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
It’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 reallive 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 reallive 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.