“Is she going to die? Is she okay? Sicily? Are you there?”
“Considering how small she is and how far she has to go, she’s actually pretty great, Vincent. She’s a little red and scary-looking, but I think she’ll grow up strong and healthy. I hope so.”
“Thank God.” It was my turn to wonder if anyone was there. “I’ll come right away.”
“You can wait. Until she’s out of the hospital.”
“No. That wouldn’t be right.”
“There’s no protocol for it, Vincent. You know, come when you get around to it.” Shut your fat mouth, Sicily, I rebuked myself. Shut your fat stupid mouth.
But Vincent said only, “Thank you, Sicily.”
“It was only polite to call.”
“For her, I mean.” I did start to cry then, in earnest. It turned out that I had a gift for it.
It was not true that I’d given birth to my daughter so that I could have one living thing I loved in my life stay with me.
Now that I had given birth to her, though, I would have given anything in exchange for her to be well and to stay with me. This was way bigger than I’d understood, and I thought that I had understood. It wasn’t interesting or a challenge or love or even the right thing. It was the only thing, the whole tortilla.
In the end, I named her Gemma, the combination of Gia and Emma. Her middle name was Marie, of course—not like everyone else on the West Side of Chicago but like one person in particular.
Outside the hospital, there was a park on a path through this little garden. I was standing out there, knee-deep in daffodils, convinced that even the smell of cigarette smoke and reheated burritos from the staff tables around me couldn’t stanch the triumphant green undercurrent of spring, when a cab pulled into the circle and Vincent got out. He looked at me without recognition and I realized, with a freaky splash in the face of reality, that he was looking at me—the way a guy would look at a girl. I’d given birth just three days before, but I had the gift of youth and all those hours at the barre, and my body had snapped back like vinyl to its approximate previous shape. My appraisal of Vincent’s appraisal seemed to possess telepathic qualities, because Vincent did a double take and said, “What are you doing out here?”
“Smoking,” I said.
“You are?” All the nurses were smoking like religion. Nurses smoke. So do opera singers.
“Come on. I’m the mother of a baby on semi-life support? Please? I’m just standing in the air. I’ve been zipped inside that building since Christmas. Somebody ripped the zipper open too soon. I’m breathing fresh air, or at least what’s in the vicinity. It’s May. May flowers. Mother’s Day. Funny you should show up. This is the only good thing about it.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s pretty okay. I didn’t mean big life support. Just a little help.”
“Is she pretty?”
“She will be,” I said, and thought, Oh, why? He had not come right away. There’s always a flight to Chicago, and he could have been there by the first evening. He’d taken a few meetings first. He’d packed carefully, instead of throwing stuff into a bag like it was an … emergency or some once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe it wasn’t. At least for him. And still, my eyes were starved for the sight of him. I could feel my cheery expression begin to crumple, the way it did before one of my now-customary thirty-minute sobbing sessions. I tried to think of all the other men in Chicago who would consider the job I would have someday as cool and sexy, who would line up to seduce me despite the fact that bits of my face might start to shear off periodically (SM965,900 was still technically experimental, although I would never go back to the standard drug regimen) and that my daughter might have had a class-four cranial bleed and be blind … It was a sobering-enough thought to bring me back to standing in the daffodils instead of picking daisies in my mind. He loves me … not.
“Can we go in?” Vincent asked.
“In just one minute. I’m going to be inside for a while. Six weeks, they say. Until she weighs five pounds.” There might come a time when I would want to go home, for an hour, for a hot bath, for a nap on my own bed. The angelic and exquisite NICU nurses—Walter, whose individual fingers were the circumference of five of his tiny patients’ thighs and who had the gentle digital dexterity of a lacemaker; Sabine, who was the size of my car and who carried a fistful of markers and drew pictures of dancing mousies and cartwheeling bunnies on the sides of the hard-plastic Isolettes; Lucy Min, who belted show tunes while she drew blood from a foot the size of a thumb knuckle and replaced blindfolds the size of my pinkie nail.
“Aren’t you supposed to be with her?”
“Your mother, your grandparents, and Walter are with her.”
“Boyfriend?” He did not look pained, my daughter’s dad, at the thought that I might already have a new love. Or maybe I just expected more drama.
