CHAPTER 14
Patrick just left. He was reluctant to go, but if he calls in sick for work again his boss might can him, so he had to leave. Meghan left a couple of hours ago for rehearsal at the Opera House. Katie thinks she was relieved to get the hell out of this claustrophobic living room, to have a nonnegotiable call time on a stage where she can become completely absorbed in something beautiful.
And then there were three. Katie and her dad are watching the evening news, waiting for news. Her mom is knitting a green-and-white blanket. She might be listening to the TV, but she never looks up at it. She’s waiting, too. They all thought JJ and Colleen would be home by now. Katie holds her phone in her hand, expecting it to vibrate any second. It never does. She’s too afraid to call or text them.
The evening news is probably not the best form of entertainment or distraction for any of them right now. The screen bombards them with one depressing, terrifying, catastrophic story after another. Wildfires in California that can’t be controlled, hundreds of homes destroyed, over a dozen people missing or killed. A father from Dedham goes on trial for murdering his wife and two children. Car bombs in Pakistan killing thirty-two civilians. Wall Street in a nosedive. Politicians throwing tantrums.
“Dad, can we watch something else?” asks Katie.
“Sox aren’t on until seven thirty.”
End of discussion. Her parents have over a hundred cable channels, but the news and the Red Sox are apparently the only two options available. She doesn’t press him. But the news is too stressful for Katie, as if each story adds a log to the fire of the living room’s collective anxiety. She decides to watch her dad instead.
He’s in constant motion, more than usual. She notices how he tries to make it all look normal. He’ll stitch the tail end of whatever part of him flings or pops or twitches into some kind of larger, meaningful-looking action. He’s become quite the improvisational choreographer. It’s always the strangest dance she’s ever seen.
His right leg snaps out as if he’s kicking away an invisible pesky dog. So he follows his foot and stands up. Standing, he must mean to go somewhere, so he walks over to the windows. He pulls the shade, sticks his nose in, and peeks out at the street. He stays there for a few seconds, muttering to himself. It makes sense that he would get up to look for signs of JJ and Colleen, but Katie’s onto him. The impulse to rise out of his comfortable seat began with an involuntary leg thrust, not with a premeditated plan to look out the window.
As he returns to his chair, there’s an extra bit of jostle in his step. She listens to the newly familiar jingle of change in his pocket as he walks. The sound of HD.
She continues watching him, and he’s more mesmerizing, and in some ways more horrifying, than anything on the news. He’s like a train wreck or a car accident or a house fire, and she’s the eyewitness, the rubbernecker who can’t look away.
Next, his left arm flings up as if he’s a nerdy student raising his hand in class. Then he bends his arm at the elbow and scratches his head as if he just happened to have a little itch. This is one of his signature moves. If you didn’t know he had Huntington’s, you’d think this guy must have a raging case of dandruff or head lice, or he’s just plain weird. He doesn’t seem to be consciously aware of his involuntary ticks or even his oh-I-totally-meant-to-do-that improvisations. He doesn’t glance over at Katie to see whether she noticed. He doesn’t seem embarrassed or fazed in any way. He simply continues watching the news as if nothing mentionable just happened. Nothing to see here. Certainly not any symptoms of an inherited, progressive, lethal neurodegenerative disease with no cure.
He keeps fidgeting and crazy dancing in his chair and watching the news with his wife and his daughter as if this were a normal Wednesday evening, and it’s starting to bug the piss out of her. As if any evening or anything at all could ever be normal again.
Then the front door opens and Katie’s heart stops. Maybe the earth stops. Time seems to have. The sound of the evening news fades to a muted murmur. Her mom stops knitting and looks up. Even her dad goes still.
JJ and Colleen appear holding hands in the living room, two numb-eyed zombies who’ve just returned from a visit to hell. Their faces are puffed and splotchy. No one says anything.
Katie’s afraid to make a sound, afraid that any noise might push time past this exact second. Maybe what she’s seeing isn’t real. Maybe what’s about to happen won’t. The room is eerily silent, still, an unshaken snow globe on a shelf.
And then her mom starts bawling, and JJ’s on his knees in front of her, hugging her with his head in her lap on top of her knitting.
“I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry,” he says.
And then her dad throws the remote control across the room. It hits the wall behind the TV and shatters. The batteries go spinning on the wood floor. Her dad’s face is in his hands, and Colleen is standing alone looking like a paper doll, and Patrick and Meghan don’t even know what’s happening. This is actually happening.
Katie sits on the couch, watching the most tragic news of the day unfolding live in front of her, the sound of a scared little girl repeating the word no inside her head over and over and over and over.