Second Nature: A Love Story

  “She was tough.”

  “She was not. Beth was so fragile she was almost transparent. I asked her, ‘When did you eat?’ ” (This is Italian for “How are you?”) “And Beth said, ‘… Eat?’ Not like sarcasm; as though she really didn’t know what I meant. I felt horrible.”

  “Something supersedes the nose for news.”

  “Yes,” Marie said. “Many things do.” She gave me the look that made strong politicians want their mommies.

  “Did you know them?”

  “I knew Pat, her husband, a little, growing up. Your grandfather played Pedro in the backyard with Pat’s father, who started the restaurant—Angelo. Pat and Beth were a few years older than me.” Everyone was a few years older than my aunt. “Beth and her family were at your father’s—”

  “I know. Eliza told me.”

  “She was out on the sidewalk, taking pictures, for The New York Times or something. She’s a photographer. She said she felt lousy, having to do it. Just like I felt interviewing her, back in the day.”

  My aunt turned and picked up the photo of my mother, in its brushed silver frame. We both studied it.

  “How happy would Gia be? You getting married, your engagement party in a few weeks?”

  “Happy,” I said. “But I wouldn’t be getting married except for you, Auntie.”

  “Lachele LaVoy wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that. Her golden-haired boy had something to do with it, too.” Lachele was Joey’s mother. And she worshipped the ground her elder son walked on. When Joey brought up having kids—which he did, often, and sometimes around his mom—I got this weird feeling that Lachele thought they would look like me, like me now, not like I would have looked before the fire. At first it annoyed me. Then I found her discomfort a bit amusing.

  I said to my aunt, “You shoved me out of the nest. That’s what good mothers do.”

  “Well, thank you,” my aunt said, turning away so I couldn’t see her eyes filling, although I did. “That makes me feel … great. And also really disloyal to Gia.”

  My mother’s hands smelled of the old-fashioned cologne called Joy, which Dad gave her every Christmas. Mom said it was “the costliest perfume on earth,” although that hadn’t been true since she was a child herself. Because I was a kid, and kids adapt or die, I adapted. My mother never toughened. The scent of Joy, faint on the few sweaters I kept bagged in plastic, was the scent of her suffering. Long before she died, she grew old young, sinking like a kite bobbing at sunset, rising a little less each time.

  Who would I have been if my mother raised me?

  Marie said, “She was five years older. But I used to have to beat up boys who stuck the end of her ponytail under the ketchup dispenser.”

  “So that’s how you got good at beating people up,” I said. “You’re still trying to start fights. I watch your show when nothing else is on. All you do is provoke people.”

  “That’s what they pay me for,” Marie said. Though she co-anchored the CBN News five nights a week, Marie Caruso was best known for Two at Ten, a scrappy Sunday-morning talk show that paired people like the founder of the Teeny Queenie Beauty Pageant with a spokeswoman for Mothers Against Sexualizing Kids. My aunt said then, “Gia was happy. Most people don’t get what they want in their lives, ever. She had a great deal of joy, for a short time. And a great deal of grief. But only for a short time too.” In the picture, my mother was pulling away from someone outside the frame of the snapshot, someone she was dancing with. At weddings—I remembered this—people would pull back into a circle to watch my parents dance with the captivating ease of people who’d more or less grown up in each other’s arms. In this picture, my mother’s black dress, with its plunging back, looked both innocent and sensual. After all those years, it was as though Gia’s hips were still in motion, and you could tell the effect that powerful sway would have on other people—probably because my mother would have been the last person in the football stadium to consider herself sexy. Marie said, “Christina and I, we gave up our dolls when we were ten or eleven. But Gia kept hers. All she wanted was to be a mommy.”

  And she had never believed she would be.

  My parents were still in love after twelve years of marriage, probably more so because they had given up, believing that they would always be each other’s only family. They were the melancholy, doting, perpetually young aunt and uncle to all the kids on their street, most of them South Side Irish, like my father and his parents and their parents.

