Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  But even the annual misspelling bee didn’t dispel my gloom.

  A few moments later, I was driven inside. I wanted to be out there, where the cold wind could give my thoughts a hard sweeping, but I couldn’t tolerate cold. The best skin grafted onto your face still isn’t facial skin. And no matter how well it’s done, it’s scarred, so it gets tight and dry quicker than normal skin. Torquing up my humidifier, I climbed onto my bed. Then I noticed my phone spinning around on my dresser like a live green beetle. I hated it (I still hate it) when people called back more than once in the space of an hour. If you don’t answer, do they think they can goad you into it? Maybe it was my aunt, calling from some Christmas party at a condo in the clouds where there was a phone in every one of the five bathrooms.

  “For Pete’s sake, I’m fine!” I said. But the voice was young. Not Marie’s.

  “Sicily? Is this Sicily Coyne?”

  “Yes?”

  “Hi, Sicily. This is Eliza Cappadora.” I let a beat of silence pass. Was I supposed to know her? The name was familiar, tied to something. But what?

  The tentative, slightly lilting voice began again. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m here. I’m so sorry. I thought you were my aunt … not that I always sound that hostile toward my aunt, but she’s leaving for London tomorrow and she worries about me like I’m six years old.”

  “I watch your aunt on TV all the time.”

  “Well, this is the royal baby thing. Aunt Marie likes socially irrelevant news.”

  Eliza continued, “We met last summer. At the police against firefighters softball game in Hilldale? My husband was playing.”

  “Your husband is a firefighter?”

  “No, my mother is the police chief in Parkside. My husband works at his family’s restaurant. But my mom isn’t the softball type.…”

  “Oh, sure, no worries. Just, Eliza, how do you know this number? I don’t mind, but—”

  “Dr. Sumner gave it to me. David Sumner? Maybe he shouldn’t have.”

  “Oh, David? It’s okay,” I said. “If it’s okay with David, you must be all right.”

  David Sumner was one of my burn-surgeon brigade, extraordinary for many reasons, not the least of which was that he was a burn survivor too, his chest and upper-arm skin rippled by a pot of boiling jam he pulled down on himself when he was three. David Sumner had worked with me (well, on me) during my early trauma period. How long since I had visited him? Months? A year? There was no excuse. I was at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus several times a month. I hadn’t been a patient for seven or eight years, but UIC was still my alma mater—in every sense. I’d graduated from there, the hospital was my greatest source of referrals for work, and it also was the place where I’d had all twenty-five of my reconstructive surgeries. Intuition would presume that a person would hate the sight of the place on earth where she’d endured the purest physical torment. But I felt for UIC the affection someone feels for a strict parent: The surgeons had fought to make my face at least work like a face—with, for example, a mouth that closed nearly all the way—even if it didn’t look like a face.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He’s well. But that is not why I’m calling. We actually first met a long time ago: I was with my mother at your father’s funeral.”

  “Really,” I said. Where was this going?

  “It was around this time of year?” Eliza said.

  I hated to have to say it. “Yes, it was. In fact, the fire was twelve years ago today.”

  “Give up!” Eliza said, and then … she began to laugh. To laugh! My first reaction was shock and dismay. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, I get stupid when I’m tense, and I’m just an idiot!” Eliza said, but she couldn’t stop laughing. And then I began to laugh too, for no good reason except that Eliza’s laugh was as irresistible as a child’s. Only long after we became friends did I realize that Eliza meant to say, “Get out!” Adopted at the age of eight from a Bolivian orphanage, Eliza spoke perfect English, better than a good many American-born physicians of my acquaintance. Under stress, however, she tended to lose her grip on the idiom.

  “You didn’t know,” I said.

  “But I should have. There’s always a story about it in the newspaper.” Eliza was right about that. The Holy Angels fire was still one of Chicago’s biggest collective heartaches. There would be some feature about where the survivors were now or a photo of the monument where twenty of the twenty-four children who died slept together at Queen of Heaven Cemetery—a green granite arch with their lyric names lettered in gold (Erin, Sofia, Malachi) and the dates of their births and deaths. A few of those dates—impossibly—were in the same decade. Even all these years later, someone always left a Santa teddy bear or a little potted tree with ornaments. The arch was green Italian marble because the colors of the Fighting Saints of Holy Angels were green and gold. It had been designed by my mother. Grandma Caruso said that’s where I got my ability to draw.

