Second Nature (11 page)

“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 make 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.

“They always say that at a firefighter’s funeral, the only room is standing room, and the only standing room is outside and around the corner. And that was the way it was for Jamie. I was in the honor guard, and I had to jog almost a mile from where I parked my car,” Renee said. “I probably haven’t met the bravest person I’ll ever meet yet. But I think of bravery as being calm in the worst possible situation. And that’s how Cap was.”

“Do you think that was the death he would have chosen?”

“Sicily, I don’t know anybody who wanted to live more than Jamie did.”

“I mean, if he knew he had to die,” I said.

“That’s hard, Sicily. I never thought of it that way. But I guess, if I had to just say one thing, it would be yes. That is the death every firefighter would choose if he wasn’t going to get to be old and die in his sleep. He knew you were alive. So, yes, I think he would almost have considered his life in exchange for your life.”

With a new decal on her own helmet—
Captain James Coyne, First
In, Last Out
—Renee had the honor of carrying my father’s helmet at the head of the honor guard. She was followed by Moory and Schmitty and Tom as well as one of my father’s brothers and two of his cousins, who were also firefighters, carrying his casket through a double row of officers from all around the city—and the world, as it turned out. Some firefighters had come all the way from Boston and New York and even from Chester, England, the walled city in Cheshire. They would finally lay his casket on the bed of Chicago Engine 88, Dad’s first company, which had requested the privilege of carrying him to Holy Name Cathedral, under an arch of two ladder trucks with an American flag strung between them.

“My grandmother Coyne has that picture in a frame,” I told Renee. “It bothers me to see it. But I know it’s beautiful. And think it’s comforting to her.”

“It was on the front page of the
New York Times
,” Renee said. “Lots of other papers too. Mrs. Cappadora took it. Vincent’s mother. Vincent was a crazy guy when I was in high school, but now he’s pretty successful, I guess. He makes …”

“Movies,” I said.

“Yes. Well, sure. Your grandparents know that family. Of course you would know.”

“I still have my dad’s helmet,” I told Renee.

The eye guards are just wavering shards of plastic, but I recognize it as the one he had when I was a kid. Every firefighter tricks out his helmet. Most of them put a big rubber band made from an inner tube around the circumference of the helmet on the outside, and Dad had all his little tools in there, but they looked as though he’d used a blowtorch on them. He had golf tees and nails stuck in there for picking locks, and his orange Garrity flashlight was secured and Velcro-ed to point forward. They all used a Garrity, because it was cheap and worked even if it melted. They still do. His decals had peeled back in the fire; there was a numeral one with an asterisk (because his was the number-one ass to kiss), and the Chester sticker they all loved:
Chester—A Place to Live and Work
, under which my father had scrawled in permanent marker,
If You Can’t Afford Western Springs
. Inside, he had glued a picture of my mom and me sitting on the porch. After he died, someone stuck on a bronze star, the kind the military gives soldiers for meritorious service. “I’ve never changed the battery in Dad’s Garrity flashlight. Sometimes I flick it on for a moment. All these years later, it still works.”

“Sicily,” Renee said, “I think I know what you’re trying to get at. It was a horrible fire. But saving more than half of those kids was … It kind of verges on miraculous that he—”

“And you.”

“That we could do that in so little time.” Renee shrugged. “As for what he would have wanted, he would have wanted to go on fighting fires for ten more years and be part of the department for ten after that. He wasn’t a guy to put in his twenty and then buy his own sports bar. I don’t know what to tell you. We’ll never know all the answers.”

“It’s okay. I’m glad we got to talk.”

Renee kissed me on the top of the head before she left. Her number had come up in Chicago and she now was a captain herself, one of the youngest in the city. She also taught fire science at Merit University. She was married to another firefighter and they had two little girls.

“What are their names?” I asked.

“Mary Katherine, for my mother,” she said. “And Elizabeth James, for my sister Elizabeth and, well, your dad.”

“That’s very sweet.”

Renee ruffled my hair again and took off for her car. She had a class to teach in an hour, and it was kind of a haul out to the northwest suburbs.

I stayed. I unfolded the tiny slip of paper I had extracted, just that morning, from the corner of the frame that held my mother’s photo. It wasn’t the first time I’d picked it up. But it was the most important time.

“This is Eliza. Please leave a message. I’ll get back to you right away,” said her voice mail.

She did too. I was on my second cup of Mexican chocolate mocha with skim and extra foam when Eliza walked in the door.

CHAPTER FIVE

“
O
h, Sicily,” Eliza said. “I’m so sorry.” This was evidently going to be a theme.

