Second Nature (41 page)

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

S
o 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.…

Even as hallucinations go, it was cheesy.

The truth was, I hadn’t even turned on the intercom thing. I couldn’t reach it. How I felt was as though I were in an “environment,” the way higher-order mammals are at a zoo, a place that had all the accoutrements of a home—a swing and a bed, plenty of food and water—but no simple affectionate touch, no freedom, no privacy, no will. I always imagined that this was the reason orangutans looked so sad. I pointed at the simple system and at the nursing station, trying to get Vincent to summon someone to turn the damned thing on. I was afraid to stretch to depress the button. So I smiled at him, at his cotton sweater tied around his shoulders in a way that would have looked femme at best on any other guy and at his sad-amused gaze, like a song I used to know. He put two fingers to his lips and laid them on the Vestex in the vicinity of my distant lips and then again in the neighborhood of the mound of my belly.

Because there was no way he could hear me, I shook my head and said, “Vincent, I love you. I have such a crush on you. Maybe I’m a jerk, but I can’t lie. I know I’m going to lose you. But loving you was worth the price of admission.”

At the time, Vincent probably thought I was talking about needing a brush for the dust. Maybe that I was saying I couldn’t get the thing to work and didn’t know why. He probably read my lips and believed I was telling him that what I could use was a good electrician.

Finally, he got the message. A nurse came and flipped the little switch.

“Houston,” I said. “We have contact.”

“What are you in for?” Vincent said.

“Two more months and then some hard labor.”

“Well, I was in the neighborhood …”

“Really! Shooting viruses in Chicago?”

“No, Sicily. I got here as soon as I could. As soon as my mother called. Actually, I got here sooner than I could.”

“How?”

“I chartered a plane.”

Now, I was still only twenty-six years old, a kid from Chicago who’d been on an airplane once and had come back with a hostage. “Get out,” I said. “You chartered a plane for just yourself?”

“It’s okay. I wanted to get here and I didn’t want to wait in line and be scanned and get stalled on the tarmac. It’s the way to go. Rob and I have flown private a couple of times, and if I had real money, I’d buy a plane and find somebody to share a pilot with. You just get right off and into a cab. It’s like you’re a diplomat.”

“What did your mother tell you?”

“She said you were in labor and that you might lose the baby.”

“But that settled down. It’s still not so great, but here I am. And there he is.” I couldn’t move, so I made eyes at him, my old gift. “You were going to come here even if I lost the baby?”

“Sicily. Especially then. I let you go through hell alone before. I won’t do that again. But I don’t think this will end that way. I think that’s a pretty cool little girl in there.”

“It’s a boy,” I said, deadpan. I was testing him, to see if he looked too delighted.

“It is? For sure? That’s great. But I would have loved a girl.”

“The truth is, I don’t know at all what it is. Stick around. They’re bound to do an ultrasound in twenty minutes tops, maybe before lunch. Lunch is around three-thirty on this floor, dinner at five.” I turned in bed slightly.

“Don’t. Do you want something?”

“Just some water. I can get it. When I talk through the curtain, I feel like I’m yelling. Earlier, I was yelling. I was pretty tense.”

“My mother was having a nutty. She was convinced it was the Cappadora curse.”

“So she said.”

Vincent approached the nurses’ station, and in no time, a brigade of more nurses than it would have taken to treat the injured in an eight-car pileup wheeled me even closer to the Vestex panel, positioning me so my mouth was near the intercom. Someone brought Vincent a chair. Everyone had figured out by now that this was
the
Vincent Cappadora, of germ-warfare pop-movie fame and sensitive Oscar-winning documentary fame. He was humble and charming and cute, and they were fluttery and deferent, and the whole thing made me very proud and also made me feel like it would be fun to push him off an overpass.