Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  “It shouldn’t be a mystery,” I said. “It shouldn’t be a joke.” Eliza nodded patiently when I told her that, during my own preliminary research, I found gimmicky photos of how it would look, for example, if the lower half of a movie star’s face was swapped with that of a gorilla. “It’s not funny. It’s not science fiction. Right? I’m just surprised that no one has asked to have this process preserved.” Eliza was watching me attentively, which made me hope I was being convincing despite the fact that I was utterly winging it. This thought had not entered my head until I stepped through the bright celery-colored double doors of the clinic. And yet it wasn’t too big a reach. This was not a necessary surgery. I could survive without it. It was not a notion born of narcissism either. If I could invest it with more meaning—more service—I could further my quest for I-wasn’t-sure-what. So I said, “If I have this procedure, I would like to have my surgery documented for a public forum.”

  “That’s not possible,” Eliza told me promptly. We sat there for another half hour while they tried to explain why I could not violate my own privacy. I raised the subject of the significance and poignancy of the exhibit called Bodies that had toured the United States some years before. The bodies were real human bodies. They were Chinese people, preserved—in states of strength and weakness, movement and stillness, sickness and health—with a polymer process. Even children who saw it were not, after the initial surprise, horrified. People were instead rapturous, intrigued, deeply moved to care for their own remarkable bodies in a way that no drawing could have inspired.

  “Yes, and some were outraged,” Eliza countered. There was considerable controversy about the provenance of those preserved people—questions raised about how they had died. Some of them were young men and women who had been in Chinese prisons or national hospitals. They very likely hadn’t given their permission to have their cadavers flayed and displayed to illustrate muscle groups or lung function.

  “But I am giving my permission,” I said. “It’s because I am a medical illustrator that I know that what some people would initially consider frightening can be not only educational but also really beautiful.”

  “You don’t even know if you’re going to have the surgery, Sicily. One decision at a time.”

  I was twenty-five years old, though, and newly un-wed, hungry for substance that seemed to have left my soul a hollow seed. Eliza might as well have told all this to a dog—a dog would have paid more attention. I’d already found out that proceeding on faith could rise up and strike you down. And yet it isn’t possible, I understand now, to entirely grasp the scope of the arena you’re walking into. Most blessings, it turns out, are mixed.

  As we parted, Eliza agreed to speak with the team leader, Dr. Grigsby. Then I asked her whether, if both the surgery and the documentation turned out to be possible, she knew a photographer. This was a trick question. I could read the ambivalence on her face when she said she couldn’t think of one offhand who had the training and the equipment and sensitivity.

  “What about your mother-in-law?” I asked, using my eyes to hold hers.

  “Right,” said Eliza. “Well … yes, Beth is between jobs right now, but I don’t see her doing this.”

  “I could call her.”

  “I can’t stop you from contacting her. I’m sure she’d be intrigued by it. But she’s in a weird kind of … mood right now.”

  Going home on the train at sunset, I wondered if I actually would go through with it, with any of it. I wondered why I had been so insistent. The answer was embodied in the question. My stubbornness was the worst thing and the best thing in my character. But it rankled that, had I been hoping for a kidney transplant, the same ethical issues would not have applied. By the time I got to my stop, I had construed the idea of making my face history a matter of honor, my own and that of the donor. I was young. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I still trust that impulse. I didn’t want attention from the larger world for myself. I wanted attention from the larger world for this process—how it would change both the outside of a person and the smaller world of that person, the world within. I intended to break what I saw then as a cycle of self-centeredness. I’m older now, and I look at the price tag before I even try the coat on. Then I decide what is prudent—which is not necessarily better, but always is safer.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Beth Cappadora might never have met Sicily Coyne were it not for Beth’s deeply superstitious belief that her family had been singled out by the cosmos for events that were statistically impossible. The Cappadoras had not been singled out uniquely. But they were a slender slice of a slender slice. If Beth took an angel’s-eye view of the households whose predisposition (and she knew it was predisposition) for the unimaginable was comparable to the Cappadoras’, if they were clustered before her on a tabletop like Monopoly houses, it would be a bonsai-ed universe that would fill only the palm of one of Beth’s hands.

