Inside the O'Briens (14 page)

“Katie, what about you?” asks Patrick.

She sighs. Does she want to know? She does and she doesn't. Of course, finding out she's negative would be an awesome relief. But deep down, she's pretty sure she has this thing. Yet without absolute, medical proof, she can still hope that she doesn't. Knowing for certain that she's positive would probably devastate her poor mom and dad. She'd probably have to break up with Felix. She glances over at the green girders of the Tobin.

Maybe she'll just keep living “at risk.” Put that on your Facebook status. But who doesn't live a life at risk? Her life is full of risk every day. Risk of failure if she opens her own studio, risk of failure if she doesn't, risk of never fitting in if she moves to a place where everyone isn't Irish Catholic, risk of not being loved by Felix, risk of not being loved by anyone, risk of burning in the sun, risk of being struck by lightning, risk of having HD. Every breath is a risk.

Or maybe she'll go to the first two appointments, get those done and out of the way. Then if she decides she really wants to know, she can show up and find out the results of the test. A freakin' test.

The idea of taking the genetic test itself, regardless of the outcome, makes her skin go cool and clammy. Katie hates tests. She's never performed well on them. In high school, she'd study and care and even know the material cold, but then she'd panic when faced with all those typed and numbered questions. She's a big-time choker.

The last exam of her senior year, a math test, she remembers celebrating after handing her completed paper over to her teacher, giddy and bragging that this would be the last test she'd ever have to take. Like the O'Briens, God has a sick sense of humor.

That last math test was on statistics. She got a C.

“I dunno,” she says. “Maybe.”

CHAPTER 13

K
atie counted eleven red cars on the walk from Cook Street to Town Yoga. She'd tasked herself with this specific mission before she stepped foot onto the front stoop.
How many red cars will you see from here to yoga?
It's an awareness exercise she likes. Reality depends on perspective, on what is paid attention to. Without attention to red cars, she probably wouldn't have noticed any on her walk. But with an awareness to red cars held in her consciousness, she experienced eleven.

She's been trying to remember how far back her dad's weird fidgeting and clumsiness goes. A year maybe. It's hard to say. It's like asking her how many red cars she saw on the way to yoga yesterday. None. She wasn't looking for red cars, so in her experience, there weren't any.

A month ago, she didn't notice whether her dad dropped the remote control or his fork. She didn't register any ticks or weird fidgeting. Now she sees it all, and everything she sees is called Huntington's.

It's an hour before class. The studio is empty, quiet but for the whispered dialogue of this familiar space—the whir of the ceiling fan, the hum of the heater, the whistle of her breath. She's alone in the room, the lights dimmed, sitting cross-legged with her knees anchored to the floor, her tailbone propped up on a bolster, studying herself in the mirror, hunting for Huntington's.

She focuses on her eyes. Blink. Blink. A black outer ring surrounding blue surrounding a black hole. She searches her eyes. They're steady, even. This is where she sees it most in her dad. His eyes are antsy, often darting off to some distant spot, at nothing in particular. Or he's looking at her, but he's not, the focus of his gaze slightly off, fixed in an odd stare. Huntington's disease. If she looks for it, she can find it in his eyes.

Blink. Blink.

She has stubby eyelashes. Meghan's are thick and long. She wonders if she'll ever look at herself in a mirror and not wish she looked more like Meghan. She notices that her eyebrows are crooked. God, has she really been walking around like this? She resists the impulse to pop up and fetch the tweezers from her purse. An angry pimple is ready to erupt on her chin. She denies the urge to poke at it. Freckles. Short, fat nose. No makeup. This is her naked face. No mask. No hiding. Here she is. Can she see HD in her face?

Her dad's eyebrows jump up a lot, as if he's surprised by something someone said. Only no one said anything. The corners of his mouth will sometimes pull into a grimace, but he's not actually disgusted or in any kind of pain. It's an expression that flashes randomly with no emotional cause or content. Her misshapen eyebrows lie still, two caterpillars sleeping soundly on her forehead.

