“Do you want to see Joey?” Marie asked.
“I’m going to my room,” Sicily told Marie. “He knows where it is.”
Sicily removed her pink sapphire ring, dropped it on the carpet, and walked away.
Marie used the paper towel she still held to blot her forehead. Frank and Mr. Sansone mumbled a few consoling words.
“Helluva thing,” said Mr. Sansone. “You call me.”
Both of them left. What was the inspirational message? The Oprah moment from the dozen leftover gray cards, now destined for recycling, that read,
ME AND JOE, FOREVER AND EVER
?
Frank returned with Joey LaVoy, who acknowledged his brother with a blink. Paul and Angel waited as Marie followed Joey into Sicily’s bedroom.
Joey fell to his knees and wept, beseeching her, “Please, Sicily, please listen. Maybe once it was feeling responsible. Maybe the first time we went out. But I love you, Sicily. I love you now. Please, God, believe me. Don’t pay any attention to Paulie. Can’t you think about it? Try believing that? I love you, honey.” Sicily lay facing the bookshelves, so motionless she might indeed have gone to sleep. Then Sicily turned, quick as a snake coiled in her comforter, crawled across the big bed, and thrust her face at Joey. Joey fell back, sprawling. “That’s all for you,” Sicily said. “Hell is all over you. Just follow Neal.”
Marie drank a tall glass of water and a taller glass of Shiraz. Sitting on Sicily’s couch, she kept vigil, turning the pages of Sicily’s sketchbook. A drawing of Joey, decorously nude, his thigh drawn up, his face somber. Marie, burdened by flowers, copied from a photo Sicily had taken with her telephone the previous Easter, on the eighty-fifth birthday of Marie’s mother, Annette Caruso. An elbow, a curved hand, a child’s skate. Marie flipped on another of the standing lamps. This must be how meditation felt. She had passed one hundred minutes of time without thinking outside a space two by three feet.
It was dark, maybe eight o’clock, when Marie crept into Sicily’s room.
“I’m awake,” Sicily said immediately. “I didn’t take an overdose.”
Marie lay down beside Sicily, who allowed her aunt to curl close to her.
“I was thinking about those science-fiction movies where they put humans in museum cases so they can wake them two hundred years later?”
Marie nodded, inhaling the playful sweetness of her niece’s Elizabeth Morrison cologne at the edges of a sharp, sour tang of sweat. Sicily never smelled dirty. Marie wanted to kill Joey LaVoy with her hands.
“You know, I would forgive Joey if I could. I would find a way to rationalize it. I would think maybe it was just pit—feeling sorry for me at first but later it wasn’t faked. I believe him that he does love me, in his own way. If we got married and had a child, then it would be real. As real as anyone’s marriage.”
“Baby,” said Marie. Although Sicily’s form was indistinct, Marie reached up, found a strand of Sicily’s hair, still damp with sweat, and twined it around her finger.
“I would if I could. But I can’t. I just can’t. Do you remember Mrs. Viola? From over on Easterly Boulevard?”
“I was in New York then,” Marie said softly. “I haven’t lived in Chicago since I’m twenty-five, honey. Well, back then, anyway.”
“I forgot,” Sicily said dreamily. “She would come to the door all the time, for a whole year, after the fire.”
Abruptly, Marie did remember. Gia’s face was as stiff and clenched as Marie had ever seen it when Mrs. Viola scratched at the screen one summer weekend.… Why had Marie been there? … Sicily’s graduation, her eighth-grade graduation. Sicily attended, although she told Marie she was glad that her face was bandaged after a recent reconstructive procedure. In empty chairs at the front, there were little white mortarboards, each accompanied by a spray of laurel, for the three eighth-graders who had died in the fire. One was for Victoria Viola, part of the group who hung with Sicily and Kit, not a best friend but definitely a second-tier sleepover girl. Marie remembered it well now: Gia quick-stepping to the door before Sicily could open it. Marie heard Gail Viola saying,
Oh, I—I’m so sorry to bother you, but you know, I can’t sleep at all, even with the pills … I said to myself, Gail, you have to try once more. Sicily! You two was friends. Did you see my Victoria? Did she suffer? I know that Victoria is with our Lord, so all I want to know is, did she suffer? That’s all …
“She does this all the time,” Gia had told Marie. “She comes once a week. I don’t know who to call, Marie. The police? The school? If I’m down with the laundry or something, she’ll come right in. And it upsets Sicily more than seeing Dennis Coyne, even though he could be Jamie’s twin. She came in February when there was a blizzard. She stands in the rain. Oh, my God, I feel so sorry for her. What can I say?”
