Second Nature (36 page)

She came back into the room. “I’ll stay here with Sicily.”

Without another word, he left. I heard the
ping
as the elevator arrived: There was almost no wait for an elevator at a hospital on Christmas Eve—when everyone well enough to be pushed, pulled, or dragged goes home, at least for the night, even if it’s to die. I heard the whoosh of the doors. And Vincent was gone.

My aunt held me and tried to pretend that she wasn’t crying, but her tears soaked the front of my dainty gown. The nurses had candles now and were walking slowly from door to door, stopping at each one—where someone had received a kidney, or was in isolation waiting for marrow, a heart, a liver.
A face to face the world
. I had to remember the girl I was once, who would have closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the candles.

Dr. Ahrens brought me a cup loaded with my discs and cylinders of drugs and I gulped them down. In a soft voice, she told my aunt that she had arranged for sedation for me at six in the morning before the procedure. I asked Dr. Ahrens for something that would make me sleep, sleep deeply, so I would not think of that little hand, swimming unawares within me through the dark water, toward the shore, toward me. Dr. Ahrens brought another paper cup, tasting of dry wood, and a glass of water that did nothing to quench my immense thirst. But she’d given good drug, she had.

As I began to sink, I confused the voices of the nurses with angels. I saw their scrubs with polka dots and polo necks and smiley-faces as gowns of white, and they sang of hope and joy and of the baby in the barn. And I rushed into the dark until it closed over my head.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
woke with my nose chilled, the familiar cocoon of warm blankets and the clang of bright lights the telltale signals of the operating room. I had awakened before, and someone had generously put me to sleep again, treating me like an animal that might become anxious if it sensed its fate. Slowly, the darkness of morning returned to me: the nip of the IV—which I noticed of late, because needles and IVs were no longer customary for me—the balm of the Valium, a good dose, a Sicily dose, straight to starlight.

“It would be unkind to wish you a Merry Christmas, so I won’t,” said Hollis.

“Why are you in this dream?”

“You’re not dreaming, Sicily, though I can’t say that it wouldn’t be easier for it to be a dream,” she said. “I came back last night as soon as I heard about this.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not yours to be sorry. I should be sorry. I am sorry. I should have been more of a doctor. I needed to be here,” she said. Hollis had taken my hand, the one without the IV. I was drowsy. The anesthesiologist murmured through his mask about IV Versed.

“I’m doing the right thing,” I said.

“Well, probably best, honey,” said Hollis. “But I sympathize. This is a loss now, and I hate that you have to bear it. But you’ll wake up just as you did when the bandages came off. And, as for the rest, time will come again.” Rustlings and adjustments were going on around and under me:
Can-you-lift-your-hips-just-a-little-Miss-Coyne, that’s-great-thank-you, now-let’s-put-one-foot-here, warm-enough-now-good
. Through a gauze, I saw Hollis recede, and in her place came a burly man, whose face and ginger fringe of hair I didn’t recognize. He leaned close to study my eyes.

“Can you hear me, Miss Coyne?”

“Of course.”

“Maybe she can have a little more?”

“Nope,” said the anesthesiologist. “Already got the Mike Tyson amount.”

“Where is Dr. Setnes?” I asked.

“She’s not here,” said the red-haired doctor. “She’s not needed for this morning.”

His voice was mellow, if terse. I had taken this man’s Christmas morning for a grim purpose, so that my psychological suffering would be eased. But it would never be eased. I would always have scars on my soul. The doctor was gowned and masked and gloved. I wondered if doctors scrubbed in so rigorously for routine abortions. I was a special case, though. An infection could thrust me farther into the shadows. But wasn’t abortion a bit of an ordinary process, performed each day on dozens of sobbing teenagers and tight-lipped forty-year-olds, in office settings? A suck and a scoop?

“Dr. Setnes is an obstetrician, Miss Coyne,” the doctor said, and I felt the cold tongue of the speculum. “I’m a gynecological surgeon. And I’m going to take the best care of you. My name is Doug Sherry. This isn’t going to take very long, and you won’t feel a thing. Please relax.”

