The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (31 page)

Before the first customer can enter, he hears the manager sing out from his office. “Ford, you got a call. An attorney. Take it in here. I’ll leave ya alone.”

“Mr. Jackson?” Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. says over the phone. “We’re going to take your case. We’d like you and your wife to come in again, this time to sign our standard contract and some authorizations for release of records. We think you have a case, a real good case. And we feel, given
all
the circumstances, the sooner we go forward with it, the better it will be. Could you come sometime this afternoon or evening? It won’t take but a minute. Then we’ll get Jessica Mary’s records and send them out for expert review. Within a month, the suit will be filed. By Passover, they’ll be begging to settle. Shall we say six?”

“Six would be fine,” Father says. “Kate and I will be there.”

“Excellent. And, please, jot this down. The key code to the gated parking lot is W-O-U-L-F-E. The lot is heated. Cold out there.”

“Thank you, sir,” says Father. “Kate and I appreciate that.” He remembers the bleak cold of the street where he parked to attend the parenting classes. Anger and relief compete in his heart.

“No problem,” says D’Woulfe. He is doodling on a tablet of yellow paper. It has the summary of points made by his father at the morning meeting. Four lines that read: “Sympathetic plaintiffs,” “Understandable medical issues,” “Medical fraud,” “Settle for policy limits.” He adds his own commentary to this paternal wisdom and writes, “Punitive damages—fifteen million.”

“See you at fifteen,” D’Woulfe says to end the call.

“Sir?” Father asks.

“I meant, six. See you at six.”

“Yes, sir,” says Father. He hangs up the phone and calls Mother, misdialing twice out of excitement.

Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. turns his eyes again to the memo, reading, “The Jackson case will settle not because of the medicine but because there’s fraud on the part of the docs. The hospital will pay up to protect its reputation. So fraud’s the angle to take in the discovery phase. Bang on it like a kettledrum.

“Name everybody who touched the kid, and the hospital. Work up a damages claim that goes heavy on the kid’s lost future wages. Like forty years at 100K per. And add another half mill for loss of consortium, pain and suffering, blah, blah, blah. That ought to scare them into surrendering the policy limits on the cardiologist and the hospital. Settlement figure I have in mind is four mill.

“Send the file to Freidman, the cardiologist in Boston and to Bill Chester, our peds guy at Hopkins. In your letter to them, tell both there’s a rush on the review. Let them charge a premium. I’d like to get this case filed in a month.

“Last. Badger, as slam dunk as this case is, DO NOT try to hit it out of the park. They’re gonna come back at us with limited lifetime earnings capacity b/c/o her set of handicaps if you do. Then we’re in a brawl that will take years to sort out, expert by expert. Just go at them hard over the fraud thing, and take the policy limits.

“Dinner? This week? This month? B. A.”

It is this closing inconsistency that kindles his thinking. January has but one week to run. To dine with his father “this week” or “this month” is a distinction without a difference. It sets him to wondering what else might be wrong with the old man’s logic.

Certainly not the part about the hospital’s eagerness to settle because of the specter of fraud. No, that’s a given. Or the probable strategy of the defense to try to limit the economic damages by suggesting the child’s handicaps would have constrained her vocational opportunities. No, a jury would certainly consider those arguments. And four mill for a quick case with forty percent going to the firm, well, that’s not bad for a couple months’ work drawing up the complaint, filing the suit, getting the depos of the treating docs and parents done. But there is something in the case that gnaws rat-like at him, because he thinks that, with just the right manipulation, juxtaposition, reassembly, it could be an altogether different case, a big, fat, juicy one. Say fifteen mill. Say twenty mill. He repeats that out loud, “Twenty mill.” He likes the sound of it.

He reads over the memo again as he waits for the mother and father to arrive, digging and pawing at the nugget in the case. It’s in there. He can feel its solidity beneath the surface. He’s the Badger.