  Only by chance had my father’s best friend on the force, Pete Nicastro, taken him to the West Side for the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and introduced him to a cute little Italian girl named Marie. Only by chance, one night when he picked Marie up for a date, had Jamie met Marie’s older sister, named Giaconda after the lady in the painting with the secret smile. Marie was a good sport. Mom and Dad were married six months later. One spring, twelve years later, when Gia began to feel truly sick, they were frightened, not hopeful: It was impossible. And yet their prayers had somehow melted the merest edge of a celestial glacier and loosed a single crystalline drop. I got my name because they used money saved for a lavish, long trip to Italy for a down payment on a ranch house in the suburbs, a nice solid red brick. A rising star on the Chicago Fire Department, Dad jumped at a spot in Chester, for less money and far less adrenaline.

  All for me.

  All for a dozen years, give or take.

  I said, “Auntie, I don’t really remember them.” I thought but didn’t say, It feels as though I was born to you.

  Marie said, “Do you remember the year you ran hurdles?”

  “I loved it. My ballet teacher had a fit.”

  “I was visiting one time, and you won your race. All of a sudden Jamie said he thought you’d be a firefighter someday. He told me never to tell your mom. She would have had a fit too. So would I.”

  “It’d be ironic,” I said. “Or something. You die doing what you dream of your kid doing. But Dad worked with guys who came back after getting some bad burns. Even facial burns.”

  “They had to overcome the fear.”

  “Joey is scared of fire. He loves it. But he’s scared.”

  Marie replaced Gia’s photo. My mother was laughing, her thick hair, shiny as a horse chestnut, coming out of its pins and plaits, her bare back sumptuous as a cello, a straight spine rising from a narrow waist above womanly hips.

  A lot of joy. For a very short time.

  “You know why Eliza called?” I finally said.

  “I forgot to ask!”

  “She works for some doctor who did the first face transplant. She called to ask if I wanted a face transplant.”

  My aunt looked down at her perfect nails. “What did you say?”

  “Auntie! I said no. Of course!” There was a long, viscous thread of silence. “What did you think I said?”

  “You never say what I think you’re going to say,” Marie told me, leaning over to kiss my eyes, as she had done for ten years. “I won’t wake you. I’ll say bye now.”

  “God save the king,” I said. “And all.”

  I fell back gratefully on my bed and tried to concentrate on the hum of the humidifier, the way you focus on a faraway sound when you’re restless. But sleep shimmered like a star out of reach. Kit would be awake but probably out with the latest in her interminable string of loser boyfriends—the one she’d invited (too early on) to visit her family at their house in Vermont. She would talk to me in the nuts way Kit always did when she wanted someone to believe that she was getting way too many phone calls. It was comical and almost worth it, although I didn’t like Alex any more than I’d liked Cam or Spencer or Ryan or Craig.

  Instead, I dialed Joey again.

  “Ah! See how it is when you try to do without me?” he said. “You’re a wreck.”

  “No. Just can’t sleep.”

  “Let me come over at least, Sis,” he said.

  “No, I’d be bad company. I’m sleepy and crabby.”

/>   “It’s nine-thirty!” Joe said. “How tired could you be?” I could hear the jeers over some televised sport in the background, as well as all the other unmistakable creaks and clinks of a bar.

  “I worked a long day. For you, mister. To get a Sub-Zero refrigerator for the poor, brave civil servant I’m marrying. I had the weirdest conversation ever too. With this young surgeon who called me.”

  “What?” Joey said. “Somebody called you about work on a Friday night?”

  “No. Guess what she wanted.”

  “Sicily, you know how bad I am at stuff like that. She’s getting engaged and she wanted you to draw her naked.” An acquaintance of my aunt’s had once asked me to draw a bust of … well, her bust, when she was facing cancer surgery, so that she could remember her body whole. Knowing what I did about the grief of mutilation, I did the drawing.

  “She wanted me to meet her boss about having a face transplant.”

  “Huh? You mean it? You’d consider that?”

  “No, Joe. I wouldn’t consider that.” Why had he said this? Why had neither Joey nor my aunt dismissed this idea with appropriate scorn?

