The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (22 page)

“Gimme that, Joe,” he says taking the phone from Cassidy. “You get over there. Help ’em out.”

Cassidy goes to his Taurus. Somehow his hand is steady when he inserts his key in the ignition. Still, he reaches for the glove compartment before shifting into drive. “Another casket,” he says when he sees the pint tucked away. “How in the name of Christ will we be able ta bury another small casket?” The whiskey warms his throat, burns his belly, all the way to my house.

My parents are sitting in the parlor with Father Larrie when he arrives. At first no one stands when Cassidy enters. Mother and Father sit and stare at him blankly, as if he has been gone a long, long time and they hardly remember him. It is Larrie who stands, who speaks first. “Joe,” he says as he walks down the length of the couch to provide Cassidy space, “sit.” He gestures to his vacated cushion. Then Mother stands and goes to him and Father quickly follows. The three who love me join their grief with an embrace. Cassidy cries the hardest, and I know his tears are for more than me. No one speaks.

Finally, they sit and Mother says, “They think it was the croup that took her. Her windpipe just closed over and she couldn’t breathe. We tried everything we knew, but . . .” Mother sounds exhausted. She recounts my last hours. Her sentences are all short sighs. Cassidy drips his tears on his shirt, not even bothering to wipe them with his hand as they course down his cheeks. He doesn’t speak what they already know, what no one has stated: that he was in his home, in his room, passed out from the drink when I died. Home passed out drunk when he should have been here, reading to me. He remembers what I said to him, the last I said to him, “You will be okay,” and shakes his head in disbelief. He stays with them for an hour, through the phone calls, the people dropping off food, BJ waking from a nap.

When he leaves, Father Larrie walks out with him. “Joe, we’ve had our differences, you and I over the years. . . . That’s the God-honest truth. But I’m asking you, don’t be putting the burden of guilt on either of those two over her death. They’ve borne enough of that already. It’s mercy and compassion that’s needed now.” The priest had said little while they sat in the parlor, and this is the most information he’s parted with since Cassidy arrived. At first Cassidy is prickled that the priest would look to direct his actions. It seems an unfounded affront to the obvious love that all three of them had for me. He is about to protest that no such thought of blame could ever enter his mind, when Larrie continues. “And the same goes for blaming yourself. I know from . . . from CCD how close you were to that girl. What she meant to you, even if I can’t accept your approach to holy dogma. But you loved her and that is enough. Don’t go laying on the blame there either. Cherish her memory. Guilt and blame will only tarnish it and serve to separate you from it and from those who share it. That’s like another death when you cut yourself off from that. I’ll not be repeating any of this unless you bring it up, Joseph.” Surprisingly, the priest offers his hand. Surprisingly, Cassidy takes it.

“I’d like to do a song at her funeral Mass,” Cassidy says. Larrie’s eyes widen. “ ‘Amazing Grace,’ ” Cassidy continues, “before the Kiss of Peace.” Larrie considers the request. “That would be within the rules. Okay, then, ‘Amazing Grace.’”

Cassidy can’t bring himself to say, “Thanks.” He just nods and gets in his car.

*

Later*, the Assembler comes by to collect the day’s* tapes. I tell Him I am shocked over Father Larrie’s wisdom, insight, and concern after all I had heard about him from Cassidy, after all of his meaningless questions in CCD class. I expect one of His stock and cryptic replies, such as “Many were the Prophets in Israel in those days, but God’s word came only to Larrie.” Instead, He regards my new thumbs and inspects them with His Artistic Eye. “It takes longer for some to understand than others.” He leaves for the basement, and I do not see Him for days*.

Nana and Ned arrive later that day. There is another wash of tears. My family goes out in the evening to select a casket. Cassidy stays with BJ. They begin to read
The Golden
Treasury of Myths and Legends.
Cassidy sings BJ to sleep. He tucks her in and goes to my room, where he sits and cries in the dark. He looks up to the ceiling. There are more stars than ever before, from the refraction of the light through his tears.

