The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (33 page)

“Then the defense gets to cross-examination. What can they do but mitigate damages? So, in front of the jury, they go hard at her academic potential, try to make her sink back into the primordial mud. The family thinks it’s okay to go along with this, ‘cause their turn is coming afterwards to set the facts straight for the jury on my redirect. But my redirect promise is a double cross. They think I’m going to rehabilitate her but I never go to the lectern to do it. Sure, they’ll be sore. They’ll be sore until I give them their check for sixty percent of the twenty mill.” He takes a bite of his pickle. His lips curl to the sour acidity. To his father, he now looks like a rat with a smile. “Trust me. This is a case made in heaven. Made in heaven.” The waitress is at the table refilling their cups. He takes his business card from his jacket pocket and hands it to her. “Just write your phone number on the back and bring it with the check. Angela.” He watches her legs as she walks away. Made in heaven, he repeats to himself.

The old man stares at his son and chews his lunch. He is reluctant to embrace the idea, he knows, because it’s his son’s. He asks himself what kind of a father does that to a son? Give the young man his head, he tells himself. Let him take the lead. He’s got the defense working his case for him. That’s real good. Like me in the old days. Twenty million. Eight for the firm. Let him go with it, he thinks. Worst-case scenario, the jury doesn’t buy the guilt thing and they return a modest award, reduced from the demand because of the kid’s limitations. Say two and a half million. He does the mental math. Yeah, let him fly with it. “Lunch is on me,” he says.

“Deal,” Badger replies. “But I get the waitress.”

Badger watches as his father scans the waitress standing by the bar printing their bill. His eyes go up and down. He looks at his son and says, reluctantly, “Deal.”

Son and father have gone their separate ways—Badger back to the office, D’Woulfe senior to sit in on a deposition in another case—before the latter remembers about Daedalus. He’s glad, now, that he had forgotten. Let the boy take the lead. Let him rise and fly and soar.

The attorney is excited by, of all things, my artwork. He declares my sailboat “perfect.” The mast is crooked because the crayon slipped twice. The sail appears to have a deckle edge. I did it in the backseat of Father’s car as we bumped along a beach road in Florida. The bow of the boat seems to have a double point to it, but not like a catamaran, more like the letter W. I was in a hurry to finish, I remember. The clouds were out, and I wanted to study them as they sailed by. The tiller I made tiny. I wanted more room for Jed the dog to recline. The work in general lacks perspective such that it appears the boat is in the act of sinking into the blue sea. Even that begs the question of just what is a dog doing out sailing alone? “Perfect,” he says again when Father announces it was one of my last creations, done in the early fall before my death, at age seven and a half. “And this?” he asks. “This is a smiling donkey?” In his hand he has my Christmas drawing I did for Nana and Ned.

“No,” says Mother a little defensively, “that’s my parents’ dog, Jed. We visited them in Florida a lot. Jess really liked Jed. She did that to give to my parents as a Christmas gift when they were to come up. But she never got to.”

“I see,” the attorney says somberly. His heart is leaping for joy. “Very interesting material. Special stuff.” He sorts through the pages my parents have brought. Stick-figure people. “Circus clowns,” Father explains. A huge set of interconnected circles. “Elephant,” says Mother. “Of course,” the attorney says. My parents announce the themes and identities of the remaining drawings. Our house, appearing bleak and haunted, Tina shouting the printed word “STOP” from an open mouth almost the size of her whole head, BJ rendered in the same manner in the midst of one of her wails, the word “NO” written on her forehead, Cassidy with a big red smile and big red eyes, and a self-portrait I did just before my seventh birthday. I stand akilter with my arms extended, my eight fingers splayed like peacock feathers and just as brilliantly colored. My hearing aids are much too large for my ears. They look like telephones stuck behind them. “Oh, this is the best!” the attorney says, nodding in approval.

“She always struggled in art. She could read well beyond her grade level and was a whiz with numbers, but she never could learn to draw. Partly because of the difficulty of holding the crayon. Right, Ford?” Mother asks. She remembers me working at the kitchen table on my art, how my tongue would pop out between my lips as if it wanted to see the magic being created. Magic, she muses. How my head would turn to get a different view of the work in progress. But it never seemed to matter. What came out of me through my fingers was rude and imperfect, no match and certainly no mirror for what I saw with my eyes. She remembers my eyes, how they drilled into her with their eternal biting blackness. “But let me tell you how special she was in math,” says Mother with pride in her voice. “She taught herself to count and to write . . .”