  Everything that had happened to these families also was statistically impossible. And yet it had all happened.

  More than thirty years ago, Beth’s son Ben was kidnapped from a hotel lobby, standing not ten feet from his mother (statistically impossible). Nine years after that, Ben had statistically impossibly turned up, healthy and well adjusted (Beth wasn’t certain that Ben was not actually more well adjusted than the rest of them), living less than a mile from his parents. He grew up to marry Beth’s godchild, Elizabeth (called Eliza), the daughter of Beth’s best friend, who also was the police detective who searched for Ben for all those years. When Ben and Eliza’s daughter, now a robust first-grader, was just a baby, she had been similarly threatened, also in a hotel and also reclaimed unharmed.

  Top that.

  Beth could.

  She kept a file, and though it was no thicker than one of Beth’s slender fingers, it was brimming with similar statistically impossible cases that had happened since: In Utah, Leslie Dorr was forced to live for two years as one of five wives of her abductor, on a farm just outside the town where her parents owned the florist’s shop. The truck driver was sick when Leslie’s own father delivered a birthday bouquet to the farm. Leslie was outside, taking towels down from the clothesline. And there was the case of Brian Ambeling, stolen after Pee-Wee League baseball practice by his coach, who turned out to be Brian’s biological father—something not even Brian’s mother knew for sure. Three years later, the mother was waiting in line with her two younger daughters at Disney World when she spotted her son.

  None of those things could have happened.

  And yet they all had.

  No one else in Beth’s nuclear or extended family was concerned about this … this … genetic strain, which Beth considered obvious, like a birthmark, like the certain doom manifest on the face of the young Abraham Lincoln in early photographs. They all acted as though they were like any other family and considered Beth, if not neurotic, then high-strung. But they weren’t like any other family. Beth had to pick up the slack for all of them, turning the events of her life over and over in her mind like a snow globe so that she never forgot.

  Hence, she lost her job.

  Beth was an accomplished photographer, and though she didn’t need to work for income—her husband’s restaurants were gustatory landmarks in Chicago—she worked for love. In middle age, she was nationally regarded for her black-and-white portraiture and photos of architecture. Her children had burgeoning lives—her oldest, Vincent, making successively bigger films; her beautiful daughter, Kerry, singing progressively bigger roles in bigger operas; and Ben taking a bigger role in the family restaurant business. Because she still liked the challenge of color, and because she loved working with the stylist, one of her regular jobs was shooting long essays and covers for Sense and Sensibility, a slick journal that combined the coverage of luxury items for ravishing people with provocative and durable journalism.

  She was doing that the day she lost her job.

  The dangerously thin and gamine actress Anne Dresden wa
s eating slices of onion, as Beth would have eaten an apple, and struggling to text with her free hand. Every time Dresden twitched, she would knock some beribboned parasol or fold of gown ever so slightly out of place, and Beth, who had set up with her ancient Hasselblad, would have to move her things; then the stylist, the legendary Ginny Culp, would have to study Beth’s Polaroids and the blowup of a fragment of Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which was what this shoot was supposed to simulate. Beth was shooting what she couldn’t see—Ginny’s digital pointillism—and the children surrounding Anne Dresden were beginning to scratch and sweat in their full muslin getups.

  “We’re good now,” Ginny said. She was famously taciturn, the former editor of Splendour, brought low by age, the economy, and the seeming disinclination of her rival at Vogue to either grow old or die. Everything was perfect again—the onion coaxed out of Dresden’s hand, the children powdered and mollified—when Anne Dresden’s phone chimed. Dresden, who would soon star in a film based on a Sondheim musical, although she couldn’t sing a note, got up and left. As she passed Beth on her way to privacy, she stepped on the hem of the antique skirt—Beth heard the ancient fabric tear—covered the phone, and confided, “I’m obsessed with him. We can’t go ten minutes without talking. And he’s in France. Like, buying Old Masters. And I’m doing this. Isn’t it ironic? Oh, my God, he just can’t stand not being on the same planet with me.”