On Christmas Eve, two days after my death, a caseworker from Child Protective Services comes to the house to interview Mother and Father and to do a site visit. She is a matronly black woman close to Nana’s age. She wears a bright orange turban around her hair and a white-striped black caftan. She comes well armed with forms. Before she talks with either Mother or Father, she walks through the house noting items on her list with the concern a surgeon has for his stitches. There is no fire extinguisher in the kitchen, no smoke alarm in the basement, no flashlight in the cabinets, and Mother’s prenatal vitamins are within easy reach of a child on the kitchen counter. The temperature of the hot-water heater is set dangerously high. The Mister Yuk sticker on the refrigerator is mostly obscured by my old art. No one can see the telephone number of the Poison Control Center. A mouse has left a pellet in the drawer containing the aluminum foil. There are no covers for the electrical sockets in Jeanine’s room.

When finally the three sit together in the parlor, Ms. Smith begins by announcing that she has met with Detective Mattingly. “Frankly, with such a preventable death, he is required to investigate your fitness as parents. As that pertains to the incident involving Jessica, it’s in his bailiwick. But we at CPS have a duty to protect the interests of your younger child, Jeanine. That’s the purpose of this visit. And just where would Jeanine be now?”

“She went to the mall to see Santa. My parents and a friend took her a little while ago,” Mother says. There is no strength in her words. They seem to leak out of her mouth like a stanched stream of water. Two nights of sleep deprivation, a day and a half of self-recrimination, guilt, and drowning grief have taken their tolls on both my parents, so much so that neither is offended by Ms. Smith’s remark concerning their fitness as parents. They are arriving at that very same conclusion themselves. Mother sees me limp and staring in my chair. All she had thought to bring was a damp facecloth

“I will need to see her before I leave. Is there any way to contact the grandparents and have them return?”

Father looks at Mother with a shrug. “We don’t use cell phones in the family, so I don’t see a way of getting to them short of one of us driving over to Macy’s.” He lets his head drop as if he is ashamed.

“Well, then, let us begin with these questionnaires and see where that takes us. Maybe they’ll be home by the time we finish.”

The interview drags out over two hours. They are each asked questions about their education, jobs, family relationships, personal histories of violence suffered and delivered, income and spending, drug and alcohol use, diet, religious affiliations, medical and psychiatric histories, use of emergency rooms. They are culling their memories on this last topic when the front door opens, and Cassidy carries BJ into the room. Nana and Ned follow close behind. Cassidy stands just to the side of the couch where the caseworker sits, and sways. BJ sees the stranger in the room and begins to cry. “Zokay, Zokay, BeeChay,” Cassidy slurs. “She’s nice lady in orage hat.” Mother stands and snatches BJ out of his arms. She fixes Cassidy with a glare. He looks like a lashed puppy, his eyes droopy-lidded and his mouth lax. The caseworker stands, smiling thinly, and says, “I’m Beatrice Smith, caseworker from Child Protective Services of Montgomery County. And you are . . . ?”

Cassidy sits in the kitchen with his face buried in his hands. Ms. Smith has left. Mother has stormed off to BJ’s room with BJ and Nana. Father and Ned have gone to the church to see about the funeral service. In the unlit space behind his eyes, Cassidy sees a single vision and hears again a sole shrieked sentence. It is Mother’s face, wild-eyed with terror, wet with tears, yet somehow set sharp in anger, too, some hot spray coming out of her mouth as she screams: “They can take BJ away from us because of you! They can take BJ away from us because of you!” He feels a turning in the pit of his stomach. He barely gets to the bathroom before the retching begins. It is the caseworker’s broad smiling face he sees as he leans over the toilet and suffers the assault of the day’s shots at the bar and the pulls from his glove-box bottle. The smile never fades as she asks him question after question and dutifully records his slurred answers. “Oh, God!” he moans just before he vomits again. “Oh, holy God!”

My wake waits until the evening of December twenty-sixth. My autopsy prevented a wake the day after I died, and the rules of the Church forbid funerals and wakes on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I am given only a single evening session for the mourners to come because Leary’s is overwhelmed by the log-jammed dead of the holidays. Only an evening in my casket in that room with all those flowers and pictures of me and family and friends. Dozens come, sign the book, find Mother and Father and express their sympathies, wander about marveling at me playing soccer, standing in the waves at the beach, splashing in the bathtub as a baby, reading on Cassidy’s lap, eating cotton candy at the circus. Then they approach my casket and kneel on the hard rubber kneeler. I am dressed in my Communion dress, ironically putting it to good use earlier than expected. The dress is pleated white taffeta and my black rosary beads are wrapped around my eight fingers. If the mourners look closely, they can spot my White Owl ring on the index finger of my left hand. Most never see it because they don’t want to look at my hands. But it is there. It was returned to Father along with my hearing aids when he signed the hospital papers releasing my body to Leary’s. My parents had never seen it on my hand before because I only wore it on special occasions, and even then, only in my room. I had put it on the night of my death because of what had happened with Cassidy that morning. The loud bang of the whiskey glass on wood echoed in my ear all that day, and I put it on.

