Fifteen
Adina
DECEMBER IS FOR DEAD THINGS. Only a few leaves cling to tree branches, and a raccoon corpse is pancaked on the side of the freeway. I read somewhere that more people die in December than any other month of the year.
I’m thinking about death as I sit across from Maureen, the genetic counselor, because even though her office is aiming for cheery, with its lavender walls and paintings of sunsets, death is everywhere. This is the place where I learned my life would change, and where, ostensibly, I will learn how to handle it.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Maureen says. Her chin-length blond hair frames her face, and she’s dressed casually in a black sweater and dark jeans. There’s a whole-note-shaped birthmark beneath her left eye.
“Really?” I came only because this is my chance to finally get answers to the questions Tovah’s research sparked. My parents still want me to meet with our rabbi, and though I’ve reluctantly begun attending synagogue with them again every week, a religion I don’t believe in won’t give me the answers I need. An old man in a kippah cannot possibly understand what I am feeling.
“Sometimes people test positive and I never see them again,” she says softly. “This is a good step, a huge one, even if you don’t realize it.”
“Oh.” I tear at a loose thread on my tights. “Thanks. I think.”
Maureen offers a sympathetic smile that scrunches up her birthmark, turns it into a whole rest and makes me wonder how much bad news she’s given over her lifetime. “Tell me how you’ve been these past few weeks.”
The past few weeks have been a seesaw of bad and good. Bad: everything this office represents. Good: everything with Arjun.
I settle for an answer somewhere in the middle. “I’ve been . . . okay.”
“You’re back at school, right? And you’re still playing the viola?” she asks, and I nod. “Good. Like I said before, Adina, the majority of patients I see who test positive have been able to carry on with very regular lives. Most of the time, symptoms don’t manifest until your forties.”
I widen the hole in the knee of my tights. “Is there any way to know when symptoms will show up?”
“Unfortunately, that’s the most challenging and frustrating part of getting tested so young. We have no way of knowing when symptoms will manifest for you. They started for your mother in her early forties. It might be the same for you, or it might not.”
“I read online that sometimes people start showing symptoms much earlier than my mom did. Like . . . like in their twenties.”
“It’s unlikely that you’d exhibit symptoms that early.”
“But it happens.”
“Well. Yes. But it’s also possible they don’t show up until you’re seventy or eighty,” she says. “We’ll be keeping a close eye on you. You know to tell us—me and Dr. Simon—if you start experiencing anything like what your mom went through, but each person is different. Your symptoms might not be the same as your mom’s.”
“So we each get our own special version of Huntington’s.”
“I suppose that’s one way to think about it.” For the remainder of the session, she talks about symptoms and youth organizations and support groups. But what I focus on is this: The next few times I drop something, the next time I lose my temper, it could be that I’m simply clumsy. It could be that I’m premenstrual. Or it could mean the end is beginning.
In the back of the bus on my way home from counseling, I compose a message to Arjun.
Can I come over tonight?
Part of me wanted to tell Tovah everything about Arjun when we were in Canada. He was the reason I was so calm on my family trip, after all. Tovah used to know everything I couldn’t tell our parents, like when I borrowed Ima’s razors and secretly started shaving when I turned eleven because I hated the dark fur covering my legs. There are a hundred reasons I can’t tell her this, but above all else: she wouldn’t understand.
Tovah apologized for guilting me into taking the test, and perhaps I can forgive her. Rationally, I know it is not her fault that I tested positive. Still, I cannot get rid of the feeling that I would be happier now if I didn’t know.
But maybe Arjun would still be hiding his feelings for me.
At yesterday’s lesson, during which no actual music was played, our mouths and hands rediscovered what they learned how to do the previous week. We haven’t slept together yet; we haven’t had enough time. It is inevitable, though, and I cannot wait.
I’m halfway between Maureen’s office and home when he finally replies.
Teaching until 9.
Those three words land in a heavy pile in my stomach.
Tomorrow?
This week isn’t good.
