The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (34 page)

Mother shakes her head. “But none of that changes the fact that you’re asking us to not tell the truth about our daughter. She could do all her own care. People did understand her when she spoke. She was gifted in reproducing sounds. And even without thumbs, she did well with her ASL. What you say we should say just isn’t the truth. Ford?” She looks at Father again.

“Mr. D’Woulfe, Kate’s right. None of this really applies to Jess. Not really. There’s got to be a way to get the jury to understand without making them doubt us.”

Brandon D’Woulfe lowers his hands and raises his eyes upward. “How shall I explain this?” he says to the white paint on the flat ceiling. “What is the best way?” He looks down to his shoes, then up to Mother and Father. “Here is the problem. Prejudice is a lie. A grave, grave lie.

“We know this.

“And we know, too, that the jury is guilty of that lie. That is the awful truth. But our focus in these proceedings is not to confront this lie of theirs.
They
are not on trial here, after all. Our focus is to confront the far greater lie, the deadly lie, the one that sealed Jessica’s fate. The lie from the physicians and the hospital about their
sacred duty
to the health and well-being of people. All people, strong and weak and perfect and imperfect. We can prove
their
lie and make them pay for their heartless error. We can have justice in all this. But
not
if we confront the lesser, common lie of the jury. That is not our goal, in the first place, and it is our stumbling block, in the second. What I am saying is this: You will not be
lying
when you give this testimony. You will simply be choosing
not
to confront the lie there in the jury box, but to confront, instead, the lie that sits in suits and good dresses at the defense table.

“Devote your future life to confronting society’s prejudice, in Jessica’s name, if you want. That would be all fine. But
do not forfeit justice
for the sake of some other cause. You will not be lying. You will simply be choosing to confront their lie with the truth at a later time and place.” His hands rise again and slash the air in punctuation. “You will
not
be lying.”

Mother’s head is spinning, listening to the words that seem unanchored in anything but the thin, corporate air blown from the mouth of their attorney. Lies not lies, truth not truth, my life, my being, somehow exchangeable with another’s version of it. She tries, but fails, to remarshal his explanation. The words “prejudice” and “sacred” and “truth” seem to ping from the sides of her confused mind.

She sighs, hoping a cleansing breath will make it all clear. The room spins a little instead.

Father says, as if awakening from some dream of the past, “They did talk about switching her big toes to her hands to make them thumbs, so she’d be able to grasp things and do her ASL better. They never did that, but they thought it would improve her abilities to hold things and to make her signs. We could answer with stuff like that. That would be all true, and would be admitting she had problems. Kate?”

Before Mother can answer, Brandon D’Woulfe interrupts. “Now that’s the most powerful and insightful memory I’ve yet heard about Jessica. Absolutely you should use that in your answers. It’s exactly what I had in mind. Show the jury the specifics, the tiny dots of her life that make up her picture in the aggregate. Toes for thumbs, that’s like two tiny dots on the connect-the-dots portrait we are going to show those jury folks. You just put down the dots, one at a time, and I’ll connect them up at the end. Just you wait and see.” He thinks to himself, Oh—my—God! Wait till the jury hears this! A girl with toes for thumbs. Gotta be worth another million. Maybe a million
a toe.
“Kate, do you see how this could go? Just remember the bits and pieces of her handicap struggle. Lay them out for the jury to see. They’ll see one thing at first through the eyes of their prejudice, then I’ll change it, reconnect the dots, make it the truth of Jessica Mary Jackson at the end. Do you, Kate? See how this could go?”

Out of confusion as much as embarrassment over that confusion, Mother says she does. She says yes to the new-changed me that she will swear to. Yes to the girl who needed her teeth brushed, her bottom wiped, her snaps snapped, her back dried. Yes to the girl with the snarled voice of a dog, the low-wattage brain of a monkey. Yes to it all. Yes.

And Father, too. His yeses, her yeses, all in the cause of justice. Yes, yes, yes to one created in the image and likeness of Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr., the Badger to his father and friends.

The complaint is written. The suit is filed.