“Wood hath hope,” the Assembler tells me when I think about that incident. “A tree, if you cut it down, shall spring a shoot from the root and shall live!” I don’t know what He’s talking about, but I sometimes still feel Cassidy lean against me, hear the second clunk of the glass on the wood, this one a gentle sound, like a dying echo. I ask Him, “Did You ever feel the power go out from You?” “Wood hath hope!” He replies.

It is Cassidy who tells them the history of the paper ring, and they put it on my finger before the viewing starts.

The doctors come to me in death as they came to me in life, with a mixture of duty and curiosity. They drive over from the hospital all together, Burke, Garraway, Marshall, Stein, and O’Neil all in the same car. Burke and Garraway are the most affected by my death, though for different reasons. Burke hugs Mother and shakes Father’s hand and repeats, like a mantra, “We will miss her so,” to everything either one of them says.

“So nice of you to come.”

“We will miss her so.”

“She loved going to see you in your office.”

“We will miss her so.”

“Thank you for your care all these years.”

“We will miss her so.”

Stein and O’Neil say, simply, “I’m so, so sorry,” and leave it at that. Marshall cries in Mother’s arms, whispering, “And we never got the chance to fix her heart. But maybe it was all for the best.” Garraway kneels at my casket before approaching my parents. He makes the sign of the cross and closes his eyes. His height makes him look like he’s peering down on me from heaven itself. Then, slowly, he bends. His lips brush my fingers a last time. The third, fourth, and fifth black beads of the rosary’s third decade briefly sparkle with his breath’s moisture. He smiles when he spots my ring and taps it with his finger.

Other than my family and Cassidy, he is the only one of the multitudes to touch me. The Assembler lets me feel it, those soft warm dabs to my fingers like some tiny bird at play.

He greets Mother and Father. He says at first how sorry he is for their loss. Then, how privileged he was to have known me and them. And finally, he says what none of the other doctors have ventured to say. “You were the absolutely best, best parents she could ever have had. And I really mean it.”

The tape ends there with Mother breaking down into tears and going to Father’s arms. They seem weak and tired, those arms, as they surround her.

The Assembler insists I watch Basement Tape #14. I pass a second eternity* waiting for it. It is Cassidy at the wake. Helping put my ring on. Helping to settle photos around. Talking with friends and coworkers about me, my life, his life with me. Laughing at some of this, crying too. Cassidy in the hospitality room pouring stiff ones into plastic cups, working hard not to slur his words, not to stagger and sway, darting his eyes around the room for the lady in the orange turban. Wondering who is caring for BJ tonight, trying to remember to ask Father that very question, willing to volunteer to drive home to read her to sleep, but in the thickening alcohol fog, forgetting and forgetting again. But he does not forget, cannot forget, the nights decades earlier in these same rooms, the two coffins, the swamping twin miseries of heartbreak and anger. He feels almost at peace here and now, at peace that he must confront only the sadness, and the sadness of just one death. It is like a gift he has gotten from me.

During the short ride back to the hospital parking lot, Garraway asks where the autopsy stands. Burke answers, “So far, just the aberrant subclavian causing partial airway obstruction so that a little croup was catastrophic.”

“How’d we miss that?” Garraway asks, sounding far away.

“I don’t know that we
missed
anything,” Marshall replies. “I’ve requested all her prior echoes to review. I’ll let you know what I see. It is an unrelated anomaly, you know, the subclavian. Not something one would expect to find.” Marshall thinks the geneticist looks a trifle haughty, and must blame her for the mistake in the girl’s management. She adds, trying to take the fight to him, to make him doubt the thoroughness of his own evaluation, “God, it makes me wonder what else there was missing from that poor girl. She was like a walking time bomb. And she just went off.”