The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (24 page)

“Today, little one, even if our friend doesn’t approve, you can have all the Coke you want.” He turns away, sets down his cup and opens another can. When he turns back, Ms. Smith is gone. “We showed her somethin’ today, kid. We sure did.” He drains his cup and adds more.

It is almost dark by the time the last of the mourners leave.

“Spend the night, Joe?” Mother asks Cassidy. “Be good to be together on a night like this. And all those leftovers.” She has noted his abstinence today, and she is touched by his sacrifice. She has noted, too, Ms. Smith’s demeanor become less judgmental as she witnessed the outpouring of support and love from so many family and friends. Mother feels less threatened by the “system” as Ned calls it. Ms. Smith has already mentioned the possibility of Mother and Father taking parenting classes. The thought of doing this eases Mother’s guilt a little, as if in taking those classes she would be doing a kind of penance for a sin confessed. But she fears for Cassidy alone in his home on my funeral night. She worries that what he managed in the light of day he likely would not manage in his mother’s old dark home, alone, as night advances.

Cassidy looks at her face. She looks neither tired nor sad, though he knows she must be both. All the doing of the day has placed her somewhere between those two emotional poles so that neither shows. He knows she does not need his company this night and that she asks for it out of concern for him.

“Not tonight, Kate. Thanks, but no. I got some things ta attend ta.”

“Like what?” Mother asks, not really wanting to hear the truth.

“Like things,” he says evasively.

“Like things. Let me make you a plate for later at home.”

“No beans,” he says.

The same physician enters his ER cubicle this night. Cassidy is relieved. He had practiced his history during the hour’s wait to be seen, but he is not sure of what to say. It is becoming more and more difficult for him to think straight. His hands are shaking whenever he tries to use them. And those sweats take over his skin and make him shiver.

“Good evening to you, sir!” the physician greets him. Cassidy notes for the first time how large and white his teeth are. They seem to gleam in his mouth. “How are you, sir?”

Cassidy holds out his fingers. They twitch and shake until he pulls them back and sticks them under his armpits. “Haven’t had a drink since before I came here yesterday. But I’m getting a case of the shakes. The cure I know about I don’t want ta take. I’m wondering what your cure might be. There must be a pill or somethin’ I can take ta settle my nerves.”

“Very good man!” the ER physician says. “Very good! We’ll fix you right up. Take the edge off, sir. You will see.” Dr. Vinik extends his hand; Cassidy takes it. “But there will be some difficulty for a week or two, even with the pills, Mr. Cassidy. Night terrors, irritability, difficulty concentrating. Perhaps you would consider a short leave of absence from your employment? I would be most happy to write you a letter. A week, two at the most. Then you will be in fine form, sir.”

Cassidy shakes his head no. “It’s where I go, Doc. The post office. Gotta work, regardless.”

“Yes, of course,” says Vinik softly.

Cassidy thinks the doctor looks disappointed. He can’t look into Vinik’s fallen face any longer, so he lets his eyes rest on the doctor’s name tag. Zacharia Vinik, MD, he reads. Tough name to go through life with, he thinks. “You know, maybe I’ll take that note, Doc. Just in case.”

Vinik beams a smile. “Good man!” he exclaims. He offers his hand again. His teeth gleam.

Nana and Ned decide to stay. First, there’s the meeting to discuss the autopsy findings. Burke expects that should be in a week or ten days. Then there’s the new baby due to arrive in late January. The normal life of a family tries to reassert itself.

Father returns to work at the post office two days after my burial. His supervisor tells him to stay out until after New Year’s, but Father doesn’t have the heart to roam the house room to room remembering his life with me, as he does the day, all day, after my funeral. He stops at my chair in the kitchen and strokes its white-painted wood as if it’s a saint’s bony relic. He remembers the fights over me eating squash, my fondness for bananas, the mashed green peas spread by my hands through my hair when I was a year and a half. He sits next to my reading seat in the living room on the slipcovered couch marked through the years by spills of chocolate milk, juice, and soda. He presses the spots to see if one is still damp, like the sand at an oasis. He trudges to my bedroom where he cries looking at my sky. He takes my blue floating duck from the tub and carries it with him through the remainder of that winter day, full of gray sky and shadowless streets beyond the windows. At dinner he places the duck next to his water glass, and no one thinks to ask why. He returns to work the next day hoping it will relieve him of reliving all the memories because they are the conduit to the pain that feels to him as if his heart has been struck by a hammer.

