Inside the O'Briens (12 page)

Katie looks over at her alarm clock. Her mother probably won't come up. She suppresses the urge to hustle Felix out before they're caught and instead dresses in underwear and a Red Sox T-shirt. Felix throws on his boxers and follows her down the narrow hallway into the kitchen.

Her apartment has the same footprint as her parents' unit, the house she grew up in, and it's similarly lame. Worn, dirty-looking-even-after-mopping linoleum floor, a Mr. Coffee on the avocado-colored Formica counter, a secondhand kitchen table, and two mismatched chairs. No stainless steel, no soapstone, no espresso machine here. Not like Felix's place. His bedroom, kitchen, and living room feel so mature, so independent, so real.

He's a bit older, twenty-five. JJ's age. He has an MBA from Sloan and works in business development for a start-up company that turns trash into fuel. He makes a lot more money than she does.

She stands in front of two open cabinets, not finding much, wishing she'd grocery shopped yesterday.

“Granola and bananas okay?”

“Sure,” says Felix, having a seat at the table, tipping his head to examine the pictures magnetized to the fridge door.

“Herbal tea or coffee. The coffee won't be any good.”

“Tea is good. Those guys your brothers?”

“Yeah, that's JJ on the left, Patrick on the right.”

She wishes she had the money to fix this place up. Yoga instruction, she's realized, is an “in-debt career.” She teaches five classes a week and makes six dollars a head, capping at seventy-two dollars a class. Even if she manages a handful of Toonie privates or a bachelorette party here and there, she barely makes enough to pay rent and eat. She still waitresses on the side, but it doesn't change her life. Plus there are the expenses—yoga clothes, music for class playlists, books, attending workshops and retreats. That may not sound like much, but it's enough to put her in the red when she makes only four hundred dollars a week. She could never afford health insurance. Thank God she's healthy.

“Which one's the firefighter?”

“JJ.”

The only way out of this financially strapped existence is to open her own studio. But she's friends with Andrea, the owner of Town Yoga, and Charlestown already has two studios. There aren't enough bodies in this small neighborhood to support a third. Plus Andrea would be pissed. But Katie sees this as a sign rather than an obstacle, because it gives her the perfect reason to marry her dream of running her own studio with her other, bigger dream.

Moving out of Charlestown.

It's not that she doesn't appreciate having grown up here or love many aspects of living here now. She's proud of being Irish. She's proud of being stubborn and tough and street smart. Her cousins from the suburbs always seemed so spoiled and sheltered with their scheduled, supervised play dates and Martha Stewart summer camps. Charlestown is real life in the real world. There's no Pollyanna bullshit here, and Katie's grateful for that.

It's just so insular. Everyone knows everyone here, and no one ever does anything or goes anywhere outside of a few square blocks. Seriously.

Every weekend before Felix, she was either at the Warren Tavern, Sullivan's, or Ironsides, and really it's always Ironsides.
Outside of her immediate friends, she's JJ's little sister or Officer Joe O'Brien's daughter or the dancer's sister or even Frank O'Brien's granddaughter, God rest his soul. It's the same people week after week, complaining about the same things—parking spaces, the Yankees, the weather, the revolving-door drama of who is hooking up or breaking up, and they're always talking about the same cast of characters, guys they've all known since they learned how to tie their shoes. If she doesn't do something drastic, she's going to end up like everyone else here—married to an Irish Townie, saddled with a handful of freckled, copper-headed kids, still living upstairs from her parents.

The teachings of yoga have opened her eyes to concepts and possibilities beyond St. Francis Church and this tiny Irish neighborhood—Buddhism, Tibet, the Dalai Lama, Hinduism, India, Bhakti, Sanskrit, Shiva, Ganesh. The philosophies of a vegan diet and Ayurveda introduced a new mindfulness around health and eating, choices other than bangers and mash and blood sausage. She grew up with the Ten Commandments, a list of Thou Shalt Nots that insisted on obedience motivated by a fear of hell and God's wrath. The Eight Limbs of Yoga offer a gentler code for living soulfully. Unlike the domineering Thou Shalt Nots, the yamas and niyamas are reminders to connect with her true human nature, to live in peace, health, and loving harmony with everyone and everything. She mumbled along to the hymns in church as a girl because she knew the words and her mother insisted. Now she attends kirtans instead of mass and her heart sings.