I began to breathe slowly, deeply, in and out, willing my shoulders down into the table. Soon it would be over. Soon I would have the chance to begin again, to take up where I had stopped so abruptly. I saw those vulnerable drooping cheeks on the grainy TV screen of the sonogram. The furled tiny hand. I saw myself naked in the night, Vincent’s body golden and red in the firelight, our arms so supple in light and shadow, so tightly against each other that we were like estuaries of a single river that met in a hollow of sand. Wide-spaced eyes. Babies not meant to be. Vincent’s eyes, his shock and awe. Annunciation. Swimming little foot. All unawares. I heard myself speak to the doctor and he murmured in return, adjusting the drape over my knees—so kind, even the drape had been warmed. I tried again. Could they hear me? I tried to sit but my legs were cumbersome and thick. The anesthesiologist spoke up.

“Dr. Sherry, she said no.”

“I don’t think so. She’s not aware.”

“I did,” I told the room wearily. “I said no. Stop it. Stop everything.”

“Sicily, do you need more time?” the red-haired man asked.

“I don’t need more time,” I said. “I need to go back to my room, and I am not going to schedule another procedure. Ever.
I am half sick of shadows.
” I had memorized only one poem ever, Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott,” and then only under duress. But I had gone to Catholic school, and I remembered it well.
God, in his mercy, lend her grace
. As the Versed ebbed like something uncovering my lucid mind, I saw the rest of my body ringed by a dozen faces, all peering at me with various degrees of astonishment, annoyance, amusement, anger. The red-haired gynecological surgeon pulled off his mask.

“Did I have an abortion?” I asked.

“No,” said the surgeon. “No. You refused it.”

“I refused it. I was not saying, no, this can’t be happening to me. I was saying no, this will not happen.”

“I’m glad Dr. Haryana heard you. You don’t need me now. If I leave right away, my kids won’t be up yet.” He turned to leave and then looked back. “Don’t worry. Good luck, Miss Coyne. Good luck, and I mean that.”

“I will need it,” I said.

“Happy Christmas. I got a good feeling,” said Dr. Sherry.

I did too. This guy had grown up on the West Side. I heard it in his voice and saw it in his big-veined nose, which had seen more than a few cups of kindness in its time.

“Good luck from me too, Sicily,” said the anesthesiologist, whose liquid East Indian eyes and lilt I now recognized.

“I won’t be seeing you again, I promise,” I told him.

“You never know. Maybe six months from now, you could have a stubborn baby who doesn’t want to come out. Apparently he is a stubborn baby already. Determined to stay put. I think he has got a right to his chance in this bad world. Maybe not always bad.”

Of course, Hollis was waiting outside the doors of the OR. Although there was nothing for me to be ashamed of, I wanted to look away. As the nurses at the head and foot of the rolling bed wheeled me toward the elevators, she walked beside me, whistling softly, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” which she could not on earth have known was the song we were singing when the Christmas trees exploded on the altar. Even I had forgotten. She said, “What’s your favorite Christmas carol?”

“ ‘Silent Night,’ ” I said. “I’m very big on sentimental nonsense. As you have just seen demonstrated.”

“Like some kinds of religion.”

“Hollis, this had nothing to do with religion.”

“I didn’t mean the Catholic religion,” she said. “I meant the religion of love.” Hollis thumbed the button while the nurses slipped the cot into the elevator: It barely fit. They always had to jockey it around and slam it against the walls. Why was that? Why didn’t somebody suggest changing either the size of the bed or the size of the elevator? Didn’t they have different sizes of elevators, some for an urban hospital, some for a French restaurant, some for the W Hotel or Lincoln Center? Hollis waved and told me she’d be back later, after getting on her computer to chat with her family in Louisiana.

Dr. Ahrens was waiting in my room on the ninth floor. She was not tapping her foot, but I could tell that her restraint was forced.

“Hi,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“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.”