Second Nature: A Love Story

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Before I went home the next day, I had my first thorough obstetrical workup with Dr. Glass, the high-risk obstetrician. She attributed a slightly high blood pressure to entirely understandable and unremarkable anxiety. The new, lush growth of my hair was down to ordinary hormonal activity, not to rejection. What my medical bills were by now would probably have paid every citizen in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a Christmas bonus of a thousand bucks, but not once in my life did I receive a medical bill from UIC. I never had litigious intentions, but each time I asked, Hollis simply shrugged eloquently. Marie’s opinion was that UIC knew how thin the ice was legally, and my experimental protocol was adding to the literature.

  At my second appointment, just a week later, we were joined by Dr. Andrea Park, who was making me into a research study of one for the experimental anti-rejection protocol. I got my prescriptions, which now included prenatal vitamins. I made a point of asking Dr. Park, “Is this okay?”

  “You mean these drugs or all of it?” she said, her face utterly impassive.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know anything.”

  “Me either,” she said, and shrugged. “It’s better than it was in 2005. It’s better than in 2011. It’s better than last year. But, Sicily, I’m making phone calls all the time when I think about what’s okay or not. I call Germany and Japan. I get up at night and call Poland. In the day, these old-time rock singers used to shoot up and snort when they were pregnant. In the literature and popular press of that time, well, it was believed that heroin use should be deemed child abuse. Of course, it’s still child abuse. But it ended up that the whole coke-baby thing wasn’t founded on science. It seemed like it should be. But it turned out that mothers who had a couple of glasses of good wine every week were more likely to have damaged babies.”

  “Is that what we might be talking about here? Like fetal alcohol syndrome?”

  “No.”

  “Down syndrome?”

  “I don’t think so. No. Dr. Grigsby, as you know, is concerned about chromosomal issues. That was with the original protocol of medicines.”

  “There has to be some syndrome we’re worrying about.”

  “I’m sure there is, but I’m not going there,” she said, and it was final.

  Dr. Park said, “Here’s what’s going to replace all those bottles, Sicily. It’s a single pill, once a day.”

  “What is it?”

  “There was all this hype a few years ago, from Strauss–McManus, the big pharmaceutical company, about an experimental immunosuppressant that would have way fewer side effects such as increasing the patient’s risk for lymphoma and so forth. I’m liking that because what’s good for the outside’s got to be good for the inside,” Dr. Park said.

  “When do I start it?”

  “Right now, unofficially. Officially, when I scope out how far I dare go with the limited work that’s been done with human subjects. Which is not a lot. And the studies have been with other soft tissue. Hands and noses. With faces? Only you.”

  “I’d be a guinea pig.”

  “Guinea pig. What a phrase. So … twentieth century.”

  Dr. Ahrens knocked, came into the room, and smiled at me. I looked closely at Dr. Park and Dr. Ahrens. I could never tell how old either of them was. Dr. Park was young. Ish. Older than I was, but how much? She walked like a runner but used expressions that weren’t used by people under forty. Her hair had not a strand of gray or that flat weird look that’s common with even the best coloring, and she seemed to defer to Hollis in a way that internists didn’t usually defer to “orthopods” of any kind. But then, Hollis was famous and not classically a reconstructive surgeon but instead a microsurgeon, despite having started out—I love this—with hands and knees. The joke is that orthopedic surgeons all used to be hockey players and are like the finish carpenters of surgery, while internists are the big thinkers who just palpate your gut and say, Hmmmmmmm, interesting.

  “Are you a resident?” I asked Dr. Park.

  She said, “Hello! No. I’m old enough to be your … older cousin.” Both of us laughed. “I am young to be an attending. That’s because Chinese people are smarter, as you know.”

  I said, “Do you have kids?”

  And she said, “I have a daughter who is ten. I am not married. My mother has disowned me. Fortunately, she has not disowned my daughter, so it’s all good. Chinese mothers are mean, but Chinese grandmothers are doting.”

  Andrea Park was smart. She also was nice.

  The high-risk OB–GYN … yeah. Not so much.

