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For Stella
In loving memory of Meghan
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—The Gospel of Thomas, saying 70
Once you can imagine these things, you can’t unimagine them.
—Joe O’Brien
PART I
Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease characterized by a progressive loss of voluntary motor control and an increase in involuntary movements. Initial physical symptoms may include a loss of balance, reduced dexterity, falling, chorea, slurred speech, and difficulty swallowing. The disease is diagnosed through neurological exam, based on these disturbances in movement, and can be confirmed through genetic testing, as a single genetic mutation causes this disease.
Although the presentation of physical symptoms is necessary for diagnosis, there exists an insidious “prodrome of HD” that may begin up to fifteen years before the motor problems appear. Prodromal symptoms of HD are both psychiatric and cognitive and may include depression, apathy, paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, impulsivity, outbursts of anger, reduced speed and flexibility of cognitive processing, and memory impairment.
HD is typically diagnosed between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, proceeding inexorably to death in ten to twenty years. There is no treatment that affects the progression and no cure.
It has been called the cruelest disease known to man.
CHAPTER 1
Damn woman is always moving his things. He can’t kick off his boots in the living room or set his sunglasses down on the coffee table without her relocating them to “where they belong.” Who made her God in this house? If he wants to leave a stinking pile of his own shit right in the middle of the kitchen table, then that’s where it should stay until he moves it.
Where the fuck is my gun?
“Rosie!” Joe hollers from the bedroom.
He looks at the time: 7:05 a.m. He’s going to be late for roll call if he doesn’t get the hell out of here pronto, but he can’t go anywhere without his gun.
Think. It’s so hard to think lately when he’s in a hurry. Plus it’s a thousand degrees hotter than hell in here. It’s been sweltering for June, in the high eighties all week, and barely cools down at night. Terrible sleeping weather. The air in the house is a thick swamp, today’s heat and humidity already elbowing in on what was trapped inside yesterday. The windows are open, but that doesn’t help a lick. His white Hanes T-shirt is sticking to his back beneath his vest, pissing him off. He just showered and could already use another.
Think. He took a shower and got dressed—pants, T-shirt, Kevlar vest, socks, boots, gun belt. Then he took his gun out of the safe, released the trigger lock, and then what? He looks down at his right hip. It’s not there. He can feel the missing weight of it without even looking. He’s got his magazine pouch, handcuffs, Mace, radio, and service baton, but no gun.
It’s not in the safe, not on his dresser, not in the top drawer of his dresser, not on the unmade bed. He looks over at Rosie’s bureau. Nothing but the Virgin Mary centered on an ivory doily. She sure ain’t going to help him.
St. Anthony, where the fuck is it?
He’s tired. He worked traffic detail last night over at the Garden. Friggin’ Justin Timberlake concert got out late. So he’s tired. So what? He’s been tired for years. He can’t imagine being so tired that he would be careless enough to misplace his loaded gun. A lot of guys with as many years on the force as Joe grow complacent about their service weapon, but he never has.
He stomps down the hall, passes the two other bedrooms, and pokes his head into their only bathroom. Nothing. He storms into the kitchen with his hands on his hips, the heel of his right hand searching for the top of his gun out of habit.
His four not-yet-showered, bed-headed, sleepy teenagers are up and seated around the tiny kitchen table for breakfast—plates of undercooked bacon, runny scrambled eggs, and burnt white toast. The usual. Joe scans the room and spots his gun, his loaded gun, on the mustard-yellow Formica counter next to the sink.
“Mornin’, Dad,” offers Katie, his youngest, smiling but shy about it, sensing that something is off.
He ignores Katie. He picks up his Glock, secures it in its holster, and then aims the crosshairs of his wrath at Rosie.
“Whaddaya doin’ with my gun there?”
“What are you talking about?” says Rosie, who is standing by the stove in a pink tank top and no bra, shorts, and bare feet.
“You’re always movin’ my shit around,” says Joe.
“I never touch your gun,” says Rosie, standing up to him.
Rosie is petite at five feet nothing and a hundred pounds soaking wet. Joe’s no giant either. He’s five feet nine with his patrol boots on, but everyone thinks of him as being taller than he is, probably because he’s barrel-chested and has muscular arms and a deep, husky voice. At thirty-six, he’s got a bit of a gut, but not bad for his age or considering how much of his life he spends sitting in a cruiser. He’s normally playful and easygoing, a pussycat really, but even when he’s smiling and there’s that twinkle in his blue eyes, everyone knows he’s old-school tough. No one messes with Joe. No one but Rosie.
She’s right. She never touches his gun. Even after all these years of his being on the force, she’s never grown comfortable with having a firearm in the house, even though it’s always in the safe or in his top dresser drawer, where it’s trigger-locked, or on his right hip. Until today.
“Then how the fuck did it get there?” he asks, pointing to the space next to the sink.
“Watch your mouth,” she says.
He looks over at his four kids, who have all stopped eating to witness the show. He narrows in on Patrick. God love him, but he’s sixteen going on stupid. This would be just the kind of knucklehead move he would pull, even after all the lectures these kids have endured about the gun.