“She can’t date. She’s three days old,” I said. I knew what he meant but, for God’s sake, exactly when did Vincent think I’d forged this relationship and how? Intercom sex with a passing phlebotomist? “Walter is a neonatal-intensive-care nurse. He’s about seven foot twelve and from Montego Bay. She doesn’t take up half his palm.”
“Gemma Marie Cappadora,” he said.
“Coyne,” I told him, almost regretfully. “Gemma Marie Coyne.”
“Sicily—”
“Yeah, I know. Your name is on her birth certificate. But she has to match me.”
Vincent shrugged, but it wasn’t a to-hell-with-it shrug, more an attempt to lift away what could not be lifted: regret and rueful thoughts. So much spilled milk—and, yes, I realized with a little jump, as my breasts rose like little loaves in time lapses, I couldn’t waste any more time tiptoeing through the tulips, because I had to nurse the baby. For the only time in my life, I rode in an elevator facing another person who was sober.
“Who does she look like?”
“Vincent, she looks like something you would cook with celery and potatoes, and to me, she is the most beautiful thing that ever breathed assisted air. That’s the other thing you have to know.” We walked out onto the NICU, which had been decorated, a bit frantically, as an orchard. Everyone knew who Vincent was, and we were ushered in without a question. Vincent had the same reaction that everyone had: They flinched in horror and pity. Most of the babies looked like shaved rabbits. Those were the babies who might be okay, preemies like Gemma. The babies to worry about, said Lucy Min, were big plump babies who looked like regular big plump babies, with tight auburn curls or thick sandy feathers. They didn’t move or wiggle. Something inside their brains had burst or burned or was never built. They were rosy and beautiful and some of their baby mouths couldn’t form a seal to nurse from a bottle, so they were fed through tubes in an incision cut into the wall of their drumlike little tummies. The skinned red babies had IV lines in every vein, brain monitors, more TV screens than a multiplex. And the parents? The parents weren’t like me, mostly. They were skinny teens with Scorpio tats and too-black hair. They were forty-something mommies and daddies who’d waited too long—their begging eyes filmed and puffed with lack of sleep. Piles of stuffed animals in hammocks hung from the heated beds, with big, elaborate photos of siblings suspended overhead. Some of those babies were twins achieved with fertility drugs. My Gemma was the anti-fertility-drug babe, forsaken as many times as Jesus by St. Peter, unwanted and adored. Vincent’s face was a mirror of pity and horror. I wanted to cradle him. I couldn’t see her that way anymore. Gemma Marie Coyne needed CPAP to breathe so that she didn’t use up too many calories, yet she was in some sense the envy of the ward, the shining star of the room. I could remove her from her warmer bed and hold her to my breast and feel her tiny mouth engulf my nipple, fierce as a fighting fish. Gemma received nutrients through a nasogastric tube, too. She had lost three ounces, but she flailed so fiercely she had to be sedated lest she outdo herself aerobically. So there were times when I pumped and read and rocked.
It was differe
nt for the other parents.
I was only a little afraid for her. I was only a little afraid of her.
The other parents probably had expected perfect. I had expected okay but had gotten not as good as but just one small handhold up the mountain better than. The other parents had not been me.
Pin-neat in her pleated black suit, Rose Cappadora drew Vincent close against her shoulder. Angelo kissed Vincent’s cheek. Beth stared at him. “Ma,” he said.
She said, “Vincent.”
It wasn’t his fault. Vincent. Lavender and salt and the brine of his mouth. He loved me. He loved me not. He loved me. He loved me not. The last petal had dropped. If he didn’t know how to love me, maybe he would know how to love her.… It wasn’t his fault.
Walter said, “Man, this is one beautiful girl of yours. This is two beautiful girls you got.” Walter gave Vincent hand-washing materials. Taking Vincent’s hands in my own, I helped him disinfect. There were cuffed openings in the bed, like little portholes on a small boat in an uncertain sea. Each of us put one hand inside. Gemma shuddered and opened her eyes. Vincent’s eyes widened in response, asking me, Would he hurt her? I nodded to tell him it would be okay. She loved to be touched.