  Although I didn’t tell Eliza, five nights earlier had been another anniversary—the tenth year since my mother’s accident. My mother died two years after the Holy Angels fire.

  Mom was on her way home from her part-time job at a vet’s office when her car was T-boned in an intersection by a kid who’d gotten his driver’s license that afternoon, one of about six pertinent ironies. My mom hadn’t needed to work that day but had volunteered to fill in for the other receptionist, whose sister in Wyoming had been … in a car accident. My mom didn’t need to work at all. We had my dad’s pension, his life-insurance benefit, and gifts from the village and the benevolent fund, including my college scholarship. But Mom did need a way to divert herself from full-time hysteria over having lost in one day her first love and, if you will, her religion—which was me. I wasn’t dead, of course. But at first I wished aloud that I would die under anesthesia during yet another hideous patch job. Then I would always wake up and slowly realize that I was not in heaven but in a hospital room overlooking a bakery on Taylor Street, and I would be fury itself. I upended trays of food and tore up the pictures of me, taken when I was little, that my mother kept in her wallet. “Why am I alive?” I would ask Mom. “Why did I live through that to go through this?”

  That was what my mom got—two years of sitting at the bedside of her ranting, melted child. At first I was out of school most of the time, and tutors, like my dad’s rookie Renee, who had studied to be an English teacher, helped me keep up. But why did I want to keep up? What was I going to do or be? I had been one of the cute girls in our small school. Everyone accepted that Marianne Modica and Jennet Liff would for sure grow up to beautiful. (They did.) But Tess Reagan, who died, and I might have turned out to be really pretty too. I knew this and I hated my mother for it, as I hated her for everything. It was the kind of nonchalant, dependable scorn that any ripped-off kid feels for the remaining parent, the one who isn’t sainted and can’t leave. My father was dead but still my hero and protector. I didn’t care that my mother knew it.

  I actually once told my mother that I wished she had been the one who died. And though I wept and apologized, and she wept and forgave me, it was true. We both knew it.

  She died not quite nine months later.

  That should have obliterated me, and it would have, except for Marie.

  A private jet owned by a rich boyfriend had whisked her across the country from a Utah ski holiday. Once she arrived in the ICU for the second time in two years, she pulled me close to her and said, “You’re like the patron saint of suffering.” When a surgeon came out to quietly explain to the gathered family—my grandparents, their brothers and sisters, and my aunt Christina, who is a Franciscan nun—that there was nothing more they could do, that my mother’s chest was crushed, I could not make my legs work to walk across the room and say goodbye to my mother. Marie stayed by my side even then, her adored big sister behind that drawn curtain. She did not leave Chicago, for business or pleasure, for the next three years.
To adopt me, Marie gave up a job in the lofty six figures as an anchor on CBN News in New York, the rich boyfriend with the airplane, the beach house in Sagaponack—all in exchange for waking up every night to comfort a tremulous teenager who wouldn’t eat and had begun to wet the bed each time she dreamed that she saw tiny flames on every flat surface. “It’s not much,” she told me the night Mom died. “But I’ll never leave you.”

  I had forgotten I was even holding the phone when Eliza said, “Sicily, are you there?”

  “I am. I’m sorry. Just spaced out for a moment.”

  “Do … do you think we could have coffee?”

  “Well,” I said. “Sure, okay … why?”

  “I’m a first-year resident at UIC. Not on the burn unit. At the Center for Reconstructive Surgery. I’m only a resident, studying to be a doctor, but—”

  I giggled a little. “I know what a resident is. I’m a medical illustrator. And I have spent a fair amount of time in the hospital.”

  “Of course. I know that. I’m going to be a reconstructive surgeon. And my mentor, Dr. Grigsby, pioneered full-face transplant surgery, well … years and years ago.”