“So which one of you did this?”
They all stare and say nothing. The Charlestown code of silence, eh?
“Who picked up my gun and left it by the sink?” he demands, his voice booming. Silence will not be an option.
“Wasn’t me, Dad,” says Meghan.
“Me either,” says Katie.
“Not me,” says JJ.
“I didn’t do it,” says Patrick.
What every criminal he’s ever arrested says. Everyone’s a fuckin’ saint. They all look up at him, blinking and waiting. Patrick shoves a rubbery slice of bacon into his mouth and chews.
“Have some breakfast before you go, Joe,” says Rosie.
He’s too late to have breakfast. He’s too late because he’s been looking for his goddamn gun that someone took and then left on the kitchen counter. He’s late and feeling out of control, and he’s hot, too hot. The air in this cramped room is too soupy to breathe, and it feels as if the heat from the stove and six bodies and the weather is stoking something already threatening to boil over inside him.
He’s going to be late for roll call, and Sergeant Rick McDonough, five years younger than Joe, is going to have a word with him again or maybe even write him up. He can’t stomach
&
nbsp; the humiliating thought of it, and something inside him explodes.
He grabs the cast-iron skillet on the stove by the handle and sidearms it across the room. It smashes a sizable hole in the drywall not far from Katie’s head, then lands with a resounding BANG on the linoleum floor. Rusty brown bacon grease drips down the daisy-patterned wallpaper like blood oozing from a wound.
The kids are wide-eyed and silent. Rosie says nothing and doesn’t move. Joe storms out of the kitchen, down the narrow hallway, and steps into the bathroom. His heart is racing, and his head is hot, too hot. He splashes cold water over his hair and face and wipes himself dry with a hand towel.
He needs to leave now, right now, but something in his reflection snags him and won’t let go.
His eyes.
His pupils are dilated, black and wide with adrenaline, like shark eyes, but that’s not it. It’s the expression in his eyes that has him arrested. Wild, unfocused, full of rage. His mother.
It’s the same unbalanced gaze that used to terrify him as a young boy. He’s looking in the mirror, late for roll call, glued to the wretched eyes of his mother, who used to stare at him just like this when she could do nothing else but lie in her bed in the psych ward at the state hospital, mute, emaciated, and possessed, waiting to die.
The devil in his mother’s eyes, dead for twenty-five years, is now staring at him in the bathroom mirror.
SEVEN YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 2
It’s a cool Sunday morning, and Joe is walking the dog while Rosie is at church. He used to go with her and the kids whenever he had off, but after Katie received her confirmation, that was the end of it. Now only Rosie goes, and she’s disgusted with the whole pathetic, sinful lot of them. A big fan of tradition, an unfortunate quality for someone who only gets a full weekend off every seven and a half weeks and hasn’t seen Christmas morning with his family in six years, Joe will still attend Mass on Christmas Eve and Easter when he can, but he’s done with the weekly sacrament.
It’s not that he doesn’t believe in God. Heaven and hell. Good and evil. Right and wrong. Shame still guides many of his daily decisions. God can see you. God can hear what you’re thinking. God loves you, but if you fuck up, you’re gonna burn in hell. The nuns spent his entire youth hammering those paranoid beliefs through his thick skull, right between the eyes. It’s all still rattling around in there with no way out.
But God must know that Joe’s a good man. And if He doesn’t, then one hour once a week spent kneeling, sitting, and standing in St. Francis Church ain’t going to save Joe’s immortal soul now.
While he’ll still put his money on God, it’s the Catholic Church as an institution that he’s lost faith in. Too many priests diddling too many little boys; too many bishops and cardinals and even the Pope covering up the whole disgraceful mess. And Joe’s no feminist, but they don’t do right by women, if you ask him. No birth control, for one thing. Come on, is this really a mandate from Jesus? If Rosie wasn’t on the pill, they’d probably have a dozen kids by now, and she’d have at least one foot in the grave. God bless modern medicine.
That’s why they have a dog. After Katie, he told Rosie no more. Four is enough. Rosie got pregnant with JJ the summer after they graduated from high school (they were lucky pulling out worked as long as it did), so they had a shotgun wedding and a baby before they turned nineteen. JJ and Patrick were Irish twins, born eleven months apart. Meghan arrived fifteen months after Patrick, and Katie came screaming into this world eighteen months after Meghan.
As the kids got older and went to school, life got easier, but those early years were ugly. He remembers giving Rosie many unreciprocated kisses good-bye, leaving her home alone with four kids under the age of five, three of them still in diapers, grateful to have a legitimate reason to get the hell out of there, but he worried every day that she might not make it to the end of his shift. He actually imagined her doing something dreadful, his experience on the job or stories of what his fellow officers had seen fueling his worst fears. Regular people end up doing some crazy shit when pushed to their limits. Rosie probably didn’t get a full night’s sleep for a decade, and their kids were a handful. It’s a miracle they’re all still alive.
Rosie wasn’t on board at first with the Infield Plan, as Joe called it. Insanely, she wanted more babies. She wanted to add at least a pitcher and a catcher to the O’Brien roster. She’s the youngest of seven kids, the only girl, and even though she hardly ever sees her brothers now, she likes being from a big family.