  “Where would it come from?” Joey asked.

  “A person who didn’t need it anymore, I guess, Joe. A dead person. An organ donor. I didn’t even think about that part.”

  “You’ve had cadaver skin before.”

  “An inch long. Not a whole face!” There was a strange sensation on the line, like the auditory equivalent of the way people glance up and to the left when they lie. “Joe? Would you want me to do this? You know, people have to take drugs forever after they have a face transplant. Drugs that can cause cancer. It’s not like a face-lift.” A cheer rose. Someone had obviously nailed a bull’s-eye on the electronic dart-board.

  “Baby, I would never want you to consider doing anything you didn’t want to do.”

  “So you would want me to consider it. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “I never said anything like that, Sissy,” Joe told me. “Quit reading between the lines.”

  “But you’re thinking it.”

  Joey sighed. “I just want what you want.”

  “I don’t want a face transplant.”

  “So don’t have one. Would you look like you?” I knew enough about anatomy to say that I would probably look like me and like the donor too, but mostly like me. Joe said, “I remember when they first did them. They were pretty gross.”

  “They’re not now. That doesn’t mean I should have a twenty-hour surgery so your mother can have photos of a church wedding, which I’m not having either.”

  Joe sighed again.

  I hung up on him. Later, I texted: I’m sorry. I love you.

  I punched my pillow and slipped a satin mask over my eyes.

  Then I got up.

  Since the fire, I had come to love the darkness. If I didn’t love it for facile reasons you could unearth in any first-year psychology textbook—for invisibility, oblivion, all-cats-in-the-dark-are-gray—I loved it because, during the years of rehabilitation, sundown was my signal that the battle had ended for that day. For twelve hours there would be no stretching and prodding, no steeling myself to bear the singular discomfort, south of agony and north of pain, of the extenders inserted under my skin so that the scarring on my throat wouldn’t drag my chin down into a turtle tuck. Twelve hours of respite. In front of my full-length mirror, I pulled off my sleep mask and my nightshirt.

  When I came inside earlier, I hadn’t pulled the shades. The aggregate glow from the tops of buildings and all those Christmas lights and the ever-present press of cars made the room noon-bright. I tipped the pier glass to put my face in shadow and tried to see myself as another would. I did have one hell of a body, made to show off. I shook my hair forward across my face and throat and stood still for a long interval. This is how Sicily at twenty-five should have looked. Sicily at twenty-five might have had a younger brother or two, gracefully aging parents, her choice of boyfriends.

  I was an outpost from myself.

  But I had so much more than most.

  A life.

  A love.

  Even some ordinary people didn’t have so much.

  Why would I risk that? A face transplant would remedy only one thing and come with its own universe of unforetold complications. It couldn’t bring my family back. It couldn’t even restore my stolen identity. I could look whole, but I would still be mauled inside. I reached up and touched my face. Suddenly I was ravenous for the dinner I’d ignored. I’d have eaten frozen pizza—still frozen. I thought, To have a mouth. To taste … a delicate cream sauce. A strawberry.

  To taste a kiss.

  You can remember smell but not taste. Try it.

  I would end up forgetting the coffee date I made with Eliza, of course, after what was to have been my engagement party. It was two months after she called when I again picked up the tiny folded slip of paper with her cell-phone number.

  That night, though, I closed the shades, slid into bed, and reached up to turn on my police-band scanner.

  “Ninety-one, are you available? Proceed to one thirteen Dearborn Street: a two-story inhabited dwelling with fire visible on the roof …”

  “Ladder Ninety-one en route.”

  “Medic Eight, Engine Three. You have a call on North Union, possible Charley response. The cross street is Evelyn. The number is twenty-four North Union; a male subject bleeding freely from a gunshot wound …”

  “Ladder Eleven is on the scene at a two-story uninhabited ordinary, three twenty-two Maywood Avenue. Nothing happening. Can you investigate?”

  “Ladder Eleven, one of our good citizens driving by said they saw smoke at Maywood, cross street LeMoyne.”