“Well, we’ll get into that a little later, Mrs. Jackson. I just want a little more insight into the . . . weaknesses Jess may have had. Clearly, her gift for art was, shall I say, modest. But that is all to the good. We don’t want the jury to see her as too perfect. Too perfect becomes unreal, and hardens hearts. So let’s find her flaws and
celebrate
them. We’re not afraid of the truth about Jess. It’s right here in front of us. She was imperfect. And aren’t we all, in some way? Beautiful but imperfect. Let them laugh at these attempts at art, if they want. It won’t hurt our case. It will only help it. So what else? What else besides these drawings makes her come to life for the jury? Makes them know who she really was?”

Mother and Father sit quietly on the couch and think. They tell him the story of my transubstantiation debacle. He writes the name of Father Murray on his notepad and next to it, the word “witness.” They tell him my history of athletic ineptness. Next to Mr. Lester’s name, he writes, “witness.” Father has brought tapes of my soccer games and my last Florida vacation. “Oh, this is good!” he chortles as I lurch around after a ball. “Oh, how precious!” he says to them during the five full minutes the camera catches me at the beach. I lie motionless on my back in the pink shade of the big red beach umbrella, hardly ever blinking my eyes, and stare up at the sky. I am studying the clouds, but you can’t know this by seeing the video. My face looks vacant, devoid of higher consciousness. It is the look that came over me whenever I tumbled and tore cumulus clouds to make them fit together as gods and goddesses, their friends and foes, animal species I had seen.

Zeus was in the heavens that day, to the west, just above the horizon, walking on the water in the way of gods. With the perfect sight of heaven now*, I can see the clouds reflecting off the corneas of my eyes. Even now* I can make Zeus from those tiny dots, with a tumble and a twist and a turn. Even now*, I am a maker of gods. But the eyes of the Badger are not so keen. He looks at my eyes caught on the film. A slant of light briefly crosses them from the wind shaking the umbrella. I see Zeus dance in that second’s breeze. The Badger sees dollar signs light my globes.

“The jury must see all of this, hear all of this, if they are to know Jessica as you do. It is our task to see they do, it is our task and solemn duty to her memory.” He hangs his head for a moment, apparently lost in reverence at my memory. “Anyone a Coke?” he asks when he snaps his head up.

Father has one. It comes in a glass with ice.

They return weekly to conference with Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. They bring report cards from school, a list of books on my shelves and desk, the names of classmates, teachers, and aides. A list of my favorite foods, of all my dislikes. The names of my soaps, lotions, and toothpaste.

They devote hours to a minute-by-minute review of the events of the day of my death. The attorney compares their memories to the notes made contemporaneously by the EMTs, the ER medical staff, and Detective Mattingly. He wants to rectify any seeming contradictions. He constructs a timeline from the moment I awoke that day until the ambulance sped away with my moribund body. He watches the faces of Mother and Father as they give their accounts to learn their flash points, the way to open their hearts to the stab of grief, using words that have sharp emotional edges. Mother cries each time she talks about the damp cloth she brought to refresh my face. Her voice cracks when she quotes what Burke had to say in the ER, “I wish you had called.” All the lawyer need do is ask what room I was in when they were brought to see my dead body. “Cubicle Sixteen,” either answers and the tears start. Father chokes and weeps when he reveals, for the first time, the vaporizer he purchased was on special at CVS that night. He bought it and was pleased to save seven dollars. He cries whenever D’Woulfe asks him its brand name. “Breathe-Easy,” he says, and bawls. The attorney is pleased, very pleased, with the tears that will soften the jury’s heart.

But it is Father who gives him what he really is looking for. It is the scene that will nail the jury to their hidden guilt like Christ to the cross: Father never has the breath to finish recounting his failed rescue breathing as I lay blue on my bed. He starts his description of his mouth on mine, his deep, deep inspiration, his gale of air out, and he must stop for his panting. He pants, gasps, ever hungrier for air, and wets his lips and drips his tears, and pants again, before he can go on to tell how his lips exploded, uselessly, on mine. He pants, and cries, and wipes his eyes, and sighs. It is bee-you-tee-full, thinks D’Woulfe.

