Second Nature (45 page)

“Something is tearing,” I told my aunt. “This isn’t how they’re supposed to feel. I don’t feel waves. Something is tearing me apart.”

“It’s going very fast,” Dr. Setnes said. “But it’s not going so fast that we don’t have time to think and settle down. And nothing is tearing, Sicily. Do you feel sharp pains in a band across the lower half of your belly, below your navel, on both sides?”

“Yes!” I roared in her face, as though something was about to pop out of my chest and rip off Dr. Setnes’s glasses, along with her face. “When is the break?”

“Usually there are intervals of up to two minutes. Do you feel a lessening of the pain between those sharp pains?”

“No!”

“I’m here, Sicily,” said Eliza. “I’m right beside you. You’re going to have a beautiful baby. My little Charley’s baby cousin. And everything will be just fine.”

“Hi, Eliza!” I screamed.

“Do you feel as though you need to go to the toilet?” Dr. Setnes said.

“I have no idea.” The nurses laid warm blankets across my thighs as I began to shiver.

“Let’s have a mirror,” said Dr. Setnes, as Eliza and the labor nurses helped position my stockinged feet. What I saw looked nothing like my dainty nether parts. It was blue and engorged and stippled with mess. I decided at that moment I would tell Kit and all the friends I would have one day to send their husbands out of town during the birth.

“Let’s not have the mirror,” I said, and pain like hot tongs, mindless but precisely aimed, hauled down on my belly.

“No pushing yet,” said Dr. Setnes, as though studying a particularly vexing bit of stitchery. “We just want a little more time here.” I saw her glance behind her at the big, bright warming bed in the corner, where Dr. Cook and another man—a huge dark-skinned man I would come to know well—waited with the open, soft-kneed, easy stance of tennis players.

The tongs seemed to open, but only for an instant, and then clench harder at me, lower in my belly. Who the hell thought this shit up? Pain was no stranger to me, but this pain was something even I had never experienced—relentless, destructive, personal. There was nowhere to escape. My aunt said, “Try to put yourself out in front of it mentally, Sicily. Try to concentrate on what’s happening. Think about progress and that the worst of this is behind you. You’re making progress.”

“You never did this!”

“I wanted to,” Marie said.

I was afraid that if I clenched my teeth harder, I’d break one. “Can’t I have something for pain?” I asked. They offered me Tylenol. If I could have gathered enough breath to laugh, I would have.

Eliza told me, “Try to think about the best moment of your life.”

“The best moment of my life since about age ten is what got me here,” I told Eliza. Still, I pictured that beach. There was a little girl with me, young but tall and skinny. She had done her own hair, with about twenty different barrettes and elastic bands. She looked up at me, with my father’s cloudy eyes.

“Then try to concentrate on one thing. Think about me and your aunt and everyone who loves you holding you; plenty of people have gone down this road before and, as scary as it will feel, it is safe. Just hold on to us. Hold on as hard as you can, and before you know it, you will be in a park with a carriage and your daughter and I’ll be there with Charley.”

So I gave up my body and held on and howled and tears sprang from my eyes, and Eliza was right. There was no going back up that path, but in an amazingly short time, my body gathered itself and, with such propulsive relief as I had not believed possible, I burst her into the world. She was yelling, but so small she was like the rough sketch of a human being.

“Not much there,” said Dr. Cook, “but what there is is doing just what it should and looking good.”

Cook had his obligations, of course. He who would later describe my child’s chances for a normal life like the warnings for a medication to treat migraines, which could result in shingles, acne, bronchitis, seizures, arrhythmia (occasionally serious), uncontrolled bleeding, liver failure, gastrointestinal distress, and death. Since everything else had already happened, it was impossible that these things also could happen, so I exercised Dr. Ahrens’s prescription for some everyday denial. I decided she would be fine. She weighed three pounds precisely and she breathed on her own. Her Apgar scores were seven and eight. Not as good as, but better than most kids, even as little as she was.

“Every delivery is a special delivery at UIC,” I said. “Right?”

“This one is,” said Dr. Cook.

“Every day after this day will be a good day for her,” Hollis said. She had materialized from the ventilation system like a genie. “Every day you will cross one catastrophe off the list. She will go from strength to strength.”

“I expect that,” I said. “I fully expect that.” I did fully expect that.

For a moment, just before they whisked her to a receiving bed under warming lights as if she were the main course at a buffet, they let me hold her. She fit in my palm. I saw only that her head was the size of a tangerine, her eyes the color of blueberries, inquisitive and unblinking. I wished Vincent had experienced that moment. Whatever I had construed as an understanding of love or lust or drink, drug, vanity, victory, courage, cowardice—it all disappeared under a great drift of immaculate peace. How had I ever considered ending her? My daughter. Shuddering and covered in glistening slime and dark blood, she was the solstice of my life. She was a little girl who had my father’s face. Jamie Coyne’s jaw, square as a sugar cube. Maybe she was not mine. I would love her long enough to let her go someday.

But I would always be hers.

Alone for hours, while the NICU poked and assessed her, I gave strong thought to my child’s name.

I had always known what it would be, but now that she was here, corporeal, with a presence, I had to give her the chance to claim another name. For half an hour, I called her Natasha, Nat, Natty, Tasha. For an hour I called her Maria—Mimi and Mia for short. I thought of calling her Jamie, short for nothing. I actually flirted with the idea of Elizabeth, but Beth already had enough tributes to her walking around. The primary value of that name was that it would have made Vincent feel guilty.

Abruptly, I sat up and called his number. No one answered from Russia with love or even from La Jolla with silicone. The machine picked up. I hung up. I called back. He answered then: “Huh … hello.” I hate it when people answer the phone as though they’re drugged. Then again, maybe he was. Why not just sit up and act like a person and realize that people don’t call you at dawn to talk about good avocado recipes.

“This is Sicily Coyne,” I said and thought, I will say,
The results of our misconception arrived this morning
. Instead, I said, “Vincent, I need …”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Our baby was born this morning—your daughter.”

“It’s way too soon! It’s, like, not even thirty-two weeks.”

Absurdly, my heart turned at his calculation of the weeks. I began to cry, not sobs but soft, salty, unceasing sheets across my cheeks and down onto my neck that soothed me.

“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.