The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (35 page)

The few times one asks about the slow grind of the gears of justice, Mother or Father answers matter-of-factly, “It’s getting there. It’s all coming together.”

Brandon D’Woulfe provides Mother and Father with a list of questions every evening they meet. Each is identical to a question asked months earlier at their depositions. They spend two hours reviewing their answers, reformulating them as needed, fleshing them out to perfect form. They thumb their transcripts repeatedly, searching them for phrasing and fact and inconsistency until they look like heirloom Bibles with dog-eared corners, marginal notations, and tattered edges. When they have done enough of an evening, D’Woulfe releases them always with the same admonition. “Please review your answers in the morning. We start in the courtroom at ten.” And so after Jeanine is off to school and Nana has BJ in the stroller, they sit on the edge of their bed where they made me with no practice at all, and practice unmaking me.

At ten they sit in mock court and testify or wait their turn at the plaintiff’s table at the side of the confident Brandon A. D’Woulfe, Jr. They even learn from him the face one should wear as one hears the sad or sweet words of a spouse in reply to a question such as, “And at bath time, how was she? Did Jess enjoy her baths?” He tells them, “There is a time for laughter, a time for tears, a time for mourning. Just like the Bible says, there is a time for everything. So, Ford, laugh a little when Kate says Jess liked to splash like a frog in the tub. That’s a happy memory. And for God’s sake, let out a sigh the jury can hear when she starts in on her Mattingly answer. They’ll know what’s in your heart,” and he points to the seven secretaries reading the newspaper or filing their nails in the jury box. “It was your time of trial back then. That time is over.
Now is the
time of justice.”

He weans them from their depositions. He allows them to carry the transcripts to their seat in the witness box for the first week of preparation. They are free to page through them to help with the formulation of the answers to the more complex questions. Then, he forbids them access to those printed words. Instead, for the next five days they must lay the manuscripts down on the plaintiff’s table, walk away from them to the witness stand, and dredge all the answers from pure memory. “Please, Mrs. Jackson, if you would, tell the jury about the quality of Jessica’s speech. And feel free to comment on her sign language. I’m sure without thumbs that must have been tricky. And wasn’t she due to get some toes put on her hands to help overcome her problems? Well, let’s see, Mrs. Jackson, seems I’ve just asked you three questions in one. So you just go ahead and put them together with your answers any which way you can.” Mother stares at the transcript on the table across the room. Her long and cohesive answer, she knows, comes from testimony given on pages 19, 37, 69–71, and 211–219. She finishes, flushed and excited, and thinks, “I know it all by heart.”

I watch in dismay and disgust. “Chewww’l ah-bya okay,” I had said to Cassidy. He understood me. They all did. Mother’s changed heart is deaf as stone.

“Well done,” D’Woulfe tells Mother as she steps down and Father rises to take her place. “Very nicely done.” He sounds to me like Mr. Lester, the soccer coach, complimenting a child on a kick.

The trial is to commence at ten a.m. on Tuesday, August eleventh. On Sunday afternoon, August ninth, D’Woulfe calls Mother and Father at home just as they are at the door in the act of leaving for his office. “Today, I want you to leave your depositions home. Today and tomorrow will be final rehearsals for our Tuesday opening. No props, no aids, whatsoever. Just leave them home. You’ll be okay.” They are in the foyer by the front door speaking on the portable phone Cassidy brought. They place their transcripts on the hallstand, and go.

Which is how Cassidy comes to read them.

Ned and Nana are out with Jeanine to the community pool. Brian Joseph has been fed. The breast milk and baby rice cereal prime him for a nap like Thanksgiving dinner. Cassidy is alone in the house, and bored. The paper has been digested, the sports on TV are lackluster. He walks to the foyer to find the phone. He sees Mother’s transcript. He thinks it would be nice to spend an hour with me through the medium of Mother’s memory. The months since my death have turned one by one, from winter to spring to the light-drunk days of summer. His memories of me now are more sweet than sad. Time has blunted much of the sorrow, sharpened much of the joy. So he carries the booklet to my old room, now Jeanine’s room. The light streams through the western window. No constellation is visible, but he knows the stars are there. In the swales of the shadowed plaster, he can see my menagerie. The clown, the faithful clown, seems to frown.

He sits on the chair and flips through the transcript. The compendium of questions and answers goes on for over three hundred pages. Everywhere he turns, Mother has underlined and highlighted and starred and doublestarred answers. There is marginal scribble on every page, much of which references other pages in the transcript where she has divulged more information on the question at hand. Not since high school has he seen anything so well studied as these pages.

