To my best friend, Kit Mulroy, and me, my parents’ displays were humiliating. They’d been married since they were twenty-three and he still called her “my bride.” My mother was at the hospital that night, alone—with her sister and her parents and my friends’ parents, yes, but entirely alone.
My father died where he stood, from his injuries. He would have been able to brace for it. He would still have been breathing air from his mask. When he put it on, I knew, he had twelve minutes, and the whole thing lasted no longer than six. When the hoses fought it all down—it couldn’t have taken long, less than a minute?—leaving the chapel a thick, charred hulk, its medieval walls gruffly upstanding, the water along the roofline already slushing to a filthy glaze, I was still kneeling in the snow. It went that quickly. From behind me, I felt the urgent, gentle hands of the medics helping me onto a rolling stretcher. Everywhere, by then, were paramedics, from towns all over, their vans filling the circle and lunging up over the high curbs onto the lawn, rushing to the kids around me. Some kids the medics just knelt to touch and then quickly, softly, laid a blanket over them, as though tucking them in, and walked past. Of course I knew why. Other kids they grabbed up, starting chest compressions and shoving oxygen masks on, yelling like athletes breaking the tape when they got a breath. It took so long for me to get out of there, because my cart’s wheels got stuck in the snow. Renee tried to stand in front of me, but I saw guys from my father’s crew bringing him out—in their arms, not on a bed. Dad still held Danny Furtosa in his arms. Danny’s face was pushed tight against my dad’s chest. In the end, Dad was old-fashioned South Side Irish, a certain kind of guy.
Even if he could have ducked and run to me, he wouldn’t have wanted a little kid to die alone.
CHAPTER TWO
TWELVE YEARS LATER
W
hat if I hadn’t picked up the phone the night that Eliza Cappadora called?
I almost didn’t.
It was the end of a long day—the longest day of what was, for me, the longest week of the year. I usually endured the anniversary of the fire by checking out—in a diagonal sprawl across my large and demulcent bed, sleeping fifteen hours at a stretch in the embrace of an indecent number of pillows. But this year I had to sock away money, money for a house, money for a week on Cape Cod. So I needed to work. Luckily, even around the holidays, there was plenty of work for a medical illustrator: doctors putting finishing touches on the papers they would deliver at conferences in the new year, lawyers preparing for personal-injury cases they would try when they could get enough people in town to seat a jury. And yet interacting even with clients I knew well enough to call friends was like wearing a cardigan made from fishhooks.
By the time I put my keys into the seventeen or so locks Aunt Marie insisted we have—despite the fact that Angel and Frank, the doormen, had the combined weight and heft of a bulldozer—my spine was so stress-pressed that I must have shrunk two inches in height. No sooner did I get inside and collapse gratefully against the door for the first long breath I’d taken that day than my cell phone began to vibrate against my abdomen. I’d stashed it in the front pack I wore when I needed my hands free and had turned the ringer off for the ballet class I took on Tuesdays and Fridays.
No
, I thought.
No more people
.
Days like today underscored what I already believed—that if humanity were a divine work of art, it would still be a work in progress.
I stepped around a dozen piles of clean clothes that I’d shucked and left arrayed around my living room in heaps, like cut-loose marionettes, then took out the phone and glanced at the message list. Four calls were from my aunt, who was leaving in the morning for England. All of them would say the same thing:
Are you sure you’re going to be okay?
Four more calls were from a number I didn’t know, and I was in no mood to blow off a solicitor. So I wrapped myself in my biggest cashmere blanket and slid back the heavy glass doors to my balcony. It was cold, well below freezing. The wind this far up bellowed off the lake. But I loved looking at other people’s lives as defined by their balconies. In summer, some people brought out barbecue grills and kegs, as though these eight-by-four concrete ledges were backyards. Some grew climbing roses and tomatoes in thick tubs. Tonight, the penthouse three floors above me had three lighted Christmas trees—pulsing madly, white, silver, and gold, to syncopated rhythm. Diagonally and a floor down, Santa’s sleigh sailed out from a space that wouldn’t have accommodated even two tiny reindeer, unless they really were the size of Jack Russell terriers.
And there it was! What I’d been anticipating for days.