  “God bless ’em. There doesn’t seem to be a problem. We’re returning to quarters.”

  I fell asleep under the patter of mayhem that still made me feel safe.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “I’m not wearing any mother-of-the-bride gear!” Marie called to Sicily, who didn’t answer. Just before noon on the day of Sicily’s engagement party, Sicily had decided to make huevos rancheros. This marked precisely the third time in Marie’s memory that Sicily had cooked anything—making it quite possibly the third time in history altogether. She had left the door to the kitchen open to Marie’s side of the apartment so that Marie could offer encouragement, although asking Marie about cooking was like asking a devout Mormon the merits of Lemon Hart 151 versus Bacardi. Cooking, for Marie—whose kitchen, with its double refrigerators and triple ovens, could have been the TV set for The Great Cake-Off—involved lightly reheating the pad Thai after spooning it out of the trapezoidal white carton. Marie heard Sicily counting off the ingredients as she took them out of the bag from Melissa’s, the little market across the street that boasted selling ingredients so fresh that they did not have a refrigerator.

  “Four eggs,” said Sicily. “One small onion, diced. Tomatoes, fire-roasted. Auntie? How do you fire-roast tomatoes? One at a time on a fork? Or all of them at once on the stove?”

  Okay, so she wasn’t Sicily’s real mother, Marie thought.

  It was at times like these that Marie—who was careful to tell friends about her brisk plans for turning Sicily’s half of the apartment into a combination home gym and office, who smiled in wry complicity when someone blatted on about how she and her husband couldn’t wait to “get their lives back” after the last kid finished college—wondered what the hell she would do with her own life once she got it back. Marie hadn’t seen Sicily take her first steps, or fed her pureed peas, or strapped her in to a papoose contraption so the dentist could yank out two-year-old Sicily’s abscessed tooth, or cried herself sick, as Gia had, when Sicily screamed for so long that she passed out. So maybe it wouldn’t be such a big dislocation as Marie imagined. Maybe after the initial jolt would come a serene immersion in long-renounced liberty. Marie wouldn’t have to listen thirdhand to Kit Mulroy’s minute and mournful dissection of her latest in a seri
al string of bad romances. She wouldn’t have to have men in masks clean the mold off the ceiling of Sicily’s rooms from the damned humidifier that ran day and night. She wouldn’t find her own cashmere sweaters, casually liberated from her closet by her niece and stretched out of shape by boobs two sizes larger than her own, draped over a dining room chair.

  She wasn’t Sicily’s real mother.

  She was nobody’s real mother.

  A skillful doctor had taken care of the threat of that—on two occasions two decades ago—and left Marie none the worse for wear. When she listened for an emotion from those incidents, there was only a loud absence, like the void left when a siren stops. Or so Marie thought until she inherited Sicily, her daughter-by-dint-of-despair.

  And still, it was not only for the sake of her niece that Marie had shoved anything out of her own life that would interfere with Sicily’s. It was for Marie herself, compensation for the loss of her sister, and for both men she had loved enough to marry, and for the doctor who explained, as he cheerfully vacuumed away the products of accidental conception, that he’d had to give his own poodle an abortion (“Not here, Miss Caruso! Don’t worry!”) because it was too small to give birth to seven puppies. Sicily’s blooming was recompense for losses and regrets that could still ambush Marie, especially late at night, in some unlikely place—in a tent city built by protesters in Washington, D.C.; on the eighteenth floor of the Four Seasons in San Francisco.

  If there was an Olympic team for pragmatics, Marie believed she would have been its captain. She was the sprightly surrogate, the cheerleader and role model. Good at it. “Prop” was the word that occurred to her. Something fake but convincing enough for a good impression, like the olde-tyme lamppost they pulled out of some back room for her last publicity photo, making her lean against it with her arms folded and her smile a welcoming beacon—so she’d look all trusty-wusty and charmy-smarmy, instead of the brassy West Side broad she actually was. So she’d look like somebody’s maybe-a-little-hipper … well, mother.