Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Marie was holding Sicily’s wrist, stroking her hand, when Sicily sprang up like a dog at the end of a chain, nearly jerking Marie’s arm out of the socket. Sicily leapt at Paulie, raking her nails along his cheeks until beads of blood burst from the marks. “No!” Marie cried. Angel had to help force Sicily back into her apartment, with Marie on the other side, holding Sicily as she had when Sicily fought her restraints to scratch at her wounds after a surgery, with a traumatic might. Angel boxed for exercise at Jim’s Gym, where Marie also worked out, and his young face reddened with the effort. Marie would have bruises in the morning. Sicily’s fingers were individual, powerful creatures, clamping and pinching, twisting away. At last, Sicily fought only in bursts and finally not at all. She went limp, then sat up and gagged, helplessly spitting into her hands—nothing more than a bit of rice and bread, but Angel looked away. Marie ran for paper toweling.

  “Breathe out,” Marie said. Sicily tried but kept gulping the air thirstily and hyperventilating. Good grief, Marie thought. Let’s not have a blackout too. “Sicily, look right at me.” Sicily did, her gray eyes nearly metallic. “Sicily, breathe out. Angel, there are lunch bags in that side of the pantry. Little brown bags …” As though he’d lived there with Sicily, Angel was back in two steps, shaking a brown bag out like a leaf. How few people really listen, Marie thought, trying to form the open end of the bag to accommodate Sicily’s difficult mouth. Marie had high-strung friends, prone to designer drugs. She’d seen plenty of panic attacks and, on the night Jamie died, she’d had one herself, while waiting in the airport with Brown Stuart. The CO2 never failed—that and the concentration. “Breathe. Fill it up like a balloon.” When Sicily’s breathing slowed to a shallow pant, Marie realized that she was gasping too. She motioned Paulie inside. They had no neighbors, but she would not conduct her private life in the hall.

  As soon as the door was closed, Sicily, now hoarse, said, “You … you told Neal not to set the chapel on fire?”

  “Yeah, I did,” Paulie said.

  They were interrupted by gentle knocking at the closed door: Mr. Sansone, the retired police officer who lived on three, with the other doorman, Frank Abuela. Marie hadn’t even heard Angel call them. They stood with their hands empty and overlarge, shrugging and looking at each other as though it was their job to stand behind Angel and lift their shoulders up and down, backup singers in a silent performance. And yet their presence, as witness—the very bulk of men the age Jamie would have been—was of some passing comfort. But Sicily’s eyes roved back and forth along a strip of wall over Marie’s head. What was Sicily seeing?

  When her niece tried to stand, Marie braced for more combat.

  “It’s a serious situation,” Angel said to Frank and Mr. Sansone.

  “Auntie, I won’t hurt him,” Sicily said. “Paulie. Listen. You are saying that Neal set that fire. That’s what you’re saying.”

  Paulie nodded. The tiny wounds high on his cheekbones had stopped bleeding and begun to swell and gel, as if the welts were stuck with dots of jam.

  “Did you see him do it?” Sicily’s voice now was cold as a coin, every syllable’s timbre the same.

  “I only saw when he came back out. The priest’s door was open—like, not open, unlocked. But none of the kids in the fire came out that way.”

  Slowly, Sicily turned away, speaking to the broad expanse of window. “Joey always said the door was locked. He told my mother that the door was locked. But it wasn’t. So Joey knew. Joey always knew. The altar was on fire. None of us would ever have gone toward a fire. Or through the priest’s door. It would be like going backstage with God.” She stopped. “Neal opened that door. That was why the fire went up so fast. That air from the door.”

  Paulie said, “Neal went back and closed it.”

  “If he closed it the first time, everybody could have lived,” Sicily said. “At least, there was a chance.”

  Marie put her arms around Sicily. “Was it just you?” Marie asked. “Who was there?”

  “Just me,” said Paul. “Just me. Joey came later, after the bell.”

  “No it was not just you,” Sicily said dully. “You’re lying. Joey was there. Joey was the first person I saw after I fell down in the snow. He said … he said that was the first time he knew he loved me.”

