Inside the O'Briens (11 page)

The fuzziness in Joe's head has spread throughout his body. He's numb all over. If Dr. Hagler placed a mirror in front of him right now, he knows what he'd see staring back at him—the flat, expressionless mask of a man in shock. He's witnessed trauma on the faces of too many crime and accident victims, an unflappable exterior running on autopilot, an eerie antithesis to the unbridled psychological and physiological terror raging on the inside.

“What do I do about my job?”

“I think we should be realistically optimistic there. You don't have to tell everyone yet, and I would advise that you don't. You don't want to get fired or denied disability. There are laws now to protect you, but you don't want to spend the time you have in a court battle. I'd confide in maybe one other officer, someone you trust not to tell anyone and to be your mirror. This person can help you decide when it's no longer possible for you to safely continue in your job.”

Joe nods. He's scenario playing, and he sees all the less-than-desirable and immediate possible outcomes of disclosing his diagnosis. He can tell Tommy and Donny. No one else. Tommy knows how to keep a secret and play him with a straight bat when he needs it. Joe trusts him with his life. Same for Donny. No one else on the force can know, not until he figures things out. He needs to secure at least a partial pension so Rosie will be taken care of when he's gone. Ten years. Maybe more. Maybe less.

But this is going to get worse. Falling down, dropping things, messing up his reports, showing up late, his weird temper. Slurring his words. Everyone is going to think he's a
drunk. Fuck it. Let them think what they want. Until he's sure that Rosie will have what she needs, this disease is a secret.

Ruth O'Brien drank herself to death.

Like mother like son.

JOE AND ROSIE
get home from MGH with plenty of time for Joe to join Donny and friends at Sullivan's, but he's feeling too fragile, transparent. He's worried it would take only one Guinness to crack him wide open, and he'd be spilling his diagnosis all over Donny and the rest of the bar. No, he's not going to Sullivan's this St. Patrick's Day. But he can't stay home either.

Rosie's at the kitchen sink, peeling potatoes. She's stopped crying, but her eyes are still pink and swollen. She's determined to put on a good face and look normal when the kids show up for supper. Joe and Rosie agreed that they need a little time before dropping the HD bomb on the kids. And Joe would never want to ruin their St. Patrick's Day.

“I'm going for a walk, okay?” asks Joe.

“Where you going?” She spins around, a half-naked potato in one hand and the peeler in the other.

“Just out. A walk. Don't worry.”

“How long will you be gone? Supper's at four.”

“I'll be back before then. I just need to clear my head. You okay?”

“I'm fine,” she says, and turns her back to Joe. He hears the flick, flick, flick of the potato peeler.

“Come here,” he says.

Joe places his hands on her shoulders, turns her toward him, and wraps his big bear arms around her back, pressing the slim length of her up against him. She turns her head and rests it on his chest.

“I love you, Joe.”

“I love you, too, hun. I'll be home soon, okay?”

She looks up at him with her bloated face and heartbroken eyes.

“Okay. I'll be here.”

Joe grabs his coat and walks out the front door, but before his feet hit the sidewalk, he stops and dashes back in. He dips his fingers in Rosie's holy water and looks at the painted blue eyes of the Virgin Mary while he signs the cross. He'll take all the help he can get.

On his way to the Navy Yard, he stops at the packie and picks up a bottle of Gentleman Jack. It's not Glenfiddich, but it'll do. As he hoped it would be, the Navy Yard is quiet and empty. There are no bars here since Tavern on the Water closed. The Toonies are all at the Warren Tavern, and the Townies are at Sullivan's or Ironsides. His kids are all at Ironsides, Patrick behind the bar. And Joe is a lone Irishman in the Navy Yard, sitting on a pier, feet dangling over the edge, facing the beautiful city he's loved and protected for more than half his life.

He woke up this morning just like on any other day. And now, just a few short hours later, he has Huntington's disease. Of course, he had Huntington's disease this morning before he went to see Dr. Hagler. He's still the same guy. The only difference is in the knowing. The veil of the initial shock has lifted, and the knowing is beginning to fuck with his head.

Keeping the bottle of Gentleman Jack concealed in the brown paper bag, Joe unscrews the top and pulls back a generous swig and then another. It's a raw, gray March day, in the low fifties but much chillier when the sun hides behind the clouds and the wind comes surfing in over the water. The whiskey feels like a glowing coal in his belly.

