Inside the O'Briens (9 page)

“Do you drink, Joe?” asks Dr. Hagler.

“A couple of beers, sometimes a little nip of whiskey, but no more than that.”

He could sure use one right now.

“Any drugs?”

“No.”

“Let's talk about your family of origin. Any brothers or sisters?”

“One sister.”

“Older or younger?”

“Eighteen months older.”

“And how's her health?”

“Good, I guess. I don't really know. We don't keep in touch much.”

“How are your parents?”

“My father died of prostate cancer about nine years ago. My mother died from pneumonia when I was twelve.”

“Can you tell me more about your mother? Do you know what led to the pneumonia?”

“I'm not sure. She was living up in Tewksbury State Hospital when she died.”

“What was she there for?”

“She was an alcoholic.”

As he says the words aloud, he knows his answer doesn't make any sense. Alcoholics go to AA, not Tewksbury State. Not for five years.

“Was she ever diagnosed with anything other than the pneumonia?”

“Not that I know of.”

“What did she look like when you went to visit her?”

Joe thinks, trying to conjure an image of his mother from the hospital, a peculiar exercise, since he'd spent years doing the exact opposite, trying to erase every second of what he'd witnessed there. He sees her now. She's in her bed. Her legs and arms and face are writhing into disturbing, inhuman shapes.

What appears in his mind most vividly, though, are her bones. His mother's bones protruding from beneath her cheeks and jaw, poking out the top of each shoulder, her rib cage, her knuckles, her kneecaps. He remembers his mother's skeleton. In the end, it became easier to imagine the white bones beneath her skin than the round, fleshy face and figure she used to have. It became easier to believe his mother was no longer really there, that the woman in that bed was a haunted corpse.

“She was real skinny.”

“Uh-huh. How about any aunts, uncles, cousins on your mom's side? Any health issues there?”

“My mother's family stayed in New York when she moved to Boston and married my father. She didn't speak to them. I've never met any of them.”

Why is this doctor so interested in the health of his mother and her family? What does any of this have to do with his knee? Joe looks at the wall behind Dr. Hagler, at her framed diplomas and certificates of excellence. Yale School of Medicine. A residency at Johns Hopkins. A fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Hagler might be book smart, but she'd sure make a shitty detective. These questions are a fat waste of time.

Joe reads Dr. Hagler's framed credentials again. Neurology residency. Neurology fellowship. Wait, she's a
neurologist
? He thought he was seeing a movement specialist. An orthopedic doctor. Why the fuck is he talking to some brain doctor?

“Look,” says Joe, offering to help her out. “I twisted my knee a few years ago, and it's never been the same. I think that's what's causing my balance and falling problems.”

“Okay, let's have a look at a few things.”

Finally, but he can't see how this lady is even remotely qualified to evaluate his knee. Dr. Hagler rises to her feet, leaves her clipboard on the counter, and stands directly over Joe. She holds her hands out in front of her in closed fists, as if she's about to play a game of Guess Which Hand.

“Look at my hands, and then look at the finger that pops up.”

Dr. Hagler points her right index finger, then her left, then left again, right, left, right, right. Joe follows all this pointing with his eyes. No problem. It's a Whac-A-Mole game with eyes and fingers instead of a mallet and moles.

“Great. Now, are you a righty or lefty?”

“Righty.”

“Hold your left hand flat, palm open, like this.”

Dr. Hagler demonstrates.

“Then, with your right hand, I want you to touch your left hand with a fist, then a karate chop, then a clap. Like this.”

She shows him the sequence several times through. He copies her once.

“Great, now do that over and over. Ready, go.”

Fist, chop, clap. Fist, chop, clap. Fist, clap. Wait. Fist. Wait. Chop. Wait. Clap. Fist. Fist. No. Fist. Wait. Fist, chop, fist.

