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.
After the first time I saw my face in a mirror, when my lips were peeling away like a rind, I figured patience was the ticket. No one who looked this bad got better. There would be some kind of overwhelming infection that would take me out. The fire had left a perfect map of its journey on my face. The burns on my neck and chest were (I would learn) relatively minor. They were caused by exposure to intense heat where my body wasn’t covered by my clothing. I had left my coat open. But I’d worn leather mittens, and because I’d held the purse to my face with both hands, my ears were whole. There was a band of undamaged flesh about an inch wide, just beneath my hairline, V-shaped, between my eyebrows. The rest of my face looked like an undercooked rack of ribs, with some of the packaging still stuck to it. Those bits of plastic were vinyl scraps of my purse, fused to my face, that the medical team hadn’t yet been able to tease out. I was sure I would not survive. But every day, my body persisted in restoring itself: I was strong and young and in rude good health. And though I tried to loose my grip on it, life would not release me.
At first, friends came in packs. There were so many daily pilgrimages to the hospital and then to my house that I was exhausted simply by the sheer magnitude of their voices. By early February, only three or four people showed up, maybe twice a week. So few, so soon? I had been a popular kid, with nine or ten birthday-party invitations under my belt every year. Had they simply forgotten me? Not until I was grown did I begin to understand that a crisis without margins is intolerable to the human temperament. People expect you to get better, and I wasn’t going to. People expect you to have a fighting spirit, and I didn’t. There’s an initial contact high that comes from being part of something big and lasting and dramatic, from actually knowing someone whose name is synonymous with an event that will never be forgotten. But time passed. The stories on TV about the fire dropped down to short updates that followed the weather forecast.
The biggest tragedy about tragedy is this truth: It’s tedious. People can’t stand to feel obliged for a long time. If you ever have a lingering illness, try not to linger too long. You’ll wear out your welcome. That’s not bitterness talking. It’s experience.
A few people hung in there and tried not to wince when they saw the newest surgical insult added to injury. Kit, however, never left, never blinked, never looked away but once. It was when I told Kit I hoped to die and waited for her to start crying and talk me out of it. Instead, she got up and left my room. I got up too and followed her out into the hall. She was putting on her parka and knit hat. “What are you doing?” I said.
“I’m leaving.”
“We were talking. You’re practically the only person who ever comes to see me anymore.”
“Sicily, you’re my best friend. But if you want me to sit here and listen to you talk about your funeral, you can … you can … blow it out your nose,” Kit said. “I feel really sorry for you, but not as sorry as you do.”
“Kit! If I don’t have a right to feel sorry for myself, who does?”
“You do. But your dad wanted you to live, and you’re all your mom has left. And why did I waste all this time on you? I’d still want to live anyhow. I know I would.”
“Try it,” I told her.
“I would want to live anyhow.”
“You would not.”
“I would.”
“You would not.”
“I would. I would find other things. I would try to have a way to be grateful.”
“You would not. You’re so dumb, Kit.”
“I would.”
“I’m not really going to kill myself.”
“I don’t care if you do,” Kit said. “Why not, anyhow?”
“It would hurt, that’s why. I couldn’t face one more thing that hurt.”
Kit took off her coat and c
rossed the room to hug me.
“You don’t really hate yourself, Sissy. You hate everybody else. People who commit suicide hate themselves, but they hate other people too. If you were like that, you’d sit inside all day and watch talk shows and eat taco chips and weigh three hundred pounds and wear Hawaiian shirts with sweatpants.”
We laughed.
Kit came to see me the day after I found out about Neal and Joey; Marie had canceled the party. Kit brought magazines and newspapers. She talked about the news of the world, which was not Kit’s style—despite the things about her that I cherished, she could obsess all day about a zit or different brands of mineral-based foundation. Today, Kit didn’t even mention the name of her latest beloved, the one I already called Evan-Until-Easter. He was handsome in a hotel-bar kind of way, employed in some job that depended heavily on commissions, played the guitar and wrote his own songs, was almost-but-not-quite divorced or still lived with his parents. She had envied Joey and me.
