Inside the O'Briens

by Lisa Genova

  But he sticks with it, and the repetition is his friend. His muscles begin to predict what will happen next. He knows the choreography to this dance. Katie seems to sense this, and her cues start to focus more on the breathing.

  “Inhale, arms up. Exhale, Forward Fold. Inhale, Halfway Lift. Exhale. Inhale.”

  And then, something magical happens. Moving moves to the background. Joe becomes a breathing body that happens to be moving. He’s breathing slow, steady, long inhales and exhaling through his nose, just like Katie taught him, and he finds a stillness within the moving. He’s in the zone. No more ants. No more falling. The bad guys who commit chorea have fled the city.

  He’s had five privates with Katie now, and this is the first time he’s experienced this kind of moving stillness, this momentary waking pause from chorea. He used to have to run the Forty Flights to the point of exhaustion, falling on the steps over and over, skinning his knees and elbows and hands, becoming a bloody mess before chorea waved its white flag. This is better. And a whole lot safer.

  After the Sun Salutations, they move to the floor. Three Cobras. Two Locusts. And then Bridge. He dreads Bridge. He lies on his back, feet planted, knees bent, and, on Katie’s cue, presses his hips to the sky. Or least up a bit.

  “Hold the pose, not your breath. Stay here for ten.”

  Joe’s legs tremble. His throat feels constricted, thin. He squeezes his face and grunts, sputtering his breath. He tightens every muscle he can find, fighting to keep his ass off the ground, to stay in the pose, to stay in the fight.

  “The pose begins when you want to get out of it. Quiet your reactions. Quiet your thoughts. Quiet the struggle. Witness and breathe.”

  Joe finds his face first and unclenches his jaw. He breathes and mindfully relaxes everything but his feet, which he pushes into the ground. He watches his stomach rise and fall. Rise and fall. And here he is, almost comfortable in Bridge.

  Stay in the Fight worked for Joe as a patrol officer. It’s even worked for Joe at times as a husband and father. But it doesn’t quite work as a man with HD. Stay in the Fight is a struggle. It’s war. Despite the Seroquel and his inadequate dose of Tetrabenazine, he still exhibits chorea, loss of coordination and proprioception, OCD, paranoia, impulsivity, anosognosia, wild swings in mood with an unconscious predilection for anger, and dysexecutive syndrome. And slurring. The slurring has started. He has no real weapon to fight HD. He’d never admit this to Donny or Tommy or any of the guys, but maybe, instead of Stay in the Fight, his approach to HD should be to Stay in the Pose.

  Katie mercifully cues Joe to release his Bridge. They move on to Seated Forward Fold. Happy Baby. Spinal Twist.

  And finally, his favorite, Savasana. Dead Man’s Pose. The irony of this position’s name is not lost on him. Joe lies on his mat, his arms at his sides, his legs wide, feet splayed, eyes closed. Breathing. Letting go of all effort. Surrendering everything, allowing every pound of him to be held by the mat and hardwood floor beneath him, which feels in this moment somehow more comfortable than his bed mattress.

  Sometimes Katie reads an inspirational passage from one of her yoga books while he’s in this pose, but today she says nothing. Without looking, he can feel her presence on her mat next to him. Joe breathes, not forcing or expecting anything, and he sinks in, releasing his body and thoughts, emptying out.

  And in that empty space emerges an image of his mother. A memory. She’s in her shared room in the state hospital, sitting in a padded, reclined wheelchair, a white seat belt over her chest, a black seat belt tight around her waist. She’s wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt, swimming on her emaciated frame, a fluorescent-yellow paper bracelet sporting the words FALL RISK around her translucent wrist. Her wrists are pronated, her bony fingers curled and rigid.

  She’s sputtering, grunting, pushing out low, wild-animal growls. Her face squeezes fast and tight as if she’s been unexpectedly punched. She grunts again and throws her chin up to the ceiling. Her mouth hangs open. Drool drips from her bottom lip onto her blue shirt.

  Joe is eleven. He’s disgusted, ashamed, repulsed. He turns his head and looks away. He wants to leave.