The post office is a-hum with customers, and it helps him to help them with postage, zip codes, and dimes. He sees his life now as inconsequential as the help he gives, stamps, tiny numbers, ten-gram coins. He can take comfort in tiny things. The few families who bring their children with them manage to queue in other lines. He is grateful for this. He doesn’t know what he would tell them if they came to him, but he thinks it might be to say to treasure the small things, the trivial and seemingly mundane. But even this balm has splinters of glass that impale him, for he goes from this thought to the next: and take every illness, every symptom of every illness, gravely. “If only . . . ,” he says aloud to an old man buying stamps.

Mother and Nana walk in the mornings when BJ is at school. Because her due date is only three weeks away, Mother can’t go very far. They often make it only two blocks south, to Wisconsin Avenue, where they stop on the corner, face each other as pedestrians go by, and relive the events of that night, and of the wake and funeral. Nana cries as often as Mother. Each day at least two passersby stop to offer help. Their tender concern makes Mother cry all the more. “The people, these strangers, they offer me help without even knowing who I am. And I did nothing for Jess that night.” Nana hugs her there, right on the corner, and says into her ear, “You were her mother, Kate, and you loved her so well, so dearly.” Their noses are raw and red from cold and crying.

In preschool, BJ wets her pants each morning and is surprised when none of the aides tells her she is a bad girl. She refuses to take her nap and is allowed to color instead. She breaks a whole box of crayons pressing down too hard. No one scolds her. At home, someone holds her in their arms every waking second. She forgets I am dead and wants to know when I’m coming back. Her question during dinner causes Mother to leave the table in tears. Father goes after her. Ned shows her how to make a pyramid out of baked ziti. It makes her laugh. Then she smashes it with her spoon and cries.

Ned buys an old snowblower from the newspaper classifieds and begins its overhaul in the garage. For hours he is alone with his wrenches and bolts and nuts. He remembers the summer before, when we made sand castles at the beach and when he taught me to ride a two-wheel bike in the parking lot of his church. It was so hot that day the asphalt was soft as fudge, but we practiced until I could coast twenty feet downhill. He promised me a big surprise for Christmas that very afternoon. He turns from the gearbox of the snowblower and sees the red bike he and Nana shipped up as their gift. It leans against the wall, its multicolored streamers dangling from the handgrips, still and limp.

His eyes tear over. He smashes his Allen wrench against the gearbox and wages war against rusty bolts.

Cassidy is the least in tune with his grief, and it hurts him to sense this. It is the effect of the drugs. Or, more precisely, the effect of a lack of one drug—alcohol—and the generous oversupply of another—Valium—for the shakes. He sleeps fitfully through the nights, visited intermittently by frightful dreams of son and wife and mother and me, and by halcyon visions of the same. He wakes every hour or two with demons or angels in his brain and wants to drown them all in drink. Then he remembers Ms. Smith, sips tap water and washes down another pill, and sleeps until the visions bloom again. He tries to return to work, but he is a zombie. He makes errors counting change for every other customer. He handles the tape dispenser as if it were a sledgehammer.

After work he drives home and sits in his idling car for an hour, taking inexplicable solace in the engine’s fitful hum, his thoughts like the morning light just before the first true light, flitting disjunctively in bits and pieces. When he visits BJ and Mother and Father at night, he has little to add to the bleak dinner conversation. He nods off reading to BJ. He knows he is sad, but the jumble in his brain can’t fit the pieces of his emotion together. Sadness looms in his head like the horizon’s black storm clouds that refuse to coalesce, open, and release a flood. The storm’s relief doesn’t come.

He wonders, finally, if it is another effect of his shorted-out brain, that he
wants
to feel the rock heaviness of sorrow in his heart. He
longs
for it.

The next morning, he drives to work and shows the manager Dr. Vinik’s note. It’s written on a prescription pad in letters too tiny for Cassidy’s bleary eyes to read. “Take what you need, Joe. A week, two, whatever it takes. Call me anytime you want to talk.” Cassidy wants to cry, wants to blubber like a baby. The tiny letters, his boss’s concern, everything so sad. Dry-eyed, he walks past the queuing customers and drives home.