The Badger makes note of it all. Their tears are the nuts and bolts, the nails and screws, of the whole case, he thinks. Their tears attach their love to their deaf deformed child. He is so happy.

The reports from the reviewing experts arrive in late February. It is all D’Woulfe had hoped for. He shows them to Mother and Father. He waits silently while they read first the cardiologist’s report, then the pediatrician’s. Father has become better versed in the medical issues of my case through a review of my hospital records. Mother continues to be an outsider to the medical jargon. She understands little of either report, except for the conclusions. Freidman, the cardiologist, concludes that a large right aberrant subclavian artery is clearly visible on the echocardiogram done when I was two. He concludes it would be below the standard of care for any cardiologist reviewing the film not to identify that large and potentially dangerous structure. Chester, the pediatrician from Hopkins, states unequivocally the treating doctors failed to provide proper anticipatory guidance to prevent airway obstruction. Further, such guidance would have in all certainty saved my life had it been followed the night in question.

“It’s an open-and-shut case,” the attorney states. “Medical negligence and resulting injury. Malpractice. All that’s left to decide now is damages. How much was Jess’s life worth. That’s what they’ll be coming after you about when you are deposed. They’ll want to show that Jessica’s life was of little value. And I mean that in economic terms. That her lifetime earnings would have been trivial because of her disabilities. You know,
I know,
better than that about Jessica. And trust me, her real value will eventually become apparent to the jury. Trust me on that. But our strategy must be to wait to show them that until the end of trial. So it’s there, fresh and stuck in the jury’s mind and memory when they go back to deliberate the case. But until then, until the very end, we let them have their way with us. They ask you during your deposition, how was Jess in school? You answer, Okay. She was okay with numbers. But she struggled in a lot of subjects. Art. She had no ability with art. She did have to repeat a grade, go back a class, in her religious studies. The concepts proved too hard for her at seven. Then let them take that stuff anywhere they want. Let them. We’ll get her straight in the record just before the jury goes out.

“They’ll come at you about her speech impediment. But you just answer, simply,
we
could understand her. Sometimes it was hard for strangers and her teachers to know what she wanted to say, but we had no problem. Then they’ll hit you over the head with her hands. About them. You know, what’d it do to her activities of daily living and that sort of stuff. You say, well, she needed help with some of it. Blowing her nose, toileting, grooming. Buttons. Grooming. Use the word “grooming” if you can. It conveys . . . a lot in it.”

“But,” Mother interrupts, “she was fully independent in all that. We didn’t need to help her since she was three or four years old for most of it. And by six and a half, she did all of it by herself.” She turns on the couch to look at Father. She is uncomfortable with what she has heard from the mouth of their attorney, making Jess less than what she was. She wonders what Father thinks. Father looks to the carpet. He thinks the lawyer must know what he’s doing. He thinks, I know what I’m doing in my job, he knows in his. We got to trust him. He knows. He knows how to get justice.

D’Woulfe regards Mother, and he nods knowingly. He looks as if he is readying to explain the mystery of transubstantiation to a first grader. He hopes his sincere explanation might effect blind acceptance, if not understanding. “True, true, Mrs. Jackson. Absolutely true. But here is our problem. The jury
wants
to hear this about Jess’s physical limitations. They want to hear it because in their hearts they
already believe it to be true.
If we at first say otherwise, it will give them cause to disbelieve
all
of what we say about her later. For them to believe us about what matters most, about what we’ll present to them at the very end, that Jessica was
blessed
with a mind, an intellect, that would have carried her far in life, they must also believe us about her physical limitations. And trust me, Mrs. Jackson, I know a thing or two about prejudice. People—good, decent, everyday people, the kind who sit on juries—are prejudiced when it comes to the handicapped of our society. They prejudge them, Mrs. Jackson. Those jurors will have judged Jessica Mary with her electric ears, her garbled speech, her thumbless hands, as being
physically
different, materially less perfect, than they. Defective, Mrs. Jackson. I hate to use that word, but defective is what the jury will preconceive about her.” He proffers the palms of both hands, beseeching like a priest at Mass, before finishing. “If we at first paint her otherwise, we have lost the jury. We have lost the case.”