Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “Definitely aloof,” I said. “I’d say a sensitive hottie who makes the woman do all the work.” Kit and I cackled.

  That night we drove back to Chicago, about a two-hour trip. Marie, ordinarily chatty, funny, and irreverent, said not one word. I tried to spark a conversation, but there might as well have been tape over her mouth. When I finally literally pressed her, poking her in the side, she said curtly that Kit and I behaved like twelve-year-olds and that she was sick of it.

  “You want me to act like Sister Mary Augustine? Auntie, why does she come around her family if all she wants to do is commune with Jesus? Why is she a nun anyhow?”

  “I don’t know, really,” Marie said. “She told me that she had a growing understanding that it was only in prayer that she felt free. She said it took her ten years to learn how to pray.” Marie shook her head. “Sicily, everybody gives you a break because … you know. Not that you deserve it. And, Kit, what about you? Saying that was unkind. You hold nothing sacred.”

  Kit insisted, “But we do, Marie!”

  As she began to list those things—high-heeled Italian boots, sexy guy ballet dancers, Edith Piaf and Wilco, Time Machine and old Springsteen, three-alarm pad Thai and Norman Love chocolates and the Reubens from Myzog’s Deli, the Green Mill jazz club and Tufano’s restaurant—I felt a green nausea form at the base of my throat. I wanted to say, No, Kit, don’t push this, I tried to signal her to stop, but Kit wouldn’t be stopped. She kept on: We both thought it was a miracle that the light inside the diner in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Art Institute surprised you even the twentieth time you saw it. She talked about first snow at her parents’ old house in Vermont. She even brought up sacred sacred things, like Easter morning at Holy Name Cathedral. “Am I right, Sissy?” Kit concluded. “How can you say we consider nothing sacred?”

  “Okay, I see,” Marie said. “Things that please you. You just don’t care about people’s feelings.”

  That had knocked the wind out of me. How could Marie say that? Everyone on earth except my grandparents—who thought that having a nun daughter was only slightly lower on the ladder of status than having a priest son—agreed that Aunt Christina was a colossal drag, so drearily devout that she complained about having to wear street clothes with her cheesy veil instead of the full floor-length habit that nuns wore in her girlhood, as though she’d been robbed of a job perk like a company car. She was forever telling me to “offer up” my pain, and I was forever telling her that I’d offer it wholesale to anyone who wanted it.

  “I care,” I said.

  “Do you?” Aunt Marie asked. “Then why do you go out of your way to be snotty? Maybe Christina is silly. But there’s no meanness in her.”

  For the first time in my life, there in the tub, sponging water over the pale half cups of my breasts, I thought, Was there meanness in me? What else had the fire consumed?

  “You can survive this. You survived high school,” Kit said. “You survived college and that crap at our reunion. You can survive this.”

  “Mmmmm,” I said. “I don’t feel like it. I have to want to. I’m not like me. There’s nothing I can say to make this … a satire, Kit.”

  For it had never been anything but difficult—a brisk uphill climb on good days, an assault on a vertical cliff on bad days. I knew that people thought I “got used to” it. But I grieved in reverse. If I had been seven years old, I might have grown up a sprightly little saint. Instead, I had been a newborn woman, who got upset if my hair frizzed up when it rained, who rolled up the waist of my plaid uniform skirt the minute I got off the bus to better reveal my dancer’s legs. And then, one night, all those sweet worries were gone. Most people who spoke to me at all spoke to me the way you speak to a pet. Kids from the grammar school who didn’t know me proved they were brave by running up to me and touching my book bag. I made myself stand outside the door of the girls’ bathroom until I was sure everyone else had gone to class, because I couldn’t stand to open the door and hear all the laughter and chatter stutter and then stop, like a music box unwound. And I couldn’t have gotten a date by giving blow jobs in a pitch-dark car. In college, the students were so self-consciously hip it was comical. I couldn’t count the number of times one of them, startled when I turned around or lowered the hood on my coat, had pretended to sneeze or cough.

