The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (10 page)

At first, “Uamm” was my Mama. “Uamm,” I would call when I saw her eyes. “No,” she would sign and shake and say, “Mama.” Three days of trial and error, cutting and pasting, ripping and sewing those four simple letters before “Mama” emerged off my tired tongue and Mother smiled and nodded and said, “Yes, Mama.” Three days the gestation of a new, proper word risen up from the floor of the sea like a bubble clear and eye-bright. So it went with Dada, milk, bottle, go, Nana, Ned, car. I took the sounds, split them with my tongue, parsed them with my lips, assembling the words for what my world contained.

But Cassidy, Cassidy was pleased with his watered-down name, his name with a wet chaser that came from me at a year. I sat in my high chair, my family around the Sunday dinner table. “AceyDee,” I called him, for that is what I heard whenever his name reached me down there, and “AceyDee” he became, no assembly required.

I had follow-up visits with my doctors. Burke’s nurses kept giving me injections. I wouldn’t grace the stenciled menagerie on the walls with even the briefest glance. O’Neil fiddled with the gain of my aids. The sea of noise grew calmer but was eternally close in my head. Voices, telephone rings, music, traffic, birdcalls washed in these more well-rounded waves with each adjustment he made. Finally, it was as if each sound dove into the chop whose skin was continuously punctured by shoals of darting, clicking silver fish. The words, the notes of music, the jolts of telephone rings swam around and around while I dissected and reassembled them. Out they came, first as solos, then as struggling duets at fifteen months, and finally, at a year and a half, fully assembled sentences.

My first word: “Mama,” at eight months.

My first practiced phrase: “Want more,” at a year.

My first sentence: “Where is AceyDee?” at eighteen months.

Eileen Marshall had continued confidence in my heart. The leaks were no worse, she told Mother and Nana after repeating my echo tests, and the lungs were handling the increased blood flow quite well. Patience. Time. Wait.

Garraway made me laugh and scream with his tickling kisses. He drew blood from Mother and Nana on the first office visit and gave them a report that made them beam at the second. The gene Mother and Nana shared had “weak penetrance.” The odds of another pregnancy complicated by the syndrome were roughly one in a hundred.

Arthur Stein took my blood pressure five times each visit. At fifteen months, the numbers all of a sudden skyrocketed. He tried a drug that tasted like the smell near the oil burner in the basement—rancid and cloying at the same time. He put me on a low-salt diet. At eighteen months, my blood pressure continued to rise. He admitted me to the hospital to remove my kidney.

“Where is AceyDee?” I asked as we drove to the hospital that early morning in August of my second year. He had told me he would come to the hospital with us that day.

“He will meet us there,” Mother said and signed. Her face was tired and worried. Her anxiety was in her hands, too, as she used the sign for “leave” instead of “meet.”

I looked from her hands to her face and gave the sign for “meet.” Mother touched my head. “Yes, sorry, meet,” she gesticulated.

He came into my room minutes before they wheeled me away. I could see on his face how hard the previous evening had been on him. His red dragon eyes, his puffy cheeks, his formaldehyde breath, a fine snow of dandruff on the shoulders of his rumpled blue shirt. “Are you sure they need ta do this, Ford?” he asked as he watched a nurse squirt something into my buretrol. “A kidney operation on a baby. That’s not nothin’. Maybe they should wait.”

“We been through it all before with you,” Father said with a note of exasperation in his voice. “It’s her pressure they’re worried about and this’ll fix that. Take the strain off her heart. Stop from needing the pills. It’s the right thing, Joe.”

“Her heart’s fine,” he said. He fixed the sock on my left foot.

“It is for now,” Mother said. “But it’s got to close those leaks, and the high pressure will prevent that from happening. And this kidney operation at least isn’t open heart. We’re here to try to put
that
off, Joe. Think of it like that, if you can.”

“And she’ll be fine. This is a good place, Joe, and Stein has a lot of experience.” Father took him by his elbow.

“Stein,” said Cassidy. “Stein.”

The nurse unplugged my IV setup and unlocked the wheels of my bed. Cassidy bent over me in a hug. His familiar essence—breathy rankness from the drinks of the night, stale tobacco smoke caught in the weave of his clothes—was at least as calming as Mother’s kiss and Father’s parting pats, as the aides wheeled me away. The medicine in my drips made me sleepy. My eyes closed. Even the peculiar incense of Joe Cassidy could not church the scent that rose with sleep in the back of my nose. The worm-scrawled earth, bitterdamp fug of decay, blew through my every breath.