Her hands are resting on her thighs, thumbs and index fingers touching in a Guyan Mudra. She's wearing two bracelets on her right wrist. One is a jade mala she uses for chanting mantras. Her favorite is Om Namah Shivaya.
I bow to my inner, true Self. I invite positive transformation.
The second bracelet is made of jasper beads and faceted with a single wooden skull. The skull represents the impermanence of all things, a reminder to be grateful for the gift of today, because there might not be a tomorrow. When she bought that bracelet only a year ago, she couldn't have imagined how freakishly relevant and
morbidly real this concept would be for her. She glances down at the skull. It used to prompt her to think about her dreams, a reminder to chase them down. She won't be here forever. Now she thinks of her dad. And forever just got a whole lot shorter.

She wears a silver claddagh ring on her right middle finger, a gift from her mother when she turned eighteen. Meghan, of course, got the good one, her mother's real gold ring, the one her dad gave to her mom when they got engaged. The silver ring isn't worth as much and isn't a family heirloom. Her mom bought it at the Galleria mall. Katie wears it with the heart pointed toward her wrist, meaning she's in a relationship.

Felix. She still hasn't told him anything about Huntington's. She knows this isn't a sustainable plan, that she's being inauthentic, lying by omission, but she can't get the words to leave her mouth. Their relationship seems to be on the verge of change, on the edge of either breaking apart or becoming more serious. The slightest thing could tip the scale either way, and Huntington's sits in her mind like a two-ton boulder. She'd like to see what's going to happen between them without the cataclysmic influence of Huntington's. What might've been. Meanwhile, this secret is breeding shame within her like a viral infection, spreading fast and making her sick.

Her bare face, feet, arms, and chest are pale and uniformly dotted with freckles. She has no tattoos, but only because she can't decide what to get. That, and she's a total chicken when it comes to pain. She wonders what's going on beneath her pale, freckled skin. Muscles and tendons, bones and blood. Her heart beating, an ovary releasing an egg, her stomach digesting granola. Huntington's plotting to kill her.

She wishes she had thicker hair and longer eyelashes like Meghan's, fewer freckles, skin that could tan when exposed to sunshine, no pimples, better eyebrows, a more petite frame, prettier feet. She wants to look away, to get up and do something. She stays. It's probably been only ten min
utes, and she's finding it hard to face herself for this long. She could stay for an hour in meditation with her eyes closed, but open is another story. Here she is, all of her. She feels self-conscious, ridiculous, judgmental, worried about someone coming in and catching her.

She returns to her breathing, to the rise and fall of her chest, and her eyes. A black outer ring surrounding blue surrounding a black hole. Blink. Blink. No subtle shiftiness. No red cars yet.

She stands, still facing the mirror, and presses her right foot into her left thigh. Vriksasana. Tree Pose. She places her hands in prayer position at her heart, then inhales, reaching her arms up as if they're branches extending to the sky. This is her favorite pose. She is grounded, balanced where she is, but she's also growing, reaching, changing.

She lifts her head up to the tin-paneled ceiling but looks beyond it, imagining a vast starry night sky above her, and sends out a prayer. With arms outstretched like a satellite dish, she closes her eyes, hoping to receive some kind of divine answer.

Suddenly, some invisible force knocks her off balance. Her arms and torso tilt right in an attempt to compensate, but she can't recover and falls out of the pose. Shit. She tries to brush it off. So she lost her balance. This happens, especially if she closes her eyes. She'd normally compose herself and then rebuild the pose, but this time, her heart jams. Was that a symptom? A sign from God? Is this how it will begin for her, falling out of Tree Pose? Her first red car sighting.

Trying not to freak out, she starts over, lifting her left foot and pressing it against her right thigh. Tree Pose, the other side. She extends her arms overhead, spreading her fingers, every muscle in both arms and her standing leg ignited, active, strong. She will not fall. She stares herself down in the mirror, refusing to blink. Her eyes are fierce, her body in control.

She inhales. She exhales. She stays and stays. Her arms
tremble, her standing leg burns and begs for mercy. She gives her arms and leg no say and stays.

Finally, she throws her exhausted arms up to heaven and says, “I'm a fuckin' oak tree. You see me?”

She waits a moment more, then slowly lowers her left foot and plants it with purpose on the mat next to her right foot. Staring at her eyes in the mirror, she presses her hands together in prayer and lands them in front of her heart.

Namaste.

CHAPTER 14

P
atrick just left. He was reluctant to go, but if he calls in sick for work again his boss might can him, so he had to leave. Meghan left a couple of hours ago for rehearsal at the Opera House. Katie thinks she was relieved to get the hell out of this claustrophobic living room, to have a nonnegotiable call time on a stage where she can become completely absorbed in something beautiful.