My parents’ depositions are taken. I am remade in paper and ink, in question and answer, in omission and half truth. Metal clips in the left upper corners of the manuscripts assemble my new, papery parts in proper order.

The depositions of defendants are taken. More lies and half truths. Burke and Marshall are videotaped when they testify. Eileen Marshall cries, she is so enraged the film library has lost all my other echoes. “They prove beyond any doubt her vascular anomaly was undiagnosable in life. Just as the one extant echo demonstrates.” Burke is doubtful I would have gone beyond high school, given my many physical limitations. He bangs his fist on the table to underscore how upset he is that my parents didn’t call the night my croup began. “If only they had called,” he says mournfully into the camera in response to D’Woulfe’s question, “Do you contend the parents are in any way guilty of contributory negligence in the death of Jessica?”

“So the answer to my question, then, is yes, you do so contend?” D’Woulfe retorts.

“Move to strike. Calls for legal conclusion on the part of the witness,” says Burke’s attorney.

“Let me ask you this, then, Doctor. It seems you are saying a phone call to you buys a trip to the ER that night, and that would have made the difference in survival? She goes to the ER, gets treated that night, and she’s okay? Is that your opinion, sir?”

“It breaks my heart to say it, but, yeah. A trip to the ER that night, and she’s outside now in this beautiful winter weather playing in the snow. God, I wish they had called me.” He hangs his head. The camera catches his smile.

Winter becomes spring.

Spring grows weary of May’s hot spell. Summer comes early with a bumper crop of shade.

The plaintiffs’ experts are deposed. The lone, lost tape of my echocardiogram is entered into evidence at Freidman’s deposition. The defense attorneys object. They abruptly discontinue their examination of his credentials to have an emergency meeting with the judge over the admissibility of the new evidence. The judge learns the tape came from my parents and was, in turn, part of a gift from one of the treating doctors months ago. He chides the lead attorney from the hospital for not inquiring as to whether the family had any such evidence in their possession when he deposed them. The judge thumbs through their transcripts. “Total of seven hundred pages of questions and answers here, counselor, most of it about the girl’s limitations and not a one about medical materials in the parents’ possession. And now you want me to exclude this tape from evidence? No, sir. You all are going to have to live or die by what’s on this here tape. This meeting is adjourned.”

Freidman and Chester go forward with their testimony. Within days, the hospital offers to settle the case for 1.2 million dollars, a generous figure given the disabilities afflicting the unfortunate plaintiff, the attorney for the hospital states. D’Woulfe and D’Woulfe demand 4.5 million dollars, or the hospital can take its chances in front of a jury, and try to defend itself against the double accusations of malpractice and medical fraud. The demand is half a million dollars over the policy limits of the named defendants. The defense attorneys convene before the hospital’s board of directors. They vote unanimously to pay up. The risk to the hospital’s reputation drives the decision. No one is happy to pay such a large sum, but in the end, it is the best strategy. They decide, too, not to renew Eileen Marshall’s contract come the new academic year.

But Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. rejects the offer of four point five million, a sum he had demanded just days earlier. “The family wants justice,” he tells Bridget Conley of Medical Center Legal Affairs.

“Meaning?” she says into the phone. She is angry but not shocked. Nothing from the mouths of the plaintiff attorneys of the world shocks her any longer. Thirty years of doing this work has seen to that.

“Meaning twenty million.”

“See you in court, counselor,” she spits back. “You’re all living in a fantasy world. Twenty million for a handicapped child! No way. Your problem is you think you can turn her into a pile of gold like Midas, just because you touch the case. Get real. Our offer stands until close of business tomorrow. Then, there is no settlement offer.

“Twenty million. The kid couldn’t even find her way out of a connect-the-dots drawing. I’ve seen the exhibits from the mom’s deposition. Go back to the parents and explain this to them. Close of business tomorrow, or we make the kid a stewed vegetable in front of the jury, and then you’ll see what you get.” She hangs up and Brandon A. D’Woulfe laughs.

The trial is set for the week of August eleventh. The tape goes to black.