  What was the one thing I could count on?

  My anger.

  Why do they make clothing for fat people patterned in gaudy fruit and ruffles and stripes? It’s distracting. What did I have to distract people from my face? My sharp tongue. Below the neck, I experienced everything else that other girls my age experienced, but I never got to test-drive my blossoming body. I could have been bulimic or agoraphobic or aerophobic and it wouldn’t have mattered, because everyone around me thought the kindest thing to do was to pretend I wasn’t there. I became invisible, and I became angrier. If people were going to refuse to see me, they wouldn’t be able to refuse to hear me. When Ella Carmichael got her first period in history class, while wearing white pants on dress-down Friday, I was the one who handed her a sweater to tie around her waist so that she could walk out of the room without dying of shame. But I also was the one who called her “Menstru-Ella,” and nobody dared to tell me it was a crummy thing to say. Loss hath its privileges. It felt good—in a nasty, guilty way—to be able to say things no one else could. After a time, the guilt went away. Time tempered the nastiness. But I could still draw remarks like a pistol from a hip holster. It got attention that wasn’t pity. It propelled me into … being part, even if I couldn’t partake. Why did I despise my aunt Christina so very much? She meant it kindly, but she wanted me to hide behind the equivalent of a muumuu with palm trees and ukuleles all over it. She kept hoping I’d be a nun, part of a contemplative order that was cloistered. Could she have been more obvious? People who pray and wear undershirts made of Brillo inside their clothes are not pious. They’re nuts. No matter how many times Christina told me that many a religious found a vocation in disfigurement, I told her that was horse petoot. What disfigured people find in religious life is a place to hide—with the bonus of hiding among people who get extra points for putting up with stuff that gives other people the creeps. There aren’t that many beautiful, fresh-faced young maidens who become nuns anymore—unless they’re from places like Somalia or Indonesia, where nunning is a great alternative to starving. My opinion was that the rest were running from something. And yet Sister Mary Augustine actually was one of those stern-at-the-time-but-later-valued teachers whom grown students came back to visit when they graduated college.

  Who would visit me? Who would be inspired by me? I wasn’t one of those admirable disfigured people who walked across America, speaking at churches and preschools on the way, or who created an interactive video game teaching children that sensitivity is for every day, not just awareness days. I wasn’t an advocate for anything. I didn’t run 5Ks to help find a cure for anything. Maybe I truly was one of those people who was exceptionally considerate—of herself. Maybe I’d so fully embraced being looked after that I’d confused doing minor good at my job with being good in my life.

  “Do you think I’m a good person, Kit?”

  “I think you’re a wonderful person,” Kit said.

  “I don’t mean, like, interesting. I mean good.”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I never … had to try to … Just, something like this happens to you, and if you don’t evaluate your life, you’d have to be really shallow. You have to think about what the hell your life is. I draw bile ducts. I make animated pictures of mitosis and meiosis.”

  “Don’t go too far, Sicily. What Neal and Joey did doesn’t have anything to do with you. If you sprain your ankle on the same day you lose your wallet, it doesn’t mean you’re being punished. Take it easy on yourself. Take one step at a time.”

  But I had already leapt off the step. There were things I had to know and do if I didn’t want to sit in the
equivalent of this soaking tub for the rest of my life. People had those idiot refrigerator magnets because they helped you get up and do stuff. Kit was right. It was day one.

  I ripped the sheets off my bed and put them into the washer. My sheets stank of flop sweat. I had to hurry. If I did not, I would never be even as good as, much less better than.

  Renee Mayerling recognized my voice.

  Of course, my voice was pretty distinctive.

  “I’m sorry, Sicily,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Neal’s inquest was over. That was supposed to have ended something that refused, at least for me, to feel finished.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Are you doing okay?”

  “Not really.”

  “Give it time.”

  “I guess I have no choice, as far as that goes. But, Renee? You could do me a big favor, if you would? I have to ask you some things.”