Ten years. He'll be fifty-four. That's not so bad. It could be worse. Hell, it's more than anyone is guaranteed, especially a police officer. Every single time he's dressed in blue, he knows he might not come home. That's not just a noble sentiment. Joe's been kicked, punched, and shot at. He's chased after and
confronted people who were hammered and doped up and pissed off, armed with knives and guns. He's been to the funerals of his fellow officers. All young men. He's been prepared to die in the line of duty since he was twenty. Fifty-four is old. It's a fuckin' luxury.

He gulps another nip and exhales, enjoying the burn. It's the certainty he hates, for one thing. Knowing he has only ten years left, twenty tops, that it's 100 percent fatal, makes his situation hopeless. Certainty eviscerates hope.

He could hope for a cure. Maybe those doctors will discover one within the next ten years. Dr. Hagler said there were promising things in development. She used words like
treatment
and
research
, but, and he listened for it, she never once said the word
cure
. No, Joe's not going to hold his breath for a cure for himself, but he'll climb a mountain of hope every day for his kids.

His kids. He knocks back another couple of gulps. They're all in their early twenties. Still kids. In ten years, JJ, his oldest, will be thirty-five. The average age of onset. This friggin' disease will be about done with Joe as it's starting in on them. Maybe they'll all get lucky, and by the grace of God, none of them will get this. He knocks three times on the pier.

Or all of them could have it, already hibernating inside them, waiting to crawl out of its cave. JJ's a firefighter trying to start his own family. Meghan's a dancer. A dancer with Huntington's disease. A tear rolls down Joe's face, hot on his wind-chilled cheek. He can't think of anything less fair. Katie's hoping to open her own yoga studio. Hoping. If she's gene positive, will she stop hoping? Patrick doesn't know what the hell he's doing yet. He might need the better part of the next ten years to figure his shit out. How on God's earth are he and Rosie going to tell them?

He's also hung up on the how of it, his dying. He's seen exactly what this disease does to a person, what it did to his mother. It's a relentless fuckin' demon. It's going to strip him
of everything human until he's just a rack of twisting bones and a beating heart in a bed. And then it will kill him. Getting shot at and not running away takes bravery. Walking into a domestic dispute, breaking up a gang fight, chasing a suspect in a stolen car takes bravery. He's not sure he's brave enough to face year ten of Huntington's. And there's honor in dying as a police officer on duty. How will he find the honor in dying with Huntington's?

He hates the thought of putting Rosie and the kids through this unthinkable ordeal, through what he and Maggie and mostly Joe's father witnessed, powerless. Shit. Maggie. Does she know anything about this? Did his father know? Did letting everyone think his mother was a drunk carry less shame than branding her name with Huntington's? If his father knew about HD, who was he protecting?

Everyone in Town blamed her. His mother's tragic predicament was her own damn fault: She's a lush. She's a bad mother. She's a sinner. She's going to hell.

But everyone was wrong. She had Huntington's. Huntington's destroyed her ability to walk and feed herself. It mutilated her good mood, her patience and reasoning. It strangled her voice and her smile. It stole her family and her dignity, and then it killed her.

“I'm sorry, Mum. I didn't know. I didn't know.”

He silently cries and wipes his wet eyes with his coat sleeve. He exhales and tips back one more glug of whiskey before capping the bottle. Standing on the edge of the pier, he looks down past the tips of his sneakers at the black harbor water. He reaches into his front pocket and pulls out his change. He sorts out four quarters, warm and shiny in his cold, pink hand. Each kid has a fifty-fifty chance.

He flips the first quarter, catches it in his left hand, and then turns it over on the back of his right. He removes his left hand, revealing the coin.

Heads.

Joe throws it as far as he can. He follows its flight with his eyes, sees the point where it enters the water, and then it's gone. He flips the second quarter, catches, turns, reveals.

Heads again.

He chucks that one into the water, too. Third quarter.

Heads.

Fuck. He winds up and pitches the coin high into the air. He loses sight of it and doesn't see where it lands. Joe holds the last quarter in his hand, thinking of Katie. He can't flip it. He fuckin' can't. He sits back down on the edge of the pier and cries into his hands, releasing pained, vulnerable, boylike sobs. He hears the voices of people walking in the shadows of Old Ironsides. They're laughing. If he can hear them laughing, they can definitely hear him crying. He doesn't fuckin' care.

