But even Dr. Livingston, although he was a tremendous person, had never really stopped thinking of this pregnancy as the “nonstarter.” I felt him watching me rather than looking at me these days, waiting for a clue.
Nobody asked if my morning sickness was settling down. Nobody asked if I hoped for a boy or a girl. All of them, even my family, seemed to hold their breath collectively, except for one person: my aunt. This was not my aunt Marie. Marie was scrupulously cheery but not cozy, after the first day, about my accident-related nondecision to have a nontermination. It was a given how much she would love a child of mine, how much she would love to be a grandmother, in fact if not by designation.
The person who was nearly swoony with happiness was my aunt Christina, Sister Mary Augustine Caruso. She displayed pure, un-smirched joy at what seemed to be one Catholic’s refusal to have an abortion against both her own and the child’s best interests—steering toward disaster on purpose being the best sort of faith-based decision, I guess.
One Saturday we had brunch with my Caruso grandparents. If not for me and my delicate condition, Grandma and Grandpa Caruso, as well as Grandma and Grandpa Coyne, would have been getting ready to leave after New Year’s for their condos in Florida. But these days, Florida seemed like … well, Florence. No one was going anywhere, for which I felt guilty. Anyhow, after everyone watched me eat enough quiche and salad for three large people and then retire to throw half of it up, Aunt Christina said, “Sicily, darling. Would it be okay if I explained the Catholic perspective on this to your doctor? Would you mind if I met with her?”
“Met with my doctor,” I repeated.
“Yes,” said Christina.
“No, of course you can’t, Aunt Christina.”
“Sicily, it’s important that she understand that this is a situation in which you aren’t to be pressured toward a most grievous—”
“She knows that,” Marie said. “The doctor knows that.”
“In this case, I’m not sure where the most harm would be, Aunt Christina,” I said.
“What you’ve done here is noble, Sicily,” said Aunt Christina. “If you should lose this … well, this facial beautification for the sake of the unborn child growing in your womb, it is virtually a martyrdom.”
“You’re not getting this. I’ve made this decision almost against my own will, Aunt Christina. I’m scared to death. Every day. This could be an actual martyrdom. It could maybe kill me if I lose my face,” I said. “Let’s talk about the Cubs.”
“But you would choose that, for the baby to survive,” said my aunt.
“Which, if I did die, would do both of us a lot of good,” I said. “What if I had the baby and gave it up for adoption? Do you know I actually considered that? Wouldn’t that be more pure and awful and painful and really holy?”
My grandmother, who had been busily making sure that everyone had way too much food, said quietly, “Sicily.” I turned away from Christina and looked down the surface of the shining mahogany table at which I’d sat all my life—every Easter and every Christmas and every other Sunday, in a high chair, on a pillow over telephone books, as a bored twelve-year-old trying to hide the earbuds of my iPod under my hair, and as an isolated, fearful teenager wishing I could conjure a mist to obscure me from my family’s eyes. In all those years, I had never seen my bustling, fit, domestically stereotypical Italian grandmother as an old woman. Old women didn’t jog from the yard to the oven to the neighbor’s house, cooking and crocheting and chatting, going on long bus trips to Broadway shows with her girlfriends. Until recently, very recently, I’d rarely seen Grandma Caruso interrupt her bustle even to sit down at her own table long enough to eat. My father used to call her a stand-up lady.
She looked old now, solemn and doleful, her cheeks motionless and grooved as a line drawing.
Grandma said, “I haven’t said the things I think. As a Catholic, I think the only situation in which abortion is not a mortal sin is to save the life of the mother, and old Catholics believe that even in that case we must choose the life of the child. But I lost my child, Sicily, my firstborn baby girl. I saw your father, who was like my son, die. I’m an old woman. I pray to the Sacred Heart because I don’t think I could bear to lose my only grandchild, who I almost lost already, for the sake of a baby, any baby. No matter how precious this baby’s life is, to God or to our family.” Grandma raised her hands to her temples, drawing the skin at the corners of her eyes back in an elegy of distress that was horrible to me. “Sicily. I would say, have an abortion, Sicily. I think you should have an abortion. I know this is a sin on my own soul. I don’t care. One day, when you are really in love with a man who is good, you can adopt a waiting child together—”
“Mother!” said Aunt Christina.
“Christina, I know your belief. Don’t talk anymore.”
