itching. Check. Check. Not check. Not check. Not check.

“Would you tell me if you thought you had rejection sickness?” Marie asked.

Sicily almost smiled. “It’s not like radiation sickness, Auntie. My hair isn’t going to fall out.”

No
, thought Marie,
your face will fall off
.

Unable to get Sicily to return her calls, Kit Mulroy came unannounced, bringing a bag of croissants, the most innocuous food she could think of, and a swag from Fair Made. Kit wanted the details, and Marie sighed as Sicily haltingly provided the edited version.

“I have lived through more than my share of bad breakups,” Kit said. Kit’s hair, naturally light brown, now was the color of a ripe bing cherry. “It’s a process. Just accept that you’re going to feel like warm cat shit for a while.”

“The hair is very peppy,” Marie said.

“I like it,” Sicily put in.

“It’s my new thing,” Kit said. She stood up and stretched, one arm arched over her head, then the other. “Every time I ditch the latest Mister Wrong, I’m going to change something. I’m going to rewrite a page of myself.”

You’ll end up transgendered
, Marie thought. But she was happy that Kit had come, happy for the CD of torch songs that brought Marie to tears (“Once Upon a Time,” “Come Rain or Come Shine”) and Kit’s own brand of clumsy condolence. The three of them sat on Sicily’s terrace like See-, Hear-, and Speak-No-Evil. Then Marie heard the buzzer sound from within and walked over to depress the button, expecting a package.

Instead, Beth Cappadora said, “Marie, can I come up?”

“It’s a free—of course, Beth,” Marie said. “Please come.”

The two older women met at Sicily’s door.

“I feel like a complete idiot,” Beth said. “Vincent has called me. He talks about her all the time. He says he can’t stop thinking about her. She’s too young for him. She’s like a child. I know he really liked Sicily. But what I think is, he won’t admit it but he’s back with Emily again, this Canadian girl he was dating before.”

“He could call and tell Sicily that much,” Marie said. “That at least.”

“I said so,” Beth went on. “Maybe he’s like every guy. He thinks it’s kinder to just let her hate him than to admit he acted like an ass. I used to think, If you don’t have the guts, just lie. Say you’re dying. Say you’re gay.”

Marie considered this. Possibly Vincent was right. Eventually Sicily’s molten heart would harden against a man who had made soap bubbles of her dreams and popped them. What could Vincent tell Sicily that would make her believe anything except that she’d fallen short in his eyes, in his arms? Distance could be overcome. Age could be reduced to a comic issue. Even men, Marie knew, weren’t immune to the ambush of love. What they meant when they said they cared too much to call was that they couldn’t be bothered.

Those very words were probably written in charcoal on the walls of caves.

Sicily came in from the terrace.

“Beth,” Sicily said. “I thought you’d given up on me.”

“No, just … Eliza’s been feeling really lousy at night, but she won’t stop working no matter what anyone says.” Beth shifted her gigantic purse to her other shoulder and crossed her arms. “Actually, Sicily, I kept waiting for you and Vincent to talk before I starting working with you again. I feel like a silly ass. I don’t know what to say.”

Kit thoughtfully freighted the food inside and, expertly accustomed to Sicily’s cabinets, measured out coffee.

“There isn’t anything to say,” Sicily told Beth. “It’s not your fault.” She sank down into her absurdly cushy sofa. “It is what it is.”

In a gesture Marie recalled from Sicily’s childhood—and, in truth, her niece looked reduced, no more than twelve—Sicily rubbed the backs of her hands against her forehead. Gia had preached to Sicily that the surest way to get pimples was to put your hands all over your face and, instinctively, Sicily still tried to finesse that.

“If I don’t feel better soon, honest to God, Marie, I will let you take me to the doctor. I’m totally dizzy. And cold. And I could throw up from the smell of the coffee.” Springing to her feet, Sicily
did
barely make it to the sink, where she delicately heaved up her bite of croissant and teaspoon of tea. She grabbed for a dish towel and said, “Oh, this is totally humiliating.”

