Katie kicks off her flip-flops, drops her bag at the door, and follows Felix into the kitchen. His apartment is central air-conditioned, and her bare feet feel refreshingly cool on the smooth tile floor. She sits on one of the bar stools while Felix pulls a bottle of white wine from the fridge.
“How’s this?” he asks.
Katie nods. Ziggy Marley is playing on his iPod. She swivels in her seat to the music and fondles one of the red apples in the white ceramic bowl on the soapstone bar counter while watching Felix work the bottle opener into the cork, admiring his strong hands. He pours two glasses of wine and gives her one.
“Cheers,” he says, and they clink glasses. The wine is cold, crisp, tangy. Katie considers the wine and the elegant heft of the glass in her hand and would bet that what she’s holding is worth more than what she would’ve earned tonight had she actually had a private scheduled.
“So it’s early now. Should we go out for dinner?” he
asks.
“It’s so hot out there. Can we just stay in?”
“Yeah. Good,” he says, sitting down next to her. “It’s been a long week, and I don’t really feel like venturing back out. I can make us a salad or we can order something.”
“Okay.”
“You look all ready to hit the town, though.”
She’s wearing the sleeveless black dress that Meghan told her to wear.
“I’m all sweaty from the walk over.”
“Looks like you could still use that shower,” he says, smiling with those eyes so liquid brown she could bathe in them, and he leans over and kisses her.
She holds the back of his smooth, bald head with her hand and pulls his kiss deeper into her. His hands reach up under her dress, up her thighs, and his kiss reaches deeper, and she pulls his Yankees shirt up over his head and drops it to the floor. He does the same to her dress.
They’re standing now, and she kisses his neck, tasting his bergamot soap and salty sweat, running her hands along his shoulders, down his arms, across his smooth, muscular back. She’s kissed and touched and tasted every inch of him, and yet every dimple and crease, each scar and tattoo still feels intoxicatingly new. She unzips his shorts, and they fall off his thin hips to his ankles. He’s not wearing any underwear. She wiggles out of her black thong, and he unhooks her bra.
They kiss and grab and hold each other, and Katie loses herself in him—the taste of white wine in his mouth, his hot hands, the bass of the music from his iPod thumping through her. He leads her by the hand to the bathroom. As Felix lets go of her grasp to turn the shower on, Meghan pops into Katie’s consciousness, and for the slightest moment, a stone-cold guilty pang interrupts her libido, sickening her.
She couldn’t go. She’s holding too many secrets as it is—HD from Felix, her family from Felix, Felix from her family. She couldn’t bear the possibility, the responsibility, seeing Meghan stutter onstage, a misstep, that right foot pointing and flexing when it shouldn’t, because she knows she wouldn’t have the guts to tell Meghan about it. And then she’d have yet another secret to carry, and her hands are already too damn full.
The glass door steams up. Katie steps into the shower, and Felix follows her. Hot water rains down on her head. Felix’s dark brown hands rub slippery, liquid soap on her ghostly white breasts. She inhales the sweet smell of citrus as Felix presses up against her from behind, and the fact that she’s not at the Opera House with the rest of her family fades to an inconsequential footnote.
CHAPTER 16
Katie and the genetic counselor are killing time, waiting for the neurologist. She pulls out her cell phone, hoping to absorb herself in some kind of mindless distraction. The battery’s dead. Well, then. She tucks her phone back inside her bag and casually browses the room, attempting to avoid eye contact and the potential for any more pointless small talk, but there’s not much to look at in here. The counselor’s office is small and impersonal, not at all what she expected. For some reason, she’d imagined something similar to her high school guidance counselor’s office, which was overly cheery, trying-way-too-hard-to-be-cool uncool. She remembers the fishbowl full of M&Ms, the antibullying and school spirit posters. EVERY KID MATTERS. GO TOWNIES! His collection of Bruins bobbleheads. The entire office was a forced smiley-face emoticon with exclamation points on every flat surface.
This place is definitely more subdued on the positivity front. The genetic counselor has his framed diploma on the wall. Eric Clarkson, MSW. Boston College. Next to the diploma is a Huntington’s Disease Society of America HOPE poster. There’s a tall, pink orchid in a pot on the windowsill and a framed photograph of a yellow Lab on his desk. She checks out his left hand. No ring. No wife or kids or even a girlfriend established or loved enough to own a spot in a frame in his office. Just a man and his dog and his pretty flower. No M&Ms. No rah rah rah!
He’s kind of cute. She tucks her hair behind her ear and wonders how she looks. In her rush to get here on time, which clearly wasn’t necessary, she didn’t put on any makeup. Now she wishes she had. Good God. How can she be sitting here, worried about how she looks? First of all, she has a boyfriend. Second, she’s here to find out whether she has the gene for a fatal disease. He’s a genetic counselor at the hospital, not some cute guy at Ironsides.
The door opens. A woman enters the room and says hello to Eric. She’s wearing a white lab coat, glasses, and high heels. Her black hair is pulled into a loose bun. She reads whatever it says on her clipboard and then looks up at Katie.
“Kathryn O’Brien?” she says, extending her hand and shaking Katie’s. “I’m Dr. Hagler. We’re going to do a quick neurological exam before you begin talking with Eric, okay?”
Katie nods, but she’s faking it. Wait, what? There’s a test before the test? Her heart tightens.
“All right. Can you stick out your tongue for me?”
Katie sticks out her tongue. She watches Dr. Hagler’s eyes studying her tongue. What is her tongue doing? Is her tongue doing something wrong?
“Okay, now follow my finger with your eyes.”
She does. Or at least she thinks she does. Shit. This is happening. She’s being tested to see whether she’s showing symptoms now. She feels blindsided, tricked. She remembers now that Eric mentioned something on the phone about a quick neuro exam, but the words went in one ear and out the other without registering. She conveniently ignored whatever that meant. She thought today would only be a preliminary visit, a conversation about whether she wants to find out if she’s gene positive, whether she’s destined to get Huntington’s disease fourteen years or so down the road. This was an appointment with a genetic counselor, not a neurologist. Even as she and Eric sat waiting for the neurologist, it honestly never occurred to her that a doctor would be checking her to see whether she’s got this thing now.
“Hold your left hand flat, palm open, like this. 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.”
Dr. Hagler shows Katie the sequence three times through. Katie copies her three times, doing exactly as the doctor did, maybe a touch slower. Does that matter? Is that bad?
“Now walk heel to toe over here in a straight line.”
Katie stands up, and the blood drains from her face. Her head feels airy, cool, dizzy. Her heart is beating too fast, panicking. She needs to breathe. She’s not breathing. Breathe.
You can walk heel to toe, for God’s sake. You can walk on your HANDS if she asks you to.
Katie walks across the room heel to toe with arms outstretched in a T, as if she’s walking across a tightrope or being busted for an OUI. Dr. Hagler writes something down. Did she not nail it? Should she have had her arms down? Dr. Hag-ler continues with the exam, and each task makes Katie feel as if she’s in big trouble, one wrong move away from a death sentence.
“Now name as many words as you can that begin with the letter B. You have one minute. Go,” says Dr. Hagler, looking down at her watch.
B is for, B is for . . . Nothing. No words. Her mind is completely blank.
“Blank. Ball. Boston. Blood.”
Think. She can’t think of any more words starting with B. What does that mean? Why didn’t JJ warn her about this? She could’ve prepared, practiced. Man, she hates tests. This is bullshit.
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, time,” says Dr. Hagler.