He's soon emptied out. He dries his eyes, takes a deep breath, and sighs. Rosie would call that a good cry. He'd always thought that was a ridiculous expression. What could be good about crying? But he feels better, if not good.

Joe stands, opens his right hand, and again considers the fourth quarter sitting in his palm. He shoves it into his other pocket, down to the bottom where it'll be safe, grabs his bottle of whiskey by the neck, and checks his watch. It's time for supper.

He walks the length of the pier, whiskey playing in his head and legs, his cheeks raw from the wind and tears, with every step praying to God and the Virgin Mary and St. Patrick and whomever will listen for a dollar's worth of good luck.

PART II

The mutation associated with Huntington's disease (HD) was isolated in 1993, mapped to the short arm of chromosome 4. This historic discovery was made by an international collaboration led by a team of neuroscientists in a laboratory in the Charlestown Navy Yard. Normally, the trinucleotide cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) is repeated within exon 1 of the Huntingtin gene thirty-five times or fewer. The mutated gene has thirty-six or more CAG repeats. This expanded genetic stutter results in too many glutamines in the Huntingtin protein and causes the disease.

Every child of a parent with HD has a 50 percent chance of inheriting the mutated gene. The discovery of this mutation made genetic testing possible for anyone living at risk. The test definitively determines genetic status. A positive test result means the person has the mutation and will develop HD. To date, 90 percent of people at risk for HD choose not to know.

CHAPTER 10

I
t's Sunday afternoon, and Katie skipped both yoga and church. Church doesn't really count. She hasn't been to Sunday Mass in years, but the thought of possibly going before deciding not to go is still a habit, maybe even a guilty pleasure. She was brought up strict Irish Catholic, which most memorably involved confessing an invented assortment of harmless sins on Saturdays to the priests, eating wafers of Christ's body on Sundays (no wonder she's vegan) and loaves of shame every day of the week, attending parochial school, where she learned from the nuns that sitting fully clothed on a boy's lap could get a girl pregnant, and saying the Angelus every evening before supper. Protestants were evil, monstrous people and somehow probably contagious, and Katie grew up fearing them, praying to God she'd never see one, never actually knowing what a real-live Protestant looked like. She could recite the Our Father and Hail Mary before she knew how to spell her name. She never understood how Jesus dying for her sins on Good Friday resulted in candy delivered by a bunny on Easter Sunday, and she'd always been too afraid to ask. This remains a mystery. And every day smelled of incense, prayers lifting in swirls of smoke, floating up to God's ear. She liked the incense.

Yoga is Katie's real religion. She found it by accident. It was three years ago, her first year out of high school, and she'd been waitressing at Figs. She walked by Town Yoga every day on
the way to work and one afternoon, curious, popped inside to grab a schedule. By the end of her first class, she was hooked. Her dad likes to say she drank the Kool-Aid, chugged a whole pitcher of it. She saved up her tip money to pay for her two-hundred-hour certified teacher training that winter and has been teaching yoga ever since.

She loves the physical practice, the postures that teach grace, resilience, and balance. Plus her abs and biceps are wicked awesome. She loves the mindful breathing, the flow of prana, which promotes a sense of grounded calm over reactive chaos. She loves meditation, which, when she can actually do it, clears the toxic trash heap in her head, silencing the negative self-talk—that cunningly persuasive voice that insists she's not smart enough, pretty enough, good enough—as well as the fictional gossip (it's always fictional), the constant doubt, the noisy worry, the judgments. She loves the sense of oneness she feels with every human being within the vibrating notes of ohm. And every day still smells of incense.

She can't remember the last time she missed Andrea's Sunday morning Vinyasa. She knows she'll regret sleeping through it later. But right now, well after noon and still lazing in bed,
her
bed, with Felix, she regrets nothing.

She's been dating Felix for a month and a half, and this is the first time he's spent the night at her place. They met the first Tuesday in April. It was the first week of Roof Deck Yoga, classes taught outside on the fenced-in wooden patio behind the studio. Katie likes teaching outdoors, sunshine warming muscles, fresh air breezing against bare skin, even if that air sometimes smells of diesel and garlic chicken from Chow Thai.

She'd never seen him before. She didn't know him from high school or the bars or waitressing. The majority of her students are Toonies and women, so the few good men always stand out. Felix stood out more than anyone.

