CHAPTER 8
Joe 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.