  “It’s rough,” said Ginny Culp.

  “But, Anne,” Beth pleaded. “We have everything so perfect now, and with the children so restless, it’s not going to last. Give me just five minutes. Okay?” Anne Dresden’s publicist, whose bronze hair matched her skin, glanced up from her clipboard.

  “She prefers you to call her Miss Dresden, not Anne,” the woman said.

  “I can’t do that,” Beth said. “I’m old enough to be her mother.”

  “We need you to,” said the publicist.

  “I am finished!” Anne Dresden called. “I need to be out of here!”

  “It’s a chosen name, don’t you think?” said Ginny Culp, sotto voce. “You couldn’t really call yourself Anne Gallipoli, right? Or Anne Hiroshima?”

  “Really, it’s me,” Beth said suddenly, collapsing her aluminum reflector. “Really I’m the one who’s out of here. I’m going to be late, and where are we anyhow—Galena? Galesburg?” They were somewhere in rural Illinois (Beth no longer accepted out-of-town assignments, except during school vacations), and Beth knew it would take hours for her to make it to her granddaughter Stella’s school on time. Collecting and stowing her things, she set out for the car. Ginny Culp ran after her.

  “Beth, this is a cover! She won’t really walk. She’s twenty-six years old. She’s just being shitty. Those costumes are rentals. They cost a bundle. We can’t reschedule this. You already shot the background.” But Beth knew they could do everything Ginny insisted was impossible. Sense and Sensibility could find some hungry youngster tomorrow, probably with a fresher eye, who would kiss Anne Dresden’s skinny butt and charge a hundred bucks for the chance to simply make that cover—which was paired with an interior shot of Dresden with Sondheim that took up a single column in a three-hundred-page magazine.

  “I really have to go, Ginny. I mean it. I have to get someplace. Right now.” Beth kissed Ginny Culp’s deeply lined cheek. “I’ll see you if they ever hire me again.”

  “They’ll never hire you again.”

  “Oh, well,” Beth said. “Oh, you know. Oh, well.”

  Stella’s other grandmother, Candy Bliss, was the police chief in Parkside. Ben and Eliza lived there with Stella, in a brownstone for which Candy had cleverly given them the down payment as a wedding gift. Because Beth’s husband, Pat, was (in Beth’s opinion) overly concerned with ostentation—he drove a Cadillac and wore custom-made suits, calling this good sense and good business—Beth lived in some horsey suburb on two acres with a pool only visitors used. In good traffic, she had to drive an hour to see Stella. It was already nearly noon. Candy had reassured Beth that she was one minute from Stella’s school, could drive by anytime, and had promised to check on Stella every day when the child got off the bus (it was Stella’s first year on the bus and she was enchanted). But Candy behaved a bit too nonchalantly for Beth’s tastes, like all the rest of them.

  “What if you’re in a high-speed chase or something at three in the afternoon?” Beth asked.

  “I’ll have somebody else check on her. I’ll have a squad drive by the house.”

  “What if you get shot and forget?” Beth asked. “The sitter will be late and Stella will be kidnapped.”

  Candy laughed—she laughed.

  She said, “Beth, I think about stuff like that all the time too. But we have to get … past the past.”

  Ben and Eliza agreed. They would not allow Beth to pick Stella up from school each day and drive her home, delivering her into the plump arms of the sitter. Both of them believed that too much anxiety would frighten Stella rather than reassure her.

  Were they insane?

  Beth drove as though pursued by Nazi robots in hovercraft and barely made it to Stella’s school before the last bell. She had just parked her car when she heard a single muffled whoop from the police car that pulled in behind her. Had she been speeding? Since Stella started school in September, Beth had gotten a ticket in Algonquin and two warnings in Harrington, her first traffic violations in twenty years.

  But it was only Candy.

