The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (20 page)

“Mars bar,”
he mutters going down the steps. Above him, the billions of stars blink in the black night.

At first they sit in the kitchen, each lost in a grief that separates them. Mother rests her head in her left hand. Her face is pale and sagged as dough. She stares at my drawings on the refrigerator door, the poorly rendered boats, jack-o'-lanterns, Jed the dog, and some just-completed Santas, a collage of my last six months of life. Father watches the fruit bowl on the table’s center, an orange on the bottom of the pile showing a blot of blue mold on its shiny skin. As exhausted as they are, neither considers sleep. Mother replays the memory of finding me semiconscious in my chair. She creeps backwards in her mind from there, identifying points where she could have acted differently. The noisy inspirations. The barking cough. The early struggle to get air in. The failure of the mist to produce continued improvement. She sees Dr. Burke standing at the entrance to my death room in the ER. “I wish you had called . . .” She winces at the words. Father watches the mold and thinks he can detect the faint musty fragrance of rot in the air. He remembers the awful failed breaths hours ago. All his force unable to lift my chest a fraction of an inch. All his fatherly force, undone. He closes his eyes. He feels again the fracture of the seal his lips made on mine, the pressure of his expiration so great it breaks the bonds of his kiss-of-life. He feels weaker than ever before in his life. There seems to be no breath left in him.

“I should have called. I should have called Dr. Burke right away when I heard that cough.” Her voice is weak and thin, and she begins to cry again.

“Kate,” starts Father, and then he falters. “Kate,” he says again. “No. We did what anyone would have done. Don’t say that. You’re not to blame for this.” He reaches his arms across the table and takes her hand in his. “Kate,” he says again, trying to penetrate her tears. “Kate, don’t. No.”

She says, “It just all happened so fast. One minute the coughing. The next—”

“Kate, don’t,” but he’s crying now, too. “I should have called. When I needed to get that damned vaporizer, I should have called and asked what else should we do.”

Get up! Get up! I shout to the film as I watch them. Go to her and hold her. Weep together. Weep in the yellow kitchen light together and in the night dark of your bedroom together. You were my parents and you loved me. That is enough. That is all and enough. Weep, embrace each other for that. It would be good, the bath of your tears.

Instead they sit opposite, hands in hands, crying, remembering what Burke said, what they didn’t do. Blaming themselves.

Dawn is slow to come. Night lingers, wanting more. It has an appetite for sorrow. It feeds on guilt.

Outside, the stars take advantage of the dark and shine more brilliantly.

*

I see through my death how much they loved me. Still love me in their separate and sprawling grief. I have returned to that thought as the meaning of it all. Love. Just their love for me. I have seen enough. Please, let the tapes stop. I am ready to let it all go.

I am dead. I am gone. I was loved. What more can there be? Let their love be the end of me.

B
enton Ridgely, the medical examiner for the District of Columbia, finds it easier to dictate as he works on the deceased than to take notes and reduce his findings to words later. A foot-controlled dictation system makes this practical. “The body is that of a seven-year-ten-month-old girl. She is well nourished and well developed. She apparently lacks thumbs. She is dressed in a Snoopy pajama top and bottom. On her left index finger is a paper cigar band. Twin hearing aids sit behind her pinnae, attached by tan wires to her mastoid antra and middle ear clefts. Evidences of medical treatment include an intravenous device in the right antecubital fossa and a five-millimeter endotracheal tube taped to the left corner of her mouth. Her chest is covered by two monitoring pads. There are needle puncture marks in both antecubital fossae and the dorsa of both hands. A urinary catheter exits her urethra.

“The integument demonstrates dependent lividity but is free of scars, bruises, tattoos, and identifying marks. The hyoid bone is intact. Palpation of the cranial vault discloses no edema or depression. There are no palpable fractures in any bone. The thumbs are aplastic. Her teeth are in good repair. Her tongue and palate are intact. The uvula is absent.

