Second Nature: A Love Story Read online

  “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

  “Oh, 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 mos
t 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.”

  “What would you tell me to do if I were your sister?”

  “I’m telling you what I’d tell my sister.” The two of us finished our meal in as much of a thoughtful silence as Kit and I had ever spent together. Kit made one lame joke about spending a hundred and fifty bucks on a meal that wouldn’t provide enough leftovers for lunch the next day. I just sat there, sort of drifting, as though I clung to a pendulum that swung equal distances over two substantial chasms. The pendulum was the only safe place. I could swing forever. If I didn’t choose now, with the healing ballast of youth on my side, would I ever choose? If I could have asked my mother, she would have tried to forbid me. If I could have asked my father, he would have told me to measure the risks, the way you do when you assess a fire or an accident scene. Dad considered foolish risks the worst kind of disrespect for life. He considered life without risk undeserving of respect.

  How many times had I begun to dial the digits of Eliza’s cell-phone number before I did? How many times had I tried to pray, to look for signs like a tracker? How many stacks of medical literature had I read in three straight days at the UIC Medical School library? This would have to be the first decision I made entirely alone (with the consent of about three dozen doctors). So it must have seemed like an impulsive plea instead of a considered pleading I made that day to Eliza at Lotta Latte. It was, however, good practice at convincing people of things they were conditioned not to believe. That would be a skill I would need for things I never imagined sooner than even I would have believed.

  I offered Eliza a latte, a tea, or a sandwich. She accepted ice water. She certainly knew what I was going to say. But she couldn’t stop her eyes from saucering up (I would learn that her compendium of eye-language symbols rivaled my own) when I told her, “Eliza, I’ve changed my mind. I do want a face transplant.”

  Calmly, as though I’d suggested I might want contact lenses, Eliza said, “This is not an unexpected visit. This is a reaction to your grief. Slow down. The clinic is not going anywhere.” I could have left then, to convince everyone that I could act normal, to pretend to think over what I’d already considered and reconsidered. Instead, I presented my first argument.

  “There’s no reason it shouldn’t be a reaction to the grief. I considered it when you raised the subject, but I had no need for it. Now I feel I have to make changes in my life. It would make it physically easier too. I do have challenges. I can live with them, but it’s very, very demanding.”

  Eliza said, “That’s true for every candidate. And still, everything you said—about your reservations, about the risks and the immunosuppressant drugs—was true. Those things still matter. You need to give this time, maybe months, to think it over.”

  “You didn’t say that last Christmas. You didn’t want me to think about it for a year. Am I put on a waiting list? How does that work? Is it patient by patient? Is there a pool of donors? Is there one for me?”

  Eliza glanced around her as though she feared being overheard. “Yes,” she said. “There may be.… Uh, the guardian has to make a choice for the recipient.”

  “Then I would be that recipient.”

  “I can’t guarantee that, Sicily! I can’t guarantee anything! I’m not in charge of any of this.”

  I was determined. I was scared—who would not have been scared?—but didn’t want the traditional wagonload of ifs and buts that always attend a major life transition, especially one that carries a significant risk.

  “You’ve thought about children,” Eliza continued. “You would most likely have to adopt your children or store your eggs in advance, although there is a time element. The effects of the drugs on a pregnancy aren’t really known.…”

  “That’s fine,” I said. For me, having children had never felt urgent, not as it had for Eliza, who’d become a mother at the age of twenty-two. I’d had other things on my mind at that age. “But I was adopted and so were you, even though it wasn’t when we were babies.”

  “Being adopted makes you long for the genetic connection, maybe even more so if you were not a baby when you were adopted and you remember your mother.” Why the hell hadn’t Eliza become a psychiatrist? I suggested we cross the street together and that she at least give me a packet of forms to fill out and an informational sheet, just as she had wanted to do last December. Then I would take the time that seemed necessary to consider the decision. There would have to be several psychological evaluations in any case. If I was trying to hide behind a new face for pathological reasons, surely somebody would be able to tell. As we walked, I continued my reasoned arguments, in a low, not-hysterical voice. Finding out about the way that Joey betrayed me, even though he had not meant to do that, made me consider my own life more, in terms of what I could do.

  I said, “I’m not sure, at my age, that I’ve done everything I want to do. Personally. Maybe even professionally.”

  “You like your job.”

  “I do, but I might want more.”

  “Your face as it is now doesn’t bar you from other professions.”

  “I was thinking of fashion modeling,” I said. “No, I’m serious. I would have a wider circle of friends. That’s a support system, not only more dates. I would have a layer removed between me and the world.” I realized what I’d just said. “You know what I mean.”

  Eliza nodded.

  “The impulse is a strong one.”

  Eventually we got to the clinic, where I met Polly Guthrie, who was the coordinating psycho
logist on the face-transplant team. I wondered why there was a team and was surprised to learn that, at UIC, under Dr. Hollis Grigsby, there was the transplantation of a full or partial face nearly every week; hands and legs and feet from cadaver donors were transplanted more often that that. “It’s not common,” Polly Guthrie said. “It’s not rare either, the way it was ten years ago.” Having made an appointment with Polly for my first interview—and after basically swearing on a stack that I really understood there were no promises—I asked for the photographic record of the surgery so that I could study it in depth.

  “There are individual before-and-after photos of two or three people,” Eliza said. “We can show them to you, but you can’t take them out of the clinic.”

  “I mean of the whole process.”

  “There are line drawings that show a sort of general set of images of the process, like what you do in your work,” Eliza said. “Like that series in your binder.”

  “Yes, but I don’t mean drawings that take out all the gore, which is what I do. I want to see the whole thing, with the mess, the musculature in color. I’m talking about the photos of the surgery.”

  “The surgeons take those only for their own use during the procedure,” Eliza said. “They photograph every step so that they’re absolutely certain to place and reattach—”

  “There’s no photographic record?”

  “Patient privacy issues,” Eliza said. “The face is a very intimate part of the body. Perhaps the most intimate.”

  “So is the vagina. But you have pictures of babies being delivered.”

  “It’s not possible, Sicily.”

  But that made no sense. It was possible.

  “What if a candidate waived the privacy provision to make a photographic record, as … well, as for science and art? So people understood more about the procedure? Isn’t there still a sort of Phantom of the Opera thing about this?”

  “There is,” Eliza said. “But people are sensitive to issues about their faces. It’s only recently that there have been documentary films of cosmetic procedures, Sicily.”