The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (15 page)

I made a fist and extended my index finger. I pointed at him and moved it in a clockwise circular motion just as I arched my eyebrows up. He nodded and returned my sign. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “always.” Then he added, “Jess, you’ll be okay.” He took my hand out of the air and kissed my fingers. From his pants pocket he took the gold paper band from his White Owl. He slipped it on my index finger and repeated again, “You’ll be okay.” He patted my hand. I nodded back, and he left.

The light from the window leaped back into the room as he closed my door. The clown’s eyes flared.

*

Why put Jeanine in my life, I wonder now*. To accept her in the face of my rejection by my schoolmates? To do unto her what others have not done unto me? To learn that my missing parts gave me space to accommodate that bulky feeling toward a new sister? To see that the only way through my imperfections was to forgive people who could not accept them? Perhaps her life says to me: give up the bone of your pride, forgo the hand of your retribution. Is that it? Sounds like Ezekiel. Ezekiel could be it.

I
t takes something unsettling in life to finally settle it. For me that was the first six months of Jeanine’s presence. She came home, as foretold, the day after Thanksgiving. Nana and Ned took me to the hospital that morning to help bring Mother and all of her flowers home. And Jeanine. We borrowed Cassidy’s car. I carried out the red carnations Cassidy had sent, thinking they would look nice in my room, in the sun that came onto my desk in the afternoons. It frightened me when I watched Mother in a wheelchair on the way to the cars. Only sick people rode in wheelchairs. Mother held Jeanine in her lap, wrapped tight in a new blanket so only her face showed. Her cheeks were plump as baby pumpkins and just as ruddy orange. Their bright, glowing color made Mother’s face look sallow and pasty. A nurse pushed her along the hallway to the elevators. Not even Ned or Father was allowed to do it. Only the very weak, the frightfully sick, needed that kind of care, I thought. What had Jeanine done? What had gone wrong? That afternoon, when Nana had hugged Mother, they both began to cry. Nana had to go into the bathroom to fix her nose and dry her eyes even before she got to hold Jeanine. But afterwards she was all wide smiles and laughing, so I had forgotten the tears. But the wheelchair ride made me remember. It looked as though the baby had stolen the life from Mother’s face. And she lay there in Mother’s arms, the culprit, innocent and asleep, and poisonous as an orange mushroom.

Everyone walking the hospital hallways got out of the way of Mother’s wheelchair as if they were worried Mother had some serious illness, too. Some people even left the elevator when it came so we could all get on together. Jeanine slept as the elevator went down and my stomach went up into my throat. Sometimes her fat little lips moved in a pucker like there was something sour in her mouth. I wanted to put my fingers in there to feel around. Maybe there was a tooth I hadn’t seen. I wanted to feel far, far back to find out if she had a uvula. I planned on doing it during the ride home while I sat next to her in the backseat. It would only take a second because I would lick my fingers first to make them slippery.

We put all the flowers in Ned’s car. We filled up the trunk and then most of the backseat. Three helium balloons painted with pink storks butted futilely against the rear window. Mother strapped Jeanine into my old car seat in Father’s car and got in the back with her. Nana joined Father in the front. “Ride with me, Jess,” Ned said patting the passenger-side seat in the front. “I’ll buckle you up.”

I heard him say to Father, just before they entered their cars to start driving home, “I replaced the hardware on the crib’s collapsible side rail this morning, Ford. Can’t be too careful about those kinds of things. I’ll show you when we get there.” Father said thanks and started his engine.

It was my old crib they were talking about.

We started driving. “Best not to suck your fingers, Jess. It’ll make your belly swell,” Ned said. His right elbow was inches from my shoulder. A quick turn of my head to him, and he might knock the teeth out of my skull. I took my wet fingers out of my mouth, hardly aware they had been there. We made it to the third turn, a right, before I started sneezing. The thick fragrance in the air had a metallic tang to it that tickled the back of my throat. There were a lot of double-parked cars in front of Saks and Neimans, but I was too disconsolate to count them. I did count the sneezes. Fourteen. And Ned’s laughs at my ongoing distress. Five. I didn’t even care to think about his warning of belly swelling.