Mrs. Viola’s face was not like skin but like soap, Marie recalled, as though white chips would break off. Marie told her sister, “You have to make her stop, Gigi.”
But it was a year, another visit, before Marie finally heard Gia say, almost harshly, “Gail, I know how you feel, better than anybody, I know. But Sicily is hurt. She has had fifteen surgeries, Gail. You can’t do this to her.”
But all I want to know …
“What about Mrs. Viola?” Marie asked Sicily now. “Why did you bring up Mrs. Viola?”
“She got … okay. She sort of gave her life to taking care of the terminally ill. She still works at Sundial. The … you know …”
“Hospice, yes.”
“Vicky’s little sister was a year younger, and she still lives with her parents.” Sicily paused. “Vicky’s sister’s life stopped. Right then. And Mrs. Christiansen, little Kieran’s mom, she used to write to me too. She stuck letters in our mailbox that said the same thing as Mrs. Viola. I only saw one letter. Mom threw them out. Mrs. Christiansen drove off the road by Sherry Creek. Everyone thought she ran away with some guy. She was pretty, like Mom. They didn’t find her car until the creek thawed. No seat—no restraint.” Sicily sighed, her breathing rough. “If I could remove the section of my head that knows all that stuff, then I could forgive Joe, because, Auntie, it’s not in him to do wrong. If I could remove the section that knows he was going to marry me out of remorse, I would. Because I didn’t want to marry a special guy. I was too proud. I was a fool. I had a guy who looked like everyone else. But the joke was, why did I have him? He didn’t love me. Not like I loved him. I still do. Why didn’t I get the joke?”
Oh, Sicily!
Marie thought.
It would have been better if Joey had set the fire—easier to dismantle this castle you built with your adoration
. Who else would want Sicily?
“Who else will ever want me?” Sicily said.
“Plenty of people,” Marie said. She consciously made her arm relax, refusing its natural inclination to tense.
“Special people,” Sicily answered. “And it’s not how they look on the outside that makes me afraid. It’s how they’d be on the inside. You made me into an ordinary person on the inside whose face is destroyed. I could love someone whose face is destroyed, or who has Tourette’s or MS or anything else, if he was like me, raised like me.”
“Huh,” Marie said.
“To be able to be like what Michelangelo said about the statue in the stone.”
“What is that?”
“Michelangelo said he could see clearly the statue he would make, in every block of marble and that all he had to do was to chip away the rough walls that kept it prisoner and there it would be—perfect. I fight to let people see through the rough walls to the real parts of me. But I don’t think everyone else does that.”
What could Marie say? She had read the books too. Case histories. Most people who prevailed and made real lives did find love. But it often was with “special” people, men with dangling little funnels for legs or who were big, blond, and blind.
God forgive me
, Marie thought. Her philosophy professor at UIC was an astute, witty, estimable man, with an adorable wife and two sons, despite his glazed eyes and his zippy wheelchair, courtesy of Vietnam. Why would a mate like Professor Kenny be anything but terrific? Who cared about looks? Who cared? Joey LaVoy, button-cute as an underwear model—sexy and full muscled, good smelling and strong—turned out to be a minor monster, the thing imprisoned inside him not beauty but a deadly secret.
Why hadn’t she encouraged Sicily to befriend people whose experiences were like hers? Who else would not judge her? Why had Marie fought so hard for Sicily to be
like everyone else
and taken pride in it? A vicious thing, the boomerang of good intentions. Marie had done it wrong. She had raised Sicily to want not as good as—but better than. Now Sicily, who would always be damaged, couldn’t teach herself to want anything that felt lesser. “Sicily, you’ll start over. This was a hard lesson.”
“You think?”
“Okay, more than that. This is a tragedy, and, yes, you’ve had a life filled with more of them than any ten people deserve. But if it’s love you want, maybe you have to look behind the rough walls.”