  “Does she have a new technique? Does she need illustrations?” I asked.

  “No. No. I … She just moved here from London, actually, to head up a team at UIC. And I told her about you. I told her about your career. I told her about your … face.” Huh? I thought. Then Eliza said, “I was thinking you might be hoping for a face transplant.”

  “A what?”

  “A face transplant.”

  “For me?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “I don’t need a face transplant.” I almost laughed again.

  “That’s the thing,” Eliza said. “If you thought you needed to have a face—that is, a new face—you probably shouldn’t be considered. If you couldn’t work or have a social life, for example, with your face the way it is, you really shouldn’t be a candidate for a new one.”

  I sat down on my bed, flummoxed. “Eliza, this sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Like, if you’re well read, you shouldn’t wear red … or whatever. This is very thoughtful, but you know how many surgeries I’ve already had? Why would I do this? Not to mention, I don’t have a million dollars or so sitting around.”

  “Whatever your insurance didn’t cover, the hospital would. There’s a fund.”

  “Eliza,” I said, suddenly eager to be asleep, oblivious. “It’s just really awkward. You might as well suggest I … hatch fertilized eggs from an alien. This is so not on my radar.”

  “I’m sorry. This was probably inappropriate. You must think I’m trying to score success points with my boss. It is not that. It was something my husband said. When he was in college, he thought he might be a teacher. He helped with summer sports programs at Holy Angels. He graduated from there.”

  “I played … uh, hoops, summer league.” I didn’t try to say “basketball.” I didn’t say “basketball” or any words that began with “B” or “P” if I could help it. Not having lips is a disadvantage with plosives. I’d avoided them for so long, I was virtually my own simultaneous translator.

  “Right. Ben transferred to your school because there was too much attention at public school about him—but that doesn’t matter.”

  Then I remembered where I’d heard the name Ben Cappadora: back when I was in first grade. He was the boy who was kidnapped and returned, whose parents once lived in Chester, where my parents had lived and where my Grandma and Grandpa Caruso still did. The Cappadoras were a sort of local legend, the unluckiest family around.

  “Sure. Everyone knows about Ben. And his brother—didn’t he make a movie?”

  “Vincent. My brother-in-law. Yes, He did. He won an Oscar. But it was only a documentary, not like, well, Star Wars. He’s a little famous.”

  “But how does this involve me?”

  “I think Dr. Grigsby will probably kill me, also, in doing this,” Eliza said, as though talking to herself. I was curious now. “Don’t be angry with me.”

  “I’m not angry,” I said. “What did Ben say?”

  “How cute you were, and really tough too. He said you played to win,” Eliza said. “Oh, dear. Dr. Grigsby seeks out patients who are tough. You have to be tough to go through this procedure.”

  “Well,” I said. “I did always play to win, I guess. Maybe I still do. But I don’t think I want to take this opportunity from someone else who really—”

  “I get it. So, maybe just the coffee will be good.”

  “At UIC? Not a chance,” I said.

  “We’ll go to Lotta Latte,” she said.

  “Now you’ve got a deal.”

  We parted with a promise to meet sometime. I wrote her home phone number on a piece of paper that I folded and tucked into a corner of the frame that held my mother’s photo, one of three framed pictures I kept by my bedside—her, my father, and my own eighth-grade graduation picture.

  In my photo, I was sitting on a rough wooden bench, outdoors, wearing cuffed jeans, my arms circling one drawn-up knee. My lustrous hair, shiny as a horse chestnut and exactly that color—a replica of my mother’s—was drawn over one shoulder in a thick sheet. I recalled myself as a little girl, wearing a red taffeta skirt that spun out like the trumpet of a lily, at Grandma Coyne’s house for some occasion, and her taking my chin in one soft, floury hand as I pranced through the kitchen. She told me that I had my father’s face—not like that was a terrific thing. Along with dimples and some smashing cloudy eyes, Dad also had a chin the size of a quarry. Ta, Sicily, Grandma said. Ta, don’t you worry yourself. You’ll grow into that chin. Just that year, I finally had. The misty eyes inherited from my dad were set in high cheekbones, strong as a scaffolding, making that chin look not protruding but proud. I was playing flirt with the camera, gazing up from under abundant lashes, my smile both tolerant and mischievous, hinting at a knowingness I did not yet quite possess. An energy sprang from that picture—that of a girl who had begun to understand the joyous potential of her supple body and smooth skin.