*

Before I can gather my disgust at the assault on the truth of my life, He is before me holding another canister. “This is the last one. The grand finale,” He says. “You want to see it? It will answer your every question.”
The Time of Trial
sits in the palms of His hands. Reluctantly, I nod my head yes. But I do not laugh at His little joke. He has no thumbs today*.

W
hen the D’Woulfes signed the lease for office space ten years ago, they immediately undertook renovations guided by a single principle: that the preparation of key trial witnesses was the most essential ingredient in securing a plaintiff’s verdict from the jury. And the key to preparing their clients was
desensitizing
them to the intimidating nature of the courtroom environment: the lofty judge’s bench, the coldly removed jury box, the opposing tables of warring attorneys with their files in big boxes like barricades, and their egos in smart suits like armor, all participants focused laser-like on the lone man or woman who takes the seat on the bare-bones witness stand, whose only comfort is iceless water in a paper cup. The D’Woulfes had come to see the physicality of the courtroom as the great equalizer—housewife, neurosurgeon, husband, physicist, garbage collector, art collector—everyone equally brought low by that space, sometimes so low they forgot their names, their facts, their well-practiced lines,
their cause
and babbled on instead about being sorry they ever started the process that led them to the present Golgotha, crucified by the truth of the halls of justice. This, they would not allow of their clients.

They constructed an exact replica of a courtroom in the very heart of their office space. And more—they had it built like a stage that could easily be reconfigured to mimic the design of the courtroom wherein the trial would actually be held. Father and son had bragged at the American Trial Lawyers Association meeting time and again that they “owned” three Latino carpenters, and that these men were more important to the firm’s financial success than any five young associate attorneys from the Harvards and Stanfords of the country. They put their star plaintiff witnesses on the mock witness stand day after day during the two-week run-up to the trial and sweated the worry out of them.

Some days the D’Woulfes marched in their associates to man the lawyer tables, and the secretaries and paralegals to sit in the jury box, and they put black robes on the security guard and handed him a gavel. The witnesses were examined and cross-examined and recrossed. They suffered “Move to strike!” and “Objection, non-responsive, Your Honor,” and “Counsel, please, approach the bench,” and computer failures and bathroom breaks. They were told how to dress, how to sit, how to answer, how and when to cry, what kind of tissue to use to blot those tears. When it finally came time for their clients to testify live at trial, the jitters were gone and the story, the D’Woulfe version of the story, spun flawlessly out of their mouths like the lines of a play.

And there was a second advantage to these preparations, these rehearsals. They seemed so much like
theater
to the witness, so evocative of the idea of “play” and “fiction,” that the half truths became untroubling to mouth. After all, this was just practice, they’d think. Day after day, the raising of the almost-shaky hand for the oath, the same sequence of questions, the same always-perfect answers full of feint and false hesitancy and practiced sobs and sighs, as they claimed this or that did or did not happen. The daily, twice daily, thrice daily recounting of myth and mutant truth made it true to them, as true as any play they’d ever seen was true.

For the duo of D’Woulfes, their efforts were simply another spatial reorientation, this of inner space, moral space, whose walls and floors and ceilings they could unbolt and press closer together, or farther apart, or higher, or lower, or remove entirely, to fit their need. As in a play, they could make the actors seemingly stand on air. Indeed, they felt they
owned
the air,
created
the truth.

Mother and Father begin their rehearsals at the end of July. Nana and Ned return from Florida to help with Jeanine and BJ. Cassidy is additional help in the evenings when Mother and Father need to meet with D’Woulfe to review their testimony in preparation for the next day’s “dress rehearsal.”

Neither Nana, nor Ned, nor Cassidy has any part in the proceedings. The defense decided against deposing them since none was present the night of my death and because they believe the testimony they have elicited from Mother and Father has clinched their case about the limited monetary damages my death merits. In the few weeks following the filing of the claim in March, all three had lost interest in the matter. Mother and Father had their attorneys, had good experts, had a good case, would in all likelihood settle, and life would go on, they all thought.