He reads from the beginning. By the fourth page, he is troubled. Misspoke. Kate must have misspoke, he mumbles. Mother’s testimony is that I often fought going to school, that I was reluctant to do my studies, that I essentially lived in my own quiet locked-in world. A fantasy world, really, she remarks in answer to a question, with stories of gods and goddesses and with imaginary animal friends. It is where I preferred to stay, away from people and reality, in a world of my own fashioning, childish and sweet but unreal. Cassidy cannot understand her confusion of fact. The Jess he knew loved the academics of school. Friends were hard to come by, true, and there was a lot of teasing, yes, but he knew a Jess who gladly went to learn math and reading and who readily engaged the physical world. And this Jess lavished her energy on her story life, drawing ideas from her books to fire her imagination. His Jess didn’t live in a fantasy world. She created one to visit as she wished, as do all children in their love of mystery and enchantment. She
used
it for her own enjoyment, but she did not hide in it.

He reads on, about my ears and my voice and my hands and my heart. “No!” he cries aloud, “No, Kate, this isn’t right! This isn’t Jess. This isn’t her.” He reads further, and sinks further into confusion and distress.

He goes downstairs and takes Father’s testimony. He sits on the couch in the parlor and discovers again the alien, mutant Jessica Mary Jackson grown from Father’s memory, dressed in Father’s words. He is shocked and sad, wounded. And angry. Very angry.

He reads undisturbed for over an hour. There are far too many pages to review them all, but what he reads makes him tremble with rage. He begins to wonder if it is the prospect of money that has induced them to do this to me. But he rejects this thought. Ford is a man who gives away dimes. Kate, a warm woman he has known all her simple, kindhearted life. “Vengeance, then, is it?” he wonders aloud. But how could this possibly serve vengeance, this reconstruction of their daughter into a less perfect being? He does not know; he cannot find his way from point A to point B, from their omissions and half truths to their purpose in it. His confusion intensifies his rage, and he is consumed with a single thought—that whatever their motivation, what they will do to my memory and to their ability to love and cherish it, will be a poison in their souls. No amount of money, no punishment for the guilty, will be antidote to the poison about to enter their lives, he thinks. They will hate themselves, they will hate each other for what they are about to do in court. Their vengeance will not be sweet. It will be venom. They must be made to see this, be made to stop their plan for trial.

He lays the transcript on the coffee table and sits on the couch in the quiet house staring off into the mid-distance. Memory, he thinks, should heal the pain of loss, not inflame it. Haven’t they all been witness to this? How could they not have seen? Or seen and ignored? D’Woulfe and D’Woulfe’s phone number is listed on the front cover of the transcripts. He dials it. A phone recording announces the office is closed. He looks at his watch. It is only three thirty. He thinks the blame, the fault, might lie in greater part with their attorney, that Brandon D’Woulfe they are always talking about. He thinks D’Woulfe must have had a hand in the transformation of me in these pages of black and white. How else could they have done what they did? He waits ten minutes longer and then begins to pace the house. He is eager for the sound of a car in the driveway, the scrape of shoe on stairs, the creak of the front door. The house is quiet, inside and out.

He waits another ten minutes. He is desperate for confrontation. He cannot suppress the anger he feels at all three of them, the lawyer and Ford and Kate. He dials the firm’s number again with the same results. Finally, he decides. He searches the transcript for D’Woulfe’s address, and finds it easily.

He retrieves the spare infant car seat from the hall closet and brings it to his car. He struggles to clasp the seat belt around it, and curses. He slams the car door shut and scrambles up the front stairs, missing the top step by a fraction of an inch. He stumbles forward into the doorjamb. He curses again and proceeds up the hall stairs to Brian Joseph’s room. The baby lies peacefully on his back, asleep. The fan on the dresser turns the air, and the air turns the pony mobile. It sways and circles in the current.

A moment of practical clarity intrudes on his anger. He rushes downstairs to the kitchen and removes a bottle of pumped breast milk from the refrigerator. He warms it in the microwave and returns with it to BJ’s room. He takes a paper diaper and the small canister of baby wipes and puts them and the bottle into the carryall Mother uses. He goes to the crib and gently lifts Brian Joseph.

The baby wriggles and stretches and moves his head side to side and settles in Cassidy’s arms. “Shh. Shh,” he says to the baby, and he takes him to his car.