  “You see that stoplight back there, lady?” Candy said, leaning into Beth’s car and placing her elbows on the open window. She wore a cream-colored blazer and long, slim pants, with a scarf at her neck printed in peacock tones, and looked as though she had just stepped out of the shower. Candy didn’t chase subjects on foot anymore, but when she had, she would have looked exactly this same way.

  “Shit no. I ran a red light?” Beth said.

  “You didn’t run a red light.”

  “What then?”

  “Bethie, I’m getting these calls about someone hanging around the school every day.…”

  Beth sat up so abruptly she knocked off her sunglasses on the visor. “So! How do you feel now? Still think I’m crazy for being afraid for Stella?”

  Candy pressed one perfect French-manicured squoval against her forehead, between her eyes, a gesture so singular to Candy that Beth could almost hear the sigh that was its invariable companion.

  “It’s you they’re complaining about,” Candy said. “My guys ran your plates and they were scared to tell me. But parents describe this lady who never gets out of the car. She just watches. People think you’re a kidnapper, so to speak.”

  Beth glanced around her at the other cars sliding into place to gather their children.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “I was in the neighborhood. Sort of.”

  “You mean, the neighborhood as in the Midwest?”

  “Sort of.” Beth made a face.

  “You have to stop this, Bethie. The sitter hasn’t been late in five months, not by a minute. And I said, if I can’t check it out myself, I will send someone to do that. It’s not like I think you’re paranoid—”

  “I am paranoid.”

  “Well, so am I. But we have to go on living as though we aren’t or we’re going to give ourselves strokes, and then Stella will grow up without grandmothers and be weird.”

  And so Beth was at home when Marie Caruso phoned that February afternoon. Marie was a nice person; she’d started out as one of the hundreds of reporters who interviewed Beth during the days and years after Ben’s kidnapping, so long ago, and had become a minor acquaintance. She had grown up in the town where Beth’s in-laws, Rose and Angelo, still lived. Pat had known Marie’s older sister, Gia, and all of them knew the terrible story of Gia’s own family.

  Another family peopled with statistical impossibilities!

  This niece was the subject of the call. Marie asked if she might come over some we
ekend morning. Her niece—what was the girl’s name, Sylvia? Serena?—had a project to suggest to Beth. Beth had no idea why, but she agreed. Not that she had anything better to do. With only local assignments for newspapers and magazines, and now absent the daily penitential drive to ensure Stella’s safety, Beth found herself with long, pensive, surplus days at the dullest time of the year, as Chicago grudgingly gave up winter for spring.

  She tried home projects.

  Although a nice young man cleaned the whole house each week, Beth told him not to bother with the grout in any of the five bathrooms; she was going to bleach that herself. The grout-bleaching kit became a fixture in the bathroom. Beth and Pat stepped around it. Sometimes, Beth used a sheet of paper toweling to dust it.

  “I have an idea,” Pat said one morning, when he finished bellowing after he’d stepped on the business end of the grout brush. “Let’s just try letting the cleaning guy clean the grout. If he fails, we can fire him and have him kneecapped by my father’s friends.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Beth said. “I’ll clean the grout. I have time.”

  “That brush and bleach have been there for more than a month.”

  “I’m going to get to it.”

  “Why,” Pat asked, “would you want to live in a house where the grout hasn’t been cleaned since the tile was laid just so you can say you have a project? Why don’t you do something? Do you have that disease where people don’t like big spaces? What do you call it?”

  “Pat, that’s a crazy thing to say.”

  “That’s a crazy thing to say? I don’t know, Bethie. What are you waiting for?”

  Pat was finishing his daily routine of dolling himself up. Their family’s trials had nearly killed him. And now Pat was the same chipper-phony guy, dapper and quick with a joke, still able to convince almost anyone that he had truly hoped to run into no one on earth more than that person on that day. Pat had fully inhabited his previous self, a knot of nervous energy masquerading as a fella without a care in the world, bouncing up on the balls of his feet in his four-hundred-dollar shoes as he waited for the restaurant to open its doors—as avidly as he had waited the first time—day after month after year.