At home, Jeanine cried every two hours. Mother fed her in my old rocking chair in the guest bedroom that now belonged to her. Ned and Father got my old baby carriage up from the basement and squirted Three-In-One-Oil on it until Ned announced it was “good as new.” I helped Nana put flowers in every corner of the house, and sneezed. The red carnations went to Mother’s room. I sneezed some more. It didn’t take long for everyone to stop saying, “God bless you.” Eleven blessings, in fact, for twenty-seven sneezes. The commingled odors of florist shop and hardware store filled my throat and nose with a nasty fizz.

Intermittently, Mother appeared as if out of nowhere throughout the long, boring afternoon and evening. The first time, I was smearing mayonnaise on bread, helping Nana make turkey sandwiches for lunch. The kitchen was the one room Nana and I hadn’t fouled with flowers. My hour-long sneezing fit had subsided, but my nose was an annoying, dripping faucet. All at once I could smell that familiar hospital smell and turned to see Mother standing just behind me. Her clothes reeked of glue or almost-rotten fruit like the sheets and disinfectants of every hospital room I had ever visited. She put her hand on my shoulder. I dropped my knife onto the tabletop, put my arms around her waist, and began to sob. “I hate her! I hate her, and she made you sick! Take her back to the hospital! I hate her!”

Mother put her hand on the top of my head and stroked my hair. She let me cry until I wet her dress with my tears. They washed away the hospital scent enough for me to smell her skin. That and the gentle press of her hand finally halted my tears. “I’m not sick, Jess. I’m fine. Just a little tired. And you don’t hate Jeanine. You’re the big sister. I need your help with her. Especially after Nana goes home. Will you help me take care of Jeanine?”

My face was still buried in the warm wet spot of her clothes. I nodded my affirmation silently and in the process rubbed my nose against her. It felt as good as scratching an itch. I nodded again and again.

That night after I went to bed, I heard Jeanine cry every few hours. The first time I knew when Mother had gotten to her room by the dim light that appeared in the gap at the base of my door like a faraway dawn. Enough brightness leaked in to extinguish the fluorescent stars on my ceiling. I went to Jeanine’s room. Mother was rocking her and breast-feeding her. “Can I help?” I signed. Mother at first began to shake her head no but quickly changed her mind. “Would you get me a glass of water?” she said. I let her have the water in my own plastic Snoopy glass. She drank it down right away. “Wow. Thanks, Jess. I was really thirsty. Get on back to bed now. You need your sleep. And thank you again for your help.”

In bed I turned up the gain on my hearing aids. Jeanine woke at two a.m. and four thirty a.m. Again and again her weak light eclipsed my ceiling stars. It was the way of things, I think now* as I remember how I eclipsed my Mother’s blinding sun the day of my birth. It’s all visible on reel one, the shadow I cast between my mother’s legs as the beam fell on me, pink and wiggling. Eclipses come and eclipses come again.

That first night home with Jeanine, Mother drank two more glasses of water. She looked much better to me for all the fluids. Through the night it seemed Jeanine’s pumpkin glow faded and Mother bloomed pink.

Tina came to my house Saturday to play and to spend the night. Her mother dropped her off. Before she left, she came inside to see Mother and Jeanine. She brought a present and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. She and Tina stood by the crib and watched Jeanine breathe and sleep. Mother had fed her just a little while before. I offered to wake her so they could hear her cry, but Tina’s mother said that wouldn’t be necessary. They stood and watched her breathe as if they were watching an unimaginably difficult feat, Hercules clubbing the heads of the Hydra, perhaps. Their eyes went big when Jeanine sighed, letting out a soft humming noise that ended in a mouse squeak. Her mom took Tina’s hand and said to Mother, “She’s a treasure, Kate. You’re very fortunate to have Jess and Jeanine both.” Mrs. Dalton’s warm right hand went to my cheek and touched it like a match to a wick.

The rest of the afternoon Tina and I played in the yard or in my room. We watched Mother feed and change Jeanine twice. Tina ran from the room when Jeanine started passing a stool on the changing table, shouting as she ran, “N-No! N-No!” Mother looked at me and smiled.

We ate dinner when Father came home from work. Then Cassidy came with a movie. We sat on the couch eating cookies and watching
Shrek
with Ned and Cassidy. They laughed more than we did. Ned ate five cookies. I counted.

