“I wanted to be … the right way. I wanted to be considerate.”
“You wanted to be considerate by having sex with me twice a day for a week?” I said.
Vincent raised both hands, leaned back in his chair, and made as if to ward off a Cape buffalo. “Hold on. No. That’s harsh, Sicily. I never said it was meaningless. It was wonderful. But one day we were shaking hands and the next day you were sitting on my bed looking at my photo albums. I said I was afraid I followed your lead and I let it get out of hand. My feelings too. Let’s go back to where we were going—to talk when this is all over, have dinner.”
Have dinner? When this is all over?
“When this is all over? Do you mean, what, in twenty years? If it—if she survives, this will never be all over for me, Vincent. Even when you stop paying child support. I sort of expected you to be an insensitive jerk, from what people said.”
“What did people say?”
“I hate you, Vincent.”
“What?”
“I hate you. You know why I hate you? Because, until I met you, even though I was ugly and even though people shunned me, nobody in my life ever completely got to make me feel ashamed.”
Vincent stood up and, through the Vestex, reached for me. I couldn’t move or even turn away from him. “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t touch me.”
“Sicily,” Vincent said, and I could hear in his voice genuine mourning, a note in a minor key that was not rehearsed. “Sweet Sicily. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Believe me. Just once, believe me. Just because you were ahead of me, it doesn’t mean I won’t catch up.”
Then, I genuinely hated him. For blindsiding me with a sudden surge of genuine charm, I truly hated him. How could I figure out a way to say that I hated him, convincingly, when a mere change in his inflection could sink my equilibrium like a cloudburst swamps a kite? I needed to think.
Then an armada of nurses swept toward us. “We need to spend a little time with Miss Coyne,” one said. “We need to check her vitals because of the preterm labor.”
“I understand,” Vincent said.
“Not now,” I said. “In a moment.”
“Okay,” the gloved nurse said, with a tight smile across her eyes, the rest of her face invisible. She stood back against the wall to wait, and the others followed suit.
“Please give us a few minutes. He has to leave for California. Please.”
“It’s fine. Go ahead,” said the woman. She studied a clipboard. I had never had such strong homicidal ideation. Neither of us said a thing. Finally, the nurse broke the silence.
“We won’t take more than fifteen minutes. Then you can go right back to chatting.”
“Can you wait?” I asked Vincent. Whiny and needy and wheedling.
“I have to go,” he said. “I have like twenty meetings—”
“Tomorrow. Yes, I know. I know you are busy and important.”
“Sicily, this is way too personal to talk out, especially with an audience, for now. Not even nurses are priests.” Vincent smiled at the nurses. Their eyes smiled back over their space masks.
“Not even priests are priests,” I said, and Vincent grinned.
“You always make me laugh, Sicily. And, yeah, it sucks. We always end up this way.”
“ ‘Always’ implies a pattern. There’s no always.”
“Can’t we talk? Please?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s not like I’m the head of a studio or anything. I could postpone things. It would be difficult to rearrange some things, but I could. I could send the plane back, pay for another day. I shouldn’t, but I could.”
“No, it would be difficult. Just call or something.”
“Are you sure, Sicily? Are you really sure? Because I’m an idiot. I don’t have to go now.”
You did sort of move in on me, I thought. You’ve been way, way ahead of me.
“Just go,” I said.
Vincent stood up. He pulled the sweater on over his head in the way guys do only in movies, so that he looked sad and sexy and not at all like a gopher that finally got his head to pop out of a hole, the way most people putting on sweaters look. I held my breath for so long that tiny black phantom fruit flies danced in front of my eyes.
The nurse ducked inside and gently steered my bed away a few feet. Vincent put on his lousy leather coat—I could remember the smell of it against my face—then put both hands against the Vestex wall one last time. That was when I should have said, You don’t have to know. I know for both of us. You were right when you said that I was ahead of you. You will catch up.
As one nurse put the blood pressure cuff on, I yelled at her, “Just get off me!” and tried to get up.
“Sicily, don’t! Don’t move. That could be devastating,” said the nurse Derry.
“Then give me the phone. Please give me the phone.”
Silently, Derry handed the real phone to me. Vincent’s card was in a folder on the desk. I pointed and said, “Please give me that. No, just dump it out. Just dump it.”
