Jacquelyn Mitchard - Second Nature: A Love Story

Second Nature is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons , living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2011 by Jacquelyn Mitchard

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Mitchard, Jacquelyn.
Second nature: a love story/by Jacquelyn Mitchard.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-679-64396-8
I. Title.
PS3563.I7358S43 2011
813.54dc22 2010048497

www.atrandom.com

Jacket design: Shasti OLeary Soudant
Jacket photograph: Lisa Metzger/Getty Images

v3.1

Contents

God has given you one face, And you make yourself another. W ILLIAM S HAKESPEARE

Authors Note

Second Nature takes place in a possible but imagined future, in a Chicago that is more a product of my memories than a city that is on any actual grid. The events, procedures, and outcomes may one day be possible but now exist only on these pages. All the errors of fact or supposition are my own.

CHAPTER ONE

T his is what I know.

My father stood in the center aisle of the Lady Chapelthat hunched, hexed little building he hated as a father and as a firefighterunder the lowering band of sooty, mean-colored smoke, and he looked right at me. He understood what had happened to me, and although he couldnt tell me then, he was still happy. He thought I was one of the lucky ones.

I was.

This is what I remember.

There were fifty of us in the Lady Chapel that late afternoon, December 20, the shortest day of the year. Inside, in winter, it was always about as warm and bright as an igloo. Wearing our coats and mittens as we sang O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, we could see our breath. As a place of worship and a historic structure, the Lady Chapel was exempt from all the building codes and conformed to none of them, which was why Dad despised the very sight of it. The mahogany pews, each with a different intricate carving, massaged for seventy years with layers of flammable polish, were nothing but tinder to him. Raw and reckless new structures, when they burned, were flimsy as tents. But the old chapel had stone walls a foot thick and had been reroofed so many times that Dad said that it could have withstood a phosphorus bomb.

It didnt take anything as potent as a bomb, only a small candle in a small draft.

That day, just as the choirmaster, Mr. Treadwell, brought together his fingertips and held them up to his delicate cheekbones, twinkly as a ballerina (looking back, I think Mr. Treadwell was twinkly all the time, what my mother called a confirmed bachelor), first one and then the other Christmas tree on either side of the altar went up like ten-foot sparklers. A few kids simply stood, flat-footed and amazed, as though the pyrotechnics were some sort of holiday surprise.

I knew better than to think that, even for a second.

It was only luck that I was in the last row of the choirs three-tiered semicircle, because I was taller and older, in eighth grade. I turned to run straight back, but the fire was more agile, leaping voraciously ahead of me along the strip of gold carpet between the seats. The Advent banners dodged and gyrated above my head like burning bats. I held my new purse, a birthday present from my Grandmother Caruso, up to my face, instinctively protecting my lungs. Then, I turned around to face the fire on the altar, which went against all instincts, except for someone raised in my fathers catechism: Keep cool. Keep making choices. These rules were not second nature to me by then. They were first nature. I felt my way along the communion rail and then turned left at the wall, feeling my way along under the windows until I saw what I knew what must be the doora ghostly flapping of white light that looked like a giant moth. This, I knew, must be the door opening and closing. When I got there, I reached for the big bronze curve of the door handle. I knew it must be there. But my fingers were clumsy in my leather mitten, and when I stopped to pull it off, other kids rear-ended me, knocking me sideways. I jumped up and grabbed for the door handle again, trying to ignore the escalating chorale of high-pitched screaming. Was there a moment of stupor? It could only have been a moment. The next thing I recall clearly was standing up, looking over my shoulder at the oxygen mask on the face of my fathers rookie, Renee Mayerling, a grown woman who was not as tall as I was already at thirteen. She shoved me along with the exigent roughness of a rescuer, with her other hand dragging Libby Van de Water. Suddenly I was out, tripping and falling on my face in a foot of fresh, burning-cold snow, which probably saved my eyes. As soon as I could, I lifted my head to look around me. There was my friend Joey LaVoy and his brother, Paulie, who were not in the choir but had come running over from the school, yelling, Help them! Help them! Thats when I really saw the other kids from the choir everywhere around me, some lying still as sleeping bags, closed and pale, others crawling half naked, because their clothes had caught fire. There were a few I didnt even recognize, because somehow their arms and faces were swollen as brown as the surface of caramel apples. Renee came out and I looked for my dad, who would have been right behind ReneeI just sensed him being right behind her. And then he wasnt. Instead, he stayed inside the door, while Renee crouched low, holding out her arms to Dad. I understood then. I should have known it, and somehow I should have done something, like kicked away that big doorstop. One side of the huge arched door was always kept locked, by order of the principal, Sister Ignatius Bell, so that students could enter and leave the Lady Chapel in single file only. But kids hadnt run for their lives in single file. In the smutchy darkness, they collided with the locked side and fell, and the kids behind them tripped and fell, and pretty soon the ones on the bottom must have been pinned down and the others kept on coming.

I turned over in the snow and scooted to a sitting position, then struggled to my knees. I could still see over my fathers head, all the way to the altar. Sweet Mr. Treadwell must have waited until he could shepherd out all of the kids he could see. He stood on the altar like a living crucifix, his arms out and his head thrown back, the two flaming fir trees on either side of him, their skinny trunks gyrating like ink lines in the deep dirty yellow flames and then vanishing altogether. I cared about Mr. Treadwell but knew Dad would not be going back for him. It was already too late for my teacher. At last, Dad did come out and I exhaled a prayer of relief. The fire was taking on force: The whole chapel seemed to shudder, like a witchs oven in a cartoon, something the witch could command to do evil if she wanted to. But Dad was out. I could see my fathers gray eyes behind his goggles, and it was almost as though he spoke to me: Sicily. Im okay! I promise! Would I let you down? Im the Cap. Im the Daddy . Whatever else was happening around him, he reassured me. He never understated the dangers of his job, but he called them manageable, with common sense. He made me thinklong past the age when most kids stop believing in their fathers as mythic beingsthat he was the barrier evil could not cross.

Dad must have heard a sound. He jerked and looked over his shoulder.

I think I saw skinny little Danny Furtosa at the same time my father did. Danny was standing about halfway between the door and the altar, with his hair on fire. This flat line of muddy smoke had begun to descend from the chapels ceiling, layering down atop the glow of the firesomething I had seen only on my dads five million or so accident-scene videos, which I was never supposed to watch but, of course, did. I knew that my dad was measuring that bank of smoke against the distance between him and Danny and hoping he had five seconds, which I knew even then could be plenty of time. And still, I tried to scream for him not to go. My mouth didnt open. My neck didnt lurch, the way it does when you gather your vocal chords to shout. I thought it was just smokeand fearclogging my voice, shoving it down.

Next page