“That’s it,” Marie said. Now Sicily was exhibiting three of the five or six symptoms of rejection. Furious, she stood up and rang for Angel to bring her car to the front from the garage.

“No, not now,” Sicily protested weakly. “We don’t even have an appointment. It’s Sunday.”

“Sicily, you need to go. Call me later,” Beth said. “If you have flu or something on top of all this, I may kill Vincent.”

Kit insisted on riding along. It was a measure of how punk Sicily felt that she’d worn no makeup and hadn’t even changed out of her scrubs and an ancient knee-length sweater that Marie thought had once belonged to Jamie. Sicily usually dressed more thoughtfully to sleep alone than she had today.

At the clinic, Hollis Grigsby’s lieutenant, the young Brit they all called Livingston, breezed out of the sprightly lavender hall at UIC’s Urgent Care.

“Sicily Coyne,” Livingston said. “How pleasant of you to pop over!”

“I’m hardly popping,” Sicily said.

“Ladies, why don’t you come back here and wait in one of the offices and we’ll do an inventory. I have to say, Sicily, you look a bit done in. Too much party?”

Sicily shook her head.

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say maybe a bit of anemia. We’ll get you stuck with a few dozen needles and do you right up.”

Sicily disappeared with Livingston and a nurse Marie vaguely recognized. Left alone, Kit and Marie made a few rapid-fire stabs at small talk: How was work? Crazy. Christmas shopping started? Not one bit. They then seemed to mutually agree to occupy themselves with seeing how fast they could flip through magazines that promised they could take ten years off their look with one fashion trick and walk forty pounds off for the New Year. There were more than a dozen magazines in the office. By the time the nurse returned, absent Sicily or Dr. Livingston, Marie and Kit were down to trying to find the hidden comb and the kite in the
Highlights
drawings. Marie glanced at the clock. Sicily had been with the doctor for ninety minutes. Sweet Christ! Some of that blood work must have shown an alarmingly high—or was it low?—white-cell count. Something was terribly wrong.

“Dr. Livingston will be out in a moment to speak to you,” the nurse said. “Sicily’s just resting.”

“Resting?” Marie said.

“Dr. Livingston?” Kit said. “That’s his name? Like, Dr. Livingston, I presume?”

“Bingo,” the nurse said wearily. “You’re the only one who’s ever said that.” She smiled. “Someday there’ll be a whole generation of people who’ve never heard that line and Stan will be happy.”

From every deathwatch of the famous she’d covered, from the night her sister Gia died, from every receptor in her palette of senses tuned up to the highest frequency, Marie knew that good news in a hospital travels fast. Indeed, when Livingston approached, he seemed almost to stroll, noticing the scenery, as though deliberately placing each step on some invisible path.

Kit stood up.

Marie stood up.

“Mrs. Caruso,” the doctor said. “Sicily is not in rejection. Her vitals are great and we don’t think there’s any kind of disease process going on from what we can determine. We are going to run a few more tests, and for that, we’d like to admit her overnight. So, in a moment, I’ll take you back to see her and then you and …”

“Kit. Katherine Mulroy.”

“You and Miss Mulroy can go and get her some trashy mags and the things she might want from home.”

“Dr. Livingston, what are you worried about?” Marie said.

Livingston examined his immaculate hands. “This is potentially an extremely sad situation. Let’s hope not. At best, it’s an unfortunate inconvenience. Sicily’s life is not in danger.”

“What is?” Kit said.

“Doctor. This is my kid. There’s a very heavy shoe that hasn’t dropped in this room,” Marie said.

“Yes. There’s that. It seems that our Sicily is pregnant.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

H
ow many nights had I lain gazing up at acoustical-tile ceilings of hospital rooms and wondering if acoustical tiles were simply cheaper or were intended to muffle the cries? I didn’t even look at Dr. Livingston when he asked me if I wanted my aunt to stay with me while Kit went back and got me an overnight bag. I did not want my aunt to come in just then. Aunt Marie would pretend that she was angry, when she actually was heartsick, but beneath her concern she would be thinking that I was a half-wit and the female version of Jonah, her own personal bad-luck charm.

