“Thank you for telling me about your grandfather. I’m calm now.”
“Good,” Hollis said. “He lived to be ninety-nine, and he died on the same land where he was born. That should be true for us all. And he had his faith also.”
“Did he live to see your children?”
“Yes, he did,” Hollis told me. “Grandfather died this morning.”
On the gurney, I passed under the eyes of Aunt Marie and my grandmother and grandfather. Aunt Marie’s face was blurry from crying. “Stop,” I said. “It’ll be all right.”
“You don’t have to do this,” she said. “I’ve grown accustomed to your face.”
“Everybody is being brave. Come on, Auntie. I have to be brave too. Plus, you can’t let your viewing audience down.” Hollis’s courage and Mrs. Cassidy’s were on my heart, as Baptists say, but I decided to see them as a witness to me. Aunt Marie had also taken a leave of absence—for the first time in her career. And on her show the previous Sunday, she had shown a photo of me as a child, a glimpse of footage from the fire, and photos of my father and my mother. She explained why I was doing this. There was no going back now.
Then I was in that cold room, being coddled like a child, swathed in blankets at last. I wanted that part to go on and on. Belatedly, though it didn’t matter, I saw that there had been perks to being “special.” I’d gotten away with doing and saying pretty much anything I wanted. Not right away, but in years to come, I would be just like everybody else, I hoped. Kit said as much at the family support meetings. She said, “I’m not going to be admired for being your friend anymore.”
“I’m going to be better-looking than you too,” I said. “Deal with it.”
Finally I felt the silvery spurt of anesthetic burst into my veins, but not before Beth made a thumbs-up at me and pursed her lips in a kiss and Eliza smiled at me with her eyes over her mask. Then Dr. Grigsby came into the room with a parade of doctors, and I knew that what was veiled by a moist cloth on the tray that the slender male nurse was pushing so carefully was … Emma’s face.
When I awakened, it was pitch-dark.
Beth picked up her camera and fiddled with a light and began to shoot right away, and Aunt Marie said, “They knocked you out properly.” I lifted my arm and was surprised to see that my hand was not restrained, although I had more IV lines in more places than ever before, even one in my stomach. I asked, “Is it already night?”
“It’s night on Wednesday,” my aunt said. “You talked to us, but it was gibberish about your grandfather being dead. It scared Grandpa. He thought you were seeing heaven or something.” She began to reach down to pull up my blankets, as an armada of nurses, ready to measure my levels of pain and awareness, slowly drifted into the enormous room I had to myself.
But Beth said, “Wait. One second.” Everyone stopped. As she moved closer and began to shoot steadily, I willed my hand to slowly brush against the bandages on my face. Beneath their dry thicknesses, I could feel geography. I had a mouth. I had a nose.
CHAPTER NINE
Hollis Grigsby came back from her grandfather’s funeral in Louisiana for the moment that Beth and Eliza had begun to call “the unveiling.” It was five days after the surgery and I was so not okay with it. For one thing, I didn’t want to leave the hospital. Six days seemed like an awfully brief stint in the hospital for having your face removed and replaced. The real issue, though, was that it seemed as though my new face, whatever it looked like, would be something I would have to carry in front of me on a tray, as that nurse had in the OR, for the rest of my life. I could not imagine ever picking at a zit or getting hit with a volleyball or, my God, getting a tattoo or something. Or even putting on lipstick. I had never put on lipstick. At the age of thirteen, I hadn’t ever had anything except chocolate lip balm. I would defile the face. I would run into something, because I would not be used to it, and break the nose.
My nose.
Not “the” nose.
I had to remind myself that the face was me, a part of me now, not something that I would attach before work. It made me mental.
“This is normal,” Polly Guthrie said.
“Is there anything that isn’t normal?” I asked her, shushing through my bandages. “It’s not normal to feel like my face before, which looked like a mask, was real and this face, which is real, is a mask. That’s pathology, Polly!”
“No, in your case, that’s normal. Sicily, say you had gotten married. You’d have changed your name—”
“Hell, no, I wouldn’t have done that!”
“Okay. You don’t make anything easy, do you?”