  The pose begins when you want to get out of it. Quiet your reactions. Quiet your thoughts. Quiet the struggle. Witness and breathe.

  Stay in the Pose.

  Joe lies in Dead Man’s Pose and begins to relive the same vivid memory of his mother, but it shifts, as if God has reached into his brain and rotated it a few degrees.

  Not like that. Like this.

  His mother’s wheelchair, the seat belts, her blue short-sleeved shirt, the yellow bracelet, the growls, the drool. Instead of looking away, Joe meets her eyes with his, and he sees his mother’s eyes smiling at him. Her face winces, and she grunts, but now Joe’s eyes are connected to hers, unafraid, and the guttural animal sounds become human, intelligible.

  “Eh ew.”

  Thank you.

  His mother is thanking the nurse for feeding her lunch. She’s thanking his father for brushing her hair. She’s thanking Joe and Maggie for the pictures they drew for her.

  And before they leave for another week, his mother gathers all the strength she has to produce a sharp groan.

  “Eh uh ew.”

  I love you.

  The last words Joe heard his mother say, words he didn’t comprehend until now, were Thank you and I love you. Gratitude and love.

  Joe replays the memory, and he sees his mother again and anew. Unable to walk or feed herself, unable to defend her reputation from the rumors that she was a drunk and a sinner and a bad mother, unable to live at home or hug her kids or tuck them into bed at night, she’s smiling with her eyes at Joe. In the end, his mother wasn’t just a living corpse waiting to die in a hospital. She was a wife and mother who loved her family, grateful to see them and still love them for as long as she could.

  Tears stream down Joe’s temples, wetting his hair as he remembers his mother, no longer the grotesque monster he despised and blamed and was ashamed of. She was Ruth O’Brien, his mother, a woman who had HD through no fault of her own, who gave her family love and gratitude when she had nothing else to give.

  After all these years, he sees his mother. Re-membered.

  I love you, Mum. Please forgive me. And Joe’s heart swells, knowing it’s already done. He is loved and forgiven.

  And, like a lightning strike, there is his example. His mother before him. The lesson that she passed down for him to pass on to his children—the courage to face every breath with love and gratitude.

  “Okay, Dad. Let’s wiggle our fingers and toes. Stretch your arms up overhead, and when you’re ready, come to a seated position.”

  Joe and Katie are now sitting cross-legged, eyes open, seeing each other in the mirror. Katie’s face is wet with tears, too.

  “Let’s bring our palms together at our hearts.”

  Joe copies Katie. They sit for a moment in silence, in prayer.

  “The light within me bows to and honors the light within you. Namaste.”

  “Namaste,” says Joe, smiling at his daughter in the mirror. “I love you, Katie.”

  “I love you, too, Dad.”

  “Thank you, sweetie.”

  Love and gratitude.

  CHAPTER 32

  Joe’s standing in the front foyer, trying to understand what he’s seeing, or rather, what he’s not seeing. The marble blessing font is gone. He’s staring at two screw holes and a patch of white paint in the shape of the font twenty years brighter than the white wall surrounding it, unable to imagine who would do this. A few months ago, he might not have even noticed its absence. The holy-water sacramental has always been Rosie’s thing. But as Joe’s HD symptoms have worsened, he figures water blessed by God is probably as effective as anything modern medicine’s got for him and a hell of a lot cheaper. So for the past few months, he’s bought int
o this devotional act, anointing himself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit when leaving or returning home. One morning, when no one was looking, he actually removed the straw from his sippy cup, dunked it into the font, and drank a little. It couldn’t hurt.

  He tosses his keys onto the hallway table and goes to high-five the Virgin Mary, another ritual he’s become almost obsessively attached to, but he’s left hanging. She’s gone, too. There’s nothing on the table but his keys and the ivory doily where Mary used to stand. Have they been burgled by some crazy Catholic?

  He finds a similar scene in the living room. The crucifix is missing from the wall above the fireplace. Jesus, St. Patrick, St. Christopher, the angels, the prayer candles, even the Christmas carolers and the manger scene have all disappeared. Only the frogs, the babies, the Snoopys, and their family photos remain. To Joe, the room looks better without all that religious crap, but his skin goes cool. The statues and candles don’t mean anything to Joe, but they mean the world to Rosie.