“The thoracic cavity is entered using the standard Y incision. The lungs are pink and spongy. The heart is dextro. The pericardium is smooth. It strips easily. It contains five cc’s of clear, serous fluid. The heart is removed in the usual fashion. It is attached to a main pulmonary trunk and aortic arch in the normal position. The aorta is seen dividing into . . .” He lifts his foot from the pedal that activates the recording system. He uses his gloved fingers to push aside the connective tissues and tiny lymph nodes in the very center of my chest, my mediastinum, to obtain better exposure. “What is this, little girl?” he asks me, though he couldn’t know that one day* I would be watching and listening. “This isn’t supposed to be there.” He snaps off his gloves and opens the folder containing the faxed medical record from Sean Burke. He scans the section on “Cardiovascular” to see if he had simply read too quickly before starting the dissection. Then he flips to the section marked “Radiographic Studies.” He reads the reports of my last two echocardiograms. “ASD, VSD. Nothing else,” he whispers to me. He dons new gloves and extends his incision to mid-neck level. He retracts nodes and thymus. He traces the course of the vessel from aortic arch to the base of the neck. “Oh, shit,” he says shaking his head. “Oh, holy shit.”

He removes his gloves again and calls the number for outpatient pediatrics. As soon as the receiver is lifted, he begins to yell, “Don’t put me on hold! Don’t put me on hold! It’s Ridgely in the autopsy room. Get me Sean Burke, immediately. It’s a matter of life and death. Well, it’s at least a matter of death.” That always did the trick with the secretaries. A little humor from the autopsy pit. They always moved pretty quick on that.

“Sean,” he says when the pediatrician is on the line, “you better get down here. And bring Marshall with you. I found out what happened to your little Hilgar girl. You gotta see this.”

I see from their faces the displeasure they experience in visiting the morgue. The room is old and dark, perpetually cold and damp, and were it not for the commingled odors of ethyl alcohol and methane, it could be the crypt of a church.

Eileen Marshall holds a handkerchief across her nose to ward off the odors. Burke, a drained look on his face, stands right next to my head. I can almost feel the warmth of his breath on my face, it seems. But the good news is I can’t feel a thing. Which is really very good because the medical examiner plunges his hands into my chest like he is trying to catch a guppy in a tub of water. “That’s what killed her,” he says with a nod to the structure now perfectly visible amid the ripped tissues of my chest.

“Aberrant right subclavian,” mumbles Eileen Marshall.

“An A for the cardiology lady. Aberrant right subclavian artery. It comes off as a separate branch of the aortic arch,” Ridgely points with the blunt end of his scalpel, “courses up and over here, and winds its way all the way to here, where it dips behind the trachea. It’s as fat as a worm and goes almost up to her throat. No wonder she obstructed her airway with a little croup. Trachea was already fifty, sixty percent compressed from behind.” He lets the information settle. “Trouble is, my friends, it wasn’t detected in life.” He releases the tissues. They barely move toward their original anatomic position. Such is their stubbornness for the truth. “That’s the trouble, my friends.”

Eileen Marshall removes her hand from her face. Her eyes dart left and right before she speaks. Even then she does not look directly at either colleague. Her eyes course from one face to the other, to my chest, to the floor, to the metal-shaded lamp hanging over my table like a hanged man, without fixing on any of it. “I’ll have to review her echoes. I don’t see how something that big could have been missed. . . .” The silence in the room calls for more explanation. She adds, “But, I mean, aberrant subclavians aren’t part of her syndrome. I mean, who could have suspected?” She clears her throat and finishes, “I’ll have to check her echoes.”

Burke’s face is blank enough that it might be pure shock he feels, like Mother’s at my bedside as I died. But the way he sucks in his lower lip and narrows his eyes, the quick lock of those eyes on Ridgley’s, tells me he feels more. Anger. Sadness. Worry. “Let’s do that,” he manages to say.

“Anything else for us?” Eileen Marshall asks. Her arms are folded across her chest, warm and full of blood’s hot life. My chest is hollow as a cave now, and just as cold.

Ridgely thinks for a moment before answering. “Yeah. She was wearing a ring on her finger. From a cigar. Now, who does that anymore? All those young kids with real gold rings and this one, paper. How do you figure?”

“Any more
medical
findings, I meant,” she says peevishly.

“Nope. Just that,” and he points with his finger at the worm from my heart. “Full written report in about two weeks, after we get the toxicology and histopathology back.”

