The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (19 page)

*

“Vengeance is mine!” the Assembler likes to say to me. “No, it’s not,” I tell him. He never argues the point. He knows too well the stories His Son told. The Prodigal Son. The Tax Collector. The Woman at the Well. In the end, it’s people who own vengeance, who will not pardon the injustice. He forgives, forgets. Forgives.

He is a detective from the DC Police Juvenile Homicide Squad, and looks it. His tan suit jacket is shapeless and wrinkled. A small yellow encrustation of yolk from the morning’s breakfast special streaks down his left lapel in a zigzag pattern. At a quick glance, it might be a metal insignia pin of some private club—the Blitzkrieg Club, say—but upon further inspection it’s clearly egg yolk. It matches in color and texture the yellow dots that stipple his blue tie. He drinks black coffee from a cheap paper cup and coughs with each swallow. He mutters in short bursts when others are speaking as if he is a bomb with a quirky fuse. As if he wants to remind you, he might go off at any instant. And he is young looking, with a face that hasn’t gone to the trouble of forming a crease or wrinkle even after a decade and a half of dead children.

But it is his heart that is rucked and seamed by the endless flow of babies’ blood down the years, and by the erosion of joy his memories carve. Heads caved against fireplace brick so red it was hard to see the blood but not the creamy mash of brain; limbs stiffened by an epoxy of ooze from hundreds of cigarette burns; tiny necks snapped by a shake and shout—“STOP CRYING!” Oh, they were made to stop, alright. Sprung joints, splintered bones, carved skin. And in the face of all this mayhem and death, the charade of denial by the parent, the babysitter, the sibling. Oh, it’s never them. Never. Except when it is. And to Officer Mattingly these fifteen years, that was pretty much always.

Mattingly sits in a chair in the consultation room of the emergency room, a brown clipboard resting on a desk. “First,” he says with the coffee cup just under his lower lip, “I’m terribly sorry for your loss. It’s gotta be tough for you both.” He sips and swallows and coughs. “But if you’d bear with me for a few minutes here, I just got to go over the last hours of the decedent’s life. Forms to fill out for the ME’s office. Won’t take too long. Been a long night for you already. Gotta be tough for you.” He sips and swallows again. He times his cough to coincide with the click of the cup’s bottom hitting the desktop. “So, why don’t we start with you, Mrs. Jackson. What happened?”

Mother sits next to Father on a bench across the room from the detective. The distance seems odd to her. She has the sense she is a member of a theater audience who has just now been singled out by the lead actor to join the performance. It is at once reassuring and unsettling. She stares at the floor, momentarily unable to formulate a beginning thought. “Like, how was she this morning?” Mattingly suggests.

Mother’s ears do not register the detective’s prompt. Her brain is filled instead with the sight of me embracing a weeping Joe Cassidy, comforting him over the lifetime sadness of his loss of son and wife. Cassidy, she thinks, we haven’t told Cassidy. Startled at this realization, she looks to Father seated next to her.

“Ma’am?” Mattingly adds. “This morning. How was she?” He writes a note in the margin of his Parental Interview Form:
12:31 a.m. 12/23/04. Decedent’s mother reluctant to give her account of day’s events. Looks to decedent’s father for ? prompt.

“This morning? This morning Jess was fine. She woke late—school was out for Christmas break—went over to her friend’s house to play most of the day. Came home before it got dark. Then she was a little sick but, you know, ate supper and talked about her day at Tina’s.”

“A little sick, ma’am?” Detective Mattingly says looking up from his jottings.

“Like a cold. A runny nose, little scratchy throat. She coughed once or twice during the meal but we—”

“Kid coughed, kid coughed,”
he mutters and writes. Then he coughs.

“—but we didn’t think much of it. Then she went up and had her bath and put on her pj’s. That was—”

“Who did the bath, ma’am? You or the father?”

“The bath? She did the bath. She was independent in her bathing and whatnot.”

“Seven year old,” he mutters.
Bath, alone.

“Seven but independent,” Mother stresses, looking to Father for his approval. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Detective. What now?” I can hear her voice rise in pitch.

“Well, ma’am, it’s past bath time and she’s okay. What happens next?”

“I . . . uh . . . I don’t know, exactly. She was in her room, reading, and I was getting our other child ready for bed. BJ. And Ford, Ford was doing the kitchen cleanup.”

