Second Nature Read Free Page A

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