Mother tucked us in. Tina slept on the green cot that stayed in the garage unless Nana and Ned stayed and Ned snored. This night, the cot went right next to my bed. When the lights went out, Tina could see my ceiling glint with stars. It was her first time spending the night. “Those are my constellations,” I said pointing up in the dark.

“What are c-consellay-s-shins?” she asked.

“That’s when God places stars in groups to make things. Like a puzzle God puts together in space. Right up over us is Pegasus. He’s a horse with wings. See over there, those stars that make his wings?” I traced the wings with my extended finger even though it was too dark for her to see. “And over there is the Crab and there is the Archer, Sagittarius. See his arrow? It’s aimed right at the Crab!” I drew my hand half across the heavens to demonstrate. It made me feel like the Assembler must feel all the time, His hand sweeping across the galaxies to point things out.

“Where is Minotaur?” Tina asked with a hint of concern in her voice.

“He’s not made of stars. He’s made of bones and horns and skin, not stars.”

“oh.”

We watched the stars silently for a few minutes. “One of them is blinking,” Tina said. I felt the stir of air as her invisible hand rose to point to the star that fell from Aquarius’s water jug. “But sometimes it stops.”

“That’s Aquarius, the Water Bearer. That’s me.”

“Why you?”

I almost answered with my February birthday. Then all at once I remembered the previous night. “Because I bring water in the night to Mother when she feeds Jeanine. She gets very, very thirsty.”

“Oh.”

“Three times in the nights.”

“That’s what I would do for my Mom but she can’t have more babies. Just me and no more.”

I thought to offer her Jeanine, but the realization of what that would mean for me—that I could no longer be Aquarius in the night—prevented me.

“I see two lines near the blinking star.”

“The ocean,” I said. “Daddy painted it. You only can see it in the dark.”

“The ocean in the sky,” she said.

“Yes.” I heard Tina yawn, and then she was asleep.

When Jeanine cried at two, I brought water. And again at five. That second time, Mother asked me how many times was I going to do that, bring her water in my cup? I told her the number. She kissed the top of my head from where she sat rocking and saved the last sip in the plastic glass for me.

I have watched the tapes many times, carefully counting the water trips. There were two a night for almost four months; one a night for another five; intermittent night calls for the next four when Jeanine was teething. I was up to four hundred sixty-three. Then I died and there was no one to bring water. Now* I watch Mother with Jeanine in the dead of night in those weeks after I was buried. Jeanine cries now* not for milk, but for comfort from the sadness that everywhere surrounds her at home. Mother comes to her room bearing more. Mother cradles Jeanine in her lap on the rocking chair and cries until her tears run dry. She is so thirsty, and no one comes. She sobs dry sobs with Jeanine in her arms, and no one comes. I would give anything—even these new thumbs of mine—to bring her water again in the dark. Even just once. There was something sweet in the bottom of the plastic glass, in that last sip she always saved me. I never wasted a drop.

*

The tapes. Cassidy and Nana and Father, their love reborn through me. Maybe so. But as I watch my mother drink in the darkened room, holding Jeanine to her breasts, it is enough for me to think that my whole purpose in life was to bear water to Mother in the nights. It was enough purpose for several lives. A purpose I would have shared with the Lexis and Doreys of my world if time had let me. Because I am Aquarius. I see that. That is enough. I am Aquarius. That is more than Isaiah, more than Ezekiel. I brought water. Like Moses in the desert.

Starting at age four, I had Confraternity of Christian Doctrine class every Sunday following the nine o’clock Mass. It was held in the classroom in the rectory’s basement that smelled faintly of bacon cooking and sewage overflowing, as if the ventilation had been improperly installed, air coming down into the bowels of the building both from the rectory’s greasy kitchen and its ancient bathrooms. There were twelve of us in that class. A nun from St. Anthony School taught us. She sat me in the first seat of the middle row, right in the center of the room, just a few feet from her desk. It was to make sure I could read her lips and hear her voice. The first year we mostly colored Bible stories in a book with crayons. The next year we also read some picture books—Moses in the reed basket was my favorite—and learned some songs. Some of them I’d already learned by listening to Cassidy sing in the car or when he put me to sleep. “The River Is Wide” was my favorite. Sometimes I put baby Moses on that river in my mind and watched him cross in that reed basket. There were no reeds in Bethesda, Maryland; otherwise I’d use some to make a boat. From studying the pictures in the book, it didn’t look that difficult to do.