“Mother … what you’re encouraging Sicily—”
“I said, don’t talk anymore! Am I a fool? Don’t you think I know what I’m saying at my own table?” said Grandma Caruso. “This baby’s life is nothing next to Sicily’s life. It’s nothing! This family has suffered enough. Sicily has suffered like a hundred martyrs. No. I think she should stop this now.” My grandmother covered her face with one of her delicate tatted table napkins. “I want Sicily to live. I want Sicily to keep the face God gave her to replace her beautiful face. I want Sicily to live her life, which is my Gia’s life too. Even if I go to hell. I don’t care if I go to hell. This is hell.”
Shame washed over me like nausea. I got up and went into the bathroom, but not to be sick. I splashed my wrists and my face and tried to think. What was I doing? How could I torture them and gamble so ruthlessly with my face and my future because I somehow thought the love of a guy had burrowed into my belly and made an accidental pregnancy somehow sacred? My heart skittered, faster and faster. I didn’t want to be a … an ICU case, an urgent giant oozing wound, a pitiable crash rescue, hoping for a face that at best would look like a battered melon? Was I bringing this on myself, like the nutty Canadian guy? Had these years of privation and longing tied off a section of my brain?
When I sat down again, I said, “Grandma, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what I’m putting you through. I didn’t think of how scared you must be. I’m even sorry that I disrespected Christina, thinking this is for religious reasons. If I thought I was really in danger …” But didn’t I? Was I? How the hell did I know? And I wasn’t telling the whole truth either, to the people who had loved and raised me, which was the least that they deserved. “I know I’m emotional. Even if this baby was conceived in sin, to you, it was also conceived in love, to me. If I didn’t think this baby’s life was important, I wouldn’t even consider this. I wouldn’t trade my life for her life. I just can’t take it lightly. I can’t. I tried.”
But that wasn’t all of it either. What was missing from this sentence? I’d weighed the odds, and I believed they could favor me. The sentence was missing an entire, other independent clause. Would I be clinging to this pregnancy if there had been bliss but not Vincent? Was this all some … offering to Vincent?
No, it was not!
“I promise. I’m going to think it over more. I’m going to talk it over more with the psychologist. Maybe this fear is a warning. The doctors know what they’re doing, but maybe I’m asking too much of them.”
No one said a word. We could hear the whipping of the tiniest bare branches of Grandma’s big old pin oak, rapping the window the way a conductor raps a podium. It sounded like mindless rain, fingernails tapping thoughtlessly, nervously, awaiting a decision.
Finally, Grandpa said, “All your aunt is doing is praising your faith. All your grandmother is doing is loving you. You are a loved young woman. You are a Catholic young woman.”
I nearly yipped when I felt a blow to my shin. Even wearing a soft ballet flat, Marie could make herself felt.
“Of course,” I said. “I’m not discounting that.”
Christina jumped right back in. “So I thought, if I spoke to your doctor, it might make her feel more at ease.”
As for me, I felt increasingly not so well. I was chilly, although my grandparents skipped around in short sleeves and kept the temperature of their house about the same as late afternoon in Death Valley. Wasn’t it time for Aunt Christina to go to vespers or matins or some prayer break at this point? I wished that I could have a drink—even though I couldn’t have had a drink even if anyone had been drinking.
“She’s a Catholic too,” said Aunt Marie. “Sicily’s doctor, Dr. Grigsby, the surgeon: She is a Catholic too.”
“I thought she was from Louisiana,” said my other aunt.
“They don’t call the counties in New Orleans parishes for nothing, Aunt Christina,” I said. “Hollis, my surgeon, is a southern black woman with a British accent who is a cradle Catholic.”
“You know what I want? I want to have a look at that new ride, Sissy. Let’s see your car,” my grandfather said, and the entire table, except Aunt Christina, rose as one.
That night at home, Kit and I had our little Christmas. Kit gave me this beautiful antique album with a picture of a girl in a swing on it. The journal was filled with postcards from a girl called Emma Rose Gunnally, all sent to her mother from her honeymoon trip “by motor car,” down the eastern coast of the United States. The album was fashioned so that the backs of the postcards were visible.
This morning in New
Hampshire, I’m afraid that Thomas became very impatient when the car would start steaming as we waited for the most cunning flock of lambs to cross the country lane
.
“Do you like it?” Kit asked.
