The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (14 page)

“AceyDee,” I said over his voice. He startled so much the spatula in his hand whacked the coffee pot.

“Jess, lady, you’ve got yourself a little sister!” His eyes were bright against the gray stubble on his face, like twin moons over an old mowed field. “Came out in the middle of the night.” He waved the spatula over his head like a flag and smiled as big a smile as I’d ever seen him make. “Your daddy had me come over ta sit for you when . . . when the baby started comin’, at around midnight. Little Jeanine was born at four thirteen. And everyone’s in fine form, your mom, Jeanine, the old man himself. I talked ta your daddy an hour ago. We’re goin’ over there after we eat and do the dishes.” He turned to worry the frying bacon. I turned and went back to my room. I woke the clown and complained.

The route to the hospital had become as familiar to me as the menagerie on my ceiling during the day and the constellations at night. There were eleven turns, three rights, then reciprocating left-rights, until we entered the parking garage. Then it was unpredictable how many additional turns up ramps we would need to make. But we had done the ride so many times that I knew it by heart. In the year before Jeanine was born, as we drove along our neighborhood streets, I’d count the number of empty garbage cans on sidewalks on Wednesday mornings or raised mailbox flags the other days of the week, and multiply that number by the sum of F
OR
S
ALE
signs, hoping one day to arrive at four hundred ninety, which was the magic number I’d learned in my Christian Doctrine classes, that “seventy times seven” number, but never even got close. . . . But that day, that trip with Cassidy to meet my new sister, I could not concentrate on anything. I tried counting. There was actually little challenge to it—Thanksgiving Day had neither mail nor garbage service, and hardly anybody tried to sell a house this close to the holidays. I tried keeping tally of it all but quickly lost interest. There was something deep inside my brain trying unsuccessfully to come to the surface. After the second turn, my nose lost the sweet scent of spilled whiskey and the talcum of cigar ash that incensed Cassidy’s car. The thumping Irish music he played melted away in my ears until only the high notes flying off the fiddles found their way in, and on Wisconsin Avenue even these receded to silence. The clear fall sunlight had winterized, crystallized in the late November sky. It seemed to seep through a gray veil of high clouds and to sift down onto the sidewalks and streets like a dull dusting of lead.

I sat next to Cassidy, seeing nothing, as he drove down the empty boulevard. Seeing nothing, hearing nothing, smelling nothing, but somehow feeling hot in the brain, simmering some emotion, some thought, like a stew that needed time to cook.

We parked on the street. He held my hand during the ten-minute walk to the elevators. He knelt down on one knee after I’d pressed the Up button, and he smoothed my hair. He straightened the collar of my blouse. He smiled and said, “You’re the big sister now, girlie.” His face was shaved smooth. I wanted to ask him if it would be possible for Mother and Father to leave Jeanine at the hospital. We could visit her when we came down for my appointments. But the doors opened and two nurses began to walk out. He stood and we got on.

Mother sat in bed and Father in a bedside chair. Both had that look about them I’d seen before, usually at the end of long, late parties at our house when they seemed slightly stooped at the shoulders, slightly wan around the eyes from too much effort, too much talk. Jeanine lay asleep in a wheeled bassinet next to the bed, the very definition of pink, from the glowing top of her bald head to the tightly wrapped pink blanket that encased her to her toes. I stood in the doorway a second after Cassidy entered.

“Jess! Joe!” Father boomed. His voice sounded more to me like a warning to duck or jump out of harm’s way than a greeting. But then he clapped his hands, stood, and ran to scoop me up and hug me to his chest. He swung me left and he swung me right in his embrace. I never before understood how strong he was or how much joy could erupt from his quiet heart. Had I been a bell in his arms, I would have clanged loud enough for Easter Sunday and Christmas combined.

He carried me to Mother, who took me next to her in bed. She put her hand on my head and kissed me twice. “Jess,” she said amid the noise of Father and Cassidy jabbering over the baby, “this is Jeanine, your new sister. She was born in the middle of the night.” She reached out and pulled the bassinet to the side of the bed. “She weighed seven pounds, and she’s twenty inches long. Twenty inches, Jess. Tiny, just like you when you were born.” She lifted her up onto her lap. Jeanine
was
little. She had a little fat face and two tiny ears. Her nose was squashed so much I could hardly see her nostrils. Her eyes were closed. Each upper lid was darkened by plum-colored tattoos, and there was a smear of glistening ointment along the lid margins. I was certain at first glance the Assembler had forgotten to attach a neck between her round head and her chest. Her face seemed to end in a plug of fat below her chin. It would be okay with me if she had no neck, I thought. The rest of her lay cloaked in pink mystery.