“Well, thank you. I’m sorry too. It’s very sad and it turns your whole life upside down. But, Eliza, do you even know? I mean, the part about Joe and me?” Everyone who didn’t live in a cave knew about the arson.

“People like to talk.” They did indeed. One would not imagine that there are cards that say, essentially,
It Sucks That You Got Dumped Under Really Unsavory Circumstances
, but there are, and I’d received about ten of them. Two weeks before, there had come a letter from Lachele LaVoy, telling me that she was very sad about my loss (it was only
my
loss) but reminding me that Joseph had a life to live and there was no point in “spreading rumors.” I wanted to go looking for Mrs. LaVoy with a pool cue, but Marie said to leave her alone, to imagine the shame she must feel. “Joseph” had moved to Phoenix, where he was living with relatives, currently selling cars, and considering entering the priesthood. I tore that letter into as many pieces as human fingers could, but getting it had also started me on a circuit of thought I had traveled night and day since then.

Joey and I were assuredly over.

A single door had closed on my past and my future, transforming both of them from what I’d understood them to be.

And now what? I could go on drawing illustrations for injuries and surgeries and animated presentations of colonoscopies, living with my aunt, my life quieting as hers quieted. Perhaps I would teach at UIC. Perhaps I would meet another man, perhaps a substantially older man who was part of the medical world I lived in. But he would never know me as Joe had. He would never be able even to picture the woman I might have been. There might never be a man. Who gets to lose not one but two lives in twenty-five years? Marie said I had “moxie,” a word I loathed because it made me sound like a cartoon character. I did not have sufficient “moxie,” however, to put yet another Sicily together. No matter how many different ways she construed her age, my aunt would soon be pushing sixty. She’d done her time. I could move away, to a place where no one had ever heard of the Holy Angels fire, and just start over as a garden-variety freak. I could move to North Carolina and (not) enjoy the sun. I could move to Alaska, where men truly were desperate, and (not) enjoy the cold.

Or I could stand where I was and, for the first time in my life, ask for extraordinary help. I could take a huge risk, in the hope of a huge gain. Other people, years ago, had risked more for less. I could take Eliza Cappadora up on her offer and change my orientation to the world and thus my location within it. After fanning out twice, I could give myself a third at bat.

Kit was shocked when I asked her to have dinner with me at The House, literally a mansion and Chicago’s premiere slow-food restaurant—where a meal consisted of seven courses of tiny exquisite edibles that probably added up to about seven hundred total calories. Usually, because her salary was bigger and because her boyfriends most often treated when they went on dates, at least during the early months, Kit bought our dinners out. After we’d been served a single scallop with minced pine nuts and a wasabi mayonnaise on a plate so huge that it could have held a flounder, I told Kit, “I have to ask you a big thing.”

“Okay.”

“I never told you about it.”

“Not okay.”

“Things got out of control too fast with Joey, and it just didn’t seem to matter—then.” I ate my scallop the way people eat oyster shooters, which was the only way that I could. The server didn’t sneer, but I saw her lip twitch. “I am thinking of having a face transplant.”

“You are,” Kit said. “Well, I don’t want you to risk your life. And I don’t want you to have another surgery.” She paused. “And, also, you have to think of my needs. People admire me for having a disabled best friend. It makes them think I’m a serious person.”

“That was one of the big factors. Working on the website for a makeup company doesn’t give you huge cred as a serious person, Kitty.”

“I’m glad you care.” The second server appeared (apparently one of the reasons for the cost of this food was the legion of approximately one hundred working staff in tuxedos).

“I have to die someday, and I’m not going to start … smoking or mainlining. And every surgery is a risk, although, yes, this is more of one. I could end up looking worse than I do now.”

Kit said, “Really?”

I nodded.
How … delicate of her
, I thought.
Sheesh
.

“But no one ever has; most of them come out well. They’ve gotten better every year.”

“Then,” Kit said, as we received a radish floret inlaid with some kind of sweet butter, on a bed—one leaf—of radicchio, which the server admitted was sort of a “food pun,” Kit laid down her fork. “Sissy, I think you should do it.”

I was not often dumbfounded. But I’d expected a vigorous argument, even a tantrum. “You’re blasé!”

“Marie told me when she got back from London. She wasn’t, like, telling me to push for it. But she wanted me to know if you ever brought it up. Just to have the information. She didn’t know how to feel about it, except she kept saying that heart patients used to live ten years, now they live thirty.”

“She didn’t act outraged over the idea.”

“It’s a toss-up,” Kit said. “We knew you when. No one who knew you before wouldn’t want you to be like … that again. But no one would ever want you to risk your life to be like that again.”