I didn’t ask how she felt now.
After a few minutes spent on judicial misconduct and typhoons, she said, “Sissy, get up,” with all the spirit of the Iowa Hawkeye cheerleader she had been. “They say it takes twenty-one days to get over a guy. I read it. Get a calendar. This is day one.”
“This is day zero.”
“Sicily, you’ve come too far now to let this be the thing that destroys you. Do you really want to give Joe LaVoy that much … power over you? Especially now that you know he was faking it?”
“He wasn’t faking it.”
“Okay. Why isn’t he here now, then? Why did he give up so easy? Was it really loyalty to his retard best friend?”
Why wasn’t Joe here?
Why had he given up after a five-minute sob session?
He had called. He’d left dozens of messages last night and today. But he hadn’t come back to face me. Even the right to refuse was denied me: I would not have the satisfaction of spurning torrents of apology. Was this some backhand liberation for Joey? If Joey didn’t really love me—if he hadn’t grown to love me with time—what else about my life was a lie? I wanted to smack Kit. How big a calendar did you need for convincing yourself to give up on the guy you loved, your friend for life, who stood by and let his best friend kill your father—and still liked his friend? Ten times that day, I’d thought of calling Joey, constructing sentences with blanks he could fill in to win me back. I didn’t know until after you and I ___________. I had to hang out with Neal because he ___________. I thought I was gay but now I’ve changed and that’s why I _________. I would have accepted anything.
“Maybe you weren’t meant to be with him anyhow, Sicily,” Kit said. “There has to be something better for you than a guy like that.”
“Are you kidding? For me? That’s so entirely possible. I have my pick of guys.”
“Why aren’t you crying, Sicily? Why aren’t you crying over the love of your life?”
“I don’t cry,” I said. “I just don’t. Some things are too miserable to cry over.”
I tried to remember the last time I had cried.
Everyone except Mom and me and the rest of the family, as well as Dad’s brother-and-sister firefighters, was gone. Father Behan was going to say a prayer of some kind. But first, Bill Hoyer, whose father owned the funeral home, set huge pillar candles at either end of the blue steel coffin that sat on a raised flag-draped bier. Over the foot was a blanket of white roses and a banner that read, in gilt, Daddy. Behind the casket were three massive wreaths of red and white roses in the shape of the Maltese cross, the symbol of firefighters. Bill Hoyer gave each of the adults a taper to light from the big pillar candles, and as the flames began to flicker I could feel my heart seizing up. My younger cousins—Uncle Denny’s two boys and Matthew, Uncle John’s son—stood with their hands clasped identically behind their backs, snatching glances at me now that they finally had the excuse to really look. Dad’s parents stepped up first and held their tapers out to the big pillar candles, and then I was as surprised as anyone else by the gurgling, screeching sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once, and it took a long time, maybe a second—which can be a long time—to realize they were coming from me. For the first time, I witnessed the looks of numb disgust that would become so familiar to me over the years.
“It’s those goddamned candles,” Aunt Marie finally said. “They must be three feet tall. She’s terrified.”
And I was. I was so galvanized by panic, I tried to get up and run. I saw my father ambushed again by fire, as he had been ambushed before, and I knew that the fire would take the rest of what it hadn’t gotten the first time. I ran and cried until I was literally sick in the washroom, just before Renee and Schmitty hustled me into the car that Grandpa Ernest had driven to the front of the funeral home so I would not have to struggle through the cold.
Afterward, I would never lose control to that degree again. Hysteria has its own majesty. You can no more control it than you can change the direction of the wind through force of will. Anger, at least, was something you did, not something that was done to you. I could turn the volume up or down as I wished. It could not seize and pummel me.
So, although I regularly got angry, it had been twelve years since I had cried. I pointed this out to Kit and asked her, “What do you think about that?”
“That you haven’t or that you aren’t crying now?”
“Now.” I never asked for advice. It felt ridiculous. “Do you think I sensed, like … something missing?” I didn’t add what I really wondered: Was something missing in the relationship or missing in me?