“Would you like to hold her for a bit?” Mother asked. I swallowed and said yes. Father and Cassidy watched at the bedside. Mother molded my left arm into a crook to support the neckless head and placed Jeanine against me. The weight of her, all seven pounds, felt good, like I was holding something precious to me that had been lost and now had been found. I could feel the heat of her body come through her blanket, and the rapid, shallow excursions of her breathing reminded me of holding rabbit pups at the pet shops where I’d go with Cassidy. Each quick flick of breath was as if she was excited about life, or scared, just like the rabbits.

“Don’t be scared, baby,” I said to her. “Chewww’ll ah-bya okay.” I touched the top of her head. The bones were firm and bumpy under the skin. My index finger rode the ridges softly up and down. Her head was nothing like Jeremy’s from preschool. All at once she opened her eyes and cried. It scared me so much my whole body spasmed. In response, her little body tried to jerk inside her swaddling blanket. Jeanine opened her mouth wide and wailed, and she arched her back. At the full extent of this stretch, I saw her neck. It wasn’t much of a neck—short and square and squat—but it was, unmistakably, a neck. My eyes fell into the pink cave of her mouth. There were no teeth, just the smooth, even ridges of her gums. The Assembler, apparently, had remembered. “I’ll take her now, Jess,” Mother said. I moved her to Mother’s proffered arms. She rocked her softly and said, “Baby, baby, little bitty baby, shh-shh-shh.”

Father helped me off the bed. He talked with Cassidy a while, and then Cassidy asked Mother some questions. He all of a sudden had an unlit cigar in his mouth. He chomped its end tight between his teeth so the length of the cigar rose to the ceiling at an angle to his face. I couldn’t pay attention to what they were saying. Mother had rolled Jeanine into Cassidy’s arm, and I was afraid he might drop her. His face lit up in wide smiles. His eyes got as big as a cow’s. “You did good, Kate,” he said. Then, looking at me, he added, “Again.” He hefted Jeanine and rocked her a little and touched the tip of her flattened nose. “Looks like you been in a brawl, girlie. You gonna be a scrapper like your sister? Eh?” He winked at me and then stared at Jeanine. I just stood there next to the bassinet trying to sound out her name as it was spelled on the card taped to the plastic sidewall. She had a number in her name. I was glad for her. But no amount of reassembly could arrive at four hundred ninety. The best I could do watching Cassidy beam like a shaft of light in a dim room was the number five hundred twenty-two. Multiply nine by the sum of the letters in her name—fifty-eight—and that was what you got because it was fifty-eight less than five hundred eighty. Not four ninety, but close.

A nurse came in to take Jeanine’s vital signs. I watched her blow up the cuff of the blood pressure machine. “Not too hard,” I told her.

“What, hon?” the lady asked, crouched over the bassinet with her head turned to the side to see me.

“Ana too hahr,” I repeated.

The nurse looked at Mother and shrugged. I flexed the first two fingers of each hand and struck the knuckles against each other in an up-and-down motion. “Hahr,” I repeated.

“She’ll be gentle,” Mother said with a reassuring nod.

Jeanine started to cry again. When the nurse was finished I walked to the bassinet and pushed it back and forth, counting aloud with each to-and-fro motion. The cries quieted at number fourteen and ceased entirely at thirty-five. I went on to seventy, because she was seven pounds. “You’re my best little helper,” Mother said with her hand lightly resting on the opposite rail of Jeanine’s bassinet. “Thank you,” she added when my arms were finally at rest.

“Can you come home now, Mama?” I asked.

“Not tonight. But tomorrow morning. And today when you get home, there will be a surprise for you. And Daddy will be home tonight. Just wait.” She put her arms out for me and I went to her. She squeezed me almost as tightly as Father had. Her neck smelled sweet with soap and sweat. “You need to go with Cassidy now to find out what the surprise is.”