He practices yoga in shorts and no shirt. Bless him for that.
He's tall and lean with a small waist and defined but not bulging muscles. His head and chest are shaved smooth, and she remembers, that first class, both were shining with sweat in the sun. As she stood with one foot on his mat, assisting him in Downward Dog, her left palm on his sacrum, her right hand sliding along the length of his spine to his neck, she found herself wanting to trace the black lines of the tribal tattoo on his shoulder with her fingers. She remembers blushing before stepping back and calling out Warrior I.

He came to class the following Tuesday, this time indoors due to inclement weather. He lingered a long time in the room after Savasana and took even longer gathering his things. He asked her a few questions about the schedule, about pass cards, and purchased a coconut water. When she asked whether there was anything else, hoping there was, he asked for her number.

They both dove in headfirst. Like most Toonies, Felix owns a car, which means they aren't stuck going to Ironsides or Sully's, and their relationship has remained mostly private, blossoming outside the scrutiny of the Townies. They go to dinners in Cambridge and the South End. They've been to Cape Cod and New Hampshire, and they even went to Kripalu for an R&R weekend. He goes to her Tuesday and Thursday classes every week, and they both take Andrea's class on Sunday mornings. The one place they'd never been together is her apartment. She's told him it's because his place is so much nicer. It is. And he lives alone. Her sister, Meghan, goes to bed so early. They'd disturb her, and she needs her sleep.

But the real reason Katie hasn't risked having Felix stay at her place has to do with her parents, who live on the first floor of their triple-decker. Felix Martin is not a nice Irish Catholic boy from Charlestown. Felix Martin is from the Bronx and was raised in the Baptist Church. A real-live Protestant. And, oh yeah, Felix Martin is black.

It's the religion, Katie would like to believe, and not the
beautiful color of his skin that her mom, in particular, would object to. It's never been overtly stated, but Katie knows her mom expects her to marry a Murphy or a Fitzpatrick, someone similarly pale and freckled and baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church and, ideally, whose family is from Town and maybe even descended from the same village in Ireland. Wouldn't that be lucky? Katie's never understood what would be so gloriously fortunate about this fate. So she and her husband could hang their identical family crests on the wall? So they could trace their family trees back through the branches and find themselves hugging the same trunk? So she can marry her cousin? A nice Irish boy from the neighborhood, from a good Catholic family. This is the future her mom imagines for her. Her mom has certainly not imagined Felix.

Her dad would probably be fine with both Felix's race and religion. It's his affiliation with New York that wouldn't sit well. Felix is a passionate fan of the Yankees. He might as well worship Satan.

So Katie has successfully steered her overnights away from Cook Street. Until last night. She and Felix went to a new vegan restaurant in Central Square. She had the most delicious vegan pad thai and too many basil lime martinis. It was late when they returned to Charlestown. Felix found a parking space on Cook Street, so it only felt natural that'd they go to her place. They didn't even discuss it. He simply followed her to the front stoop and up the stairs.

Meghan is already awake and gone. Katie heard the water running in the pipes and Meghan's footsteps squeaking the hallway floorboards hours ago. She opened her eyes only long enough to register that her bedroom was still dark. Meghan has a matinee performance today at noon and before that a rehearsal, then hair, makeup, costume, and the painstaking process of preparing another pair of new pointe shoes.

Meghan is the other reason Katie hasn't been in a rush for Felix to stay over, and Katie's more than a little relieved that
Meghan isn't home right now. For one, there's the potential for either judgment or teasing, and as her older sister, Meghan has historically acted 100 percent entitled to either option. But the more subconscious and unflattering reason has to do with a jealous insecurity in Katie so deeply and long embedded, it might very well be congenital.

Meghan always gets everything. She got the naturally skinny body, the prettier hair, better skin, better grades, the talent for dance, and the boys. Meghan always got the boys.

Every crush Katie had in high school went unrequited because every boy she liked was crazy for Meghan. Everyone in Town is still crazy for her. Katie can't go to the post office or the hairdresser or Dunkin' Donuts without someone there telling her how wonderful it must be to have such a remarkable, accomplished sister.

The Boston Ballet! Isn't that something? Yes, it is. Now can we all please talk about something else?

Her parents and brothers never seem to tire of gushing about Meghan to anyone who will listen, and they never miss her performances. Her mom has given Meghan a pink rose after every dance recital and performance since she was three. It's their mother-daughter tradition. Meghan keeps the petals in glass bowls displayed all over their apartment. Homemade potpourri. Meanwhile, no one ever gives Katie flowers, she doesn't have a mother-daughter tradition, and not one member of her family has taken a yoga class.