She did. I saw the red-and-green logo. Not until after Christmas had I noticed that Vincent had crossed out the business number and written his own personal number next to the “V.” I’d committed every digit to memory, but I didn’t dare risk a mistake in the state I was in. “Please read me that number.” I dialed it as she did. The phone rang.… It rang and rang. It rang more. It rang as though the line was engaged. Finally a voice picked up. “This is Vincent Cappadora. Leave a message.”
“No!” I shouted.
“Sicily, you need to quiet down.”
I dialed again. The phone rang—and I could hear it ringing. Turning my head, I glanced at the door. There was Vincent’s cell phone, whirling on the floor like a child’s toy. He’d gotten up to pace, like the expectant father he was, when he learned that Hey, Dad, it’s a girl! It’s a girl!
“That’s his cell phone. He dropped it! You have to get him! Please go get him.”
“Okay, I will.” Derry took off running. The phone kept spinning.
I didn’t realize until I felt the tears running down my neck that I was crying, the kind of gulpy, sloppy crying that doesn’t make you look vulnerable and pretty but instead leaves you basically a swollen, drooling subhuman with eyes that will look bruised and bleary the whole next day. This was what I had feared. Something inside me had finally given way, and I could no more stop the crumbling, tumbling collapse than I could have kept a building standing by bracing my back against one of the walls.
He would not come back.
He would not come back ever.
Of course he would.
He would come back once in a while.
He would come back when she was born.
He would send checks.
I would send pictures.
I would be good friends with the Cappadoras. Sort of like extended family. We would always be good friends. This was not the way it was supposed to end, with me strapped to a bed and Vincent walking away, his hands in his pockets, unsure of what the girl who always had something funny to say really meant—or meant to him. Happy he had a little girl. Soon my twin mother doves, Marie and Beth, would come up to cradle me.
“Vincent,” I said.
“That’s okay, honey,” said the other nurse, whose name I didn’t know. “You’ve been through a rough time. You go ahead and cry it out.”
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s been so long …”
“I know how you feel. Sometimes you just have to let it out.”
Once every thirteen years.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The days slipped in and out of each other as spring rolled into Chicago, balled in morning fogs unfurling soft as socks. I lay still and wet the bed like a ninny and stopped caring and grew bigger, bigger, and lolled and yearned for the tiny wing sweep of someone’s hair to tickle my cheek as he held me—as she held me. Anyone. Vincent. A civilian. Someone who didn’t rustle or smell of rubber and paper or o
f rubbing alcohol. I longed for the desperate tremor of sexual impact, the near-painful delight of a too-hot bath, the scrape of sand on my hand, the friction of wool or wood or corduroy or the soft, raspy navel of a coneflower. I wanted to hear a voice that was not recorded or muffled. My music was stale, strings of giddy nonsense or syrupy rhyme. All food tasted like pudding and seemed to be the temperature of the inside of my mouth. There was no pleasure in it (how had I forced it down for so many years before the transplant?). My appetite plummeted, and there were times when my aunt spoke to me that I didn’t answer at all, just smiled at her in a way I hoped wasn’t limp but that I knew was, in fact, practically soppy.
I longed to hear someone, anyone, say Vincent’s name.
Eliza now turned up nearly every other day. She brought food to try to tempt me, spicy things and sweets. She brought gossip that she thought I might like. There had been a brawl at the first location of The Old Neighborhood. It had been a party for the son of one of Angelo’s friends, who was headed to prison for tax evasion—a little sendoff. Someone raised a toast. “To Vito, for all the time they didn’t catch you.” Someone else broke a bottle. Ben had to leap over the bar like Clint Eastwood and grab a bunch of black silk lapels.
“Oh, wow,” I said. “Hey, Eliza. What’s up with Vincent?”
“He’s been on the road so much. It’s constant. Would you believe they’re making a sequel to the germ movie?”
“I’d believe anything. Does he talk about me?”
Eliza said, “Not in so many words. Ben says he thinks about you and the baby all the time. Our new family baby. What are you going to name her, Sicily?”
I turned my face away. Once I had uncapped the bottle, I cried like a water fountain in a kids’ school, at two different speeds—wistful and truly bereft. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t like to think too far ahead. She’s not out of the woods yet.”
“But every day is a good day.”
“Of course it is.” I said suddenly, “Eliza, would you and Ben stand godparents for her?”
“Of course,” said Eliza. “We would be honored.”
“I mean in the real way. The old way. Like if she’s sick or if I die. Would you take her and raise her like she was your own? Like she was a Cappadora too?”