It was a very different sort of pain I had after kidney surgery. More like a deep, deep ache that kept changing location. First I felt it in my side. It was as if I had fallen hard on the small of my back against the point of a wooden stair. The first ten minutes after a fall like that was the pain I had for a day and a half. Then, all of a sudden, I felt as if someone had tightened his grip on the tissues in my lower belly and wrenched it clockwise. I was keen to double over in an effort to lessen the discomfort, but the stitches in my back yanked me in recoil before they tore through their bites of skin. For a day and a half I flexed and returned between doses of morphine. On the fourth day, the pain was gone. In its place I could feel the hot thrust of blood beating at my wound eighty times a minute. I lay on ice on Cassidy’s chest and listened to the stories he read from the new book he brought as a get-well present. I liked the one about the king penguin chicks on the winter ice. Penguins have no ears. Cassidy pointed that out to me.

The last night in the hospital I kept him reading until late. His eyes were closing over. He kept rereading the same sentence. Even the ice pack on his belly couldn’t keep him awake. Nana was in the room with us. Mother and Father had gone home, and she was to spend the night. She sat watching us. When Cassidy would startle awake, I’d say, “Please, AceyDee, more.” Pah-ees, AceyDee, mah-oh-ah. Then he would reread, “The Wooly Penguin looks like an ugly duckling now, but in the warmth of summer. . . ,” and droop his chin to his chest. After the third or fourth time, Nana rose, found a piece of paper and wrote him a note. She took her little overnight bag, kissed me on the head, and signed, “Good-night.” She closed the door gently.

I sat feeling the ice pack press my wound each time Cassidy breathed. In four or five minutes, he awoke and looked around the room. “I tired,” I said and gave the sign for sleep. “Good thing,” he said huskily. “Let’s find Nana.” “Gone,” I said. Gah-on-a. By then he’d found the note. “You looked so peaceful there asleep, I thought you might like to spend the night. Be back first light. Mae.” He scratched his head with the hand holding the paper. “Ty-ud,” I repeated. He eyed the door, then the fold-out cot next to the window. I could feel the breath come into his chest and stay there a while. The cold press of it felt good on my incision. Finally, he exhaled and rose to get me ready. When he had me comfortable in my crib, he looked at the door again for a while. Then he looked at me, smiled weakly, and said, “Sleep tight, Jess.” He turned out the light and lay on the cot. I had rarely before been as grateful for the gift of hearing as that night when I lay awake listening to the snores and snorts, the restless shifting, the toss of bed covers, the occasional muted shouts that came from a sleeping Joe Cassidy. Sober and asleep, he was reason to ignore the burning pulse in my back, to doze and await the light of new day that seeped through the imperfectly fitted window drapes, before calling for my codeine with a shriek.

Next morning, Mother, Father, and Nana arrived to pack me up and take me home. Cassidy was beside my crib drinking coffee he’d gotten from one of the nurses. He stood watching me pick dry Cheerios from a pile on my breakfast tray. I nabbed them two and three at a time, between the index and middle fingers of both hands. His hand shook when he brought his cup to his lips, but his face lacked the cracked-leather appearance it so often had in the mornings. And his eyes were somehow bright, an effect perhaps of sclera a faint muddy brown color instead of crimson red. It was Friday, a working day, for Father and him. He stared at Nana when she came through the door. Mother and Father said good morning and came to my bed.

“Slept well at home, did you, Mae?” he asked.

“That I did, Joe. And yourself?”

“Passable,” he replied, sounding annoyed.

Nana took my new red sweater from the box.

“Wouldn’t it be a bit warm for that outfit?” he asked. “August days.”

“It was just too cute to pass up,” Mother interjected. Cassidy shook his head in disagreement. “And in a few months she’ll have outgrown it, Joe.” He shook his head again, unconvinced of the wisdom in it, sipped his trembling coffee, and shuffled his feet.

“Ride with me to work,” Father suggested after I had been dressed.

Cassidy checked his watch. “Thought I’d stop by my place ta clean up a bit first,” he said. All three of them stopped to stare at him. His hands shook the surface of the coffee to a little squall. A few drops of brown liquid sloshed over the side of the white Styrofoam container and dripped to the floor. I heard the first and fourth splats.

“I’ll drop ya off, Ford, and then I’ll go home a bit,” he said quickly.

“Wash up quickly here, Joe, and we’ll go in together,” Father retorted. “You don’t need anything from home.”

Cassidy straightened his back and took a jerky step toward the door. His eyes narrowed. “I do, Ford, and I’m going ta get it. You can wait in the car on the street if ya want, but I’m stopping by my house. I know what this is all about, but just leave me be.” In the silence that followed I watched his face charge with pain. Back now was the morning’s etch of lines in his forehead and around his eyes. It was quiet for a long time. No one moved. Another silent drop fell to the floor from his cup.

