The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (18 page)

We drove home to Maryland the next morning. Mother helped me write a thank-you note to Nana and Ned for the fun time they showed us. I tried to draw a likeness of Jed on the reverse side of the card, to thank him. I tried to make him look like he was barking, but the way I rounded his lips made him look more like he was singing.

School began again. Second grade was easy. I went to fourth grade twice a day for math and reading. Our soccer team went five and two. Timmy decided not to play. Father would not consider my quitting the team. I looked at Lexi less and less but smelled her just as much. I did not practice transubstantiation. My second tour of provisional, provisional time went well. For some reason, it was Father Larrie who sat behind the desk now each Sunday when he came to ask the stupid questions. I answered well. Father Larrie smiled at me sometimes. Once or twice, I even thought he would have smiled if I had made a mistake.

Mother’s belly swelled as the months went by.

Jeanine’s second birthday came. Cassidy came to the party we had for her, the day after Thanksgiving that year, with eyes whiskey-wet at noon. When we sang her “Happy Birthday,” he barely lifted his voice. The rest of that week he only read to us once. His face was like the ocean running out from the sand, roiled and angry and rough.

C
assidy continued to drink heavily. Some evenings he called on the phone to tell Father he wasn’t coming for supper or to read books with me or BJ, as Jeanine was being called. But even on those nights he’d sometimes arrive, haggard and stumbling, coming like a blind man into the kitchen and banging his hip against the Formica table as he tried to negotiate his way to his chair. Then he listed left or right on the rough whiskey sea inside of him and mumbled on about his bad day at work, the heartless weight of Christmas mail, the needless parcels needing to be weighed and postaged, the dull folks buying ten-dollar money orders to give to their kids as presents. This last gripe he repeated again and again. He was moved, temporarily, to the loading docks. He refused the coffee Mother offered and the food we were eating. Sometimes Father tried to convince him to sleep the night on the living room couch rather than drive home. If Father threw a bottle of rye into the bargain, he stayed. On those occasions, I saw him in the morning before I went off to school or out to play. Usually, there was a tumbler of whiskey in his hand even at that early hour. His eyes were red and tinged with yellow in the whites like a poorly beaten egg, and his breath was wormy. His breath those mornings when I went to hug him was the primordial air itself, the mushroomy wick of what tunnels below.

“You okay?” I signed each time. Yes, he’d answer flatly, sipping his rye. Finally, three days before Christmas, he said nothing in reply to my question. Instead he broke into tears. Whether he did it purposefully or not, I don’t know, but the way his left hand went to his wet eyes and slid down his cheeks seemed to be the sign for “sad” or “sorrowful.” The death in his breath blew at me. The whiskey in his right hand trembled.

“Joey?” I mouthed slowly. I knew it was. I had heard Mother and Father talking about it over the past few days. He looked at me with startle in his face. “Sorry,” I signed, rubbing my fisted right hand in circles over my heart. I placed my hand on his wrist. He went to take another sip but I held on tight. He jerked his hand free and began to say something. His face seemed full of pained apology, but he fell into silence. There was comfort in that silence, it seemed, like the comfort of the confessional’s private whisper that I’d practiced twice in CCD class. He blankly looked past me, through me and past me, and signed, “Joey and more.” The fingertips of both hands banged together twice, and then twice again. More and more. Some whiskey dripped onto the tabletop, forming the number eight as two pools merged. I remembered the gravestones with the identical dates of death. Today was the anniversary.

“Joey and Rose Mary?” I finger-spelled. “Twenty years today?” He went to drink and caught himself. He brought the tumbler back down on the top of the coffee table with such force the loud
bang
made me turn my head to see if he’d shattered the glass.

“That,” he signed, “that and more.” There was nothing but hopeless, vacant space in his eyes. And our resorting to unspoken communication, to sign, seemed to expand that void to engulf us both. I didn’t have the heart to brush my right index finger down over my left palm to ask the question, “What?” Instead, I put my arms around his neck, locked my fingers, and pressed him as hard as I could. I felt his torso lean to the table and his arm reach for his drink. “You will be okay,” I said into his ear as perfectly as I could. He put his glass down, gently this time, and tied me up tight with his arms. He kissed my cheek and cried. kissed it again and was quiet.