Man, it's harder than it looks. Dr. Hagler performed the movements one after another without pausing between sets, without breaking the steady rhythm, without error. But she probably does this with patients all day long. She's well practiced. He'd like to see her try her hand at loading and unload
ing a gun. And what does any of this friggin' nonsense have to do with his knee?

“Now I'd like you to get up and walk heel-to-toe across the room and back.”

Joe's been on the other end of this request more times than he can count. He wonders whether he'll be asked to recite the alphabet forward and backward next.

“What is this, an OUI?” he asks.

Joe spreads his arms out like airplane wings and walks heel-to-toe across the room. No problem. He rushes things and gets a hair sloppy on the way back, but nothing he'd book anyone for. Again, no problem.

“Great. Now I want you to tap each finger to your thumb, starting with your index finger down to your pinkie and back. Like this.”

Joe touches each finger to his thumb. He's slow, careful, and deliberate in choosing and landing each finger, wanting to be sure he nails it.

“Yes, that's it. Now try doing it a bit faster, and keep repeating it.”

She demonstrates. It's Joe's turn, and this time, he trips up and can't recover. His fingers go out of order or freeze up.

“I'm no Beethoven,” says Joe.

He looks at Rosie, and her face has gone ashen, her eyes withdrawn.

Dr. Hagler retrieves her clipboard. She slides her glasses back over her eyes and writes in Joe's chart. She then sits down, places the clipboard on the counter, removes her glasses, and sighs.

“Okay, you have some symptoms here. Your movements don't look completely normal. It's possible that you have Huntington's disease, but I want to do some blood tests and an MRI.”

“An MRI of my knee?” asks Joe.

“No, not your knee. Your head.”

“My head? What about my knee?”

“Dr. Levine checked out your knee and found it to be stable. Your knee looks fine, Joe.”

“But my head doesn't?”

“We'll do the MRI and the blood work and go from there.”

“Wait,” says Rosie. “What's Hunningtin's disease?”

“Hun-ting-ton's,” says Dr. Hagler. “It's an inherited neurological disease, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. We'll do the MRI and the blood work. We'll do a genetic test to confirm whether or not it's Huntington's, and if it is, we can treat the symptoms, but we can talk about all that next visit if that's what we're dealing with.”

Moments later, Joe and Rosie are led back into purgatory, where a new set of lost souls waits in silence, and Rosie schedules Joe's appointments with the receptionist. His next visit with Dr. Hagler isn't until March, exactly two months from today. Rosie asks for something sooner, but the receptionist says it's the soonest she has.

They proceed through the automatic doors of the Wang building, and the biting January air rushes at them. Joe takes a deep breath. Even polluted with car exhaust, the cold air feels fresh and healthy in his lungs. He pauses on the sidewalk, the air blowing against his face, moving through his lungs, and he feels real again. Whatever just happened in that building wasn't real.

Rosie leads him to their car on the fourth floor of the garage. Joe's grateful that she came with him as he admits to himself and not aloud to Rosie that he couldn't remember where they parked. They get in, and Rosie hands him the garage ticket.

“At least we know my knee works,” says Joe.

Rosie doesn't comment. She's frowning, her eyebrows knotted, tapping her iPhone screen with her finger.

“Whaddaya doin', hun?” asks Joe.

“Googling Hun-ting-ton's disease.”

“Oh.”

Joe drives the dizzying spiral out of the garage. It's a quick, unmemorable drive back to Charlestown and then the longer hunt for a parking space. As Joe zigzags up and down the hilly streets of their neighborhood, he keeps glancing at Rosie, her attention still buried in her phone. He doesn't like the shape of her face, her frown deepening, ruining her pretty mouth. He doesn't like that she's not sharing any of what she's reading. She doesn't say anything to reassure him. She's not saying anything at all. She taps, frowns, reads, and says nothing.

He finds and doesn't mess with two parking spaces “reserved” with trash barrels before finally landing a spot only a block away. They walk home in silence. They dump their coats and shoes in the front hallway. Joe goes straight to the kitchen. He pulls the largest jelly jar from the cabinet and pours a glass of wine. He grabs a can of Bud from the fridge and looks for Rosie.