  The next ultrasound I had was not long before Christmas. It showed a big-headed bean with alarmingly evident and distinct finger buds, lying on its back. Dr. Glass stood with her arms folded.

  “Is that great?” I asked her. “It’s great, right?”

  “It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye,” she said. “We’ll know more at twenty weeks. What we need is an amnio, but I want to wait a month or so. Although by the time we get the results for one, you’ll be ready for the other. It’s up to you, Florence.”

  The ultrasound tech gasped.

  I cracked up.

  “What is it?” asked Dr. Glass.

  “It’s Sicily. My name isn’t Florence. It’s Sicily.”

  The doctor colored up lightly, and I continued, “If it’s a girl, I’m going to name her Pompeia or … Madrid. Do you like those?”

  What a wretched stick up the ass she was. And I have a prejudice for women. As for this doctor, I needed her to be on my side or I needed another doctor. I wanted to say, Do you say crap like this to every expectant mother? Or do you say, wow, Mommy, that kid’s waving at you, or some happy horseshit? I know for a fact you don’t act like what’s in there is a nasty tumor that doesn’t seem any bigger.

  But even Dr. Livingston, although he was a tremendous person, had never really stopped thinking of this pregnancy as the “nonstarter.” I felt him watching me rather than looking at me these days, waiting for a clue.

  Nobody asked if my morning sickness was settling down. Nobody asked if I hoped for a boy or a girl. All of them, even my family, seemed to hold their breath collectively, except for one person: my aunt. This was not my aunt Marie. Marie was scrupulously cheery but not cozy, after the first day, about my accident-related nondecision to have a nontermination. It was a given how much she would love a child of mine, how much she would love to be a grandmother, in fact if not by designation.

  The person who was nearly swoony with happiness was my aunt Christina, Sister Mary Augustine Caruso. She displayed pure, un-smirched joy at what seemed to be one Catholic’s refusal to have an abortion against both her own and the child’s best interests—steering toward disaster on purpose being the best sort of faith-based decision, I guess.

  One Saturday we had brunch with my Caruso grandparents. If not for me and my delicate condition, Grandma and Grandpa Caruso, as well as Grandma and Grandpa Coyne, would have been getting ready to leave after New Year’s for their condos in Florida. But these days, Florida seemed like … well, Florence. No one was going anywhere, for which I felt guilty. Anyhow, after everyone watched me eat enough quiche and salad for three large people and then retire to throw half of it up, Aunt Christina said, “Sicily, darling. Would it be okay if I explained the Catholic perspective on this to your doctor? Would you mind if I met with her?”

  “Met with my doctor,” I repeated.

  “Yes,” said Christina.

  “No, of course you can’t, Aunt Christina.”

  “Sicily, it’s important that she understand that this is a situation in which you aren’t to be pressured toward a most grievous—”

  “She knows that,” Marie said. “The doctor knows that.”

  “In this case, I’m not sure where the most harm would be, Aunt Christina,” I said.

  “What you’ve done here is noble, Sicily,” said Aunt Christina. “If you should lose this … well, this facial beautification for the sake of the unborn child
growing in your womb, it is virtually a martyrdom.”

  “You’re not getting this. I’ve made this decision almost against my own will, Aunt Christina. I’m scared to death. Every day. This could be an actual martyrdom. It could maybe kill me if I lose my face,” I said. “Let’s talk about the Cubs.”

  “But you would choose that, for the baby to survive,” said my aunt.

  “Which, if I did die, would do both of us a lot of good,” I said. “What if I had the baby and gave it up for adoption? Do you know I actually considered that? Wouldn’t that be more pure and awful and painful and really holy?”

  My grandmother, who had been busily making sure that everyone had way too much food, said quietly, “Sicily.” I turned away from Christina and looked down the surface of the shining mahogany table at which I’d sat all my life—every Easter and every Christmas and every other Sunday, in a high chair, on a pillow over telephone books, as a bored twelve-year-old trying to hide the earbuds of my iPod under my hair, and as an isolated, fearful teenager wishing I could conjure a mist to obscure me from my family’s eyes. In all those years, I had never seen my bustling, fit, domestically stereotypical Italian grandmother as an old woman. Old women didn’t jog from the yard to the oven to the neighbor’s house, cooking and crocheting and chatting, going on long bus trips to Broadway shows with her girlfriends. Until recently, very recently, I’d rarely seen Grandma Caruso interrupt her bustle even to sit down at her own table long enough to eat. My father used to call her a stand-up lady.