He walks carefully, purposefully, with the baby in his arms and the blue carryall slung over his shoulder, but even so, he misjudges the last of the brick stairs and lands unexpectedly hard on his left foot. The baby wakes and begins to fuss. “It’s okay, BJ. Just takin’ a little car ride. Quiet down now. We’ll be on our way real soon.” He puts the carryall on the car roof while he tries to strap BJ into the car seat. It is the first car seat the family ever used, my old baby car seat, and he is no longer familiar with it. He at first makes a jumble of the straps. He can’t remember where the arms go, where the legs. He is tempted simply to tie the straps around the baby’s middle. It’s a short drive, only a few minutes, he offers as argument. But he rejects his own bad advice and persists until finally Brian Joseph is made to fit. But he is wailing now, mad to have been awoken from sound sleep, uncomfortable in his wet diapers and on the cusp of hunger. Cassidy stops for a second to reconsider.

But it is only a fifteen-minute trip to the attorney’s building. That’s okay, he thinks, I’ll change him when I get there. He’ll be okay.

He closes the door on the bawling baby and walks quickly to his seat. He starts the car. I can hear the deep rumble in the old engine. The vibrations massage the cry out of my brother for a moment. Cassidy breathes a sigh of relief and begins to pull away from the curb. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the blue carryall fall from the car roof to the street. He brakes hard. The jolt startles Brian Joseph and he cries again. Cassidy can see his red face and open pink mouth in the rearview mirror. “Not a good idea,” he says to the reflection of that face. “In fact, a stupid one, kid.” He parks, retrieves the carryall and brings Brian Joseph back inside the house.

An hour later, Nana and Ned return with Jeanine. The rage that boils out of Joe Cassidy as he shows them the transcripts and summarizes what Mother and Father have sworn to, frightens Jeanine. She begins to cry, and Nana holds her in her lap, torn between hearing what Cassidy has to say, and taking the frightened child into the other room. She stays. Cassidy goes on and on about the testimony he has read. He leaves for the law office at five.

Nana and Ned sit on the couch, each immersed in the questions and answers that seem to them to pertain to some other child entirely, a child born on the pages of myth and legend rather than to flesh and blood.

There is little Sunday traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The city has suffered the retreat of many to the beaches and mountains, so the roads are mostly empty.

Cassidy is as angry as when he first encountered the transcripts. His review for Nana and Ned refuels his rage. His hands shake holding the steering wheel. The dull sheen of the sun on the metal of his car’s hood puts an ache behind his eyes. He tries to control his breathing, tries to slow it and steady it, but it comes in rapid gulps and his head spins. He can feel and hear the squeezing surge of blood in his ears.

His eyes fall briefly on the glove box. He knows it is empty, has been empty these past eight months. Almost enough time to have a baby, he thinks. He approaches Rory’s Place. There are parking spaces right out front. The word “baby” lingers in his brain. He parks.

He studies the glove box again and then turns to regard the awning-shaded front of the pub. Through the window he sees the haphazard array of tables and chairs around the bar. A baseball game is on TV. In its sallow glow, patrons sit with glasses and bottles and cigarettes lost in the smoke and shadow. He closes his eyes and squeezes the steering wheel until his fingers play sharp notes of pain. He holds the pain for a minute, savoring it. He opens his eyes, starts the car, and drives away. Now he’s angry
and
he’s worried. He is desperate to reach D’Woulfe’s office before Mother and Father leave. He wants all three of them together to hear what he has to say. And if that D’Woulfe gets in the way of it, he’s got a punch in his lawyerly face just for him. He speeds southbound down the empty avenue. He makes the light at Wisconsin and Calvert, and the next and the next. A driver pulls his parked car onto the street fifty feet ahead of him, and he must slow and change lanes. The green light at Denton turns amber. He accelerates and gets through the intersection as the light turns red. He switches back to the right lane moving fast. There are only four blocks left. He scans the few cars traveling in the opposite direction, hoping not to see Father’s maroon station wagon. The light at Reservoir goes amber. He accelerates and the Taurus’s engine pings and groans. The light is red before he ever gets to the crosswalk. He looks left. The cross street is empty. He looks right. The white SUV seems to come out of the western sun and slams into his car, caving both passenger doors and sliding Cassidy’s Taurus across the northbound lanes, where it comes to rest against the brick wall of the Georgetown Public Library. Cassidy’s head has spiderwebbed the side window, leaving a bright red bloom of blood at the center of the filigree of cracks.