  “You bet. Do you want to get together?” she said. I wasn’t sure that I did. Only a month had passed since the night of my “engagement party,” and that month had passed so slowly that it was evident proof of the theory of relativity. I still vacillated: I loved him. I loved him not. I would take him back. I would spit on him if I ever saw him again. I was still a young woman who was, at some point, going to have to place an ad that read: ARIA MCBRIDE WEDDING DRESS: NEVER WORN. Push, Sicily. Jump. We made a date for the following week, to have coffee at the place across from UIC where I once planned to meet Eliza Cappadora. Eliza. I had business later at UIC. But for now my business was with Renee. She had the afternoon free, having come off her shift early that morning.

  Renee was the kind of woman who would always look a little like a teenager. Deceptively petite, she could haul heavy hoses up three flights of stairs without panting. Back when I was a teenager, she could chin herself a dozen times, and now, when I asked her, she admitted that she still could. Renee had to be about five-two and weigh about one hundred and ten pounds. Maybe not even. Her curly hair, cut short, looked the way kids’ hair does when they tumble out of bed. When I stood up, I felt enormous at five feet six. “I didn’t remember you being so much taller than me,” she said. “I don’t come up to your chin!” We didn’t talk about one thing and another. Renee sat down with her black coffee and said, “What do you want to know, Sicily?”

  “I want to hear about the fire. The way you saw it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  Renee had never described that scene to me. We’d barely spoken of the fire even when she tutored me, even when she drove me to clinic appointments. I think she worried for me. Even good people have a way of hoping you’ve forgotten the things that redirected your life. You don’t remember them, not in the way you did at first. The film stutters and goes blank in places. It stops completely—a still photograph in which the clothing looks dated.

  “I remember every moment,” she said. “It was the thing in my life. I remember it the way I remember my daughters being born. Maybe even more.”

  On the three-minute ride to Holy Angels, no one spoke. The silence inside the cab was so charged it seemed to buzz. My father, whom Renee and the others called “Cap,” was in the front seat with the driver; Renee and Moory Tillett sat facing Tom McAvoy and Schmitty, who sat sitting backward—all of them trying to relax by breathing out but rigid with knowing that dozens of kids were at the destination and that the engine that would lay the pipe and deliver the water was still minutes away. Renee quietly finished dressing, pulling on her Nomex hood and fastening the clasps on her turnout coat. Cap said nothing. He didn’t push the red button on the truck that played the Superman theme. He seemed only to thoughtfully regard the blurred glittering of lighted Christmas decorations. Against her better judgment, Renee started to have personal thoughts: This was her first true rescue fire. Working in Chester meant a great many medicals, including the frequent fliers who made lukewarm suicide attempts every Saturday night, or grossly overweight people who fell off the sofa and had to be hoisted back on with the big black rubber sling they all called “the whale tarp.” There were some property-damage fires: Renee said Cap made the veterans dummy certificates for the grace under pressure they showed at the Great Dumpster Fire of 2006. “I started thinking about the last time I saw you, pouting because you were nearly twelve and didn’t think you needed a babysitter anymore. You’d just gotten your hair cut in that horrible shag thing that looked like old pictures of Joan Jett …”

  “And you let me drink some of your beer,” I said, remembering.

  “I would never have done that, Sicily,” she said. But she had.

  Trying not to get caught up in looking at the building, because it was my father’s job to assess it, Renee jumped down carefully from the truck—always carefully, because she would be no good if she rolled an ankle. She followed Jamie at a brisk walk toward the single open door (you never ran; only in movies did they run). They passed a few children who were already crying and choking, sitting or lying down on the snow, some bloodied, a few barefoot—children they ignored, because the circle driveway in front of the chapel would momentarily be filled with paramedic vans that would see to them, and because from the chapel they could hear that screaming, thin and animalistic, familiar to Renee only from training videos. In person, it curdled her lunch to a cold bolus at the base of her throat.