  He continues to inspect the living room as if it’s a crime scene. Rosie’s ironing board is set up, but the iron’s cord is unplugged, and the laundry is still a wrinkled heap in the basket on the floor. Vanished religious crap, unfinished ironing. Nothing else seems to be amiss, but then his eyes land on the TV cabinet, the final clue. The Oprah videotapes are gone.

  Rosie’s come undone.

  “Rosie?”

  He walks into the bedroom, and there she is, still in her pink pajamas, lying in the fetal position on the bed, her face red and puffy, her eyes sunken, her auburn hair looking like it’s in an eighties rock band. He kneels down on the floor next to her and leans into the mattress like a boy saying his prayers at bedtime. His face is even with hers, only inches apart. He can feel her soft breath on his nose. She smells like wine.

  “What happened, hun?”

  “Nothin’.”

  The Madonna holding baby Jesus is gone from the night table next to her. In its place are two bottles of Chardonnay and a jelly jar, all three empty.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “So.”

  “So? It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”

  “I don’t fuckin’ care.”

  “ ‘Fuckin’,’ huh?”

  “That’s right,” she says, challenging him to correct her. He wouldn’t dream of it.

  “Whaddya do with all the religious stuff?”

  “I packed it up.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cuz I don’t believe in God anymore.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t. I’m all done. How, Joe?” she asks, sitting up now, suddenly coming to life. She’s got a rant in her that’s been simmering in wine all morning, just waiting for an audience. He can see it in her outraged green eyes. “How can I? How am I supposed to have faith in a God that would do this to our family? We’re good people, Joe.”

  “I know. Bad things happen to good people every day.”

  “Oh, don’t feed me any cliché bullshit. I was okay with you dying.”

  “Thanks, darlin’. That’s real sweet.”

  “No, you know what I mean. I’ve been to too many police funerals with you. I’ve seen the grief on those wives’ faces. I’ve been prepared to be one of those women since I was in my twenties.”

  He gets it. The funerals always bring it home. This ain’t no game of cops and robbers. This shit is real. Sometimes, the good guys get taken down. And when they lose a brother or sister in blue, every cop standing at attention, honoring the lost officer in the casket, is thinking the exact same thing.

  That could just as easily be me.

  “I was okay when I was praying for just you,” says Rosie. “I could handle it. Dr. Hagler said the disease is slow, so okay, that’s a blessing, right? We still have time. I prayed to God to give me the strength and grace to endure this, to take care of you, to be grateful for every day we have. You know I’ve always believed in trusting in God’s plan.”

  Joe nods.

  “Plus we’re Irish. We know how to endure backbreaking, soul-crushing hardship. Perseverance is in our blood, for fuck’s sake.”

  Joes agrees. They’re a strong and tenacious breed of people, stubborn as a constipated mule and proud of it.

  “But then JJ and then Meghan. They have this fuckin’ hideous, mutated thing in their blood and their brains, and they’re going to die before me, Joe, and I can’t take it. I can’t.”

  It’s a mother’s worst nightmare, and Rosie’s voice cracks under the cruel weight of it. She’s weeping, and Joe can’t think of what to say to comfort her. He wants to run his fingers through her hair, to wipe away her tears, to rub her back and hold her, but he doesn’t trust his arms and hands to do what he intends. He might punch her in the face, squeeze her too hard, poke her in the eye, or dig his fingernails into her skin, drawing blood. He knows he might, because these things have already happened. It’s as if the command center for voluntary movement in his brain has been hijacked by a gang of naughty kids, and they’re in there maniacally laughing as they randomly, repetitively flip the switches. Or conversely, the kids are in there with their arms crossed, some stubborn, others indolent, flat-out refusing Joe’s simple and polite request to turn the proper motor sequence for hugging on. So he resists the urge to touch her, and Rosie cries next to him alone.

  “I think about their funeral services, their beautiful faces and their bodies in caskets, buried in the ground, and I don’t want to spend one minute on this earth knowing two of my children are buried beneath it.”

  “Shhh, honey, don’t go there.”

