The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (21 page)

The corpses, separated by space, untouching, alone.

*

It is a tape within a tape the Assembler has brought. To see a young Cassidy, his baby and wife and mother, vibrant and alive, and in a flash, to see the two youngest dead, is too much for me to bear. And there appears to be no clue in the sad footage for my own needs. Or what He thinks must be my needs. I continue to watch, knowing full well how it is to lie limp and dead on a hospital gurney. I am broken, heart and soul.

Cassidy stares at the funeral Mass cards on his mirror. He closes his eyes and lies back on the bed. He sees Father Larrie at the wake sitting opposite his mother, knees to knees, holding her hands as she cries in the corner of the room with the caskets and flowers. Her face holds as much wild terror as deep sadness. Father Larrie is a new-minted priest then, his hair brown and wavy, his eyes shining with the blue of Mother Mary’s hope and love. Carina Cassidy is urgent, nearly hysterical, in her cries and in her words between them. Her face bursts with need. Larrie nods, whispers, “Yes, yes,” and retrieves his stole from the side pocket of his black jacket. The vestment goes around his neck. If you didn’t know better, you’d think he is preparing to leave for the cold walk to his car. The stole is long and ends in dark purple rectangles that dangle almost to the floor. The purple is the color of the bruise on Joey’s forehead in the ER, the only mark on his dead body. Cassidy wants to turn away from the scene when he makes this connection, but there is something in Larrie’s demeanor that won’t let him. It is the way he leans forward toward his ranting mother, the half turn of the head so that she’s whispering directly into his right ear, the slow nodding he does like a man completely convinced, fully certain, about what he hears. The nodding, slow, so slow. He releases her hands and they immediately come together in the pose of prayerfulness. His mother’s face is fixed on the priest’s, as expectant as before but now calm. He turns his head to look at her. His hand makes the sign of the blessing in the air. Cassidy hears the first few Latin words,
“Absolvo te
. . . ,” and turns away, not knowing if it’s sadness or anger that makes him go.

There is a hospitality room at Leary’s Funeral Home. Leary’s is an Irish establishment and the hospitality room is stocked with bottles of good Irish whiskey the mourners bring. But Cassidy doesn’t touch a drop the two long afternoons and nights of the wake. He takes condolences from family and friends and drinks warm soda from a plastic cup. He comes and goes from wake to home in his car, alone, while Nana and Ned chauffeur Carina. Before the concluding prayers on the second night, Father Larrie tells him to see after his mother. “She’s suffering mightily for your coldness and distance. Comfort her, Joseph,” he says in the hallway. Cassidy is astonished the priest would even think to approach him after the row they had over the two coffins. But he does, his blue eyes a little cloudy from fatigue and his face a little shiny from sweat. There are a hundred people present for the service and the heat is intense.

“It’s for me ta decide how ta go on, not for you, Father. She’s the one who drove, who’s responsible for their deaths. That’s not somethin’ I’m likely ta put behind me.” He turns to go but the press of the standing crowd locks him in place.

“She’s received the absolution of the Church, Joseph. With a penitent heart she has come to Christ and He has forgiven her. She asked me to tell you that. She has no debt to God in any of this sadness, and now you must forgive her also.” His face is set so hard, Cassidy feels like punching it.

“Well, all the absolution in Christendom won’t put breath back in my wife or my son. That’s what it will take for me ta give her forgiveness. Their lives returned.”

“Joseph, you risk the loss of their loved memory. That memory which you share with your mother. You risk losing that and your mother’s love. You won’t get through this with hate and retribution. They will eat the love out of you. Only with love and forgiveness will you get through. Replace your stony heart with a living heart, the Bible says to you, Joseph. Your heart will not live, truly live, unless you go to her in forgiveness.”

“Well, you’re wrong there, Father. I’m livin’ off anger and hate right now. If I don’t have that, I don’t have nothin’. Nothin’ at all but emptiness. I left her the cab money. She killed them and that’s the way it will always be for me.”

“Joe,” the priest begins, but Cassidy finds a gap and slips away. “Put away . . . ,” he says to the retreating figure, but his words fall unheard into the din of the room. I read his lips, though, as he finishes, “. . . anger. Put on mercy.”

