CHAPTER 22
Sleep is a blissfully peaceful respite from Huntington’s. When Joe sleeps, there are no involuntary thrashes, wiggles, or twitches. His body lies still in a normal state of slumber all night. Apparently, chorea will only tie on its tap shoes when there’s an audience. Even the devil inside him needs a good night’s sleep.
The alarm wakes him, and he opens his eyes to a new day. He feels rested, reset, a tabula rasa. Before he pushes back the covers, he’s still thirty years old, a young man, ready to attack the day and capable of anything that happens. Bring it on.
Then he stands, and every muscle in his body feels stiff and wound tight, shortened several inches. He’s bent over at the waist, groaning, rubbing his lower back, and his right knee refuses to straighten, and he remembers that he’s forty-four. He hobbles to the bathroom. He looks in the mirror, and he’s definitely forty-four, and he wonders how that happened. Then his shoulders shrug without instruction to do so, and he remembers that he has HD. Shit.
He studies his puffy-eyed morning face in the mirror as if he’s meeting this man for the first time. Short, unremarkable brown hair. No sign of balding. Wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and creases like parentheses cupping each side of his mouth. Joe rubs the black, brown, and white stubble on his chin. He has a strong chin, like his father’s. The droopy skin of his eyelids makes him look sleepy even when he’s wide awake. He leans in closer to the glass and looks deep into his own eyes. Blue, the color of morning sky. His mother’s eyes.
He’s forty-four, and he has Huntington’s. Every morning it’s the same drill, the same shocking, soul-sinking revelation. He sighs and shakes his head at the poor bastard in the mirror. The poor bastard in the mirror can’t believe it either.
Joe’s on for shift 3, evening duty, and has only one necessary task on his agenda to accomplish before then. He showers, dresses in sweatpants, a hooded Patriots sweatshirt over a BPD T-shirt, a Red Sox cap, and sneakers. Patrick is still sleeping, and Rosie has already gone to work.
She left his sippy cup and a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon on the kitchen table for him. He takes the cup and sucks on the straw. His hot coffee is ice cold. He downs the whole thing, ignores the eggs and bacon, blesses himself with holy water at the front door, and leaves the house.
He walks to Bunker Hill Street and crosses in front of St. Francis Church to the top of the Forty Flights stairway. He reads the sign, dedicated to Catherine and Martin O’Brien, no relation.
TO MASS AT ST. FRANCIS DE SALES
DAYS AND NIGHTS
THEIR STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
THESE “FORTY FLIGHTS”
Joe stands at the edge with his hands on his hips, staring down the steep, concrete steps to the bottom. It’s an intimidating descent, but not as imposing as its misnomer implies. The stairway is actually seven flights of ten steps each. Joe has no idea how anyone got forty flights out of seven or ten or even seventy. Townies aren’t known for their proficiency in mathematics.
Joe rubs the palms of his hands together, ready to go. Needing something constructive to do with his anger and fear, Joe’s been running these steps every day since finding out that Meghan is HD positive. He’s running for JJ and Meghan, to prove that he can, to wear out the demon inside him, to stay in the fight.
He runs down, then up, down, then up. He runs up the seven flights for the third time, and he’s got a stabbing stitch in his side. His lungs feel like bags filled with gravel. He skitters down the stairs, and his quads are on fire. He keeps going, running up and down, punishing his muscles, flushing the anger out of his blood.
This is his daily private PT session. Focus, balance, coordination, strength, control. He’s even heeding the imagined admonition of Colleen and Vivian, his physical therapist, gliding his hand along the black iron railing as he ascends and descends, just in case. Of course, at Spaulding, he’s on a soft, cushy blue mat, and every move he makes is supervised. Joe knows Colleen and Vivian wouldn’t actually approve of this activity, railing or not. Rosie wouldn’t like it either. Good thing none of them know a damn thing about it.
He’ll readily admit that a slip here could be a mistake he’d regret. A fall could result in a broken leg or back, and either would lay him up for a long time. Or he could fall and crack his head. Lights out. Game over. That wouldn’t be a bad way to go, considering the options. Officer Joseph O’Brien died on These Forty Flights, his Stairway to Heaven. It has an enticingly poetic ring to it.
