Second Nature Read Free

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!