This one person—directly across and two floors below—never let me down.
At Christmas, whoever lived there always spelled out a greeting across her porch rail—and always, always always, got it wrong. One year, it was
MARRY XMAS
. One year the lights read
NOLE, NOLE
. This year—perhaps the best ever—
PEECE
! I wanted to call my best friend, Kit, but she’d gone with her family to their cabin in Vermont for Christmas.
But even the annual misspelling bee didn’t dispel my gloom.
A few moments later, I was driven inside. I wanted to be out there, where the cold wind could give my thoughts a hard sweeping, but I couldn’t tolerate cold. The best skin grafted onto your face still isn’t facial skin. And no matter how well it’s done, it’s scarred, so it gets tight and dry quicker than normal skin. Torquing up my humidifier, I climbed onto my bed. Then I noticed my phone spinning around on my dresser like a live green beetle. I hated it (I still hate it) when people called back more than once in the space of an hour. If you don’t answer, do they think they can goad you into it? Maybe it was my aunt, calling from some Christmas party at a condo in the clouds where there was a phone in every one of the five bathrooms.
“For Pete’s sake, I’m fine!” I said. But the voice was young. Not Marie’s.
“Sicily? Is this Sicily Coyne?”
“Yes?”
“Hi, Sicily. This is Eliza Cappadora.” I let a beat of silence pass. Was I supposed to know her? The name was familiar, tied to something. But what?
The tentative, slightly lilting voice began again. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m here. I’m so sorry. I thought you were my aunt … not that I always sound that hostile toward my aunt, but she’s leaving for London tomorrow and she worries about me like I’m six years old.”
“I watch your aunt on TV all the time.”
“Well, this is the royal baby thing. Aunt Marie likes socially irrelevant news.”
Eliza continued, “We met last summer. At the police against firefighters softball game in Hilldale? My husband was playing.”
“Your husband is a firefighter?”
“No, my mother is the police chief in Parkside. My husband works at his family’s restaurant. But my mom isn’t the softball type.…”
“Oh, sure, no worries. Just, Eliza, how do you know this number? I don’t mind, but—”
“Dr. Sumner gave it to me. David Sumner? Maybe he shouldn’t have.”
“Oh, David? It’s okay,” I said. “If it’s okay with David, you must be all right.”
David Sumner was one of my burn-surgeon brigade, extraordinary for many reasons, not the least of which was that he was a burn survivor too, his chest and upper-arm skin rippled by a pot of boiling jam he pulled down on himself when he was three. David Sumner had worked with me (well,
on
me) during my early trauma period. How long since I had visited him? Months? A year? There was no excuse. I was at the University of Illinois Chicago Circle campus several times a month. I hadn’t been a patient for seven or eight years, but UIC was still my alma mater—in every sense. I’d graduated from there, the hospital was my greatest source of referrals for work, and it also was the place where I’d had all twenty-five of my reconstructive surgeries. Intuition would presume that a person would hate the sight of the place on earth where she’d endured the purest physical torment. But I felt for UIC the affection someone feels for a strict parent: The surgeons had fought to make my face at least work like a face—with, for example, a mouth that closed nearly all the way—even if it didn’t look like a face.
“How is he?” I asked.
“He’s well. But that is not why I’m calling. We actually first met a long time ago: I was with my mother at your father’s funeral.”
“Really,” I said.
Where was this going?
“It was around this time of year?” Eliza said.
I hated to have to say it. “Yes, it was. In fact, the fire was twelve years ago today.”
“Give up!” Eliza said, and then … she began to laugh. To laugh! My first reaction was shock and dismay. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, I get stupid when I’m tense, and I’m just an idiot!” Eliza said, but she couldn’t stop laughing. And then I began to laugh too, for no good reason except that Eliza’s laugh was as irresistible as a child’s. Only long after we became friends did I realize that Eliza meant to say, “Get out!” Adopted at the age of eight from a Bolivian orphanage, Eliza spoke perfect English, better than a good many American-born physicians of my acquaintance. Under stress, however, she tended to lose her grip on the idiom.
“You didn’t know,” I said.