I replay that scene of first meeting Jeanine very often now*. I find it interesting that what I did just before leaving—so important to me at the time to answer the question bubbling below the surface of my consciousness—I would completely forget once I’d done it, and that I’d go to my death without the slightest residue of its memory. But I watch it now*. I stick my hand down the side of Jeanine’s swaddling blanket and extract her arm. It is solid, fat, heavy as a branch. She cries when I get it out. Not a cry of pain, but surprise. I hold her by the wrist and gently pry open the hand. I touch each finger, one by one, beginning with her pinky and go to four. When at last I reach the thumb, I hold it loosely for a moment. It is no bigger than the stub of a crayon. “Five,” I announce. Then I kiss it. I am surprised by this each time it plays.

Surprising, too, is the look on Mother’s face. There is patience in it, and a weary concern, and, yes, around the mouth, the slightly curled hint of a smile, as if she had anticipated my doing this, had wanted me to do it, and was pleased I had taken the initiative to answer the unasked question of Jeanine’s assembly for myself.

I put her arm down and look at Mother. I point with the index finger of my right hand to my right earlobe and then to my lips. Mother shakes her head and says slowly, so the words hardly needed reforming, “No, not deaf.”

“Jeanine,” I say, but her eyes have closed and her mouth seems to be in a puffed pout. “You’ll be okay.” I know she hears me. I see her eyes flutter. They rove under her plum tattoos like the moles mounding the soil in our yard. It shocks me to think how large those tunnels must be, how much loamy air they must hold.

I was quiet the whole ride home. I kept seeing Jeanine in Mother’s arms and then in Cassidy’s. And their faces full of that awful wonderment adults can express, a mixture of surprise and fear, of recognition and mystery. Cassidy asked me if I wanted McDonald’s for lunch. “Not hungry,” I signed. Well, really I shook my head no and signed “hungry.” You need thumbs to sign “not.”

My surprise at home was Nana and Ned. They were already working on Thanksgiving dinner when we got there. Nana was tying up the legs of a pimply turkey and Ned was peeling potatoes. When he had finished with one it was smooth and white as a carton egg and just as small. The kitchen smelled like cinnamon and sugar from two pies baking in the oven. The radio played music so loud my hearing aids began to whistle and buzz. Ned wiped his hands on a towel and gave me hugs and kisses. Nana was next after she washed her hands at the sink. They talked excitedly with Cassidy, but because of the background noise, I couldn’t follow any of it, and I didn’t watch their lips. The pale puckered skin of the turkey held my stare as I tried to see a pattern in the tiny bumps—a whorl suggested a rose, but I couldn’t be sure. All I heard was the Irish music screeching in my ears. It was sharp and hurt my head. I left the three of them in the kitchen—Ned and Cassidy had a toasting taste of Irish Mist in their hands—and went to my room and lay on my bed.

I told the clown about baby Jeanine and the number in her name. I told him Cassidy liked her and so did Mother and Father. And that she would be coming home tomorrow morning. He could like her too. It was okay. She had thumbs and ears that worked. Everybody could like her, Nana and Ned and even Tina when she came over to play.

The clown’s face didn’t change in the pewter light coming through the window. He stood silent and grave in the etchings of plaster and listened to me repeat, “And she has thumbs and hears. And her heart probably has no holes. And she has a kidney where I don’t. Her blood pressure was normal. They took it and I watched. You can like her, too. The Assembler made her perfect.” I thought, but didn’t say, how the unfairness of that act made the Assembler seem even more imperfect to me than when he forgot my thumbs and ears, botched my kidney and my heart. And I began to wonder why He was like that. Why even what He did well had the spark of the imperfect in it.

A shadow swept across the clown. No wisp of birds this time, but Cassidy opening the door. “I’m goin’ home for a bit, kiddo, ta clean up, but I’ll be back for dinner later on.” He saw my blank stare and the trace of tears in the corners of my eyes. He stood in the doorway, leaning into the room the way he always did before he left after reading to me in the evenings. But now he didn’t leave. Instead, he came to my bedside and knelt on one knee. He took my hand in his and shook his head. His whiskey breath was familiar and reassuring. “Jess,” he said, “I can’t look at Jeanine’s face without seein’ your dark, dark eyes shining. It’s you she reminds me of when you was little. Jess, listen ta me. No baby’s cry’ll take the air in this house without me seein’ your shining black eyes. Nothing will change for the worse for her bein’ around.” He put his hand on my head and made small circles with his palm. “I love you, Jess. Me and your ma and daddy and Nana and Ned. And that’s the God’s honest truth, it is.” He took his hand away and punched my shoulder. “It is.”