Second Nature (44 page)

“Well,” she said. “We’ve been friends for twenty years, and I thought I would be the one to have a baby first. I thought you would be maid of honor in my wedding, like we promised each other when we were five.”

“I will be still. You can buy bridesmaid dresses in size twenty-two,” I said.

“Oh, Sicily. You’ll piss out twenty pounds overnight when she’s born.” Kit leaned closer to the intercom. “I think Anthony is gay. I don’t think he’s out to himself.”

“That said,” I told her, “I wish I were gay.”

“Sissy!”

“Think about it. The food would be better. The house would never stink. The toilet seat would be down and you could borrow the other person’s clothes. Probably the sex would be better too. Although I guess for me …”

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

“Alas, heterosexuality. The bane of mankind.”

Kit cried on my shoulder when she left and I cried as well, mid-level tears. Kit was still a kid in lady’s clothing, with a great smoky eye but an inward eye that didn’t have the sense not to wear turquoise. I had perforce become a woman with responsibilities. At least, I was doing the run-up. Indeed, I had filled out insurance forms and school applications and drawn a birth announcement and made daily entries in the journal for waiting.

Miss Thing, This is the clubhouse turn. I wish I could promise you a world without confusion and heartaches. I wish I could promise you glamour and fun all the time. The fact is, you’re going to be the daughter of a mommy with a demanding job, but it will be interesting to your first-grade class, I promise. And I already love you more than I ever knew it was possible to love anyone, even though you probably weigh about as much as a good Reuben. But you’re my girl. And we’re out on this together, just us. You were only unplanned. You were never ever unwanted, and you sure won’t be unloved. I can’t be sure about me. Love, Mommy
.

I was watching a really dramatic thunderstorm, pretending I was Catherine or Isabella looking out at the purple crags above the moor, when Derry the nurse brought me a letter. It was still warm to the touch, freshly baked. It was handwritten, with a return address in Beverly Hills.

Had he moved?

Had he actually left that little blue clapboard house? Who slept now in the room where the tree branches bushed the window like fingertips, like a wand?

He hadn’t moved. He was just using hotel stationery.

It read:

Dear Sicily,

I’m not good with words. Actually, I am good with words, but not the serious kind. In high school and in college, I became well known as sort of the local screwup and screw-off. If I had two choices, I would always make the wrong choice. I had a vocation for making bad choices. So I started to do it on purpose. I thought, Screw them. If they were going to think of me as a loser, I would be a big loser. Screw everybody. Eliza’s mother had to get me out of so many stupid things I did that she called in every favor owed to her by anybody else in any police department in America, and she finally said the next time she would let me go to Joliet and play footsie with people who knew what it was like to be really bad and to enjoy it.

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.”