And the people within the yoga community, hailing from all over the planet, are so exotic to Katie—Asian, Indian, African. Hell, Californian is exotic to Katie. There are mala beads instead of rosary, Krishna Das concerts instead of Mumford and Sons, tofu instead of hamburger, kombucha instead of Guinness. She's intuitively drawn to what she isn't, naive and enthralled.

She knows she's only scratched the surface. She's tasted a small
sample of thought, tradition, and living foreign to the way she was raised, the way everyone here lives generation after generation without questioning, and her curious soul is hungry for more.

She remembers being young, around seven or eight, and standing on the Freedom Trail, each sneaker on a brick, following the red line with her eyes as it snaked along the ground, out of Charlestown. To freedom! She didn't know then that the trail simply went over the bridge and into the North End, another small ethnic neighborhood in the same city. In her imagination, the redbrick line was constructed by the same mason who designed the Yellow Brick Road in
The Wizard of Oz
, and so it obviously led to somewhere magical. When she was little, this magical place had houses with farmer's porches and two-car garages and grassy yards with swing sets. It was a land with trees and ponds and open fields and people who weren't Irish and who didn't know her since birth.

She still dreams of living somewhere over the rainbow in a different zip code with the space to breathe and create the kind of life she wants, a life not predetermined by where and how her parents or even great-grandparents lived. A life she chooses and freely defines, not one inherited from her parents. Someday.

She's a big “someday” talker.
Someday, I'm going to own my own yoga studio. Someday, I'm going to live in Hawaii or India or Costa Rica. Someday, I'm going to own my own house with a yard and a driveway. Someday, I'm going to leave this neighborhood. Someday something great is going to happen.

“Am I ever going to meet them?” asks Felix.

“Who?”

“Your brothers, your family.”

“Yeah, sure, someday.”

“How about today?”

“Today? Ah, I don't know if they're around.”

“What about this supper you always go to on Sundays? When am I going to get invited to that?”

“Sweetie, you don't want to come to Sunday supper, believe me. It's a duty, it's not fun. The food is horrible.”

“It's not about the food. I want to meet your family.”

“You will.”

“What is it? You ashamed of me or something?”

“No, definitely no. It's not you.”

She's about to pin the blame on her parents, on her mother's Catholicism and her father's singular obsession with Boston teams, or on Meghan's irresistible feminine mystique, but then the real reason presents itself, clear and unavoidable. She's the reason. She's standing in an old T-shirt and underwear, barefoot in her tiny kitchen, her feet cold on the dingy linoleum floor, and she doesn't feel worthy of being with him. She's practically twitching with discomfort over revealing this much of herself to him, as if the more of her he sees, the less of her he'll realize there is. Her kitchen exposes her lack of sophistication, her bedroom a lack of maturity, her living room a lack of elegance. The thought of adding her parents and brothers and where she grew up, the real Charlestown, not the Pottery Barn Toonie version, of him seeing her lack of education and culture, the statues of Mary and Jesus and Kermit the Frog in every room and the jelly jars her parents use as glassware, makes her feel far more naked than she was ten minutes ago.

And if he sees all of her, maybe he won't love her. Boom. There it is. They haven't said that word yet, and she's sure as hell not saying it first. For all her yoga training in vulnerability and living authentically, she's still a chicken. What if he meets her family and they're incapable of embracing a Yankee-loving black Baptist, and he takes this into consideration along with the substantial list of everything else about her that isn't perfect and decides that he can't love her. She's not worthy of his love.

She's standing at the counter with her back to him, pouring granola into mismatching bowls, thinking about Felix rejecting her, and her body doesn't know the difference between the real
deal and simply rehearsing this shit. It's monkey-mind madness, and she knows better than to invest energy in this completely invented story, but she can't help herself. She predicts their breakup in blow-by-blow, excruciating detail, always initiated by him, at least once a week and three times since they woke up today, every imagined split pulling more threads from her heart, knitting into a bigger, tighter knot in her chest.