The funerals are the next morning at St. Anthony’s. Cassidy refuses to sit next to his mother. Nana holds her, weeping in the front pew the entire service. It is no better at the cemetery. Cassidy does not return to his home for the reception. He drives instead to Rory’s Place and gets drunk in his mourning suit.

The next day he packs up his clothes and the few mementos of his wife and child and moves out. He drinks to stupor again that night. And the next.

At first it is Ned who provides him care and attention. He comes every morning with hot coffee and buttered rolls to his basement apartment on Rollins Street to see that Cassidy is up and out for work. For weeks, he rouses a hungover Cassidy and gets him moving, never stooping to lecture his young friend on his drinking but only telling him what he thinks is the secret to being a man: a man goes to work. No matter what, a man wakes and washes and works. Cassidy curses and grumbles, but he showers, drinks the coffee, and goes to his counter at the post office with crumbs on his shirt. The work starts to put a wedge between his anger and his day.

For a few months, it seems enough. But when spring comes with its cruel, green reminder of his April wedding day, Cassidy’s grief is reborn, and the violence begins. The county police let him go the first time—he’d punched a fellow patron at Rory’s Place when that man let his disdain for married life be known to those seated at the bar with him—but they take him into custody for his second offense, smashing the windshield of Father Larrie’s car with a stone hurled from two hundred feet away. But before the hearing takes place, Nana intervenes. She asks the priest whether it is better for Cassidy if he loses his job and goes to jail, or does something useful with his talents. He had been a high school standout in baseball, the shortstop on the team that went to the Maryland state championship game his senior year, she tells him. Why not drop charges in exchange for Cassidy’s agreement to coach baseball teams in the Police Athletic League? And let Ned replace the windshield? In the space of the few seconds it takes for Larrie to consider the request, he sees Cassidy standing on the corner two blocks from the rectory parking lot as he, Larrie, drives onto the street. He sees Cassidy bending to retrieve a rock. He sees Cassidy’s arm in a throwing motion. He sees himself in the car, smiling, thinking, “Never in a million years from such a distance.” Then he sees the rock coming at him in a straight line like it’s on a string. He sees himself still smiling when the rock smashes his windshield with a noise like a gunshot. Father Larrie blinks, and he sees the wisdom in Mae O’Brien’s request.

Nana’s suggestion was shrewdly calculated, and proves even more successful than she’d hoped. Cassidy grumbles at first, adamant not to do anything the priestly ass had agreed to. But he finally sees the wisdom in Nana’s argument, that he would lose his job and perhaps even go to jail, if he didn’t take the offer. So, reluctantly he begins coaching junior high students. And loves it as much as his charges love him, even a stubbly-bearded, hungover, Saturday morning him. Especially a stubbly-bearded, hungover him. He has a flair for the game, true, but also a way of dealing with boys on the cusp of adolescence that is something to see. He makes the wind sprints, the games of pepper, the endless fielding of hard grounders and towering fly balls seem like the most important things in the universe for his players to do. His teams win and win and win. And in the winning, he wins the admiration of their parents, many of whom are members of Montgomery County’s police department.

In the months and years that follow, those brown-suited enforcers of the county’s laws have a difficult decision to make when they arrive at Rory’s to find Joe Cassidy at the giving end of a sound beating, or at the receiving end of one: do they jeopardize their own sons’ futures in baseball by hauling their coach into jail, or call Ned and Mae O’Brien to come pick him up? Nana is amazed at the power of baseball. The basement tape ends.

Eileen Marshall is childless and, for the past three years, unmarried. Mercifully, unmarried. She comes and goes as she pleases now. There is no longer a man who needs things—a meal, a conversation, a friend, a lover. She is free to work late, eat late, retire late, without having to offer an excuse or an explanation. Especially this time of the year with all those tedious Christmas parties that rise up like speed bumps, slowing her down as she tries to forge on ahead. “But you have to come with me,” Ray would plead about some partner’s gathering. “I can’t show up alone.” And for those four constraining years she did go with him.

And hated him for it. The chitchat, the talk of trials won, of
strategy
that won them, of billable hours, of rain makers. And the food, always the same, always eaten standing, eaten with the fingers. But that is over now, finished. And good riddance.