*

For reasons He won’t share with me, the Assembler now* presses me to view the Cassidy tapes. The ones from before I died were so difficult to sit through. And the ones from after, well, I’m just not sure how they will make me feel. I think He wants me to see something there, something that will revive my interest in piecing the parts of my life together so it makes sense in a bigger way. Something that will take me further than what has become my belief since I viewed my death and its immediate aftereffects. That my life made sense ultimately and simply because I lived and was loved. I lived a life of happiness and sorrow, of acceptance and rejection, of fullness and incompletion, and of forgiveness, all wrapped in the love of my family.

When I tell Him I want to stop this exercise, this Cinema Purgatorio, He says to me again, “What has been hidden from the wise has been revealed to the blind!”

But not now*, not yet*. There are the Cassidy tapes to watch. When I finally agree to them, He smiles and replies, “Ah, yes, I’ll get them. They’re in the basement.” It seems to take forever* before He returns with them. Perhaps He thinks I need the time to ponder? Or has He lost His way? “Make straight, make straight the way of the Lord!” I want to joke. But I don’t. His feelings are easy to bruise.

Cassidy is off the morning before my death, just as he had been each December twenty-second for the preceding twenty-one years working for the postal service. Mother sent him home from our house with a mug-full of coffee. He laces it with glove-box whiskey in our driveway, again at the first stop sign down the street, and again when he parks in front of his house on Macomb. He tries to wash and shave but abandons his razor before he’s done his chin and left cheek. By day’s end, which is also my life’s end, he looks mangy and piebald in the face, like he has a cancer. But now, as a shaggy coat of flu mucus begins to form on my throat, he walks through his house room to room, stopping to contemplate the living room couch, the kitchen table, the padded rocker in the spare bedroom, the funeral holy cards stuck in the frame of his bedroom mirror. Two of these he pulls away and reads. “Joseph (Joey) Delaney Cassidy Jr. entered eternal light and rest 12/22/1984.” He mumbles from memory the prayer on the card’s other side. He repeats the process with Rose Mary Ferraro Cassidy’s card. His voice is drunk with whiskey and sorrow. He wipes a tear from his left eye before replacing the cards in the frame.

He turns sharply to leave the room, loses his balance to whiskey’s pull, and falls onto the corner of the bed. He starts to get up, his arm going to the mattress as if to push away, but suddenly he stops and sits staring at the mirror. He sees his slumped-over frame, his gray uneven stubble, his red, sunken eyes. He sees the third funeral card, and for the first time in many years, he lets himself remember the last morning, the last good memory. Rose Mary leaving their bed for the six a.m. feeding, then bringing Joey back with her to snuggle warm next to him while she showers; the smell of him, of her, almost the same smell; her body glimpsed naked in the mirror of the bathroom vanity before she steps into the shower, her breasts swelled up like life itself; the noises Joey makes from mouth and ass; his joy in it all; the sound of water cascading down his wife’s body; Joey then asleep next to him, the soft spot on his head sucked in with each tiny breath. Then there was his Ma in the kitchen putting out the breakfast. The bacon and eggs and potatoes. A good breakfast in case they get caught long at the doctor’s for Joey’s two-month checkup and Rose’s second postpartum visit. Her words to him as she puts down his plate of food, as Rose Mary enters the kitchen in her robe and black hair so wet it drips. “You never know. At the doctor’s office, you just never know.” Rose saying, “Good morning, Carina,” and his Ma smiling back with that woman’s smile a man can never penetrate. “No counting calories this morning,” his Ma saying as she scoops bacon grease on the yolks of their eggs sizzling in the pan. Rose, after she’s certain Carina is engaged with the eggs, grabbing her breasts through the terry cloth and saying, “No one I know is about to complain.” Her look, a smile a man can penetrate.

Then he’s at the door readying to leave for work. Then the words, “I’m leavin’ the cab money. Won’t cost much, Ma. I’ll get to those old brakes of yours this weekend. Replace the brake hose, flush the system. If you can remember it, a call after Joey’s visit just to fill me in, OK?” And he’s out the door to his own car, bringing the morning smells of the kitchen in his clothes.

The rest flashes by in bursts. The police car’s red lights beyond the post office window. The ride to the hospital, passing the scene of the accident, his mother’s old Chevy broadsided by a pickup truck at the intersection of Wisconsin and Reservoir. The eerie quiet in the halls of the emergency room. The corpses of his son and wife on separate gurneys. His mother unscathed, weeping, weeping in a chair, unable to stand, unable to say anything.