He held me like that until Mother came in with BJ and sent me and her back to my room to play. “You will be okay” were the last words I said to him. He had gone home half an hour later when I came downstairs, and I was dead only twelve hours after that.

Here’s how I died: My voice, my imperfect voice, died first. My throat grew so tight, so constricted, I had no air for my dysmorphic words. My breath was blocky and thick, so difficult to move beyond the beefy tissues of my throat, I spent every joule of my body’s energy pushing the frozen bellows of my chest. Soon my arms grew limp, too weak and too tired to form a sentence, a phrase, a word in sign. I sat in my chair in my room hearing at first the dull hiss of the cool-mist vaporizer Mother shot my way. My leaden arms drooped at my sides like the stems of a dying plant. My mouth hung open. My chest caved with each impossibly stridulous breath until I thought I felt my breastbone kiss my spinal column. My ears, my drilled ears, died next. At ten that night the hiss softened to a gentle breeze like the one that ruffled the canopy of the trees in high summer. And that sound slowly waned to become the longingly hollow, caressing susurrus of a seashell. The sound was familiar and frightening. Mother came in with a cool cloth and spoke. I heard nothing. I saw her lips move a little but nothing seemed to drop to my eyes, my lips. I remember the look of panic on her face. The sound of the sea in the shell ceased. A last difficult breath smelled richly of fungus and damp.

That’s how I died: as silently as I was born.

*

Then I was here* and the movies began.

It is not a good thing to have here* in heaven, the last memory of your mother’s face full of panic over your death.

I see the death, I see the panic, and it seems I know nothing of my existence, have learned nothing from the exercise of the tapes. The tapes are as deaf and dead as my ears in the womb, in the tomb. They teach me nothing. I am no Isaiah, no Ezekiel, no Moses. Only a girl with no thumbs whose life was bookended by silence and despair. The meaning of my life? It is not to be found in the tapes.

I see the panic on my mother’s face. Mercifully, I cannot hear her screams.

PART TWO

ACT OF GOD

T
here is a police investigation of my death. It is a routine procedure when a child is brought in dead by the rescue squad. I was dead for six minutes when they arrived at my room. Father’s attempt to give me rescue breathing was futile. He knelt by my bedside with his dry lips on mine and blew as forcibly as he could while Mother called 911 and, later, did chest compressions, just as she had learned in her Red Cross CPR class. My blood surged under the frantic weight of her palms, but it did no good. My blood was brown by then, brown and thick as sludge. My upper airway was obstructed and none of Father’s furious air went beyond my vocal cords.

The EMS techs arrive. One of them manages to insert an endotracheal tube down my airway, which relieves the obstruction, but by then it is much, much too late. Five minutes, to be exact. Cassidy could make you cry if he sang that long, and five minutes without oxygen makes you dead. They try to restart my heart. They push drugs down the tube into my lungs and into a vein in my arm. It does no good.

Mother stands near my bedside staring blankly during this time, her frozen gaze directed to the dark outside my window. Her face registers no emotion but shock. It seems to darken, to take on the color of the night. Her mouth is open a fraction of an inch and, if I look closely, I can see my own fixed the same. It is the tube that parts my lips; shock, my mother’s. Neither of us blinks. Our eyes are offered to the dry air of the house, our vision to the advance of the night. Her hair is swirled wildly as if a great wind had coursed through the room, whipping her long strands where it will. But it is from the position she held those eleven minutes working over my breastbone with the palm of her hand. My hair is too short to be disheveled.

Father creeps closer to the working men as their nine minutes of effort spin out. It is not so much shock on his face as bewilderment. His slow encroachment on their space seems like the action of a curious child who wants to understand what he is viewing from too far a distance. Just another few feet closer and it will all make sense, he says with his baby steps.

The men are still breathing for me with their black Ambu bags and banging on my chest and squirting drugs into my vein as they load me onto a stretcher and bring me downstairs to their truck for the ride to the emergency room. Mother and Father follow behind in their car. Mrs. Sampson from across the street stays with BJ, who sleeps through it all.