“I’m not normal,” I said.
“Touché. So, say you would have, and your name was now Sicily Smith. For months and even years after you got married, you would self-identify as Sicily Coyne. You’d be at work and look down at your wedding band and say, Oh, my gosh, I’m married! It would be a new page in your life. It would take getting used to.” Polly looked at her watch. It annoyed me that, even at this moment, I was not her top priority. “If you were … pathological, you would continue to see your face as a thing. You’d treat it badly.”
“I think I’ll probably treat it too goodly.”
“I can guarantee you that from what I know of you so far, within a year you’ll be using, like, washing grains on your face and plucking your eyebrows—”
“Blond,” I interrupted.
Polly jumped. She was a blonde and thought I was insulting her.
“Are they blond? My eyebrows?” Emma was a blonde. Had been a blonde. My hair was a dark reddish-brown, like my mom’s. I hadn’t taken the opportunity to look at the mirror (in the mirror! What was the matter with me?) when they changed my dressings, even though everyone made approving noises. Technically I wasn’t supposed to, but I hadn’t done anything else by the book, so it would have been okay.
“No, she wasn’t really blond,” Polly said. “Her hair was touched up. Her eyebrows are lighter than your hair, but it’s not a big thing.”
“Does my skin match?”
“Better than most,” Polly said. “It’s as if you’d worn SPF seventy-five on your face but not your arms. Like most people.” Polly was reassuring, but I could tell she had more to say. It was two days before “the unveiling,” and she had to warn me of everything that could be strewn along the road ahead. “The thing is, when you first see your face, it’s not going to look the way it will in two months. Or anything like it will in four months. The advantage of your being so young is that you’ll heal like a kid. That’s not true for people who are forty. That’s why those movie stars have plastic surgery and can deny it six weeks later. But there is loose skin under your chin that will have to be trimmed.”
“Trimmed?” I knew this, but hearing it was a different matter. Months before, Polly had shown me pictures of Connie Washburn, the fourth or fifth transplant victim—Patient! Recipient! Sicily, please! And her face looked like a blimp with these little slits for eyes. Before her husband had done her the courtesy of throwing acid in her face because she’d grown tired of his beating the crap out of her and left him (he did seven years for this; we are such a forgiving society), Connie Washburn had been … gorgeous, this fresh-scrubbed tennis-player-looking woman. Afterward, she was ordinary. Plain.
“Yes, you will have to have that skin trimmed, in a minor surgical procedure, a same-day affair.”
“Can we just take the bandages off now? And get it over with?”
“Sic-il-y,” said Polly. She sounded like my grandma Caruso. “You waited twelve years for this. You can wait until day after tomorrow.”
On the day, Beth arrived before the doctors. The sun wasn’t even up. “Go away,” I told her. “I’m sleeping.”
“You remind me of Ben,” she said. “He’s lucky he works nights. He could sleep around the clock. He once slept eighteen hours. Won’t be for long, though.”
“Why?”
“Eliza’s pregnant,” Beth said. “Four months. St
ella’s going to have a little brother or sister! I’m going to be a grandmother again. Which is probably the only time that will ever happen. Eliza thinks two is the limit, with the way they both work. Vincent will never find a woman who’ll put up with him, and Kerry wants to be the only opera singer ever to have a waist.”
I was lucky then that the bandages hid my face. This was a sentence I might never hear. It was like a punch in the stomach. I banished the thought. Enough. Aunt Marie had shown me that love didn’t necessarily derive from genetics—although, when I thought about it, she was more closely related to me genetically than anyone else on earth. I don’t count Christina, who is actually prettier than Marie but who gives me the creeps, still.
Beth said, “Sicily. I hurt your feelings.”
“No …”
“Yes, I did. Don’t deny it. By now you’d have been married.”
“No, two months from today, actually.”
“Sicily, oh Sicily. This whole thing asks way too much of you. You knew this going in but that’s not the same as the reality, is it?”
“It really is okay, Beth.”
“You know it’s not!”