“She is a Cappadora, Sicily. She’s my family. And so are you.”
I thanked Eliza. She said thanks were not necessary. That was good for a half hour of tears every time I thought of it. I tried to think of it as often as I could. Derry the nurse had been right. Once you got the hang of it, it felt better to let it out.
“It won’t be long now, Sicily,” Aunt Marie told me. “This has to be torture. Sometimes I just fly out of here in the mornings, after one night. It’s like the silence has its own sound.”
“It’s like listening to your own heartbeat inside a conch shell,” I said.
“That’s just how it is.” Aunt Marie had begun to read to me from Wuthering Heights, and I, having gone from zero to seventy in one day, crying-wise, cried like crazy through half of that lovely, crazy book, written by someone who had about as much experience of the world minus two men as I did. I cried for Catherine, too proud until it was too late to admit she was freaking coughing out her lung tissue, who knew so much about the mute love she had never experienced that it was supernatural. I cried because Heathcliff was just a self-centered asshole writ large but also kind of like the guy you would want to pull you up onto the black horse. I cried for what that reminded me of and then felt like a saphead for that too. I also cried because beautiful language, like anything else in my battened world, was just too much, a beckoning hand, a train whistle in the night, an aria.
Dr. Setnes came several times a week now. She told me that the little contractions that made a hard shelf of my belly were not the abruption but truly normal and would go on for the rest of the time. She said the baby looked good and active, and her limb length compared with her head size and all that jazz I no longer paid attention to were appropriate to whatever they were appropriate to.
Hollis was all up on the moon about the saddest case in the world, the face transplant of an infant—the face of an identical twin who had died during birth was transplanted to her sister, whose own face had been conjoined to the back of the infant’s head. She sat and blatted on to me about how this was a case in which no pre or post anti-rejection regimen would be necessary and that in all likelihood the baby would survive for her expected lifespan, which made me think Hollis believed that I, on the other hand, would not.
Of course, Vincent and I didn’t “talk.”
We spoke briefly by phone a couple of times, but there was no way to begin the conversation we needed to have. And as his visit receded down the days, the less urgent the conversation itself began to seem. If the baby held on until June, it would be about the time that Beth would complete her year-long saga of the pilgrimage of this changing face. She had refused the Ossum Tate Gallery on behalf of a big main-gallery show at the Art Institute in Chicago, after which the selected photos would tour various smaller galleries and museums. It could not have been more fitting.
The show would open on the anniversary of the Holy Angels fire—coinciding with the spread in Sense and Sensibility—and the sale of all first-night reception tickets would go into a fund to pay for fire victims’ reconstructive surgery at UIC. I had decided to go back to school after that, keeping this decision even from my aunt Marie, but I felt very good about the way that the whole project would end in a geyser of hometown beneficence, stoked by a dazzling popshot of national attention.
At the end, it would all be right and worth it.
By early May, the nights were the best of times.
I lay watching what Beth called “the landscape channel,” which is more or less exactly what it was. The baby curled low between my hip bones. Because I always lay on my side, with piles and piles of pads beneath me, I never had the panicky experience of being nearly unable to breathe. I pretended that I lay on a berth in a train, facing a picture window. I imagined it would feel about the same—an unforgiving mattress, a crackling pillow. But the vistas would make it worthwhile—wharves strung with bobbing lights like small pumpkins, breathless mountain gorges, endless plush wheat fields, Central Park in snow, two New Orleans row houses with lacy metalwork hands interlaced like a lady’s lacy gloves. Places I had never been. Places I could go now, except that I would be a single mother. How long had my single-girl period been? Not even a season, which I had wasted on dopey, inevitable self-interrogation about matters that would be revealed when time turned the page to the answer key. As an instructor would say to me later, in the only rebuke I ever got, I was a person who honestly believed there always was more time.
Kit and Anthony had broken up. But Kit had been promoted to chief designer. This meant a move to New York, and although Kit was elated at the thought of a pool of four million men to graze, she was distraught at leaving me behind. Kit had dozens of other friends but, I flattered myself, only one Sicily. I had few, and they had become fewer, oddly. My new face had not made me many new friends, except for Eliza. I would have to join another group, like FFSM (Formerly Faceless Single Moms). It had a vaguely perverse, erotic sound. Perhaps I would found it. On the last day before she moved, Kit came to see me.
“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 y
ou 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.