I was my own bad-luck charm.

Pregnant? I thought.

Pregnant?

Of all the things I had been fearfully yet grimly prepared to hear Dr. Livingston say, this had not been on the list, or even in the vicinity of the mental paper on which I’d written the list. When Vincent and I made love, the condoms weren’t linked in my mind to any real possibility of … pregnancy. They were like a courtesy, like a hook-and-eye latch on a screen door, truly preventing nothing, a barrier that even a little … a little kid could defeat.

A little kid.

I couldn’t be pregnant. I could not be. But they’d taken enough blood from me, it seemed, to transfuse every trauma patient admitted that night to the hospital. They’d run that test over and over. The results were conclusive. And so was my fear, a kid’s fear. I’d only felt this way one other time, the first time Eliza and I talked transplants—a thousand years ago—disoriented, like Alice through the looking glass. There must have been a terrible accident. There had been. The accident was within me, the size of the head of a pencil.

I wanted it out.

Out now. Even when Joe and I were first thinking about marriage, Joe was talking kids long, long before I was ready to consider them in anything except—please excuse the expression—a conceptual way. In hindsight, I knew that the kids were Joe LaVoy’s beard, not just his mother’s obsession: If he had pretty kids, it would blunt the impact of being shackled forever to the girl who had no face. It would give him something to show off, the way guys showed off their wives. As I lay there, curled on top of the covers, I wondered if I ever would be meant to be a mother.

And I decided I would.

But not now.

Then I thought about Vincent and was surprised by the awful wave of hunger that barreled through me when I considered that this … this accident was a product of my one week as someone’s beloved.

Well, as someone’s pretend beloved.

As someone’s roomie with benefits.

As for the abortion itself, I wasn’t at all frightened. I wished I could have it tonight. I wondered how it was possible at this stage that there was not some medical remedy, like a long-acting morning-after pill. All I could think was,
Hold on. You have been through so much worse, this isn’t even a blip on the screen. Tomorrow this will be all over. All over
.

Dr. Livingston returned, and the nurse everyone called Derry—although her given name was Adair—helped me get as comfortable as you can get in a hospital bed. “I see you won’t need to change for surgery,” Dr. Livingston said. “You can just scrub in.”

I didn’t answer.

He let out a gusty breath and said, “Sicily, I apologize. That sounded wrong. I didn’t mean that. Frankly, I don’t know what to say. This is a bit unprecedented and all too tough for you. I suppose that the best-laid plans …”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“Alas. I’ve got both feet in my mouth now. You did use a second form of birth control.”

“Yes.”

“And so both a condom and the shot failed.”

“Well, there was a second form except once.”

“Which is, as they say, all it takes. And you know, Sicily, this is a bit of a non-starter.” He drew himself up. “It’s more than that. I know you have read all about the fellow you refer to as the Canadian crazy. Well, he died a horrible death.” I began to speak and Dr. Livingston held up a stop-sign palm. “He died a horrible death because of being off his medication. At any point, perhaps he could have been saved, but he still might have died from sepsis as his transplanted skin became necrotic. A slow death. As Americans say, we aren’t messing about here, Sicily.”

“What they say is, we’re not messing
around
, Dr. Livingston.”

“Just so. I know that this must be very sad for you—”

“It’s not. I wasn’t planning to have a baby.”

“But for all women, having an abortion is sad.”

“How do you know all women? Aren’t you thinking only of your wife or your sister? And what if your life was at stake? Or theirs was?”

Dr. Livingston placed his immaculate hands on his knees and studied them. “Well, Gwen and I are only now trying to adopt a child. We couldn’t conceive,” he said. “And perhaps I should not have used the term ‘very sad.’ What I meant, really, was … unpleasant. Unavoidable unpleasantness. I’m grateful and happy that you’re being so reasonable in a situation that might shatter another girl. You really must be careful.”