It wasn’t okay. But it was. It was both. So much of me now was both. It sounds odd to say that someone who as a child had lost both her parents and her face could be happy-go-lucky, and I had not been happy-go-lucky. But I had been happy. I’d been happy most of the time with my aunt and with my friends, and I’d been happy especially since Joey and I had fallen in love—or since I had fallen in love and before Joey had revealed himself to be a lying sack of shit. In truth, I still missed Joey. I missed his voice and still listened to it on the cell-phone messages I had kept. I missed his body, his arms holding me against him, the solid male chest. I couldn’t hold anyone else’s body that way. I missed being someone’s, other than my aunt’s. For a moment, I missed the baby Joey and I would have had. How can you miss something you never knew? It was as if I had gone forward and backward in life at the same time, as though I had been on an animated ride at Disney World—to which I had never been. Polly would have told me they were “normal” feelings when, in truth, generalizing on the basis of something that had happened at most a few hundred times was not a sampling I trusted.
The Virginia grandfather, whom I had phoned, was quite possibly the least communicative man who wasn’t on a respirator. When I tried to dig for answers, he said, “That’s probably true” or “I guess so” or “By and large.” He was already married before the transplant. He’d already had children, who were now in college—except for the one who’d dropped out and had a child, and she and her baby lived with them. He said he could now breathe much better while he was asleep, and eating was such a pleasure that he’d gained twenty pounds.
Why had I expected people whose faces had been transplanted to be dramatic, singular, and insightful? They were ordinary people who had bad luck and who Dr. Grigsby and her sidekick, Livingston, had transformed into ordinary people again. If I felt this way, antsy and verging on depressed, before I even saw my face, how would I feel afterward?
Beth asked me, “Are you scared?”
“Would you be?”
“I think I’d be puking.”
“I have a strong stomach.”
There was a rustle in the hall and Kit slipped into the room.
She’d come twice before to the hospital, once on the day of my surgery and once while I was recovering. But we were in a relationship trough, which occurred every time Kit fell in love with another lousy guy. Through each of these hiatuses, I missed her, as I had missed her when she was away at college. For four years, I hadn’t seen Kit during fall or winter except when the Hawkeyes were on TV and once when I’d gone to a game with Marie. At the game, the cold punished my face and I had to leave early. Though Kit eagerly wanted me to stay with her at the Kappa Delta house, had I been ready to socialize with girls outside my acquaintance, I would not have picked Big Ten cheerleaders for the test group. With utmost care, Kit chose men who considered themselves desperadoes of love, were not at all as cool as nerds, and didn’t know how to use computers. Kit worked in computers, creating the online platform for Fair Made, the big green-cosmetics store. She would say computer things that even I didn’t get, like, “You have to upload these on a ASCI DUB bedrock with a coda builder streaming on a Kibbly Bits Tin Foiler.” She found the guys’ ignorance of her life endearing. It was an annoying part of being Kit’s friend. The glory days would be spent with her other friends: Mia Zanoni, the twins Merit and Marta Moore-Grossman, or Francie Bach. The slow, excruciating defenestration, however, was just for me. We drove past houses, left notes on cars at bars, and made hang-up calls. When my aunt was a kid, it was easy to make hang-up calls, or so she says. As difficult as it was now, Kit always managed. And she always managed to blame herself.
Kit would say, “I’m like a moth to the flame,” which sounded like the limp lyrics her boyfriends wrote. I would tell her, “You’re more like a horse to strychnine.” But Kit had excuses: The guy was “so obviously a Pisces.” Or she’d just noticed that she had a mirror instead of a water jug in the relationship corner of her feng shui setup. And she believed in all that stuff.
“If it were true,” I’d tell her, “everyone would believe it.” Kit would point out that there was a horoscope section in the newspaper. I loved Kit. And I didn’t want to lose her. But I needed more friends, maybe some who didn’t start each day with the tarot.
Mutants can’t be choosers, though.
I wasn’t surprised that she came to the hospital. But I was stunned that she’d brought Marc-Until-Labor-Day. While we were having a fifteen-minute fight about my willingness to push her out the ninth-story window rather than let him into this room, Hollis showed up with Livingston and what seemed to be about twenty other doctors, some of them not even part of the practice of reconstructive surgery. They were just … interested. Why wouldn’t they have been?