“Father does dishes.”

“When did you see her next?”

“Next was after I got BJ down. It was probably near eight or so. She was making this noise . . . She didn’t look sick or troubled by it. But she sounded . . . you know, like a seal every time she coughed. Like a seal barking. The first time I heard it, I even laughed. At her sounding like a seal—”

Laughed at the kid. Sound like a seal.

“—and I went and looked in our home health care book and they suggested a cool-mist vaporizer and then Ford went into her room and heard it. Her cough. So, then . . . Ford went out and got a vaporizer at CVS, and I sat with her for a while as she was reading and I . . .” Mother stops and lets her tears fall again. She sees me in my chair struggling with the big Greek words in
D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.
Heph-aes-tus, Mother remembers pronouncing for me, syllable by syllable. “I helped her with some of the big words.” Mother blots her tears with the Kleenex a nurse had given.

“Anything else, ma’am?”

“I felt her forehead, and she didn’t feel warm. We had Tylenol in the cabinet, but she didn’t feel like she had a fever. And then, then Ford came back and I set up the humidifier and—”

“Ma’am, vaporizer or humidifier? Earlier you said ‘vaporizer’”.

Mother looks at Father and shrugs. Father opens his mouth to speak, but Mattingly holds up his pen like the baton of a symphony conductor and says, “Wait your turn, Dad. You’ll get your turn. Right now I want to know what Mom remembers.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember what it said on the box. I just poured water in the hole and plugged it in. I aimed it at Jess’s face where she sat reading.”

“Aimed it. Daughter’s face.”

“What?” Mother asks, sounding confused and exasperated. “What?”

“And next what happens?”

“I think . . . she seemed to get a little better. That coughing noise slowed down some for a while. But then at eight thirty or maybe nine, she started another noise with her breathing. Like a crowing sound when she inhaled. Just when she inhaled. But she was sitting there in her chair, just reading and didn’t have a fever. I asked her if she had a sore throat or a pain anywhere, and she just said no. So I left her to—”

“Left the kid
,” Mattingly mutters and makes a note on his forms.

“—to do more housework. With Christmas coming and all.”

“Christmas. Christ, Christmas.”
He shakes his head.

Mother stops her recounting and stares at the floor. She sees me breathing, the hollow at the base of my neck growing deep as a cave with each inspiration, my neck muscles straining like wire pulleys, my nose flaring like a breathless horse in a race. “I wanted to give the mist some time to work,” she whispers.

I want to comfort her, to reach out to her and reassure her.

“So now it’s what time? Nine? Nine thirty?”

“Maybe closer to ten,” Mother says with a flat voice.

“All the way to ten.”

“I came into her room with a cool cloth to freshen her face. She . . . she was vacant, her face was vacant. She could barely breathe. Her arms were limp. And her legs. I called her name. I called it again. She didn’t recognize me. Or hear me.” Mother covers her face with her hands and closes her eyes in the futile hope the vision will fade.

“Go on,” Mattingly says tapping his pen on the desk.

Mother uncovers her face and says, slowly, “I shouted for Ford. I went to our bedroom and dialed 911. I went back to Jess’s room. Ford had her on the bed and she . . .” Mother buries her face in her hands and weeps. Father encircles her with his arm, wrapping it lightly around her shoulders, and he cries, too. Mattingly sips from his coffee, and, finding how much it has cooled, swallows half the contents of the container in five gulps. He coughs and waits.

“Then we did CPR,” Father says.

“Not your turn yet, Dad. Still listening to the wife’s version.”

“This is not a
version
of the story, Detective. This is a recounting of the events of the night. I agree with everything Kate has told you about the day. At least that part of it I was there for.” He takes his arm from around Mother and sits straight in his chair. “So it is too my turn. We lost our daughter tonight, Detective, and we’d appreciate a little compassion and understanding for the pain we are going through.”

Compassion.
“So, I haven’t heard anyone mention a call to your doctor yet. She did have one, didn’t she, a pediatrician?” He scans the sheet of paper on his clipboard for my name. “Jessica did see a pediatrician, right?”

“Of course. Dr. Burke. He was here an hour ago. You missed him.”

“Well, with all due respect, sir,
and compassion,
the question is why didn’t you call him when the girl got bad? And if you want, you can go first on that one and then the missus.”

