Second Nature (31 page)

At last, I couldn’t ignore my body changing. That was too much to bear. I scheduled the termination.

When the appointed day arrived, 1 drove myself to UIC. Marie had a story to work on. I would call her when it was over so that she could come by taxi and drive me home in my car. When she objected, I was firm: There was no need to further alarm or involve her. I was sad—that was expected—but also relieved by the relative peace conferred by the new ability to do private things on my own.

In the parking lot, I sat for a moment in the car.

The classical station that was one of my seven settings played “Claire de Lune,” which had been one of my favorites since I was a child. As I listened, I admitted that I should have done this sooner, before the noticeable small changes in my body. The pregnancy was a pregnancy. I’d wanted to experience an annunciation. What a selfish fool I was to let the inevitable conclusion drag out week after week. When Dr. Ahrens explained the possible alternative protocol for anti-rejection drugs to me should I proceed, I’d allowed a sliver of my rational mind to hope. Dr. Ahrens had also, and firmly, made sure I understood that it was experimental, a last resort with no guarantees, and that if it failed to protect me from rejection, I might have to have a late-term abortion that would require a court order. All the days and nights of considering and reconsidering pointed me toward this inevitable conclusion. I needed to arrange what was incontrovertibly—to me at least, despite everything I knew about viability—a death. I could still have an abortion legally in Illinois and I would be able to for nearly two more months. Now the doctor’s time was booked and the room reserved yet again. I had to choose life, as all those cruel billboards proclaimed. I had to choose my life.

As I clipped my keys inside my purse, I saw that it had begun to snow. I’d worn what the physician, a Dr. Thorpe, had suggested, loose and comfortable clothing and flat shoes. As I hurried, the wind plucked at my thin wool coat and forced my hair across my face like a veil. I had waited too long. The anguish I now felt was only what I deserved.

I didn’t notice the car that came peeling around the corner into the circle at the revolving door. In the front seat, an elderly woman was strapped, slumped forward, listless and agape. I later learned that she’d had a stroke at her great-granddaughter’s fourth birthday party, and, because the family lived just five blocks from the hospital, her son had decided to drive her to the emergency room himself. He had, however, missed the ER entrance, half a block behind him, the way he had come.

All he saw was a hospital with a door and he made for it, one hand on his dear mother’s shoulder.

I probably hadn’t needed to leap quite so athletically as I did. At the last millisecond, I sprang away from the nose of the old car aimed at my rear end. But I, along with the old lady (who did recover), ended up in the ER. My butt was unscathed, but I hit my head on the patient-loading sign and went sprawling on one side, my cheek scraped, my knee bloodied, and a bump that would swell to the size of a tennis ball on the back of my head. I was never unconscious, but I was dazed.

The contrite driver, Kobena, who had moved to Chicago the year before from Ghana, not only kept poking his head around my curtain to apologize ever more earnestly but came to see me the next day, to assure himself that “God was watching.”

When I fully came around, a resident was leaning over me, asking the usual questions:
Are you taking any medication, Mrs. Coyne; do you know what day it is; are you here by yourself; could you be pregnant?
All of my answers were true, but they were also enough to prompt the resident to hotfoot it for his attending. A nurse quickly put an IV in my hand and started a drip; I held an ice pack on my head while I waited for a doctor to whom I could quietly explain why I was at the hospital that day. Then a nurse came back with a portable ultrasound machine, that zippy kind that fits right inside the vagina, and before I could stop her she said, “Let’s just quickly have a look-see and make sure everything’s copacetic here.”

The solar system inside me resolved into a clear picture after a few little nudges. And then I saw the sole of a foot. It was a perfect, actual human foot, with a high arch, and as I watched, it poised and launched itself through space like a swimmer off the blocks.

The attending leaned in and said, “Don’t worry, Mrs. Coyne. The baby’s fine and active and you’re going to have a headache the size of the Hancock Center tonight. I, uh, pulled up your chart? And, given everything, you might want to consider letting us admit you overnight to be on the safe side.”

And that was all she wrote. I couldn’t turn my back on someone who was swimming that hard for the shore.

I was asleep, at around two in the afternoon, when Hollis arrived in my room.

“You are just full of surprises, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t intend this.”

“But evidently your pal in there did,” she said. She sat down in my bedside chair and told me that, before she and her husband were wed, she became pregnant with their first child, unplanned, and she had called her mother in Louisiana to ask how to know if it was the right time. Hollis’s mother had said that the only time a woman could be sure if it was the right time to have a baby was when she knew for sure that she was too old to have one.

“And so?” I said.

“One day at a time, Sicily.”

That was how each of us lived. We never stopped long enough to completely consider the possible alpha and omega of all our choices. In my situation, I had to. From that day on, each day was a page.

When Marie arrived for a fleeting visit before hurrying back to the station for the news, I told her, “I thought you’d be offended to be a grandma so young, Auntie. But I got stuck in traffic.”

“ ’Tain’t funny, McGee,” she said. “There is still time.”

“I don’t feel I should.”

“Do you think you’re the only person who’s ever had to do this?”

“No.”

“You’re not. I wasn’t the only person either. I was three months’ pregnant before I knew I was pregnant. And the guy said he would marry me.”

“Then you didn’t want children.”

“Oh, yes, I did. I even wanted the guy, at least at the time.”

“Why then, Auntie?”

“Well, his wife wanted him too. She wasn’t with him when he was working in the London bureau, where I was for two months. He was going to wait for me back in New York. He sent me a letter instead.”

“Couldn’t you have raised the baby yourself?”

“Maybe if I’d stayed in Europe, bought a wedding ring in a pawnshop. Not here. Not with my parents. Not in my world then. Not broke and starting out and twenty-four years old.”

“I’m not broke.”

“You’re not rich,” my aunt said, standing up and deftly looping her scarf around her neck. “I’ve been careful with the money your parents left you. I’ve been careful with my own money. But have a sick child who won’t get better?” She snapped her fingers. “That’s gone, Sicily. You’ll knock the cap off your insurance like that. I can’t raise a child. I’m too old. What if something happens to you?”

I’d expected Marie to be worried. I hadn’t expected her to jump down my throat.

“I’d … have a guardian.”

“Do you know how the world treats disabled children whose parents die?”

“Yes. I was one.”

“Where are your brothers and sisters, Sicily? Who’ll raise this child? One of your cousins on Jamie’s side? Don’t count on it. No one ever loved her kid more than I love you. But it was no picnic.” Marie kissed my eyes and turned to leave. “I have to get to work. Think this over. Hard.”

She left then. I made handles of the parts of the sheet I could gather up—every hospital bed I’ve ever been in is short-sheeted, like a cruel camp joke—and tried to hold on. I had not considered a handicapped adult, a grown person who was still a child. A good foot didn’t guarantee a functioning brain.

One of the nurses brought me a phone. “There’s a call for you, Mrs. Coyne.”

“It’s Miss Coyne,” I told her. The call was from Marie.

“Sissy, I’m sorry. What I said when I left was just plain cruel. This pregnancy might end up being your kid. But you are
my
kid. When you’re terrified for your kid, it can make you say things that seem cruel. I did want you to end this, here and now. You’d be safer. But if you won’t, I will love your child more than anything on earth, except for how much I love you. We’ll get through this together. On the way to work, I got desperate and called Christina. My sister now has the whole convent, the whole school, the whole order, and several very well-placed contemplative nuns praying twenty-four-seven. I know how you feel about God. But let’s say, for shorthand, it’s in God’s hands now.”

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
.