Coward. She should own who she is, where she's from, and how she feels about him. She loves Felix. She should tell him and introduce him to her family. But the risk feels too big, the cliff too high, the chasm between what they have now and what they could have too wide. Like jumping could kill her.

“Another time. Really, I don't even know if my dad and JJ will be there today.”

Felix's mouth goes tight, and he lowers his head as if he's searching for meaning in the ugly pattern on the linoleum floor.

“You know what, I'm not hungry. I should get going.”

He leaves the kitchen and returns in a moment, fully dressed.

“See ya,” he says, and barely kisses her on the cheek.

“Bye.”

She should stop him, invite him to supper, apologize. Instead she says nothing, paralyzed and mute, and lets him go. Shit.

She sits at her crappy kitchen table, stunned to be suddenly alone, and doesn't touch her oatmeal and banana. She wishes she'd gone to Andrea's class, that Felix had stayed, that she wasn't such a stupid coward, that she knew how to walk her yoga talk. The kettle whistles, jolting her out of her seat. She pours the boiling water into one mug and leaves the other empty on the counter. Sipping her green tea, she replays what just happened and rehearses what she might say to him next. She hopes he'll forgive her and call her later. She hopes to God she didn't just end their relationship, that she didn't just lose him. But mostly, she hopes he didn't bump into her parents on his way out.

CHAPTER 11

K
atie is sitting between Patrick and Meghan on the couch in her parents' living room, wondering what Felix is doing. She almost invited him to Sunday supper today, had the words ready and wrapped in her mouth, but at the last second, she chickened out and swallowed them instead. He hasn't brought up meeting her family since they fought about it last week, so the issue seems dropped for now. But she's going to have to bring him one of these Sundays. She can't keep Felix a secret forever.

JJ and Colleen are sharing the love seat opposite her, their legs and bodies pressed against each other, JJ's arm draped over Colleen's shoulders. They look so happy. Katie wishes Felix were here.

Her mom glides into the room, practically tiptoeing, places a six-pack of Coors Light and a chilled bottle of Chardonnay on the coffee table without a word or looking at anyone, and returns to the kitchen. She's back a moment later with a bottle opener and three jelly jars and leaves again. Everyone looks at one another. That was weird.

They aren't allowed to start drinking until supper is ready. It's a strict rule. Patrick shrugs, leans over, grabs a beer, and cracks it open. Katie twists the bottle opener into the cork and pulls it free. JJ takes a beer, and Katie pours a glass of wine for Meghan.

“Wine?” Katie asks Colleen.

“No thanks, I'm good for now.”

“Where's the remote?” asks Patrick.

“I dunno. You live here,” says JJ.

The boys search the room without getting up off their asses.

“Pat, go put it on,” says JJ.

“Nah, you do it.”

“I'm comfortable here with Colleen. Get up, see if anyone's playing.”

“B's aren't on till tonight.”

“Go see what else is on.”

“I'm still lookin' for the remote.”

Patrick leans back into the couch, his heels together, knees spread out, and sips his beer. Katie shakes her head. Her brothers are pathetic. The room does feel strange, oppressive even, with the TV off. In fact, Katie can't remember ever being in this room without it on. It's as if they're missing their fifth sibling, the one who never shuts up and demands all the attention.

Colleen pries herself out of the love seat, marches over
to the table with the angels and frogs, and returns with the remote.

“Thanks, hun,” says JJ, grinning at Patrick as he turns the TV on.

He's flipping the channels, not landing anywhere, but the light and noise coming from the screen give them all a common purpose, and the room instantly feels brighter, familiar again. Katie sighs and smells Windex. That's weird. It usually smells like whatever animal her mom is boiling this week. Her obsession with ironing aside, her mom isn't exactly famous for domestic tidiness. Wiping all the dusty figurines and surfaces down with Windex typically only happens when they're having company. Katie inhales again. Only Windex.

With the exception of bacon, which somehow bypasses ev
erything she knows and believes and still makes her mouth water, she has a hard time stomaching the smell of Sunday suppers. But the house doesn't smell like bacon or chicken or lamb. Has her mother finally figured out how to remove the taste
and
smell from food?