Together, with two fingers each, with the tiniest motion of rocking between us, we held our daughter—as an infant—for the first and last time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TWO YEARS LATER
After forty minutes in the Prince’s Hall at Navy Pier, holding even such a flyweight as Gemma, Marie Caruso’s arms were about to detach at the shoulder, to snap as though attached with rubber bands. Although little, Gemma was not placid. People who mistook her for a baby and goo-gooed her got a rebuke: “Ima big girl, Gemma, please!” Fortunately for Marie, her granddaughter had obligingly slept for nearly an hour and now was graciously humming throughout the mayor’s address to the graduates. The tune sounded something like the nursery song that Gemma insisted on calling “Old McDonald’s,” drawing out the long “zzzzzs” at the end to make sure her mother and Marie understood that the moo-moo here lived under the golden arches. When Gemma tired of singing, she began to call out softly, “Why Mama there?” and then, in what verged alarmingly on a whine, “Wanna coupla cookies, Marie.” (Gemma didn’t call Marie “Grandma,” although she did call Beth “Grandma,” as she did Marie’s own mother. From listening to Sicily, Gemma called her “Marie” or “Auntie,” and Marie was vain enough to be just fine with that. She had all the perks and none of the pejoratives of grandmotherdom.)
Now, she could tell that Sicily heard Gemma’s voice, but her niece didn’t turn a hair. Except for her chin—and, of course, Emma Cassidy’s turned-up nose—Sissy’s profile that day was Marie’s sister Gia’s, down to the pore. Her posture was all Jamie. That slender back in her long-sleeved dress whites would never touch the back of the chair.
Suddenly, with an ache that felt nearly physical, Marie thought of Jamie. Jamie would have been sixty now and trying to avoid retirement. In his body at this moment, there would have been room for nothing but hope and glory. Marie thought of the day after Sicily’s track meet, when Jamie uncapped two beers and confided in her that he hoped one day for his little girl to wear the Maltese cross—but he warned Maria not to tell her sister.
Despite her family’s holy history, Marie was not especially a believer; still, she couldn’t help sending up a mawkish hope that Jamie could see not only Sicily’s strong shoulders and her sweet, healed face but also the little girl with the gray eyes and square jaw who so favored Jamie himself.
Marie began to bob back and forth in the time-honored shimmy of motherhood. Although Gemma was and always would be a small-size person, she was not as good as but better than most two-year-olds at all the stuff two-year-olds were supposed to do—running, drawing on faux-marble walls with permanent marker, screaming her ass off when she was denied sticky or sharp-pointed things. If Marie were to set her down, she would be off like a mouse out of a slingshot, even if she had to wriggle her way under the hundreds of folding chairs with the gold-draped seats to grab the back of her mother’s legs.
At last, the mayor, whose own nephew was among the candidates being inducted into the Chicago Fire Department, finished blatting on about honor and courage and proud traditions, raised both hands, and began to applaud. Gratefully, Marie shifted Gemma to Pat Cappadora, who, to the toddler’s delight, set her on his shoulders. Although no family members had been allowed to pin on the graduates’ badges for ten years, that tradition had just been reinstated. Marie began to make her way down a side aisle, along with several dozen other mothers, fathers, and wives, a few of them also wearing the uniforms of firefighters. As she did, Marie tried in vain to smooth the wrinkles Gemma had installed in her new-for-the-occasion linen jacket, which was fractionally larger than six others like it in Marie’s closet—fractionally in proportion to the fractional growth of her ass. There was no hope for that.
What the hell.
If Marie was not the proudest woman in Chicago that day, maybe someone else’s kid had cured world hunger. Photographers—although not Beth, not that day—followed her progress. Ever so slightly, Marie preened. Normally, a class of graduating firefighters was a class of graduating firefighters—hunky guys and compact women, cute and wholesome and good for one shot on a slow news day. Today, one of the graduates was Captain Jamie Coyne’s daughter, who had been the girl with no face and the subject of a much-discussed, gorgeous, disturbing exhibit at the Art Institute. Furthermore, if Marie could admit it, none of the graduates was the adopted daughter of TV legend (that meant you were old) Marie Caruso.
It wasn’t as though Marie had approved of any of it. It wasn’t as though Sicily had cared. Sicily was stubborn as a boulder, relentless as a hailstorm. “I’m doing this, Auntie,” she said. “I was always going to do this. I just didn’t know it.”