“Okay. Say I do,” Sicily said. “How do I know they will?” Marie thought back again to the disabled people she knew and the stories she’d read. With the exception of deaf people, the mated pair rarely was made from two of a kind. “What if the other person in the stone wants a beautiful wife who has … one arm? Not many people want a girl without a face, Auntie. That’s a really rough wall.” Marie thought of Professor Kenny’s dazzling blond wife. He couldn’t see her, but sure as hell everyone else could. Sicily sighed and then drew in breath, as though it were a fluid that could nourish her. “It’s a shame. I could be frozen, like in those movies. And come back later. Maybe there would have been an age of enlightenment and everyone would be kind. Maybe everyone who’s damaged could be repaired. But I would still know about the fire. I would still know that, for Joe, it was an obligation. They couldn’t cryogen my heart.”
Both of them lay in silence, but not at rest, until the edges of the windows brightened. Another brand-new goddamned day.
CHAPTER FOUR
I
barely got out of bed for five days.
My aunt begged me to take a walk outside, do some stretches, take a bath. She ran hot water into the giant triangular tub and poured oil of lavender into it. She told me that it would make me feel better. But I didn’t want to feel better. I wanted to feel sick unto death, and it helped to smell and have greasy hair. Marie brought me broth and scrambled eggs I couldn’t swallow. The salt and tang of beef broth nauseated me: It had the aroma of flesh. Eggs disturbed me—they’ve always disturbed me—because they’re one cell. Everything, from sounds and textures to lights and sight, seemed malign, out of place, distorted, as though there had been a nail scraped across the surface of the natural world.
Juice and water. I had to drink, because I breathed primarily through my mouth, and it would dry up too quickly otherwise.
I wanted to die, but not from thirst.
In the first days after the fire, when I was newly undergoing the startling process of debridement, which is the slicing and scraping and picking away of dead tissue to hasten the growth of new tissue, I amused myself—if you can call it that—by planning my own funeral. Listen, everyone does this, even people whose faces aren’t being literally skinned on a daily basis. Everyone who feels blue has the irresistible urge to think about how bereft people would be if you were gone, what those who came to mourn would say about you, and even what you’d wear. (For me, that wasn’t an issue. Nobody would be opening
that
casket.) Before the fire, I’d known only one kid who died, and she died by suicide, the older sister of a girl my age. Shelby kissed her parents good night, and
brushed her teeth
and took a whole bottle of her mom’s Valium; apparently she had intended to hang herself from a clothing hook on the back of her bedroom door but lost consciousness before she could. No one ever knew why. Shelby did not have a history of depression. She had a boyfriend, and they were happy together. She had a ton of friends and a full ride to Carleton College the following fall. Her funeral was the most heartbreaking occasion of my life to that point. Her parents had made poster boards of all her baby pictures and school photos and awards, and I thought, how bad could it have been if it looked not just good but
superlative
from the outside? Even if your father was a closet molester, even if he hit you, why not run away and change your name instead?
In college, a biology professor told the class that he had attempted suicide after his fiancée dumped him for the equivalent of a billionaire sultan. He also tried to hang himself (I don’t know what the fascination is with hanging, except that it’s like running, in that you don’t need any special tools). My professor knotted a few of his neckties to make a noose and threw it over the shower rod. He probably weighed only about a hundred and sixty, but as soon as he stepped off the side of the tub, he realized that his toes touched the floor and he was going to suffocate instead of breaking his neck. Then the shower rod broke. So he went to the closest big box store, like a Savemore. On the way he picked out songs (I remember that one of them was the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” which he thought would be guilt-producing). While standing in line with a heavy-duty shower rod, who did he see but his ex-girlfriend with her sweetheart, the Arabian prince. They were cuddling and didn’t notice him, but my prof wanted to go up and show them the shower rod and say,
Look at all the trouble I’m going to so that I don’t have to live without you!
At that moment, this store employee came up and gave my professor a sample of pizza on a little napkin. It was really good. He decided to have a slice of pizza before he killed himself and ended up buying a whole pizza.
“There is a moral of this story,” he said. “It’s that there’s always pizza. And sometimes pizza is good enough for that day.”
Losing your girlfriend to a handsome billionaire—especially if you happened to be a skinny amoeba nerd—is not comparable to losing your father and your face. And for teenage me, there wasn’t even going to be the joy of pizza. I couldn’t script the tributes, but I hoped there would be a goodly amount of them. I did choose Bible verses, like the one about the pillar of fire that gave us light by night. I chose my favorite hymns (“Were You There?” and “Jacob’s Ladder”), and then I ran out of ideas for that portion of my afterlife.