  Marie rubbed Sicily’s back. She was hearing nonsense. Neal Polachek had committed murder? Neal had killed twenty-two kids and two adults and brutally damaged six more kids for life, and the boy who put his body inside Sicily’s body, his heart into Sicily’s hand, he knew? He accepted and lived with this?

  “He said that was what made him love me! You talked this over, didn’t you? Neal told you ahead of time. You tell me right now.”

  “Only that day. It was a prank, Sicily. He didn’t plan like … some school shooter. Neal is a good guy.”

  “Neal is a … good guy,” Sicily repeated.

  “A good guy?” Marie said. “You scummy little idiot! Look at my niece. Look at her! Neal and you and Joey knew those kids. Dominic Kelly can’t walk without an oxygen tank. He’s like eighty but he’s only twenty-four. Sicily’s father died. He died, at forty-four years old. All these families’ lives—and you didn’t tell.”

  “What good would that do, lady?” Paulie asked. “Joey wanted to make it right. He’s getting married to her to make it right. He’s the kind of guy who could do that. He’s giving up the life he would have had to make her happy. We were only kids. Neal just couldn’t stand to see Joey go through with this.… He’s his best friend.”

  “Go through with it,” Sicily said. It was as though they all had their parts but hadn’t memorized them yet. “Go through with it. So it was mercy. Joe never wanted me.”

  “Get out of here,” Marie said to Paul. “Go away.” Angel nodded and began to herd Paul toward the door.

  Sicily said, “Neal was old enough that he could do time. Maybe even now Joey and Neal could go to jail. They were thirteen. Letting someone kill someone else. Not prevent … standing still for a crime. That’s a felony murder. You could do time too. Why does it matter so much that Neal was a kid? Shannon Finnucan was a kid. She’s in Queen of Heaven now. Tess Reagan was a kid. Victoria Viola was my friend. Keely DiCastro was only ten. So were Emma Bakken and Simone Sinico and Gabriel O’Connor. Byron Lynch lived next door to you. My dad was holding Danny Furtosa when they burned! I was a kid. Why did you come here?”

  “I didn’t want you to hear it,” Paul said. “On the news.”

  “It wouldn’t be on the news,” Marie said. “Not by name. We would have thought it could be anybody. There’ll be an inquest.”

  “But there was going to be that party tonight. Neal couldn’t let—”

  “Shut up,” said Marie.

  The buzzer sounded. Angel looked questioningly at Marie, who leaned over and turned on a lamp. The room, which had grown murky and dim as cloud cover piled up outside, snapped back into focus. There was a sudden urgency.

  Sicily said, “Did Joey send you? Did he want you to tell me?”

  “No,” Paul said. “Of course he didn’t.”

  When Marie interviewed people, she studied their faces: The very vigor of Paulie’s shocked expression was proof he was lying, and she knew that Sicily, who was acute this way as well, saw it too.

  Angel spoke into his phone, then said, “Jerry Krause came in to help, Miss Caruso. And—” Angel jerked his head in Paulie’s direction. Sicily’s beloved had arrived.

  “Do you want to see Joey?” Marie asked.

  “I’m going to my room,” Sicily told Marie. “He knows where it is.”

  Sicily removed her pink sapphire ring, dropped it on the carpet, and walked away.

  Marie used the paper towel she still held to blot her forehead. Frank and Mr. Sansone mumbled a few consoling words.

  “Helluva thing,” said Mr. Sansone. “You call me.”

  Both of them left. What was the inspirational message? The Oprah moment from the dozen leftover gray card
s, now destined for recycling, that read, ME AND JOE, FOREVER AND EVER?

  Frank returned with Joey LaVoy, who acknowledged his brother with a blink. Paul and Angel waited as Marie followed Joey into Sicily’s bedroom.

  Joey fell to his knees and wept, beseeching her, “Please, Sicily, please listen. Maybe once it was feeling responsible. Maybe the first time we went out. But I love you, Sicily. I love you now. Please, God, believe me. Don’t pay any attention to Paulie. Can’t you think about it? Try believing that? I love you, honey.” Sicily lay facing the bookshelves, so motionless she might indeed have gone to sleep. Then Sicily turned, quick as a snake coiled in her comforter, crawled across the big bed, and thrust her face at Joey. Joey fell back, sprawling. “That’s all for you,” Sicily said. “Hell is all over you. Just follow Neal.”