But he won’t fall. He can handle this. Despite the involuntary ticks popping all over him while he runs, he’s in control. He focuses on the precision of each step even as he tires, pressing and lifting, each foot landing with a tap on the concrete, creating a steady drumbeat that echoes through his center, inspiring him, cheering him on despite the burn beneath his ribs and the weariness in his legs. Keep going. Stay in the fight.
He’s fatigued, sucking wind. He harnesses Patrick’s rebellious attitude. These demons don’t know who they’re fucking with. He thinks of Katie and lengthens his breathing, gathering stamina. He pushes up another flight and another, maintaining his pace for JJ and Meghan.
He pictures his mother, strapped to her wheelchair, wearing a bib, a nurse feeding her lunch. His mind runs wild with this memory and others like it, faster and harder than his legs up the stairs. His mother grunting like an animal, unable to speak intelligible words. His mother wearing a helmet while a nurse struggles to get her onto the toilet. His mother weighing ninety pounds. Then his mind’s a master magician, and abracadabra, every image of his mother is now Joe. Joe in a wheelchair, Joe wearing a bib and a helmet, Joe being fed and showered and hoisted onto a toilet, Joe unable to tell Rosie or his kids that he loves them.
That last imagined thought chokes the air from his lungs. He runs up the next flight unable to breathe, his heartbeat pounding his skull like a drum. This is his future. This is where he’s going, and there’s no running from it.
But not yet, he reminds himself. Not today. His lungs insist on air, and oxygen rushes in, feeding his starved muscles. Joe asks his legs to pump harder. They respond. He’s not in a wheelchair today. Today, he is alive and well.
A pack of teenage boys gathers at the bottom of the stairway, wearing their tough gangsta pusses and pants hanging below their tighties. Joe will never comprehend what’s so tough about underwear. These kids don’t have a clue. They glare at him, likely annoyed that he’s invading their hangout and repulsed by Joe’s chorea, wishing this sweaty, weird old man would get the fuck off their stairs. Joe feels the pinch of embarrassed self-consciousness, but he pushes past it. He’s doing this, whatever it looks like, in front of a bunch of punk teens or not. He considers asking them why they aren’t in school today but decides to leave them alone.
It’s a cold December morning, in the low forties, but Joe’s now steamy hot. He wipes his forehead, slick with sweat. He decides to make a quick pit stop after ascending the next flight to remove his Patriots hoodie. He’s panting and pushing up each step, almost there. Then the ball of his right foot misses the edge of the next step and skids out from under him. His heart and lungs jump and stay suspended, weightless in his chest. He’s falling. Before he has a chance to think, his hand reaches for the railing. It slides at first and then catches, wrenching his shoulder but saving his body from slamming prone onto the concrete, tumbling down the Forty Flights.
He hangs there for a few seconds, dangling from the railing by one arm, lying on his stomach, feet splayed out several steps below him, waiting for his heart to calm the fuck down. He releases the railing and rolls over, taking a seat on the step. Looking down the length of the staircase, he rubs his shoulder and counts. Thirty-five. That would’ve hurt. The teenage boys stare at him with flat, uncaring eyes and say nothing.
If Colleen or his physical therapist or Rosie had seen that little stunt, they would not be pleased. But they didn’t see it, and he caught himself. He may be a decrepit old man with Huntington’s, but he’s got the reflexes of a gazelle. Still in the fight, baby.
Woop, woop.
Joe turns. A cruiser is parked at the peak of the stairwell. Then he sees Tommy standing at the top, looking down at him with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Training for the Olympics?”
“Yeah.”
Tommy trots down the steps and takes a seat next to Joe. Joe stares straight ahead past the bottom of the staircase, down Mead Street. The punk boys are gone. They must’ve heard the siren and taken off. Tommy sighs.
“This isn’t the smartest thing you could be doing.”
“It’s for my application to Harvard.”
“I’m not going to be able to talk you out of doing this.”
“No.”
“You wanna ride home?”
“Yeah, man. Thanks.”
Tommy offers Joe a hand, and Joe takes it. There’s an extra moment in their clasp before they release, an unspoken exchange of respect and brotherhood. When they reach the top of the stairs, Joe taps the Forty Flights sign with his fingers, a promise to return tomorrow.
Keep going.
Stay in the fight.