In the emergency room, my hearing aids gleam under the intense light from the overhead lamp as Dr. Arthur Jamison pounds my chest with the fury of an angry man in a brawl. Another doctor shines a light into my eyes and shakes his head. “Fixed and dilated,” he says.

Jamison gives my breastbone a last frustrated shove and announces, “Ten forty-two. Let’s call it.” A nurse closes off the IV drip; a respiratory therapist detaches the Ambu bag from the tube in my airway. I am officially dead.

But even in death I still fascinate my doctors. Jamison places both gloved hands on my head and rolls it from side to side so he can inspect my ears and their hardware. “Huh,” he manages. He reaches down and takes my right hand into his. He squeezes the thumbless spot near my index finger and moves his hand up the length of my forearm, pressing every inch or so for the missing bone. “Huh,” he says again. He pulls his gloves off with a snap that sounds like the whip of the animal trainer at the circus. He leaves to find my parents.

I am surprised Mother and Father don’t cry right away in the emergency room when Jamison tells them I am dead. Perhaps their immediate tears would have buffered their anger over what was to happen. Perhaps, if they had fallen into each other’s arms and sobbed in pain, they would have spent themselves emotionally too much to grow angry over what was to come. There are only a few seconds between the doctor’s terrible declarative sentence, “I’m sorry, Jessica didn’t make it,” and the next about the police needing to clarify the events of the evening. Father, in those few moments, does put his arm around Mother and tugs her closer. And Mother does take a deep breath and pauses. Is this the advance of tears? Perhaps. And perhaps if Dr. Jamison had waited just a moment longer they would have come, the tears. Was he so busy he could not wait? Was he, at thirty-six, already so jaded about the death of a child? Or was it the death of
this
particular child, this two-“huh” deformed child, that propelled him through the event so tranquilly? Nothing on the tape clarifies this for me.

He says, “I’m sorry, Jessica didn’t make it . . . and the police have some questions for you both. We’ll let you see her first.”

It’s then, just there and then, that both their faces look as if they’d been stabbed through the heart.

“The police? Why the police?” a wounded Father asks. “What for?”

“They’ll explain it all. Everything. Just answer them honestly.”

Mother takes a half step forward. “What is the. . . ,” she starts, but Jamison is already turning away, leading them to my cubicle, my corpse. Number Sixteen, the cubicle, a number with no particular resonance.

“The nurses did their best to clean her up. But we have to leave the tubes and IVs in place until after the autopsy.”

The next nine minutes of the tape break my heart. Me on the gurney. Mother and Father holding on to me, embracing me, sobbing over me. The pain pouring out of them, and there is nothing I can do. Minute after minute, their arms unfelt around my shoulders, my thighs. Their faces buried in my chest, ruined breaths puffing my pajama top numbly until it is too wet to rise again. Mother kissing the tips of my ears so softly, that even if I were alive I would have to strain to feel it.

But the seed of anger, of recrimination, had been planted before they spilled their sorrow. The seed of anger scattered in the ripped furrows of their souls. And more seed to come. What is that parable about the kingdom of God and the sower of seed? Yes, more to come, sadly, even with kind Dr. Burke.

The nine minutes are mercifully finished. Burke walks in. He zips open the curtain and stands there looking uncertain and unfit for the job at hand. It is midnight. Night advances like the Kingdom coming. “Kate . . . Ford. I am so sorry,” he begins. They look up with faces flushed and streaked with tears, their hands unable to lift from my body to be shaken in grief.

“How . . . how could she die so quickly? It was just a cold this afternoon. A runny nose, hardly even a sore throat. What . . . how is this possible?” Mother doesn’t know what else to say. She is just now leaving her disbelief that the events of the past hour were real, that her child is dead. She can barely take her eyes off the plastic tube taped to the left corner of my mouth half convinced I will awaken and pull it out.

She steals a quick look at Burke. He shrugs his shoulders and looks away. At the first viewing of the tape I missed the significance of Burke’s unstudied reply: “I wish you had called. Maybe . . .” That’s all he says, “I wish you had called. Maybe . . .” But now I see how those words strike like darts at my parents, work their way deep into their too-fertile memories, waiting the drenching rain of vengeance.