When BJ takes ill with a low-grade fever and cough on New Year’s Eve Day, Mother calls Burke, and he sees her in his office. Father leaves work to join them for the visit. BJ is not sick at all—in fact, she feels so well she refuses to leave the house until she gets to wear the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer suit she received for Christmas. No amount of urgency on Mother’s part can convince her otherwise.

“A touch of the flu, nothing more,” Burke says after looking her over. As they dress BJ in preparation for leaving, Burke mentions that he has been in contact with Ms. Smith and that together they are trying to work things out. Neither Mother nor Father has a response to that. At the door, he repeats again about BJ, “Nothing more than a little flu.”

His diagnosis does nothing to placate my parents’ concerns. BJ sleeps in their bed the next few nights. Of the three occupants, only she sleeps well. Mother and Father keep vigil in the dark, separated by twenty-nine pounds of sleeping flesh that splays its limbs out broadly in a child’s abandonment of the concept of space. They listen to her noisy breathing, her few coughs, each remembering the sequence of sounds that tolled her sister’s death, my death, each trying to match that memory to this moment.

“I’m glad we took her in,” Mother whispers in the dark.

“Good to know it’s only the flu,” Father whispers back.

Mother hesitates as BJ shifts position, jutting her left leg so it pushes on Mother’s right. “And now it’s on record that we called right away and took her in. I mean, they can all see that we . . . we care. Are careful.”

Father takes a deep breath and quickly pushes it out of his lungs. “Yeah. That too.”

Mother waits for more before saying, “You don’t sound all that convinced.”

“I’m just starting to get mad, is all. It’s starting to get to me, all this investigation stuff. Smith and Mattingly. I’m starting to think we’ve been, I don’t know, unfairly pegged as bad parents. And now Burke and Smith whipping up somethin’ for us to do. And, like today at Burke’s, what did
he
do? Nothing. Not even some cough medicine. And BJ didn’t sound any different than Jess when she started off. Sounded the same until just before the very end. So what would a call have accomplished? I don’t know. I wish we had called, but . . . I don’t know.” He stops for a minute thinking of Detective Mattingly. “I should have told him to go fuck himself, that Mattingly, the night he was here. Not ‘thank you,’ but ‘fuck you.’ And now the goddamn caseworker and her parenting classes. I don’t know. It all makes me so pissed. I want to tell them all to go take a flyin’ leap.”

Mother sits up in bed and reaches her hand across BJ to lay it on Father’s chest. In a voice more a whisper, less a moan, but both, she says, “Ford, no. Ford, no. Don’t go there. They got the system and they got us in it. If we do anything to resist, to try to block them . . . They got us in it, Ford.” Father lies quietly. She presses her hand down on his ribs. “They could take BJ away from us. Smith said as much.” Mother’s voice is husky, and then she begins to cry. “We just lost Jess and they could take BJ, and I would die, Ford. Jess and then BJ, Ford.” She pulls her hand away.

Father throws off his covers and walks around the bed to Mother. He sits next to her in the dark and finds her hands. “No one is taking BJ,” he says aloud. “That’s my promise to you, Kate. I’ll hold my tongue. I’ll do it for you and for her and for this little one.” He puts a hand on Mother’s round belly. “I’ll be mad, but I’ll be quiet.” Mother puts her arms around his shoulders and pulls him next to her. There is so little room, he is half on and half off the bed. Her face lies on the side of his neck. He can feel her warm tears, and he can feel her head going up and down, nodding her acceptance of his promise. He can hear BJ’s breathing. He looks to the clock on the nightstand. It is not yet the New Year.

Cassidy comes for New Year’s Day dinner. He is calmer than in the previous tapes. Five days distant from his last drink, he feels that the agitation, the sense of his engine racing that took hold of him those first few days is waning. He drinks Coke and plays songs for BJ and Ned while the others cook and set the table. Twice he forgets the words to songs he’s sung since childhood and receives prompts from Ned. His confusion makes BJ laugh and yell, “Again!” for the stumbled song.

The house is warm and fragrant. There are football games to watch. They eat at two. At three Cassidy proposes a visit to my grave. Just to say hello, he says. Everyone is eager to go, but Mother doesn’t think it a good idea to expose BJ to the cold and blustery day. She has sung and played and colored in her books all day but still has a low-grade fever and a cough. Ford quickly agrees with her. Cassidy shrugs his shoulders. “Okay. You all go, and I’ll stay with the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Besides, I already visited there this morning.”