CHAPTER 34
It’s early afternoon, and Katie and Meghan are sitting on the front stoop. Meghan is smoking a cigarette, something she does only if there’s no risk of their mom seeing or smelling it. Their grandfather died of lung cancer, and their mom goes ballistic whenever she catches Meghan smoking. Patrick is sleeping, Colleen is out walking baby Joey, their mom and JJ are working, and their dad is at PT. Cook Street is sunlit and quiet, no cars zipping down the road, no joggers or dog walkers. No one’s around.
Katie hasn’t chilled out with Meghan like this in ages. They live together, so everyone assumes they see each other all the time. Only rarely do they, and when they do it’s mostly in sleepy-eyed good mornings as they fill travel mugs with coffee or tea, quick hellos as Katie rushes off to teach a class or Meghan dashes to catch a bus downtown, whirling by each other as Meghan packs her makeup case for a performance or Katie changes out of lululemon and into jeans and a sweater for a date with Felix, a quick hug and good night before going to separate bedrooms, closing doors before going to sleep. On the few occasions Katie is actually there. She sleeps over at Felix’s apartment most nights. Even with the self-constructed barrier between them removed, she and Meghan are still in the habit of occupying separate sides of their old wall. Without a reason for them to remain distant, they still haven’t found their way back to being close.
“So what’s happening with you and Felix?” asks Meghan, tapping loose ash from the tip of her cigarette.
“I dunno. We’ve been fighting a lot lately.”
She nods. “About what?” she asks, her perfectly sculpted right eyebrow lifting at the arch. She already knows.
“He’s pressuring me to decide about Portland, and it’s totally stressing me out. It feels like too many things to figure out right now.”
Katie’s genetic test results hang over her head like a guillotine, the pointed blade hovering inches above the tender, bare skin of her neck. But maybe she’s gene negative, and so there is no guillotine. Maybe her HD gene is normal, and she’ll never get HD. Maybe she’s free.
She tries to imagine that sense of freedom, but she’s sitting next to Meghan, her big sister, an accomplished, beautiful dancer who will get HD, and being HD-free doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels unfair, tainted, rotten. She feels utterly unworthy of that freedom.
“It’s like the worst possible timing,” says Katie.
“Or it’s absolutely perfect,” says Meghan.
Katie studies her sister, her smooth brown hair, her green almond eyes, the five freckles on her face. Five. It would take all day and a calculator to count the freckles on Katie’s face. Meghan’s petite frame, her small, delicate feet. Katie places her ugly Fred Flintstone bare foot on the step next to Meghan’s. Their feet don’t look one bit related.
They have the same sense of humor and tastes in clothes, music, and men. Meghan gets Katie better than anyone on the planet. But, in addition to being naturally prettier and smarter and able to dance like an angel, Meghan has always been so much braver than Katie. In middle school, Katie was desperate to play one of the orphans in the production of Annie. In her wildest dreams, the drama teacher cast her as Annie. But she was too afraid, too loathsomely self-conscious to even mention her interest aloud, never mind try out. Meghan auditioned. She played one of the orphans. Katie hated her for it and, consumed with jealousy, didn’t speak to her sister for months. She never told Meghan why.
Meghan was never afraid to flirt openly with the boy she liked, and is equally unafraid of dumping a guy’s ass if she’s not that into him. She knew she wanted to be a ballerina since she was a little girl and went after it, full throttle. No waffling. No wondering whether she’d be good enough or assuming she wasn’t. No vague plans of maybe someday. She just claimed it. This is mine.
It was the same with Meghan’s genetic testing. She just did it. She didn’t agonize over each appointment or ignore Eric’s phone calls. She didn’t delay her judgment day. She arrived at Eric’s office the very day her results were ready, sat opposite him along with a friend from the Boston Ballet, and received her fate.
Meanwhile, Katie is paralyzed, drowning in a thick, creamy vegan soup of fear.
“How do you do it?” asks Katie. “You’re fearless.”
“No, I’m not. I’m scared shitless.”
Meghan inhales a long drag off her cigarette, turns her head, and blows the exhale away from Katie’s face.
“But whatever; I gotta keep going. I’m a dancer. I’ll keep dancing until I can’t.”
“What would you do if you were me?” asks Katie, looking for advice or maybe for her brave sister to make Katie’s decisions for her.
“About Felix?”
“And the test results.”
“Find out the results and move with Felix.”
“What if I’m gene positive?”
“Move with Felix and be gene positive.”
Katie blinks, stunned. Meghan didn’t even pause to think about it.“Yeah, but, wouldn’t that be totally unfair of me, to get further involved with him knowing I’m going to get HD?”
“Jesus, don’t be such a martyr.”
“I’m not,” says Katie, her voice a whiny violin. “I just don’t know if I could knowingly saddle him with that kind of future.”
“Why do you get to pick his future?”
Because. Because. Katie thinks, but she can’t complete that sentence without sounding like a spoiled brat or a total moron. They sit in silence for a few moments.
“How do you think JJ’s doing?” asks Katie.
“Okay, I think.”
“You see anything with him yet?”
“No, you?”
“No.”
“What about me?” asks Meghan.
“Nothing. You’re fine.”
“You swear to God?”
“Yeah.”
“Thanks. I’m kinda worried about Pat. I dunno—he’s got this thing going on in his eyes. Like they’re kinda shifty.”
“That’s just how he is.”
But Katie’s been thinking the same thing. Each time she thinks that she’s possibly seeing something, she sweeps it away. It can’t be. But there it is. Meghan sees it, too. Patrick might already be symptomatic. Fuckin’ hell.
“Has he told Ashley about HD being in our family?” asks Katie.
“I dunno.”
“Do you think he’ll end up marrying her?”
“No way,” says Meghan, picking at the dead skin on her big toe. “That’s probably for the best.”
“Yeah,” says Katie, agreeing on both counts. She loves her brother, but even subtracting the possibility of HD, Patrick isn’t exactly stellar-husband material. “How about me? You see anything?”
“No,” says Meghan, then checking out Katie’s feet, hands, eyes. “You’re good.”
“Every time I fall out of a standing pose in class, I think, Is this it? Does this mean I have it?”
“Yeah, HD totally fucks with your head. Before this, if I fell off pointe or messed up an eight count or something, I’d think, Fuck, and be mad at myself for like a few seconds. But then I’d think, Whatever, shit happens. Now, if I make a mistake, I have this huge, heart-stopping, wordless moment of panic. It actually feels like I’m having a heart attack.”
“I have whole weeks of heart-stopping panic,” says Katie.
“You gotta let it go, or it’ll make you crazy. I figure however long I have, I’m not going to let HD steal the symptomatic-free time I have. I don’t know when this thing’s going to hit, but I’m not going to live like I’ve got it before I actually do.”
Katie nods. You are either Now Here or Nowhere.
“I also figure most professional ballerinas are done with touring and performing in companies by the time they’re thirty-five. So no reason I can’t have a full-out dance career before HD sets in.”
Katie nods. “That’s true.”
“That’s why I’m going to live in London in the fall.”
“What?”