The living room shades are drawn, making it feel like early evening instead of noon. Joe doesn't flip on the light. Rosie is wrapped in her ivory afghan on the couch, reading her phone. Joe places the jar of wine in front of her on the coffee table and sits in his chair. Rosie doesn't look up.

Joe waits. Pictures of the kids from their high school graduations and JJ's wedding hang on the wall over the couch. There are pictures all over the room—baby photos on the fireplace mantel, more baby photos on the side tables, pictures of Joe and Rosie on their wedding day on the hutch. He likes the pictures. It's all the other crap he could do without.

Scattered among the standing frames are all sorts of figurines—­angels, babies, Snoopy and Woodstock, Jesus and Mary, St. Patrick, Miss Piggy and Kermit, too many frogs. Rosie has a thing for frogs. And then there's the year-round Christmas carolers, which might not seem too out of place now in January but are plain ridiculous in August. Rosie loves them all.

Years ago, Joe actually considered staging a burglary, a clean heist of all the knickknacks, a mysterious crime that would go
unsolved. But Rosie only would have replaced every little statue with more of the same, and so in the end, the plan would've left Joe back where he started but with less money in the bank.

All this decorative crap makes the room feel crowded and tacky if you ask him, but no one ever does, and it makes Rosie happy, so he's resigned himself to living with it. As long as he has his chair, the TV, and his side of the bed, he doesn't complain. The rest of the house belongs to Rosie.

When Joe lived here as a kid, this living room looked and felt much different. The couch and chairs were wooden frames with thin cushions, much less comfortable than what they have now. He remembers each year's awkward school photo hung on the wall on either side of Jesus on the cross: Joe on the left, Maggie on the right. There were no figurines.

His parents were chain smokers, and every wooden surface held at least one ashtray, many made and painted by Joe and Maggie in school as holiday gifts (ah, the seventies). There was the tube TV with two dials and rabbit ears, the TV trays, and always an issue of
TV Guide
and the newspaper on the coffee table, which was permanently stained and almost spongy to the touch with waterlogged rings all over. Some of the many scars left by his mother's drinking.

Joe holds the remote but doesn't turn on the TV. Today's
Patriot Bridge
is on the coffee table, unopened, but he doesn't feel like reading the paper. He drinks his beer and watches Rosie. She says nothing and frowns. He says nothing and waits. He waits.

Ice-cold dread in his veins.

Ominous chanting in his bones.

Purgatory has followed them home.

CHAPTER 8

J
oe is in the kitchen wielding a screwdriver, tasked with replacing the cabinet hinges that are bent beyond repair. He begins with tightening the ones that are merely loose. The cabinets, like everything else in their house, are old and worn out, but Rosie blames Joe for the broken hinges, says he's been too rough when opening them, yanking too hard on the handles. He doesn't agree, but he doesn't care either. It's not worth fighting about.

He's actually grateful for the job, something to keep him busy and out of Rosie's hair for a bit. Ever since Rosie shared with Joe what she learned on the Internet about Huntington's disease, Joe's been trying to scrub every word of it out of his mind. None of it rings true. He doesn't have some friggin' rare and fatal disease. No fuckin' way.

Huntington's. It's pure malarkey, and Joe won't give it any stock. Police officers deal in facts, not speculation, and the fact is, this doctor threw out this big, scary medical word without having done any real medical tests, without knowing a damn thing. It was an offhand, irresponsible remark. It's practically malpractice, to put a word like that out there, into their innocent heads, with no facts to back it up. It's complete bullshit is what it is.

While Joe refuses to think about Huntington's beyond calling it bullshit, Rosie has done pretty much nothing but think
about it. She hasn't confessed her new obsession to Joe, but it might as well be tattooed across her forehead. A Sunday churchgoer her entire life, she's been at Mass every morning since Joe's doctor's appointment. Her couple of glasses of wine with supper is now at least a whole bottle beginning at four o'clock. The scarf she was knitting is now a queen-size bedspread and still growing. She's up every night way past midnight, watching old Oprah episodes while ironing anything with a seam. And normally a constant gabber, Rosie isn't talking.