“But your face! How much are you going to push it? You’re a fool,” Marie said.
“It was my face that let me do what I should have done in the first place.”
And that was the last they said of it, for quite a long time. Marie refused to speak to Sicily, hoping it would change Sicily’s mind.
For weeks, Marie took Gemma into her arms each morning at the door—before the sitter arrived, when Sicily left for class—without saying a word. For weeks, Sicily kissed Marie’s cheek and said, “I love you,” and left for Renee Mayerling’s class at Merit University, a ninety-minute drive each way. Four hours a day, three days a week, Sicily was in classes, starting when Gemma was four months old. Most weeks she worked a good twenty hours too; she got by with what Vincent sent and, yes, with what Marie chipped in. Between work and school and running and ballet class and studying late and nursing Gemma, Sicily wore probably a size four, Marie guessed, when she had never, not at her skinniest, worn anything smaller than a six. Although Sicily was still just a kid, exhaustion pinched lines in the corners of her mouth. But you had to hand it to her. Because of her previous degree and all of her and Gemma’s medical stuff, Sicily placed out of most of the science classes and the human-body-type classes she would be required to take as a rescuer and a paramedic. At night, bouncing Gemma on one of those strong dancer’s legs, Sicily would repeat, “Attic ladder: An attic ladder is usually eight to ten feet long and can be folded to …”
“Addy laddy,” Gemma would say, when she learned to say anything.
“Drafting: The pulling of water from a source other than a pressurized fire hydrant or apparatus …”
Sicily got her BS in fire science in just three semesters. When the twelve fire-science grads came in for the ceremony along with thousands of other kids and adults wearing blue caps and gowns, they also wore their firefighter helmets, the silver tassels on top. Sicily’s was an old leather-covered helmet, scorched and battered, with a numeral 3 on the front—her father’s.
A month later, she had entered the academy. All those years of ballet and running paid off, as Sicily lugged hoses and tri
pped up three stories with an ease that made strong men cry.
Sicily would be honored today, first in her class. Not that she hadn’t had an edge, with her history—a history you wouldn’t choose if it wasn’t yours already. A lot of these people were the sons and daughters or husbands or wives of firefighters. The department tended to be generational like that, in Chicago perhaps more than anywhere. Sicily also had another mysterious edge, the kind no one questioned. The way that the academy worked, it could take years for your number to come up in a random system of approved graduates. But rookie-firefighter Coyne already had a job at Chicago Engine 88, her father’s first outfit—on the ladder, she hoped, once she’d done all her rotations. Search and rescue. And from there on up.
The first time that Marie and Sicily had talked about it, Marie said, “All I want is for you to admit it’s nuts.”
“I admit that. It would be nuts for anyone else, at least. But you know it’s what I’m supposed to do. Doing my medical illustrations paid the bills, but at the end of the day, it was kind of like a cloister, like what Aunt Christina always wished on me. I was hiding in it. Now I want to get out there. Maybe I’m sentimental. Maybe I’m interesting. Why don’t you give me the benefit of the doubt?”
“But so much? A bachelor’s?”
“Auntie, you know me. I’m aiming to be brass someday. It’s not like it was back in the day with my dad. You don’t advance just because you’re Irish and a brave lad. You have to be smart.”
“So this isn’t a flirtation. It’s a life thing.”
“Well, it’s always been a life thing. I was always this way. I just wasn’t out to myself. For good reason. Before, it was impossible. And now it’s no longer impossible. So I have to.”
“Why, Sicily? Guilt? Because of your father? Because your baby turned out healthy instead of having a ton of problems?”
“Sure,” Sicily said. “That’s absolutely part of it. Auntie, there is good guilt and there is bad guilt. It’s not only my father or Gemma. It’s the kids who died at Holy Angels and the ones who still wish they did. It’s Mrs. Cassidy and Emma. It’s that piece of trash Neal. It’s my chance to give the whole tortilla, and, no, don’t look like that! I don’t mean dying. I mean, like Aunt Christina says, maybe I was spared for a reason. I also really think it’s going to be fun. Fun and hard and active and different every day. People to goof around with and have their back. Not like drawing a good intestinal bypass.”
Second Nature: A Love Story Page 36