Well, now Katie has the boy. Not Meghan. But if her life so far has taught her anything, Felix will take one look at Meghan and toss Katie aside for the better O'Brien sister. Lying in bed next to Felix, Katie can admit to herself that this fabricated drama sounds more than a touch paranoid and even preposterous, yet she's still relieved that Meghan isn't home.

“So this is your place,” says Felix, lying on his back, looking at everything around them.

Katie yawns, trying to see her things as if they were new
to her, how Felix might be interpreting her purple bedspread and floral sheets, her childhood dresser and collection of Hello Kitty figurines, her fuzzy throw rug from Pier 1 Imports, the cracks in the plaster walls that spread like river tributaries from floor to ceiling, her cheap, once-white window shades yellowed like old teeth, and the tacky green curtains her mother made and recently ironed.

“I like all the quotes,” he says.

“Thanks.”

She's handwritten twenty-one inspirational quotes on her walls with a black Sharpie. Most come from the mouths of master yogis such as Baron Baptiste, Shiva Rea, and Ana Forrest. There are also quotes from the poems of Rumi and the teachings of Buddha, Ram Dass, and Eckhart Tolle.

When she was growing up, her mom used to try to feed her spiritual wisdom from the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but those words left her feeling hungry. Too many of the Catholic psalms passed right by Katie's ears, unabsorbed, discarded as outdated, esoteric, irrelevant. She couldn't relate. Through the spiritual teachings of yoga, Buddhism, and even poetry, Katie has found the words that nourish her soul.

Plus, yoga teachers love quotes—affirmations, intentions, words of enlightenment. Yoga is about creating balance in mind, body, and spirit so that life can be lived in peace, health, and harmony with others. The quotes are quick cheat-sheet reminders to focus on what matters. Whenever Katie's thought DJ gets stuck on a negative playlist, she borrows from a quote on her wall, consciously replacing her own default doom and gloom with prepackaged, time-proven positive words of wisdom.

She reads:

“You are either Now Here or Nowhere”

—Baron Baptiste

“I especially like your bed,” Felix says with a devilish smile, and kisses her.

Her bed once belonged to a woman named Mildred, the sister of their neighbor Mrs. Murphy. Mildred actually died
in this bed
. Katie had been completely skeeved out by the prospect of inheriting Mildred's bed, but she'd been sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, and Mrs. Murphy was offering it to her for free.
What? You gonna turn down a perfectly good free bed?
Katie's mother had said. Katie had wanted to argue that a woman had just died in it, so it wasn't exactly perfectly good, but Katie was broke and in no position to argue. She smudged it with incense every day for weeks and still prays to Mildred each night, thanking her for the comfortable place to sleep, hoping she's happy in heaven and that she won't be visiting for any naps or slumber parties. She's surely rolling over in her grave right now if she can see the naked black Protestant in her bed. Katie kisses Felix and chooses not to tell him about Mildred.

“I feel bad that we skipped class this morning,” says Katie, carting out her guilt.

She learned guilt right along with her manners. Please.
I want something
. Guilt. Thank you.
I have something
. Guilt.
I'm kissing a beautiful naked man in Mildred's bed while my oblivious parents watch TV two floors below me
. Guilt. The ability to attach guilt firmly by the hand to any positive emotion is a skill cultivated by the Irish, a fine art admired even more than Meghan's pirouettes. Katie's been fully awake for about five minutes, and guilt is already sitting wide-eyed at the table, grinning with that shiny crown on its head.

“We had some spiritually enlightening exercise last night,” Felix says, smiling, flashing the dimple in his left cheek that she's crazy for, hinting at another go.

“I'm starving. You hungry?” she asks.

“Ravenous.”

“You want breakfast or lunch?”

“Either. Whatever you've got.”

Oh. She was thinking of getting out of her apartment, maybe going to Sorelle's. Last night in the safety of the late, dark hour and with a few martinis at the helm of her normally tightly navigated ship, the possibility of bumping into her parents seemed like a faraway continent. But now it's well into the next day, and her mom could easily pop by to say hello or to have a cup of tea or simply to remind her that it's Sunday and supper is at four o'clock, as it always is. Her dad could be out on the front stoop, walking Yaz. Shit.