Second Nature (46 page)

It was different 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

A
fter 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 tripped 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.”

“You don’t have to atone, Sicily. That’s bullshit.”

“Oh, but I do,” Sicily said. “If you start a fire, you’re responsible for whatever it burns.”

“You never started a fire, Sicily,” Marie said. Sicily just pressed her lips together and smiled at Marie. That was something Sicily said all the time, and Marie knew that her niece believed it. But she was still not sure exactly what Sicily meant.

The myth was that Sicily would be at real hazard probably half a dozen times in thirty years—far less than the danger she was in every day when she started her car and nosed it out onto Ohio Street. But in fact she would be in danger more often, because of how she was. It had been her nature to take chances: once with the transplant, and again with the evidence that was right here in Marie’s arms. Since Sicily had become a parent, though, it was clear to Marie that she would not take a path that involved truly insane jeopardy. Marie would have been furious, personally insulted, if Sicily had done any of this at the expense of Gemma, after going through what she had to have the baby. But Sicily was a smart mom, just adoring enough, just strict enough. Gemma always came first for Sicily, though she didn’t let her know it. She allowed Gemma to sleep in bed with her but ignored her tantrums. She let her take Popsicles into the living room but never asked if she “wanted” broccoli. Gemma grew up a little beauty, who could be as ferociously sharp as the meaning of her name and then clamber up on you like a cub, tucking her tiny arms under yours to get closer. Just as Sicily had refused to leave the newborn intensive care for one single hour of Gemma’s thirty-one nights (Marie could not escape a visceral image of Gia at Sicily’s bedside), Sicily never left her child behind now. For an evening, yes. For a whole night, never. When Sicily and Beth traveled to do lectures or radio interviews about the exhibit or the magazine piece, Gemma came along. At two years old and change, Marie’s grandchild had been in more cities than Marie had visited in her first ten years out of college.

Marie took her place on the dais and gazed out at the other family members. Just as at Jamie’s funeral, so many of the primary players were here today: Only Martin Coyne, Jamie’s father, had died—at the age of ninety-one, falling from a ladder. But there was his mother, Patricia, seemingly aged not a single instant in sixteen years, and his brothers with their wives, and all the Cappadoras except the sister who sang opera—and one other notable exception. There were Renee and Moory and Schmitty and a few others from Jamie’s old crew.

Fire Chief Linden Doyle took the microphone from the podium and said, “Now, families and friends, let’s meet the graduates. Will the four students who have achieved high honors step forward?” Sicily stood, along with three men. “Thank you. Congratulations and welcome to the fraternity of your brothers and sisters, first in your class, Firefighter Sicily Marie Coyne,” said Chief Doyle.

Marie took the badge from his hand and pinned it to Sicily’s lapel, where it shined dully, Marie thought—compared with Sicily’s eyes.

And so again, Hollis Grigsby thought, as she watched Marie pin on the badge, this young woman who did things her own way—despite the tenuous nature of the bonds that had sometimes kept her tethered to life, or more likely because of them—had done one more. Hollis had not been surprised when she received the invitation to Sicily’s graduation and could think of no valid reason why Sicily should not do this work.

Routine use of SM965,900 had allowed Hollis’s own work to reach down lower into the age ranks for appropriate candidates for face transplants among young women, and her colleagues around the United States and in Germany had been able to do the same. She knew of three young women who now were expecting babies, although, unlike Sicily, all of them had waited two years after their transplant surgeries to attempt pregnancy.