Hollis said, “Are you ready, Sicily?”
“I’d like everyone to leave, please,” I replied. Nobody left. “I don’t mean you and Beth and Eliza and Kit, I mean the other professional people. And I don’t mean forever, but for a few moments? I just want to have a private moment to … uh, meet myself.”
So Hollis banished everyone, except we six women, with a gentle shooshing motion. “Now,” she said, “let’s get to the good part.” She began to unfurl the bandages. Although I had medication to dull the pain, I don’t think there would have been much. It takes time for the nerves to activate after being reconnected. Even the muscles would need weeks to really motivate, although basic things, such as being able to open and close the mouth, would be pretty established. Hollis sat down with a big mirror on her lap. “You hold it,” she said. “When you are ready, go ahead.”
I went ahead.
It was like the boy with the corneas, like looking into the sun. Although the face was swollen, it was not so swollen as I’d expected it to be. It looked like the face of a girl who’d been in a skiing accident. I say that I looked like a girl, not like a woman seven years older, which, even in the moment, seemed to be a bonus. I felt as though I was looking at a TV. Then I saw my own eyes and I made them answer me. I saw my own … expression, my nature, under the face. Both my mother and father had strong, sharp noses. Now I had a pert Irish nose with a little tip-tilt at the end of it. My chin was still square, but my Irish bonbon of a mouth was replaced with a brick-pink pout. I touched the lower lip, felt its contours, plump and firm, almost too exaggerated for prettiness. It was a really good mouth, almost cosmetic.
“Sicily,” Hollis said. “Beautiful.”
“Not Sicily. Not really Sicily. But it’s wonderful,” I told her. And the general exhalation in the room would have made my hair blow back if it hadn’t already been contained by a white cotton headband. Beth had been snapping away the whole time, but she stopped then.
Hollis said, “Sicily, it’s early yet, but can you try to move your face? Don’t do
anything that feels unnatural. Just try to do something. This isn’t a test, my dear.”
I expected it to feel like trying to use a robot arm to grasp one of those toys in a vending machine. It did feel slow and a little stiff. But I smiled.
Eliza burst into tears.
Kit said, “My God, Sissy. It looks like your smile. It looks like your own teeth.”
“They are my own teeth,” I told her. But I was caught on the prongs between joy and distress myself. I said, “Propose. Pompous. Propaganda. Primate. Profligate. Priest. Popular. Bubbles. Bunches. Benefits. Booster … Baby.”
Aunt Marie said, “This is a miracle. Oh, Sicily. Oh, my Sicily. Oh, Dr. Grigsby, thank you. Thank you. If her mother could see this.”
I smiled then, again. I had a dimple. It was as though I was cherishing something newborn but also familiar, back after a long while. I smiled and my throat closed and, though I did not cry, I felt as though something frozen was melting.
I suppose something was.
CHAPTER TEN
Now began the loneliest period of my life.
Something was missing. I assumed it was that singular purpose for which I had strived and had expected would descend upon me, like some raiment from heaven, conferring a sense of achievement. But I had achieved nothing. Hollis had. Mrs. Cassidy had. Even lost Emma had, in her way, if I believed in a consciousness after death, by endowing a community of mortals with her generous spirit.
But I?
I should have hit my knees, morning and night, and thanked God for my reclamation. But to what purpose was the reconstituted Sicily? What was I meant to do beyond the completion of my facial surgery? I had no larger ambitions than any other twenty-five-year-old with an adequate job. I did have an insufficiency of guts and enterprise to search out what more I could do. I’d spent my life building a tough, supple body that I daily put behind a desk in front of a computer. Had all that sweat equity been to foster vanity and defeat depression? Should I actually try choreography now? Should I train as a volunteer paramedic and literally put my strong back and my medical knowledge out on the street? I certainly had the spare time. Hollis told me that my ordinary life was exemplary and that if there was to be something further required of me, it would become apparent. She added, furthermore, that life was not a horse race. I met with Polly Guthrie weekly—which I would do, apparently, until one of us died.