  Marie drank a tall glass of water and a taller glass of Shiraz. Sitting on Sicily’s couch, she kept vigil, turning the pages of Sicily’s sketchbook. A drawing of Joey, decorously nude, his thigh drawn up, his face somber. Marie, burdened by flowers, copied from a photo Sicily had taken with her telephone the previous Easter, on the eighty-fifth birthday of Marie’s mother, Annette Caruso. An elbow, a curved hand, a child’s skate. Marie flipped on another of the standing lamps. This must be how meditation felt. She had passed one hundred minutes of time without thinking outside a space two by three feet.

  It was dark, maybe eight o’clock, when Marie crept into Sicily’s room.

  “I’m awake,” Sicily said immediately. “I didn’t take an overdose.”

  Marie lay down beside Sicily, who allowed her aunt to curl close to her.

  “I was thinking about those science-fiction movies where they put humans in museum cases so they can wake them two hundred years later?”

  Marie nodded, inhaling the playful sweetness of her niece’s Elizabeth Morrison cologne at the edges of a sharp, sour tang of sweat. Sicily never smelled dirty. Marie wanted to kill Joey LaVoy with her hands.

  “You know, I would forgive Joey if I could. I would find a way to rationalize it. I would think maybe it was just pit—feeling sorry for me at first but later it wasn’t faked. I believe him that he does love me, in his own way. If we got married and had a child, then it would be real. As real as anyone’s marriage.”

  “Baby,” said Marie. Although Sicily’s form was indistinct, Marie reached up, found a strand of Sicily’s hair, still damp with sweat, and twined it around her finger.

  “I would if I could. But I can’t. I just can’t. Do you remember Mrs. Viola? From over on Easterly Boulevard?”

  “I was in New York then,” Marie said softly. “I haven’t lived in Chicago since I’m twenty-five, honey. Well, back then, anyway.”

  “I forgot,” Sicily said dreamily. “She would come to the door all the time, for a whole year, after the fire.”

  Abruptly, Marie did remember. Gia’s face was as stiff and clenched as Marie had ever seen it when Mrs. Viola scratched at the screen one summer weekend.… Why had Marie been there? … Sicily’s graduation, her eighth-grade graduation. Sicily attended, although she told Marie she was glad that her face was bandaged after a recent reconstructive procedure. In empty chairs at the front, there were little white mortarboards, each accompanied by a spray of laurel, for the three eighth-graders who had died in the fire. One was for Victoria Viola, part of the group who hung with Sicily and Kit, not a best friend but definitely a second-tier sleepover girl. Marie remembered it well now: Gia quick-stepping to the door before Sicily could open it. Marie heard Gail Viola saying, Oh, I—I’m so sorry to bother you, but you know, I can’t sleep at all, even with the pills … I said to myself, Gail, you have to try once more. Sicily! You two was friends. Did you see my Victoria? Did she suffer? I know that Victoria is with our Lord, so all I want to know is, did she suffer? That’s all …

  “She does this all the time,” Gia had told Marie. “She comes once a week. I don’t know who to call, Marie. The police? The school? If I’m down with the laundry or something, she’ll come right in. And it upsets Sicily more than seeing Dennis Coyne, even though he could be Jamie’s twin. She came in February when there was a blizzard. She stands in the rain. Oh, my God, I feel so sorry for her. What can I say?”

  Mrs. Viola’s face was not like skin but like soap, Marie recalled, as though white chips would break off. Marie told her sister, “You have to make her stop, Gigi.”

  But it was a year, another visit, before Marie finally heard Gia say, almost harshly, “Gail, I know how you feel, better than anybody, I know. But Sicily is hurt. She has had fifteen surgeries, Gail. You can’t do this to her.”

  But all I want to know …

  “What about Mrs. Viola?” Marie asked Sicily now. “Why did you bring up Mrs. Viola?”

  “She got … okay. She sort of gave her life to taking care of the terminally ill. She still works at Sundial. The … you know …”

  “Hospice, yes.”