It is a great relief for Mother and Father to hear Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. say that there will be no cost to them for his firm to litigate their claim unless the outcome is successful. Until then, the firm will bear all the costs including the fees of the experts, which, the young attorney says with great earnestness, may run upwards of forty thousand dollars if the case goes to trial. No, as the contract he hands them stipulates, all costs will initially be borne by D’Woulfe and D’Woulfe. Whatever monetary settlement is won will be proportioned forty percent to the firm, sixty percent to the claimants. Only then will the costs of bringing the claim be taken out of the family’s share. “So you see,” he says, “there is no risk to you and your family. For instance, if we receive four million dollars in settlement, the firm retains one million six hundred thousand and you get the rest, two million four hundred thousand, out of which you pay the experts’ fees, the court costs, duplication costs, postal costs, those sorts of things. Let’s say they all come to fifty thousand. That leaves you with a net of two point three five million.” He lets that last word hang in the air like the peal of a Sunday church bell. “Mill-y-on,” he repeats for effect. “If all that’s clear, please, both of you sign and date the last page above your names.”

Mother looks at Father. Her face does not hide her fatigue. She is but a week postpartum. Brian Joseph calls for her breasts every hour and a half through the nights. Father has tried bottles of milk so that Mother can rest, but the hungry baby will have none of it. Fatigue has eroded some of her eagerness to join Father’s cause to set my death aright. So she regards Father’s face and simply says, “Ford?”

“It won’t cost us a thing,” Father says. “And it’s what we got to do. For Jess.” He doesn’t hesitate a bit. He signs his name and adds the date and hands the paper to Mother. She signs but even her cursive is grudgingly slow. “It won’t cost us anything,” he repeats when he takes the contract from her.

They also sign a dozen form letters requesting a release of my medical records to the law firm of D’Woulfe and D’Woulfe. Brandon D’Woulfe explains the next step—a formal review of my records by their experts and then the filing of papers that will commence the legal proceedings. He offers his best guess of the timeline—a month to file the case, three or four more for discovery, and then either settlement or trial by summer. Mother nods. Father makes notes.

“May I offer you some tea or coffee?” he asks.

Father checks his watch. “No, thanks. It’s getting close to seven and we best be getting home. Our new little one will be wanting his dinner about now.”

“Shame you can’t stay. I’d like to learn more about Jessica. Pity.” Even before he stands to lead them to the exit, his mind is racing, unlocked by the word he last spoke. Pity. Yes, pity, the missing element in his father’s construction of the case. The central theme of damages should not be the economic losses of a life of well-paid work by an intellectually capable but physically handicapped citizen. That truly would be worth three or four million. But there is a different, much more lucrative calculus of the case. The approach to take is to make little Miss Jessica entirely
pitiable.
In her hearing and speaking and eating and walking and ass-wiping, as pitiable as a human child can be made to seem. So pitiable she seems barely to break the threshold of humanness. Her garbled words, some animal dialect. Her motor ears, some robot assembly. Her gamboling gate, Neanderthalic. Her claw-hand touch, alien. All for the jury to see. He knows already how his closing to the jury will sound. “And what did the defendant doctors do to this poor unfortunate child, this innocent, simple gift of a gracious God? They judged her not worthy. Not worthy of the care you or I or yours or mine might have expected as one’s just due. Just due.

“But Jessica Mary Jackson,
not worthy?!
” He will shake his head in amazement and disbelief before continuing. “Their wanton act of negligence was their judgment on poor Jessica that she didn’t deserve the special life she was given. Because she was different from the rest of us, they turned away. They turned away and let her . . . strangle to death. Like a criminal hung on the gallows, or a wild animal caught in a steel trap. But Jessica Mary was no criminal, unless the way her imperfect hands stole her parents’ hearts is criminal. And no wild animal, either, unless the spirit in her that clung to life through the pain of her surgeries and the rejections of her peers, is animal.

“And, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know you will not turn away from little Jessica now. You will not join those mighty judges of worth, those doctors sitting smugly there in good clothes and comfortable seats. You will not turn away from the duty you now have to her. They are guilty of her death. And her death is no small thing. Punish them for thinking it is a trifle, a nothing. Punish them for extinguishing the pure light of love that was there in her and in her family with her. Return a verdict for twenty million dollars. Teach them a lesson. Teach these doctors, these healers, these demigods, a lesson in life. They sure to God need it.”