“It’s just exquisite. When did this happen? In 1912? Kitty, that was the time of the
Titanic
, more than a hundred years ago. Can you believe it?”
Kit put her hand on her chest and let out a deep sigh. “I got worried you would hate it.”
“Why?”
“Well, I got it for you a while ago and just realized that the girl is named Emma and it’s a honeymoon.”
Now I felt my breath snag in my chest. The shivers came back and I pulled the mohair throw from the back of my couch around my shoulders. When was the last time I’d spoken to Mrs. Cassidy? Of course, she didn’t know anything about this … issue. It wasn’t as though it had gotten around the West Side. She deserved to know. But what would I say to her? Here was my Kit, woebegone, looking as though someone had eaten all her Norman Loves and then rewrapped the box.
“A lot of people are named Emma. It’s like Rebecca. It’s an old-timey name. It’s even better, Kit. I think of Emma all the time.”
Except not
, I admitted to myself. “And, wow, a wedding is the last thing on my mind.” I faked a good smile and said, “Now you open yours.”
I’d given Kit an Italian martini set, a blown-glass shaker, and two glasses in her favorite colors (I know, God help me), black and pink.
Afterward, she cooked dinner for both of us—her specialty, chicken divan, which we’d called “chicken dive-in” when we were kids and her mom made it—and I listened to Kit’s litany of complaints about her job. These mostly centered on how Jon Archer, her boss, kept taking credit for all of Kit’s color schemes and ideas for the home page. Kit would quit tomorrow—if it weren’t for the six figures and the trips to London and Milan and the corner office on Michigan Avenue and the mandatory exercise hour and the indoor pool and massage room and all the free makeup and body butter and other extraordinary loot, a load of which she now hauled out to give to me in a satin Santa bag—samples of all the “super-eco” brands. It all sounded just absolutely, hideously unbearable and dreadful, really, sort of like getting dressed up every day to go to a spa and play princess on the computer until dinnertime. I’d majored in art. Why couldn’t I be Kit? Eye-shadow palettes versus the bombardment of rectal tumors with angiogenesis inhibitors. Like Kit’s job, mine was also a six-figure project, if you counted the two zeroes after the decimal point that made up eight thousand bucks. Being a medical illustrator was useful and, for me, it was pretty easy. But it was often—as in, oh, 80 percent of the time—about as interesting to me as if I’d owned a lawn-care business. When it had suited my neat and very medical little world, my job felt like a perfect fit. Now it felt cramped.
Soon, I thought, I might need a real job with real benefits. I didn’t have a mortgage, thanks to my beloved mom-auntie. But after next year I wouldn’t be covered under Marie’s policy. One more thing to gnaw on. After we ate coffee ice cream with marshmallow whip, Kit and I watched
The Bells of St. Mary’s
, as we did every Christmas. Unlike every Christmas, Kit smoked a joint, which I picked up and took a hit from. “Jesus!” Kit shrieked, as though I’d pulled out a big jug of Apple Valley and taken a long swig while tamping down a pack of Marlboros.
“It’s okay,” I said. “One puff of dope isn’t going to make any difference here in the valley of the pills.”
“Am I the godmother?” Kit said.
“Sure,” I told her. It was the first time I’d thought about the not-abortion as a someday-child with ceremonies and clothing. She brought out a last present, one she’d been hiding in her bag—a CD of old-fashioned lullabies sung by young jazz artists. I couldn’t say anything except “My God.”
“It’s three months now,” Kit said. “I’m guessing we’re going to have a birthday this summer, huh?”
It might have been the dope, Bing Crosby, or how much better a nun Ingrid Bergman made than my aunt, but pretty soon I felt all oozy and sentimental. I said, “Kit, I don’t say stuff like this. But tell me it’s going to be okay.”
Kit put her arms around me, patting my back in the make-it-all-better way good people do. I was on my own in the world with this, though. I had a good family. But there are no two ways of thinking about being a single mother: No one will ever love the kid the way you do, and if my kid turned out to have problems, no one would love the kid at all after I died. The idea of five years shaved off my life by a face transplant abruptly seemed like a very huge deal indeed. What would I do with my for-certain handicapped child? I was stoned and paranoid. I would … raise him with … with understanding and love and valor and respect for his abilities, as Marie had raised me. But what if he were really disabled and I got really, really unlucky?