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“But we were happy. As happy as anybody. We never had a fight. Not one fight. That’s bull—that’s crap,” I said. “The thing is, I’m just thinking this because I don’t have any basis for comparison. There was Joey my playmate and then Joey my friend and then Joey my boyfriend.”
Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, I sat up. Even that small rearrangement of balance dizzied me.
I could not remember a time when I didn’t know Joey.
The LaVoys lived on the corner, at the end of the block, in a big yellow bungalow that reminded me of a circus tent. My parents went bowling—who went bowling?—with Mr. and Mrs. LaVoy. Joey and Paulie and I and Jimmy Panico and Mary Ellen Dowd played baseball together, in the way every kid on the West Side did—one long game that began after lunch on a summer day and paused when we couldn’t see the ball anymore, ending only when we went back to school. We kept score; the scores were in the thousands by the time the summer was over. Four of us smoked cigarettes behind the hedge at Bernard Lobby’s house. Paulie LaVoy threw up. Joey beat me by one vote for vice president of the seventh grade. The summer after the fire, someone told me that Joe bloodied Jimmy Panico’s nose for calling me “Mummy Girl.” We’d been friends all through school. When I was a sophomore, he helped me pass algebra (despite forty absences). In senior year, he climbed into my personal pantheon by asking me to the prom. At the advanced age of eighteen, it was my first date, and also my first kiss—a weird, awkward kiss I carried for three years in my pocket, through all the unanswered yearnings of a new woman, until Joey came back from the service and we met again in college.
Joey.
Strong and cute. Opener of doors, and not just car doors. Holder of coats: not only a gesture of manly courtesy but to shelter me. I wanted Joey back, no matter what, now, ferociously. I could not get up. I could not consider the massive heft of the effort of starting over. I wanted the children we would have and the vacations we would take and the wine club we would join with friends from our neighborhood. If I had never known, I could have been happy. To accept him now would be to betray my dad. Or would it? Everyone has secrets. Not the mortal kind, but everyone has done something no one, not even a husband or wife, can ever know about. Joey was not only beautiful and caring—and good. He was proof. Proof that I had overcome. I didn’t question Joey any more than I questioned the noo
n and six o’clock whistles in Chester—even though hardly anyone broke for lunch at noon anymore and hardly anyone got off work at six. I didn’t believe, but there was no life I could imagine without the dry tot of the communion wafer on my tongue. Not everything had to fit or make sense. Joe didn’t want much from me, and … did I have much to give? If he was marrying me because he owed me a life, was I was marrying him because he was my only chance to have one? And was that wrong?
“I’m going to take a bath,” I said. Wobbling, I made my way to the tub. Kit sat on the closed toilet seat as I climbed into the steaming water. She got up and poured shampoo into her hand and rubbed it on my scalp.
“Don’t,” I said. Hurt and stunned, Kit stepped back.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m sorry, sweetie. I mean, someone’s always doing something for me. I don’t even know how to drive.”
“Maybe there’s a message for you in all this,” said Kit. “Maybe this happened for a reason.”
When something horrific befalls you, people say that everything happens for a reason. I used to hate it when people said this. It wasn’t really to comfort you. It was stupid, cowardly, whistling in the dark. The fear of a fate without pattern. Now I longed to believe it. I understood the motive behind the desire to give structure to something that refused to fill a mold. I was working to grasp a thought, and it was like trying to use chopsticks to raise a grain of rice at the bottom of a pool of water. I thought of my aunt—not Marie but Christina.
There had been a family picnic one summer at my uncle Al’s. Kit came up with Marie and me for the weekend. How old were we? Nineteen? Twenty? I’d asked Marie why only one Caruso girl ever got married, knowing full well that Aunt Christina would pipe up and point out that, as a Franciscan nun, she was indeed married—to Jesus.
“I wonder what Jesus is like in bed,” Kit said. Grandma Caruso gasped, and Aunt Marie made throat-cutting motions. But Christina hadn’t even heard us, since she rarely paid attention to any topic she hadn’t raised.