Which is why there is nothing unusual about the lady cardiologist working late in her office the evening of December twenty-third, when everyone else is out having a good time. Even the janitors have grown used to that—they know to collect her trash the last of their shift.

She has retrieved the metal canisters containing my echocardiograms from the film library and has brought them to her office to review. There are two studies done in the newborn period, and then a study from each of my yearly evaluations. She reviews the first and sighs relief when there is nothing arising aberrantly from the aortic arch. The second newborn study likewise is clear. Even more relieved, she spools and plays the echo from age one. And there it is, partly hidden among the plumper pulmonary vessels, but clearly visible, a gray-black wisp coiling into the chest. It is even more apparent on the next three echoes, the artery growing in size and definition as the rest of my body does. The diagnosis is clear and clearly missed.

“But it is not supposed to be there!” she says aloud to herself. “It’s not part of Hilgar’s. It has no
right
being there!” She thinks of the statistics. A one in one hundred thousand chance of Hilgar’s and a separate one in ten thousand chance of the aberrant artery. The chance of both occurring in the same individual is one in a
billion!
She takes comfort in the numbers. “I should not be
required
to search for something as rare as that! Her death was out of my hands.” She ejects the tape from the projector and sits looking at the grayness of it. “Gray,” she says aloud as she taps the eraser of her pencil on the echo’s empty metal canister. The hollow, tiny sound is like the beat of a drum. The silver-gray film from the viewed echoes sits on her desk in a jumble like a nest of snakes. There is a knock on her door.

“Housekeeping,” says the tremolo voice of Henrietta. “Housekeeping, Dr. Marshall.”

In that instant she ceases her drumming. “Come in, Henrietta,” Marshall says. “I’ve been doing some Christmas cleanup. You can take this stuff away. Take it all away.” At the last moment, she retains the second of the two newborn echoes. She first thinks to keep both but argues against the idea. Verisimilitude, she understands, will be her
strategy.
Tapes are often lost. Even the very first one is gone. Only one can be found in that god-awful film library. Those filing clerks can be the height of incompetence.

On top of the tapes goes the uneaten remnant of her working supper, the glutinous mashed potatoes and gloppy creamed corn soaking the silver celluloid tape, darkening it, making the snaky tape look old, old as the hair of Medusa.

Before leaving that evening, she replaces the sole surviving echo on its proper shelf. In the morning she will ask her secretary to place a written request for all my echoes; she will raise a stink when only one can be found. Very verisimilitude and very discoverable should a suit arise, she thinks as she walks to her car. All that will remain of the lost studies are the dictated reports in the chart and her own imperfect memory of what those images showed. She thinks of her actions as a Christmas present to herself, one she fully deserves. It is a present that will prevent her from suffering the unpleasantness of a lawsuit over a matter so unfair to the treating physician, the discovery of the rarest of rare constellations of anomalies in an already blemished child. No need to get trounced over a slipup like that. Ears and heart and voice and artery and bones and kidney. Who knows what else lay beneath her skin? A mess. The girl was a mess. A mess
no one
should be responsible for.

Cassidy is too hungover the morning after my death to notice that Father has not come to work. Instead, he swallows aspirin and drinks black coffee while he waits on a long line of holiday-impatient customers. He manages a few tablespoons of instant noodle soup during his lunch break and has just decided to dash to his car for a quick pick-me-up when the manager calls him to his desk phone. “Joe, it’s Jackson for you. He’s got some bad news. Real bad. You better sit down.” Cassidy’s hand shakes when he reaches for the phone. But it’s been shaking all morning long. His face is gray-green in the cheeks and black about the hollows. His eyes are rimmed with red and look cold and lifeless.

“Ford,” he half whispers. “Where are ya?”

“Joe, I’m home with Kate and BJ. It’s Jess, Joey. It’s Jess. She’s dead.” Cassidy moves the phone a few inches from his ear. The cries he hears are like spikes in his brain.

He waits for the sounds to stop. “What? What are you sayin’ about Jess? She’s dead? She died?”

“Last night, Joey. She got sick last night and just . . . just couldn’t breathe. We did mouth to mouth, everything. But she was all obstructed in her windpipe. By the time EMS got here it was too late. She was dead. They’re doing an . . .” but he breaks off again into sobs. The manager can hear them where he stands at the window. He walks to a stunned Joe Cassidy.