  I still had that hair. I styled it carefully and had two good inches trimmed twice a year. Mom had refused my demands to cut it all off. By the time my mother died, my many surgeries had left my face shaped roughly like the face of a snowman, if that snowman had been put together from bits of cheap plastic in slightly different colors. The strange contours had the effect of making it seem that I was wearing some kind of mask; this, in turn, had the effect of making my hair, which had escaped the fire with nothing but a frizzle here and there, look fake too, like a wig. It also itched like a hill of red ants whenever my hair touched the places where I was healing. Mom got it off my neck by plaiting it into a flat intricate braid she then looped up and pinned in a barrette. Half the time, I pulled it out, telling her I not only looked like a monster but a monster whose mother made her look like something that belonged in The Sound of Music.

  I still had those eyes. They’d always been my best feature, and now they were my communication salvation. You’d be shocked by how much you telegraph with the tiniest smirk or pout. If you had to do it all with a wink or an eye roll, you’d increase your repertoire. I collected eye gestures from other people, like from the memory of poor, doomed Mr. Treadwell with his “twinkling.” Now the repertoire was so much a part of me that I must look like some B actor trying to get noticed in the crowd scene. Hey! I’m intelligent! Hey! I’m nice! Hey! That was a joke! Don’t be afraid of me! I fluttered my lashes so much I was surprised I couldn’t lift small weights with my eyelids.

  I used my hands too, and not just the way all Italians do but for what I came to think of as DSL (Disfigured Sign Language, as opposed to American Sign Language). I kept my hands soft and impeccably groomed so that I could mime everything from opening a textbook to opening the gut for an appendectomy.

  The esteem that normal people get for nickels and dimes cost me thousands of dollars in sweat and effort, and even then sometimes it was denied me. People fled
from me, psychically and in fact. Your face is your defining impression on the world. My job was to contradict that impression every day of my life. To do that, you have to be willing to scream, vamp, and pantomime.

  I could no longer close my eyes and instantly summon the splendid young girl’s face that once was mine. My own face, and my parents’ faces, had begun to slur away, like ink drawings dissolving under a spilled glass of water. I was becoming one of my distant memories.

  After I hung up with Eliza, I slipped out of my dance clothes, showered, and pulled on a triple-XL UIC T-shirt that brushed my knees. Then I stowed my leather briefcase—holding my laptop and separate folders in which I’d placed the notes and sketches from each of that day’s appointments—in my office. My office was no more than an L-shaped niche under a northern skylight—two long banks of laminated ledge with generous decks of shelving above, arrayed with my two desktop computers, my pastels and ink pens, and my sketchbooks. But it was as immaculate as my personal space was a mess—even my pens gradated by shade, the rose next to the carmine, the claret deepening to the maroon. In my home life, because Aunt Marie spoiled me, I was a slob. The cleaner picked up after me.

  The only personal space I would allow no one else to lay hands on was the little glass shelf in my bathroom, where my prosthetic nose reposed in its box. I loved my nose, which was truly a triumph of the anaplastologist’s art, down to the minute wires that simulated the tiny veins you have on your nose but never even really see. Wearing it with a thick pasting of the kind of glop makeup that burn victims use, I could, from a distance, appear almost ordinary.

  Useful as it was, putting on my face (no pun intended) was always an effort.

  It was not one I would make tonight.

  I thought briefly of my last appointment that day—with a new client, Dr. Sajid Joshi. When I was ushered in to his office, he had made no attempt to acknowledge my presence, beyond the involuntary spasm of shock no one (no one) could suppress the first time they saw me. Potential clients were all acquaintances of acquaintances: People knew to expect a scarred face, and yet I was always worse than what they could allow themselves to imagine. A handsome man in his forties, Dr. Joshi was speaking on the phone, in Russian, with a British accent.