But Joe made his decision, and that was that. He wasn’t budging, and for the first time in his life, he actually refused to have sex until she agreed with him. That was a tense three months. He had been prepared to take care of business in the shower indefinitely when he noticed a flat, circular container on his pillow. Inside, he found a ring of pills, a week’s worth already punched out. Against God’s will, Rosie ended their cold war. He couldn’t take her clothes off fast enough.
But if she couldn’t have any more babies, she wanted a dog. Fair enough. She came home from the animal shelter with a shih tzu. He still thinks she did that just to spite him, her way of getting in the last word. Joe’s a Boston cop, for cripes sake. He should be the proud owner of a Labrador or a Bernese mountain dog or an Akita. He agreed to getting a dog, a real dog, not a prissy little rat. He was not pleased.
Rosie named him Yaz, which at least made the mutt tolerable. Joe used to hate walking Yaz alone, out in public together. Made him feel like a pussy. But at some point he got over it. Yaz is a good dog, and Joe is man enough to be seen out in Charlestown walking a shih tzu. As long as Rosie doesn’t dress the pooch in one of those friggin’ sweaters.
He likes walking through Town when he’s off duty. Even though everyone here knows he’s a cop, and he’s carrying his gun concealed beneath his untucked shirt, he feels unburdened when he’s not wearing his tough police persona along with the uniform and badge that make him a visible target. He’s always a cop, but off duty, he’s also just a regular guy walking his dog in his neighborhood. And that feels good.
Everyone here calls the place Town, but Charlestown isn’t really a town, or a city for that matter. It’s a neighborhood of Boston, and a small one at that, only one square mile of land tucked between the Charles and Mystic Rivers. But, as any Irishman will tell you about his manhood, what it lacks in size, it makes up for in personality.
The Charlestown Joe grew up in was unofficially divided into two neighborhoods. The Bottom of the Hill was where the poor Irish lived, and the Top of the Hill, up by St. Francis Church, was home to the Lace Curtain Irish. People at the Top of the Hill could be just as poor as the bastards at the Bottom, and in most cases they probably were, but the perception was that they were better off. People here still think that.
There were also a few black families in the projects and some Italians who spilled over from the North End, but otherwise Charlestown was a homogenous hill of working-class Micks and their families living in tight rows of colonial and triple-decker houses. The Townies. And every Townie knew everyone in Town. If Joe was ever doing anything out of line as a kid, which was often, he’d hear somebody yelling from a stoop or open window, Joseph O’Brien! I see you, and I know your mother! People didn’t have to involve the police back then. Kids feared their parents more than they did the authorities. Joe feared his mother more than anyone.
Twenty years ago, Charlestown was all Townies. But the place has changed a lot in recent years. Joe and Yaz plod up the hill, up Cordis Street, and it’s as if they’ve turned the corner and stepped into another zip code. The town houses on this street have all been refurbished. They’re either brick or painted in a glossy palette of approved historical colors. The doors are new, the windows have been replaced, neat rows of flowers bloom in copper window boxes, and the sidewalks are dotted with charming gas lamps. He checks out the make of each parked car as he presses on up
the steep hill—Mercedes, BMW, Volvo. It’s like Beacon Fuckin’ Hill here.
Welcome to the Invasion of the Toonies. He doesn’t blame them for coming. Charlestown is perfectly situated—on the water, a quick hop over the Zakim Bridge to downtown Boston, the Tobin Bridge to the north of the city, the tunnel to the South Shore, a quaint ferry ride to Faneuil Hall. So they started coming, with their fancy corporate jobs and their fat wallets, buying up the real estate and classing up the joint.
But the Toonies don’t typically stay. When they first come, most of them are DINKs—Double Income, No Kids. Then, in a couple of years, they might have a baby, maybe one more to balance things out. When the oldest is ready for kindergarten, that’s when they leave for the suburbs.
So it’s all temporary from the start, and they don’t care about where they live as much as people do when they know they’re staying until they get put in a box. The Toonies don’t volunteer at the Y or coach the Little League teams, and most of them are Presbyterian or Unitarian or vegetarian or whatever friggin’ wacky thing they are, and so they don’t support the Catholic churches here, which is why St. Catherine’s closed. They don’t really become part of the community.
But the bigger problem is the Toonies have made Charlestown desirable to outsiders, and they’ve bloated the housing market. A person has to be rich to live in Charlestown now. Townies are a lot of great things, but unless they’ve robbed a bank, none of them are rich.
Joe is third-generation Irish in Charlestown. His grandfather, Patrick Xavier O’Brien, came over from Ireland in 1936 and worked in the Navy Yard as a longshoreman, supporting a family of ten on forty dollars a week. Joe’s father, Francis, also worked in the Navy Yard, earning a hard but respectable living repairing ships. Joe’s not breaking the bank on a cop’s salary, but they get by. They’ve never felt poor here. Most of the next-generation Townies, however, no matter what they do for work, will never be able to afford to live here. It’s a real shame.