“But I should have. There’s always a story about it in the newspaper.” Eliza was right about that. The Holy Angels fire was still one of Chicago’s biggest collective heartaches. There would be some feature about where the survivors were now or a photo of the monument where twenty of the twenty-four children who died slept together at Queen of Heaven Cemetery—a green granite arch with their lyric names lettered in gold (Erin, Sofia, Malachi) and the dates of their births and deaths. A few of those dates—impossibly—were in the same decade. Even all these years later, someone always left a Santa teddy bear or a little potted tree with ornaments. The arch was green Italian marble because the colors of the Fighting Saints of Holy Angels were green and gold. It had been designed by my mother. Grandma Caruso said that’s where I got my ability to draw.
Although I didn’t tell Eliza, five nights earlier had been another anniversary—the tenth year since my mother’s accident. My mother died two years after the Holy Angels fire.
Mom was on her way home from her part-time job at a vet’s office when her car was T-boned in an intersection by a kid who’d gotten his driver’s license that afternoon, one of about six pertinent ironies. My mom hadn’t needed to work that day but had volunteered to fill in for the other receptionist, whose sister in Wyoming had been … in a car accident. My mom didn’t need to work at all. We had my dad’s pension, his life-insurance benefit, and gifts from the village and the benevolent fund, including my college scholarship. But Mom did need a way to divert herself from full-time hysteria over having lost in one day her first love and, if you will, her religion—which was me. I wasn’t dead, of course. But at first I wished aloud that I would die under anesthesia during yet another hideous patch job. Then I would always wake up and slowly realize that I was not in heaven but in a hospital room overlooking a bakery on Taylor Street, and I would be fury itself. I upended trays of food and tore up the pictures of me, taken when I was little, that my mother kept in her wallet. “Why am I alive?” I would ask Mom. “Why did I live through that to go through this?”
That was what my mom got—two years of sitting at the bedside of her ranting, melted child. At first I was out of school most of the time, and tutors, like my dad’s rookie Renee, who had studied to be an English teacher, helped me keep up. But why did I want to keep up? What was I going to do or be? I had been one of the cute girls in our small school. Everyone accepted that Marianne Modica and Jennet Liff would for sure grow up to beautiful. (They did.) But Tess Reagan, who died, and I might have turned out to be really pretty too. I knew this and I hated my mother for it, as I hated her for everything. It was the kind of nonchalant, dependable scorn that any ripped-off kid feels for the remaining parent, the one who isn’t sainted and can’t leave. My father was dead but still my hero and protector. I didn’t care that my mother knew it.
I actually once told my mother that I wished she had been the one who died. And though I wept and apologized, and she wept and forgave me, it was true. We both knew it.
She died not quite nine months later.
That should have obliterated me, and it would have, except for Marie.
A private jet owned by a rich boyfriend had whisked her across the country from a Utah ski holiday. Once she arrived in the ICU for the second time in two years, she pulled me close to her and said, “You’re like the patron saint of suffering.” When a surgeon came out to quietly explain to the gathered family—my grandparents, their brothers and sisters, and my aunt Christina, who is a Franciscan nun—that there was nothing more they could do, that my mother’s chest was crushed, I could not make my legs work to walk across the room and say goodbye to my mother. Marie stayed by my side even then, her adored big sister behind that drawn curtain. She did not leave Chicago, for business or pleasure, for the next three years. To adopt me, Marie gave up a job in the lofty six figures as an anchor on CBN News in New York, the rich boyfriend with the airplane, the beach house in Sagaponack—all in exchange for waking up every night to comfort a tremulous teenager who wouldn’t eat and had begun to wet the bed each time she dreamed that she saw tiny flames on every flat surface. “It’s not much,” she told me the night Mom died. “But I’ll never leave you.”
I had forgotten I was even holding the phone when Eliza said, “Sicily, are you there?”
“I am. I’m sorry. Just spaced out for a moment.”
“Do … do you think we could have coffee?”
“Well,” I said. “Sure, okay … why?”
“I’m a first-year resident at UIC. Not on the burn unit. At the Center for Reconstructive Surgery. I’m only a resident, studying to be a doctor, but—”
I giggled a little. “I know what a resident is. I’m a medical illustrator. And I have spent a fair amount of time in the hospital.”