The whole point of going to the goddamn doctor was to stop Rosie from worrying about him, and now look at her. A hundred times worse. Joe twists the screw he's working on with extra muscle, unleashing his infuriation on the tiny screw head, but the tip slips out and then fumbles out of Joe's hand entirely, dropping to the floor. Joe grinds his teeth. He steps down off the kitchen chair, retrieves the Phillips head, then winds up and pitches it back to the floor as hard as he can. He retrieves the screwdriver again, sighs, and resumes his business with the cabinet hinge.

He'd like to help Rosie out, to reassure her and protect her from this needless worrying, but a small part of Joe is afraid of what she's thinking, so he doesn't open up the conversation. Maybe she knows something he doesn't. He doesn't want to hear anything more until his next appointment, when the doctor admits that his tests came back fine and everything's normal. And an apology. There'd better be a fuckin' apology in there.

But while he's been doing his best to avoid falling down the dark, muddy rabbit hole of Huntington's disease, he has been thinking a lot about his mother. Joe stops turning the screwdriver and runs his index finger over the scar by the outside corner of his left eye. Six stitches when he was five. It's a thin white line now, and only visible when Joe's face is sunburned or emotionally pink.

His mother threw a potato masher across the room. Joe doesn't remember what he'd been doing before the throw, if he'd provoked it, if his mother had been mad or frustrated about anything. His memory begins with the shock and flashing pain of being struck in the face with something hard and heavy. Then the sound of Maggie's scream. Then the bright red blood on his fingers, the darker red soaked into the wet facecloth he pressed to his head while his father drove to the hospital. He remembers sitting alone in the backseat. His mother must've stayed home with Maggie. He has no memory of the stitches. He remembers his father saying he was lucky. A centimeter to the right and Joe would've lost his eye.

Joe likes to believe that the scar by his eye is the only thing he got from his mother, a single souvenir of her madness. Aside from his sleepy-lidded blue eyes, Joe's the spitting image of his father, and he grew up assuming he'd descended straight from the O'Briens. He has his father's and grandfather's walnut-brown hair that lightens to blond in the summer, the same thin smile, broad chest and shoulders, and ugly feet, the unfortunate pasty-to-pink skin. He even has the same voice. People used to mistake Joe for his father on the phone all the time. He has the O'Brien work ethic, bullheadedness, and sense of humor that keeps everyone in the room laughing and at arm's length.

What if he inherited more from his mother than blue eyes and this scar? Alcoholism has always been a real concern, which is why he keeps his drinking under tight control. If his mother gave him a genetic predisposition for addiction, if that beast lurks within him, he simply won't feed it. While he's often wondered what it'd feel like to get rip-roaring drunk, he's never indulged in actually finding out. He'll never be a drunk like his mother. But what if beneath the scar by his eye, beneath the white, hardened skin, he carries an uglier, more insidious heirloom?

Did his mother have Huntington's? Is that why she lived at Tewksbury State?

Joe remembers going to visit his mother in the hospital after church on Sundays. At first, these were reasonably pleasant car rides. Joe and Maggie loved road trips—to Stowe in the fall for apple picking, to Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester once every summer, to some suburb every now and then to visit cousins on his father's side of the family. Granted, they weren't going to pick apples or swim in the ocean, but those rides to Tewksbury didn't seem so bad at first. Hospitals were places people went to get better. This was when Joe was seven years old, when he still hoped she'd come home, when he could still imagine the mother she'd been before—buying him ice cream from the truck at Good Harbor, the sound of her voice singing in church, her arm curled around his shoulders as she read Hardy Boys mysteries to him before bed, the cat-whisker crinkles next to her eyes when she laughed at something he said.