And then there were three. Katie and her dad are watching the evening news, waiting for news. Her mom is knitting a green-and-white blanket. She might be listening to the TV, but she never looks up at it. She's waiting, too. They all thought JJ and Colleen would be home by now. Katie holds her phone in her hand, expecting it to vibrate any second. It never does. She's too afraid to call or text them.

The evening news is probably not the best form of entertainment or distraction for any of them right now. The screen bombards them with one depressing, terrifying, catastrophic story after another. Wildfires in California that can't be controlled, hundreds of homes destroyed, over a dozen people missing or killed. A father from Dedham goes on trial for murdering his wife and two children. Car bombs in Pakistan killing thirty-two civilians. Wall Street in a nosedive. Politicians throwing tantrums.

“Dad, can we watch something else?” asks Katie.

“Sox aren't on until seven thirty.”

End of discussion. Her parents have over a hundred cable channels, but the news and the Red Sox are apparently the only two options available. She doesn't press him. But the news is too stressful for Katie, as if each story adds a log to the fire of the living room's collective anxiety. She decides to watch her dad instead.

He's in constant motion, more than usual. She notices how he tries to make it all look normal. He'll stitch the tail end of whatever part of him flings or pops or twitches into some kind of larger, meaningful-looking action. He's become quite the improvisational choreographer. It's always the strangest dance she's ever seen.

His right leg snaps out as if he's kicking away an invisible pesky dog. So he follows his foot and stands up. Standing, he must mean to go somewhere, so he walks over to the windows. He pulls the shade, sticks his nose in, and peeks out at the street. He stays there for a few seconds, muttering to himself. It makes sense that he would get up to look for signs of JJ and Colleen, but Katie's onto him. The impulse to rise out of his comfortable seat began with an involuntary leg thrust, not with a premeditated plan to look out the window.

As he returns to his chair, there's an extra bit of jostle in his step. She listens to the newly familiar jingle of change in his pocket as he walks. The sound of HD.

She continues watching him, and he's more mesmerizing, and in some ways more horrifying, than anything on the news. He's like a train wreck or a car accident or a house fire, and she's the eyewitness, the rubbernecker who can't look away.

Next, his left arm flings up as if he's a nerdy student raising his hand in class. Then he bends his arm at the elbow and scratches his head as if he just happened to have a little itch. This is one of his signature moves. If you didn't know he had
Huntington's, you'd think this guy must have a raging case of dandruff or head lice, or he's just plain weird. He doesn't seem to be consciously aware of his involuntary ticks or even his oh-I-totally-meant-to-do-that improvisations. He doesn't glance over at Katie to see whether she noticed. He doesn't seem embarrassed or fazed in any way. He simply continues watching the news as if nothing mentionable just happened. Nothing to see here. Certainly not any symptoms of an inherited, progressive, lethal neurodegenerative disease with no cure.

He keeps fidgeting and crazy dancing in his chair and watching the news with his wife and his daughter as if this were a normal Wednesday evening, and it's starting to bug the piss out of her. As if any evening or anything at all could ever be normal again.

Then the front door opens and Katie's heart stops. Maybe the earth stops. Time seems to have. The sound of the evening news fades to a muted murmur. Her mom stops knitting and looks up. Even her dad goes still.

JJ and Colleen appear holding hands in the living room, two numb-eyed zombies who've just returned from a visit to hell. Their faces are puffed and splotchy. No one says anything.

Katie's afraid to make a sound, afraid that any noise might push time past this exact second. Maybe what she's seeing isn't real. Maybe what's about to happen won't. The room is eerily silent, still, an unshaken snow globe on a shelf.

And then her mom starts bawling, and JJ's on his knees in front of her, hugging her with his head in her lap on top of her knitting.

“I'm sorry, Ma. I'm sorry,” he says.

And then her dad throws the remote control across the room. It hits the wall behind the TV and shatters. The batteries go spinning on the wood floor. Her dad's face is in his hands, and Colleen is standing alone looking like a paper doll, and
Patrick and Meghan don't even know what's happening. This is actually happening.

Katie sits on the couch, watching the most tragic news of the day unfolding live in front of her, the sound of a scared little girl repeating the word
no
inside her head over and over and over and over.