Father waits for B. A. D’Woulfe to unlock the front door with his key. Mother stands at his side. He thinks the attorney looks otherworldly, lost in some complex legal place weighing the good, the bad, on the scales of justice. Father is glad he has retained this firm, this man. Justice, he thinks, justice.

“It would help me a lot if we could spend some time together so I can get an in-depth feel for Jessica, the person she was. Maybe review some photos and her schoolwork, her art, any videos you may have of her, and talk with you at length about her accomplishments. And, of course, her limitations. It is of utmost importance to put forth a full and complete picture of any plaintiff but especially a young child so the jury can form a relationship with her. So that Jessica is not some abstraction we merely talk
about,
but is instead a real person whose presence in the courtroom is
felt.
So I was wondering if we could meet again, at your convenience, on days when you, Mrs. Jackson, might have some help with your new baby at home?”

Father has Friday off. They will bring their pictures of me and all my refrigerator art and the video of our beach vacation. And Brian Joseph, too, if he persists in refusing the rubber nipple.

And their memories. They are happy to bring their memories. For the first time since my death, they see their memory of me as a sacred part of who I was. As real, as palpable, as clippings of my hair kept in a plastic pouch or the shriveled umbilical cord pressed between the pages of my baby book. Their memories, now, are not all painful, any more than touching the cut locks from my first haircut is a source of pain. They will bring their memories, troves and troves of them. They will come now with brave smiles and only occasional tears.

Badger writes a memo to his father. “B. A. Met with the Jacksons tonight. Signed the contract and release of records requests. Seems, though, the kid might not have been as bright as they first let on. They’re coming back Friday with videos, school stuff. Art. Then I’ll be able to judge this wrinkle better. Have a thought I’d like to run by you about the damages angle if what I get from the family corroborates this wrinkle. Working lunch tomorrow? Next day? LM know. B. A. Jr.”

Father turns onto Wisconsin Avenue. The last of the evening traffic herds by in headlamp shafts of brightness. If all the streetlights along that corridor were to be extinguished at once, Wisconsin Avenue would pulse with silver light like an enormous wriggling glowworm in the dark.

“I think we should be glad we found this firm of attorneys for our case. That young D’Woulfe, he seems to know what he’s doing. He’s smart. And thoughtful. I looked at his face when we were leaving, and I swear I could almost hear the gears in his head grinding on about Jess, and us, and the case. And in a week, two tops, he’ll know Jess as well as anyone. I think we’re lucky, Kate. And it isn’t costing us a thing.”

Mother’s eyes are closed, though she is not sleeping. “Do you think he could do that with Jess? Get to know her so well that he could make people on the jury—just a group of strangers—see her as she was, love her the way we all did? Do you think he could really do that?”

“That’s what good lawyers learn to do over a career. That’s their duty to their clients, to present them and their case honestly and completely. So, yeah, I believe he can.” He turns his head to steal a look at Mother. Her eyes are still closed. The warmth of the car, the drone of the engine, the sense of confinement in a space, are making her sleepy. He turns back to the road and traffic. Her face, his face, are more shadow than skin in the silver light of traffic.

I watch and listen and loathe those empty words, words that seem the hollow echo of what had been spoken on the same stretch of road eight years earlier as we three drove home from my first outpatient conference with the doctors. “I think we will be real glad to have the doctors we have for Jess. They all seem to know what they’re doing,” Mother had predicted. And now Father’s prophecy.

Jeanine is sleeping in my old room now. Mother and Father had never gotten around to taking the changing table and old rocking chair out of her room after she outgrew the need for diapers, breasts, bottles, and burps. So it seems the best solution is to put Jeanine in my room and hand over her room to Brian Joseph. They wheel the old crib up from the basement. The pony mobile is still clamped to the headboard and plays as loud and clear and quick as ever. Jeanine fusses the first few nights, but my nocturnal ceiling soon catches her imagination. Father or Cassidy sit with her in the dark, after bath and books, and tell her about the constellations.

She is Sagittarius, the ninth sign of the zodiac. She learns to count to nine in the dark at Cassidy’s teaching well before little Brian Joseph takes his first bottle at ten weeks. She bids me goodnight most nights—well, not me really, but the constellation Aquarius—just as Father or Cassidy is at her door to leave.