  She looked old now, solemn and doleful, her cheeks motionless and grooved as a line drawing.

  Grandma said, “I haven’t said the things I think. As a Catholic, I think the only situation in which abortion is not a mortal sin is to save the life of the mother, and old Catholics believe that even in that case we must choose the life of the child. But I lost my child, Sicily, my firstborn baby girl. I saw your father, who was like my son, die. I’m an old woman. I pray to the Sacred Heart because I don’t think I could bear to lose my only grandchild, who I almost lost already, for the sake of a baby, any baby. No matter how precious this baby’s life is, to God or to our family.” Grandma raised her hands to her temples, drawing the skin at the corners of her eyes back in an elegy of distress that was horrible to me. “Sicily. I would say, have an abortion, Sicily. I think you should have an abortion. I know this is a sin on my own soul. I don’t care. One day, when you are really in love with a man who is good, you can adopt a waiting child together—”

  “Mother!” said Aunt Christina.

  “Christina, I know your belief. Don’t talk anymore.”

  “Mother … what you’re encouraging Sicily—”

  “I said, don’t talk anymore! Am I a fool? Don’t you think I know what I’m saying at my own table?” said Grandma Caruso. “This baby’s life is nothing next to Sicily’s life. It’s nothing! This family has suffered enough. Sicily has suffered like a hundred martyrs. No. I think she should stop this now.” My grandmother covered her face with one of her delicate tatted table napkins. “I want Sicily to live. I want Sicily to keep the face God gave her to replace her beautiful face. I want Sicily to live her life, which is my Gia’s life too. Even if I go to hell. I don’t care if I go to hell. This is hell.”

  Shame washed over me like nausea. I got up and went into the bathroom, but not to be sick. I splashed my wrists and my face and tried to think. What was I doing? How could I torture them and gamble so ruthlessly with my face and my future because I somehow thought the love of a guy had burrowed into my belly and made an accidental pregnancy somehow sacred? My heart skittered, faster and faster. I didn’t want to be a … an ICU case, an urgent giant oozing wound, a pitiable crash rescue, hoping for a face that at best would look like a battered melon? Was I bringing this on myself, like the nutty Canadian guy? Had these years of privation and longing tied off a section of my brain?

  When I sat down again, I said, “Grandma, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I’m putting you through. I didn’t think of how scared you must be. I’m even sorry that I disrespected Christina, thinking this is for religious reasons. If I thought I was really in danger …” But didn’t I? Was I? How the hell did I know? And I wasn’t telling the whole truth either, to the people who had loved and raised me, which was the least that they deserved. “I know I’m emotional. Even if this baby was conceived in sin, to you, it was also conceived in love, to me. If I didn’t think this baby’s life was important, I wouldn’t even consider this. I wouldn’t trade my life for her life. I just can’t take it lightly. I can’t. I tried.”

  But that wasn’t all of it either. What was missing from this sentence? I’d weighed the odds, and I believed they could favor me. The sentence was missing an entire, other independent clause. Would I be clinging to this pregnancy if there had been bliss but not Vincent? Was this all some … offering to Vincent?

  No, it was not!

  “I promise. I’m going to think it over more. I’m going to talk it over more with the psychologist. Maybe this fear is a warning. The doctors know what they’re doing, but maybe I’m asking too much of them.”

  No one said a word. We could hear the whipping of the tiniest bare branches of Grandma’s big old pin oak, rapping the window the way a conductor raps a podium. It sounded like mindless rain, fingernails tapping thoughtlessly, nervously, awaiting a decision.

  Finally, Grandpa said, “All your aunt is doing is praising your faith. All your grandmother is doing is loving you. You are a loved young woman. You are a Catholic young woman.”