  “I can’t help it. I keep picturing them dead in the ground, and it’s winter, and their bodies would be so cold, and I can’t stand it.”

  “You gotta stop imagining that. They’re not dying anytime soon. You gotta keep faith.”

  “I can’t. The faith I had is broken. It’s gone. I tried. I tried praying for them, and it started all humble and hopeful, but then it turned to begging, and then it became this full-on rage against God and the angels and the church. What if Katie and Patrick and baby Joseph get this, too? I could lose everyone, Joe.”

  Joe notices Rosie didn’t include Patrick’s unborn, illegitimate bastard child in her list of “everyone.”

  “They won’t. You won’t.”

  “I’ll tell you right now, I’m crawling into the casket with the last one. They’re gonna have to bury me alive because I won’t go on alone.”

  “Rosie, honey, this isn’t good for you to think like this. You gotta focus on the kids living.”

  “What if the girls never get married and have families because of this? What if JJ and Colleen decide they shouldn’t have any more children?”

  “They can all do that genetic in-vitro thing. Or they could adopt.”

  “What if JJ becomes symptomatic and he loses his job? How will he support his family? Who’s going to teach Joey how to play catch and hit a baseball and all those father-son things?”

  Her voice is spiraling higher with each question, and Joe fears she’s going to what-if herself into a full-blown drunken panic attack.

  “He’s not symptomatic, and we have to hope that he won’t be for at least another twenty years. And Colleen can teach Joey that stuff, too. Have you seen her throw? She’s got one helluva arm.”

  “I think I see it happening in Patrick.”

  “It’s not. You’re just scared and imagining the worst. Look, there’s so much hope to have for our kids. Those scientists are gonna find effective treatments and a cure for this thing.”

  “How do you know? What if they don’t?”

  “They will. I have faith in them. There are all these really smart people right down the street in the Navy Yard labs who are dedicating their entire lives to figuring this out. They already know the mutation, and that’s the on
ly thing that causes HD. It’s gonna happen. They’re gonna cure this someday, hopefully in time to save our kids. And hopefully no one else in our family has the gene. That’s what I pray for.”

  “You pray?”

  “Jeez, you don’t have to look that shocked. Yeah, I’ve been going to church.”

  “Since when?”

  “ ’Bout a month now. I figure if there’s ever a time for praying and finding some greater purpose and grace, it’s now.”

  “Do you go to Mass?”

  “Nah. I don’t need the priest and all the sitting and standing. I’d probably fall on my face and cause a fuss. I go most mornings, after the seven thirty is cleared out.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “Just sit and pray.”

  Joe actually started going to church because of his sister, Maggie. He finally talked to her on the phone last month, told her everything. She was stunned and upset and even cried while asking about Joe’s kids, which surprised him, given that she’s never even met them. While Joe’s grateful that Maggie hasn’t noticed any symptoms in herself, he also couldn’t help feeling outraged. He and Maggie each had a fifty-fifty chance of inheriting HD from their mother. Why couldn’t it have been Maggie who got it instead of him? Maggie has no children. It could end with her. Why would God curse Joe’s kids with this wretched disease? And to his shame, he hated Maggie for probably being HD negative. He hated God for singling him out, for giving HD to his family. Most of all, he hated himself.

  Without a consciously calculated decision to do so, he walked his sorry ass into St. Francis the next morning, collapsed into a pew, and, alone in the church, prayed aloud to God. He prayed for many things that day, but mostly, he asked God for forgiveness. To his surprise, he felt almost immediately absolved, lighter, cleaner, the toxic hatred washed from his body. He’s gone to church almost every morning since.

  Four rows from the back on the right side, where they always sat as a family when the kids were little. He’s only there each time for five minutes, tops. He could easily pray from his chair in the living room, but he likes praying in that spot, in their old pew, in St. Francis Church. He likes the columns leading to grand arches on the balcony level, fashioned after the cathedral in Limerick, Ireland; the pipe organ; the American, Irish, and Charlestown flags; the gold crucifix hanging from the ceiling; the stained glass windows and stations of the cross; the worn, red-painted wooden floors. His prayers whispered there feel official, blessed, heard.