  “Your dad said into the radio, ‘Ladder Nineteen is on scene at the corner of Winchester and York Boulevard, a single-story stone church with visible fire and smoke showing.’ And the dispatcher acknowledged, and she sounded bored, the way they always do. Jamie said, ‘Ladder Nineteen will begin search-and-rescue operations. The first due engine should begin fire attack. We have people trapped inside. Children.’ ” For children, my father always said (although he was never vulgar), it was balls to the wall. You did things you wouldn’t do otherwise. Renee said that my father sent McAvoy and Tillett to do a 360 and told Renee, “Rook, come on.” They put on their oxygen tanks. That gave them twelve minutes. They were the last words she would hear my father say.

  “Then the boys …” Renee said.

  “Joey. And his brother.”

  “Yeah. I knew the LaVoys, of course. Just like you. They ran up to me and said they tried to crawl in through the priest’s entrance at the back but couldn’t make it,” Renee said. This is one way I’ve since learned to tell that people have committed a crime or done something wrong: They answer questions before you ask them.

  “I didn’t know the bigger kid. Neal. He ran away down the street, yelling to everyone who was out on their stoops,” Renee said.

  Renee had testified at the inquest, and she knew that I knew that there was a finding of no fault. Whoever sets a fire is responsible for whatever it burns, by law, even if there is no intent. But Neal was not quite thirteen years old—and he was truly repentant. The news reports said only that there had been an inquiry and that a man who had been, at the time, a juvenile had admitted setting the fire. A brief resurgence of magazine stories and retrospectives, local and national, resulted, with speculation about who and how and with what. I’d received a few calls and answered not one.

  “Did you think it was a set fire, Renee? Back then?”

  “No. Neither did the fire inspector. There was no puddle pattern, no trail that would have been present if there had been gasoline or any accelerant used. As for the candles, Sicily, there were enough candles in that chapel at that time of year to light séances or Halloween pumpkins for the next ten years. And the little votive jars where candles are lit by people making a novena or whatever? They were all over the place. Kids ran into the stand and some of the candles were burned and others weren’t,” Renee said, and stopped to drink her coffee. She looked up at me, her lips compressed. “It’s worse for me knowing it was an arson fire and it didn’t have to happen. So it’s a hundred times worse for you.” She went on to tell me more about the moments before the engine arrived. “We were supposed to m
ake sure that each of the kids was laid down at a distance one and a half times the height of the building, but we didn’t. Cap went straight in. I kept dragging kids out. When I finally got inside, I saw the pileup of kids behind that big door.” Time for Renee had slowed down from words to whole pages contained in the passage of a second. In the circle of her light, she saw more kids, stuck behind the locked side of the door that she could not kick open. Some of the kids were already PBN. Renee could tell that two of the boys would never top five feet five or grow a beard or kiss a girl, and she thought that two of the girls who would never run down the stairs to tear open their first high-heeled boots or their last Collector Barbies. It was not the first time she’d seen a dead person, but it was the first time she’d seen a dead person she could have saved. She heard a medic’s victory cry when a few puffs got one of them breathing. She began to pray silently, then to pray aloud. She had not yet seen me. And then she did. “And for that I was so grateful,” she said.

  “Tell me the rest.”

  “Well, Sicily, after the event—after the flashover—they lifted you onto a rolling backboard and I thought, At least Sicily is in no pain.” I know that a full-thickness burn was too bad for pain, the nerve endings razed. Someone else made the radio call: Captain Coyne is down. Firefighter down … Renee talked over it, telling me to look right at her, that it would all be okay.

  “But I knew you had seen everything and heard everything. You don’t remember it, though, do you?”

  Renee was the best, a neighborhood girl, one of my father’s special protégées. So I lied.

  “Not really,” I said.

  Ten days passed before my father’s visitation. It takes time to arrange the funeral of a ranking firefighter, his last bells, his honor guard, his pipers. My being able to be there with my family was an important concern too, and I could not be released from the burn unit at Loyola, where I was first taken, until there was a solid, reasonable chance I would not contract an infection.