  “Vicky’s little sister was a year younger, and she still lives with her parents.” Sicily paused. “Vicky’s sister’s life stopped. Right then. And Mrs. Christiansen, little Kieran’s mom, she used to write to me too. She stuck letters in our mailbox that said the same thing as Mrs. Viola. I only saw one letter. Mom threw them out. Mrs. Christiansen drove off the road by Sherry Creek. Everyone thought she ran away with some guy. She was pretty, like Mom. They didn’t find her car until the creek thawed. No seat—no restraint.” Sicily sighed, her breathing rough. “If I could remove the section of my head that knows all that stuff, then I could forgive Joe, because, Auntie, it’s not in him to do wrong. If I could remove the section that knows he was going to marry me out of remorse, I would. Because I didn’t want to marry a special guy. I was too proud. I was a fool. I had a guy who looked like everyone else. But the joke was, why did I have him? He didn’t love me. Not like I loved him. I still do. Why didn’t I get the joke?”

  Oh, Sicily! Marie thought. It would have been better if Joey had set the fire—easier to dismantle this castle you built with your adoration. Who else would want Sicily?

  “Who else will ever want me?” Sicily said.

  “Plenty of people,” Marie said. She consciously made her arm relax, refusing its natural inclination to tense.

  “Special people,” Sicily answered. “And it’s not how they look on the outside that makes me afraid. It’s how they’d be on the inside. You made me into an ordinary person on the inside whose face is destroyed. I could love someone whose face is destroyed, or who has Tourette’s or MS or anything else, if he was like me, raised like me.”

  “Huh,” Marie said.

  “To be able to be like what Michelangelo said about the statue in the stone.”

  “What is that?”

  “Michelangelo said he could see clearly the statue he would make, in every block of marble and that all he had to do was to chip away the rough walls that kept it prisoner and there it would be—perfect. I fight to let people see through the rough walls to the real parts of me. But I don’t think everyone else does that.”

  What could Marie say? She had read the books too. Case histories. Most people who prevailed and made real lives did find love. But it often was with “special” people, men with dangling little funnels for legs or who were big, blond, and blind. God forgive me, Marie thought. Her philosophy professor at UIC was an astute, witty, estimable man, with an adorable wife and two sons, despite his glazed eyes and his zippy wheelchair, courtesy of Vietnam. Why would a mate like Professor Kenny be anything but terrific? Who cared about looks? Who cared? Joey LaVoy, button-cute as an underwear model—sexy and full muscled, good smelling and strong—turned out to be a minor monster, the thing imprisoned inside him not beauty but a deadly secret.

  Why hadn’t she encouraged Sicily to befriend people whose experiences were like hers? Who else would not judge her? Why had Marie fought so hard for Sicily to be like everyone else and taken pride in it? A vicious thing, the boomerang of good intentions. Marie had done it wrong. She ha
d raised Sicily to want not as good as—but better than. Now Sicily, who would always be damaged, couldn’t teach herself to want anything that felt lesser. “Sicily, you’ll start over. This was a hard lesson.”

  “You think?”

  “Okay, more than that. This is a tragedy, and, yes, you’ve had a life filled with more of them than any ten people deserve. But if it’s love you want, maybe you have to look behind the rough walls.”

  “Okay. Say I do,” Sicily said. “How do I know they will?” Marie thought back again to the disabled people she knew and the stories she’d read. With the exception of deaf people, the mated pair rarely was made from two of a kind. “What if the other person in the stone wants a beautiful wife who has … one arm? Not many people want a girl without a face, Auntie. That’s a really rough wall.” Marie thought of Professor Kenny’s dazzling blond wife. He couldn’t see her, but sure as hell everyone else could. Sicily sighed and then drew in breath, as though it were a fluid that could nourish her. “It’s a shame. I could be frozen, like in those movies. And come back later. Maybe there would have been an age of enlightenment and everyone would be kind. Maybe everyone who’s damaged could be repaired. But I would still know about the fire. I would still know that, for Joe, it was an obligation. They couldn’t cryogen my heart.”

  Both of them lay in silence, but not at rest, until the edges of the windows brightened. Another brand-new goddamned day.

  CHAPTER FOUR