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 unloading 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He looks at Rosie, and her face has gone ashen, her eyes withdrawn.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?”
“Hunting-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 Hunting-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.