It was Mother who spoke next. “So be it, Joe. But you’ve got to come to supper tonight to celebrate Jess’s discharge. And to thank you for spending the night so we could get everything ready.”

“Book,” I said. “Read book.” I gave the sign for “bird” and clapped my hands.

“Sure,” Cassidy said. “I got ta finish the story anyway.” He signed “good-bye” to me and walked out of the room.

“It’s a start. One night’s a start,” Nana said.

“Let’s hope,” said Father.

“Not much of a start if he goes at it hard this morning. What kind of start is that?” Mother asked.

“Well, I don’t know what kind of start it is, Kate. Just that it’s a start,” Nana said.

“Book,” I said. “Read book.”

We left at eight. It was warm in the car in my sweater. I thought of ice and whiskey in a sweating glass and penguins on frozen seas.

Now* I see him in his kitchen, drinking tap water till his belly aches, and he must bend over the sink. The door of the kitchen cabinet holding the liquor is open. The bottle rests on the shelf untouched, until he’s drunk five huge glasses of water in rapid succession. His stomach is so distended he can’t straighten out. I can hear him moan over the splash of water from the tap. He stands there flexed at the waist, his face only a few inches away from the red porcelain sink. In a moment his right hand reaches up to the shelf and finds the bottle. Without looking he takes it down and unscrews the cap. He tilts the bottle back and takes a single long pull. Before he swallows, he stares at the red sink, replaces the cap, and slides the bottle back onto the shelf. The liquor goes down his gullet with a moan that could be pain, could be pleasure. His hand finds the cabinet door and slams it shut.

He doesn’t shave or wash. He comes straight to work and is only a little late. His supervisor tells him to get checked out by a goddamn urologist the fifth time Cassidy leaves his station to use the bathroom. “Gladly I’d go,” Cassidy says, “if only the insurance would cover a visit ta the horse vets. Them’s the only ones with instruments ta fit my size.” He winks at Father, who chuckles.

My high blood pressure was cured. My body’s defective tissue will stare out of a glass jar until Dr. Burke dies at seventy-three and a junior member of the practice inherits his office. That young woman will hold it up to the light and marvel at what modern genetic testing has been able to prevent since the early days of that discipline. Then she deposits me in the trash.

It was in those few months of my recuperating from kidney surgery that Father finally abandoned his loud empty words. What had been so instinctual and effortless for Mother, the graceful indulgence of her flesh for my flesh, both through the watery miracle of her womb and the milky feast of her breasts, bound her to me in love. I was her creation, unseen and then seen, through days hidden and then revealed, and she loved me like a jealous god. Father, though, had had the smallest of parts in that endeavor. I became, I was, I grew, beside him, not through him.

In the fall of my second year he began to paste more stars onto my ceiling. There were already a few flung glowing specks up there when I had come home from the hospital as a newborn, part of the predelivery ritual of readying the room for their new arrival. But on that night in late October, he climbed the stepladder as I read in Mother’s lap, and he began to affix a few dozen more fluorescent stars to the flat valleys in that corrugated terrain. His hand went out and stuck a star here and there in no particular pattern. He climbed down, moved the creaky ladder a few feet, and reascended to do more pasting. He moved through the room for twenty minutes until he was done. Mother changed my diaper for bed and kissed me goodnight, signing “Love you” with her hands, and passed me to Father. She turned off the light, closed the door, and left.

Father sat rocking me for a few minutes, trying to remember the words to “Camptown Races.” His song lapped imperfectly by as my eyes scanned the new, green, glowing spots on the ceiling. At the middle of his third rendition of the song, the stars coalesced. There above us, just over our heads, stood a horse. Not a nag with a cropped tail and certainly not an everyday reddish-brown steed, such as Father’s song was made of. No, this animal was green and glowing and proud and bushy-tailed, his body and legs and tail clearly delineated by the recently placed stars. “O-arr-sa,” I said over his song. “O-arr-sa.” He went on singing, now with a nod to my apparent endorsement of his tune. “O-arr-sa!” I yelled, this time pointing with my right index finger to the scene above. He looked up, moved to do so more by the sense of motion of my rising arm than his ability to see it in the dark. A few more notes fell from his mouth, and then he stopped at “all the do-dah” and stared with me. “Sweet Jesus, it is,” he muttered. I could feel his head swivel on his neck to align the glowing dots more perfectly. “It most surely is.”