  I nearly yipped when I felt a blow to my shin. Even wearing a soft ballet flat, Marie could make herself felt.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m not discounting that.”

  Christina jumped right back in. “So I thought, if I spoke to your doctor, it might make her feel more at ease.”

  As for me, I felt increasingly not so well. I was chilly, although my grandparents skipped around in short sleeves and kept the temperature of their house about the same as late afternoon in Death Valley. Wasn’t it time for Aunt Christina to go to vespers or matins or some prayer break at this point? I wished that I could have a drink—even though I couldn’t have had a drink even if anyone had been drinking.

  “She’s a Catholic too,” said Aunt Marie. “Sicily’s doctor, Dr. Grigsby, the surgeon: She is a Catholic too.”

  “I thought she was from Louisiana,” said my other aunt.

  “They don’t call the counties in New Orleans parishes for nothing, Aunt Christina,” I said. “Hollis, my surgeon, is a southern black woman with a British accent who is a cradle Catholic.”

  “You know what I want? I want to have a look at that new ride, Sissy. Let’s see your car,” my grandfather said, and the entire table, except Aunt Christina, rose as one.

  That night at home, Kit and I had our little Christmas. Kit gave me this beautiful antique album with a picture of a girl in a swing on it. The journal was filled with postcards from a girl called Emma Rose Gunnally, all sent to her mother from her honeymoon trip “by motor car,” down the eastern coast of the United States. The album was fashioned so that the backs of the postcards were visible. This morning in New Hampshire, I’m afraid that Thomas became very impatient when the car would start steaming as we waited for the most cunning flock of lambs to cross the country lane.

  “Do you like it?” Kit asked.

  “It’s just exquisite. When did this happen? In 1912? Kitty, that was the time of the Titanic, more than a hundred years ago. Can you believe it?”

  Kit put her hand on her chest and let out a deep sigh. “I got worried you would hate it.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I got it for you a while ago and just realized that the girl is named Emma and it’s a honeymoon.”

  Now I felt my breath snag in my chest. The shivers came back and I pulled the mohair throw from the back of my couch around my shoulders. When was the last time I’d spoken to Mrs. Cassidy? Of course, she didn’t
know anything about this … issue. It wasn’t as though it had gotten around the West Side. She deserved to know. But what would I say to her? Here was my Kit, woebegone, looking as though someone had eaten all her Norman Loves and then rewrapped the box.

  “A lot of people are named Emma. It’s like Rebecca. It’s an old-timey name. It’s even better, Kit. I think of Emma all the time.” Except not, I admitted to myself. “And, wow, a wedding is the last thing on my mind.” I faked a good smile and said, “Now you open yours.”

  I’d given Kit an Italian martini set, a blown-glass shaker, and two glasses in her favorite colors (I know, God help me), black and pink.

  Afterward, she cooked dinner for both of us—her specialty, chicken divan, which we’d called “chicken dive-in” when we were kids and her mom made it—and I listened to Kit’s litany of complaints about her job. These mostly centered on how Jon Archer, her boss, kept taking credit for all of Kit’s color schemes and ideas for the home page. Kit would quit tomorrow—if it weren’t for the six figures and the trips to London and Milan and the corner office on Michigan Avenue and the mandatory exercise hour and the indoor pool and massage room and all the free makeup and body butter and other extraordinary loot, a load of which she now hauled out to give to me in a satin Santa bag—samples of all the “super-eco” brands. It all sounded just absolutely, hideously unbearable and dreadful, really, sort of like getting dressed up every day to go to a spa and play princess on the computer until dinnertime. I’d majored in art. Why couldn’t I be Kit? Eye-shadow palettes versus the bombardment of rectal tumors with angiogenesis inhibitors. Like Kit’s job, mine was also a six-figure project, if you counted the two zeroes after the decimal point that made up eight thousand bucks. Being a medical illustrator was useful and, for me, it was pretty easy. But it was often—as in, oh, 80 percent of the time—about as interesting to me as if I’d owned a lawn-care business. When it had suited my neat and very medical little world, my job felt like a perfect fit. Now it felt cramped.