“Because until the last few minutes, Jess didn’t appear to be troubled by any of the symptoms she was having. The cough, the noisy breathing. She felt fine. The book even mentioned that about the croup. How it’s rare after infancy and usually is more of a nuisance than a serious illness in the older child. We didn’t think we should bother Dr. Burke after hours with a call.”

Didn’t bother,
Mattingly writes. “Ma’am?” he asks.

Mother sits, mute and crying.

He takes pictures of my body in Cubicle Sixteen before he follows Mother and Father home. Mrs. Sampson is sitting on the couch in the living room when they come into the house. She cries in Mother’s arms when she hears the news. Mother’s belly is so distended by her pregnancy, Mrs. Sampson can barely get her arms around her. Her plump hands start to pat Mother’s sides, then grab folds of her coat and desperately hang on as sobs shake her body. Detective Mattingly asks about Jeanine. “Not a peep,” Mrs. Sampson says. She wipes the smudge of tears from her cheek, puts her hand on Father’s shoulder, promises them her prayers, and leaves.

Mother leads the way upstairs, walking ponderously as much for her advanced gestation as her overwhelming sadness. Mattingly tries to pass her halfway up, but Mother stops and turns and stares at him. “First the sister’s room, ma’am,” he says. Mother takes him to Jeanine’s room. The detective turns on the overhead light and looks around. He leaves the light on as he leaves.

In my bedroom, he takes pictures for the death scene investigation. My chair, my bed, my new vaporizer, my desk, even the cover of
Greek Myths.
It lies on the floor where I had dropped it before Mother found me. “This the book she was reading?” Mattingly asks Mother. She nods and Father whispers, “Yes.” They embody a church-like reverence in my death room. “Weird,” mutters Mattingly, stepping over the book to get to my bedside. His thick body throws the book cover, a drawing of Helios, the sun, in shadow for a moment. Mother bends to retrieve the book and holds it to her breast with both arms crossed. “No medicines given to her during the day?” the detective asks as he takes close-ups of my bedding. “No stuff for colds and coughs?” He coughs.

“No, none. As we told you earlier,” Father says.

Mattingly bends low and checks under my bed. He sorts through my dresser drawers, photographing the contents. He enters my bathroom and empties the garbage can into the sink. He finds an empty toothpaste tube and eleven Q-tips. “What’d she need all these for?” he asks without turning around to see if Mother or Father is watching him from the doorway. They are. His camera memorializes the wax from my ears.

“Jess wore hearing aids. She needed to pay special attention to her ear . . . hygiene,” says Mother. “They were to clean her ears,” she finally manages to restate. She feels that, at last, she has been able to answer knowingly.

“Clean as a whistle.”

Mattingly looks through the contents of my vanity. “Anything removed from here?” he asks. His camera catches my hairbrush, ear syringe, toothbrush, powder puff, Avon skin cream, giant box of unused Q-tips, and a Mars candy bar at rest on the shelves. “Did you know she hid candy in here?”

Mother looks at Father. “No,” he says. “We never checked her bathroom for candy.”

Sweet tooth. Greek myths. Mars bar.

“No,” Mother says, almost smiling at the thought of me hiding candy. “We didn’t.”

“And your bedroom would be where?” Mattingly says, checking the clarity of his last two digital images.

“But she never was in there,” Father volunteers.

Mattingly finishes his review. “Where?” he says walking past them.

Mattingly leaves a little after two in the morning. Father signs a form listing the items Mattingly takes for analysis: the used Q-tips, my bedsheet and bedspread, a sample of water from the vaporizer’s reservoir, the discarded toothpaste tube, and my uneaten candy bar.

His camera contains thirty-eight digitized images of my room. For all the years of practice in the rooms of the dead, he missed what was most important, most revealing, for it was all above him in the heavens of my stucco ceiling. A glance at the sad clown would have told him the story, a look at Aquarius brimming a bucket of tears would have been enough. But he did not see. He looked down, always down. The Assembler likes to say, “Look up, look up to the mountain whence comes your deliverance. From on high, He comes.” I have no quarrel with that one.

“Sorry again for your loss,” he says when he is departing. “We’ll figure it all out.”

In their stunned graciousness, both Mother and Father tell him, “Thank you.”