The front door opens, and her dad stands before them in the living room, carrying a plastic bag and three pizza boxes, smiling as if he's Santa delivering a sack of toys.

“I've got pepperoni, plain, vegan cheese and veggie for Katie, and a salad for our little rabbit.”

“Where'd you get it?” asks Katie.

Papa Gino's doesn't do vegan anything.

“The North End.”

“Wow, really?”

Her mom brings in a stack of paper plates and napkins, and they start peeling off hot slices of pizza.

“Wait, we're eating in here?” asks Meghan.

“Yeah, why not?” says her mom.

“Is there a game on?” asks Katie.

“Not 'til tonight,” says Patrick.

Pizza and beer in the living room for Sunday supper sounds like a party, but Katie tenses. This never happens, not unless there's an important game on. Something's off.

Her dad sits in his chair, her mom in the wooden rocker. He's drinking a beer, and she's holding Yaz, but neither of them have plates of pizza in their laps. Her mother's face is pale and distracted. She's looking in the direction of the TV but not at it, rubbing Yaz with one hand and the crucifix on her necklace with the other. Her dad is fidgeting in his chair. He looks nervous.

The room suddenly feels stranger than it did with the TV off. There's an electric energy in the room, and Katie goes still and cold as it passes through her. She feels an animal intuition, an instinctive pinch in her nerves. Thunderclouds gathering.
A lion waiting in the brush. Songbirds silencing before taking flight. Something is coming. Something bad.

Patrick is stuffing his face with pepperoni pizza, chewing with his mouth open. It's got to be him. It's always him. He's done something illegal, and either he has to come clean now, or their dad has to arrest him. But Patrick looks totally chill.

Maybe it's her. They saw Felix. That's it. Here comes the lecture. They're not going to let her stay here under their roof for practically free if this is how she's going to behave. Shacking up with a black man who isn't Catholic or Irish or from here. What will the neighbors think? Doesn't she care about her reputation and her family's good name, if not her soul?

She'll have to choose between her family and Felix. Maybe. Maybe this kind of ultimatum will be a blessing. They'll be doing her a favor.
Good. I'm gone. Outta here
. Just the kick in the pants she needs. She could live with Felix until she finds a place of her own. But where would she go? She's not ready. She hasn't saved up enough money to leave Charlestown, and she can't afford to live here on her own either. Shit.

Her mother gets up, takes the clicker from the love seat arm, and points it at the TV, shutting it off. JJ looks up at her in protest, but the stricken look on her face stops him from complaining. No one does. No one says a word. She sits back down in the rocker and clutches her crucifix.

“Now that we're all here together, your mom and I have something we want to tell you,” says her dad.

He's trying to talk, but the words aren't coming. His face floods pink and twitches, struggling with itself. The air in the room thins, and the bottom of Katie's stomach drops out, her insides and two bites of pizza sinking without a floor. This isn't about Felix. Her dad clears his throat.

“I had a medical test, and we found out I have something called Huntington's disease. It means I'll have trouble walk
ing and talking and a few other issues over time. But the good news is it's slow and will take at least ten years.”

Huntington's disease. She's never heard of it. She looks to her mom to gauge how bad this is. Her mom is squeezing her crucifix in one hand and hugging herself with the other as if she's holding on for dear life. This is really bad.

“So you'll start having trouble walking in ten years?” asks Meghan.

“No, sorry. I have some of the symptoms now. I already have it.”

“It'll take ten years for what, then?” asks Patrick.

“For him to die,” says Colleen.

“Jesus, Coll,” says JJ.

“No, she's right. You've seen this at your job,” says her dad, checking with Colleen.

Colleen nods. Colleen's a physical therapist. Seen what? What has she seen?

“So you know the next part of this speech, huh?” says her dad.

Colleen nods again, all color drained from her face, which is clenching as if in pain, scaring the shit out of Katie.

“What next part, Dad? Ma?” asks JJ.

Her dad looks to her mom.

“I can't,” she whispers. Her mom reaches over and pulls a tissue from the box on the side table. She dabs her eyes and wipes her nose. Her dad exhales forcefully through pursed lips, as if he's blowing out candles on a birthday cake, as if he's making a wish.