But she didn't get better, and in fact she was worse and somehow farther away in the same bed each time he saw her, and those fond memories of a happy, tender, sober mother began to feel vaguely imagined, a fiction he'd wished for or dreamed about, and soon he only remembered her drunken rants, and then only what she looked like lying in that bed. She was emaciated, contorted, grunting or silent. She was grotesque. The woman in that bed would never be able to read or sing or smile at him again. The woman in that bed was nobody's mother.

The atmosphere in the car changed. Normally, Joe and Maggie would play I Spy games and horse around. Their play would invariably turn too loud or too violent, and their father's hand would suddenly be in the backseat with them, swatting blindly, aiming to smack whatever body part it could reach. But now, Joe didn't feel like spying for anything. Maggie must've
felt the same way, because they didn't talk or play games or even fight. Joe stared out the window and watched the trees blur by in silence. He thinks the radio must've been on, tuned to NPR or Magic 106.7, but he doesn't remember that. He remembers only the blurry silence.

And the way home was always worse. On the way to Tewksbury, there was the hope, however deluded, that his mother might be better this week. Or the memory of how bony and listless she'd been the previous week would have faded some. A particularly gullible kid already, Joe could easily trick himself into thinking his mother might be cured this Sunday.

The big, fat, hideous truth of that Sunday would sit next to him on those car rides back to Charlestown, taking up way too much room in the backseat, crushing his spirit. If Joe wasn't entirely stripped of hope when he buckled his seat belt, his father would soon rob him of whatever was left. Even if Joe purposefully looked away and couldn't see his father's face in the rearview mirror, even if he didn't actually see the strongest man in the world crying, he always knew it was happening. Even with the wind and the car engine roaring in his ears, Joe would hear his father's breath catching, and he'd know. Joe remembers looking over at Maggie, checking for permission to cry, too, but she just stared, stone-faced, out the window. If Maggie didn't cry, he wasn't going to either.

His mother was a drunk in the loony bin, his father cried like a little girl in the car, and Joe and Maggie stared out the car window.

This went on for years.

Joe can't recall specifically the last time he saw his mother. He remembers watching a nurse feed her, his mother's head dropping, her mouth stretched open, the mashed potatoes and gravy dribbling down his mother's chin, spilling onto her bib and the floor. That could've been the last time. He remembers feeling disgusted and ashamed.

Joe assumed his father became ashamed, too, because they stopped going. At least, Joe and Maggie stopped. Joe can't remember what his father did. He remembers going to Aunt Mary Pat's and Uncle Dave's instead of the hospital after church. He remembers stuffing himself with Dunkin' Donuts and playing basketball at the park with his cousins. He remembers feeling relieved not to have to see the sick woman in the bed anymore.

He doesn't remember what she looked like when she died.

Joe's thoughts are interrupted by Rosie entering the kitchen. She's wearing a Town Yoga T-shirt, baggy gray sweatpants, and the fluffy pink socks she wears around the house in the winter months. She pulls a bottle of Chardonnay out of the fridge and walks over to the counter next to Joe. He assumes she's approaching him to say something. She's going to thank him for finally fixing the cabinets or ask him a question or just offer a friendly hello and maybe even a hug.

He's wrong. She opens the cabinet in front of her (without comment about the perfect, new hinges), pulls out a wineglass (no words of thanks to Joe for the new glassware), grabs the bottle opener from the counter, and leaves the kitchen. Joe sighs and looks over at the clock on the wall. Four o'clock.

He can't take another month of this. She's torturing herself over nothing. Tap your fingers. Clap your hands. Do the Hokey Pokey. That doctor doesn't know shit. He wishes he could convince Rosie. He's about to go after her, to sit her down and confront this unsubstantiated worry she's burdened with head-on, but he stops cold in front of the sink.

While he'd bet a million bucks this fancy doctor doesn't know shit, he's still not sure about Rosie. What does she know that has her so scared?

Joe stares out the kitchen window and says nothing.