“So this Huntington's thing is hereditary. I got it from my mum. And so you kids. You kids. Each of you has a fifty-fifty chance of getting it, too.”

No one moves or says anything. Katie forgets to breathe. Then her mom starts crying into her tissue.

“Wait, fifty-fifty chance of getting what? What is it again?” asks Meghan.

Her dad, their rock, their protector, always so sure of everything, looks physically fragile. His hands are shaking. His eyes are wet and pooling fast. His face grimaces as if he's just sucked on a lemon, struggling to hold back his tears, and it's turning Katie inside out. She's never seen him cry. Not when his dad died or when his friend on the force was shot and killed or when he finally came home the day after the marathon.

Please don't cry, Dad.

“Here.” He pulls a stack of pamphlets from his jacket pocket and lays them on the coffee table next to the boxes of pizza. “I'm sorry, I can't talk.”

They each pick up a copy and start reading.

“Fuck,” says Patrick.

“Language,” says her mom.

“Ma, I'm sorry, but fuck language right now,” says Patrick.

“My God, Dad,” says Meghan, clutching the pink silk scarf wrapped around her neck.

“I'm sorry. I'm praying every minute that none of you get this,” says her dad.

“Is there anything they can do to treat it?” asks Meghan.

“They have some medications to ease the symptoms, and I'll do PT and speech therapy.”

“But there's no cure for this?” asks Patrick.

“No.”

Katie reads.

Huntington's disease manifests in motor, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms that typically begin at age 35–45 and advance relentlessly until death. There is currently no cure or treatment that can halt, slow, or reverse the disease's progression.

Her dad has Huntington's. Her dad is dying. Ten years. This can't be happening.

Each child of an affected parent has a 50 percent chance of developing the disease.

Symptoms typically begin at thirty-five. That's in fourteen years. And then she might be dying of Huntington's disease. This can't be happening.

“If you have the gene, is that it, you'll definitely get it?” asks JJ.

Her dad nods. A tear trickles down his pink cheek.

Katie buries herself in her pamphlet, looking for the fine print, the exception, a way out. This can't be right. Her dad is fine. He's a strong, tough Boston cop, not someone sick with a fatal disease. She reads the list of symptoms again.
Depression
. No way.
Paranoia
. Totally not him.
Slurred speech
. Clear as a bell. They must be wrong. The test was wrong. A mixup or a false positive. Dead in ten years. Fuck those assholes for being wrong and making her dad cry.

She keeps reading.
Reduced dexterity
. Sometimes, but so what?
Temper outbursts
. Okay, yes, but everyone loses it once in a while.
Chorea
.

Derived from the Greek word for
dance
, chorea is characterized by jerky, involuntary movements.

She looks at her dad. His feet are doing an Irish jig on the floor. His shoulders shrug. His eyebrows lift, and his face grimaces as if he just sucked on a lemon. Shit.

“So we can find out if we have the gene?” asks Meghan, reading the booklet.

“Yes. You can have the same blood test I had,” says her dad.

“But if we have the gene, there's nothing we can do about it. You just live with knowing you're going to get sick,” says Meghan.

“That's right.”

“Does the test tell you when it will happen?” asks Katie.

“No.”

“Fuckin' hell,” says Patrick.

“How long have you known about this?” asks JJ.

“There've been some symptoms for a while, but we didn't know about Huntington's for sure until March,” says her dad.

“You've known since
March
?” asks JJ, his jaw clamped and his hands squeezing into fists, as if he's resisting a sudden, overwhelming urge to break every ceramic frog and angel in the room. “Why are you just telling us this now? It's friggin'
May
!”

“We needed some time to process it ourselves,” says her dad.

“It was hard getting you all together at the same time,” says her mom, defending him.

“That's bullshit—we all
live here
,” says JJ, now yelling.

“There's Meghan's dance schedule, and either you or your dad are working on Sundays,” says her mom, her voice wobbly, Yaz covered in a heap of damp, crumpled tissues on her lap. “We had to tell all of you, all at once. We couldn't tell two of you and leave the cat half in the bag.”

“Why is Mom talking about a drunk cat?” asks Patrick.