My hand tightens around the phone. What the hell does that mean? What makes this week bad? Is he having doubts about us?
He is the only person who doesn’t treat me like I’m made of glass. I’ll do anything to keep him from changing his mind.
Don’t make me do all the things I want you to do to me all by myself. That sounds lonely. . . .
His response is quicker this time.
Come over next week after your showcase rehearsal.
I’ll be done at 6. Will you cook dinner for me?
I’m testing him.
I can do that. And then maybe you can show me those things you do by yourself.
He aces it.
I ride the bus for another hour, until long past sundown. These days it feels like I live on buses. On a mental map, I connect Seattle’s neighborhoods: Fremont to Ballard to Loyal Heights to Crown Hill to Greenwood to Phinney Ridge and back to Wallingford. When I was little, the city was a blob that gradually became more defined, until I could read a map as well as a piece of sheet music.
Tonight is the first night of Chanukah, and though it is not as significant as Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, I’d rather skip it.
It’s past eight o’clock when I get home. In our window, the menorah is already lit, candles burning.
“Adi?” Ima calls from the living room. “Is that you?”
I freeze. “Hi, Ima.” Quickly, I unlace my boots, slipping past the living room on my way to the staircase.
“Yalla. Come in here, please?”
Slowly, I back up, my muscles tensing. She’s curled in a chair grading papers, a geography assignment with colored-pencil maps of the United States. On the couch is a half-finished knitting project.
“Chanukah sameach.”
“Chanukah sameach. Where’s everyone else?”
“Aba is studying Hebrew in his office, and Tovah is upstairs doing homework. How was your session?”
“Good, I guess.”
“What did you think of Maureen?”
“I’ve seen her before, Ima.”
“I know,” she says. But it’s different now is what I’m sure she means.
“You know I like her.”
“She’s very understanding. Very . . . knowledgeable,” Ima says. “Adi, do you see that bag over there?” She points to a blue bag with gold Stars of David printed on it sitting on the dining room table. “Can you bring it to me? I know we haven’t done Chanukah presents since you and Tovah were little kids, but I wanted you to have something.”
I retrieve the bag and pull out a bracelet, a silver chain with blue spheres painted to look like eyeballs.
“It’s the evil eye,” Ima explains in her fifth-grade-teacher storytelling voice. “Do you know what it means?” I shake my head. “The evil eye was a malicious look thought to be powerful enough to inflict pain and suffering on whoever the person was glaring at. This eye here, it glares back to protect you from evil. This bracelet belonged to your savtah. My mother. She wore it all the time. Never took it off, in fact.”
“Todah. It’s beautiful.” I fasten it around my wrist and give it a shake. I plan to wear it every day. “Did you get something for Tovah, too?”
“I only had this from my mother,” she says. “But I didn’t want Tovah to feel left out, so I found a similar bracelet online and told her it was from her grandmother too. You won’t mention it to her, right?”
“I won’t.” Before the test, this would have made me happy: another secret between Ima and me. But now I wish my mother hadn’t given me something so special—because it makes me wonder whether she’s doing it out of guilt. You tested positive, but here, have a bracelet!
“Good.” Ima returns her attention to her papers. “You haven’t been by the classroom lately.”
“School and rehearsals have gotten really busy.” Half true. She must know I’ve been avoiding her. “How are your kids?”
“Caleb and Amanda were holding hands during the movie I played this week.”
“You mean Annabel?” Ima routinely forgets names like this.
“Oh. What did I say?”
“Amanda.”
“I meant Annabel,” she says, and she gives me a guilty look, because we both know the blanks in her memory are one of the many things I will inherit.
When I was little and hurt myself, Ima found a way to take away the pain. Here, transfer it to me, she’d say. And I’d hold out the knee I’d banged up or the elbow I’d smacked against the wall and she’d cup her fingers around it and say a made-up word like shoomp! Then she’d touch her hand to her own knee or elbow and screw her face up. Ouch, she’d say. See? It worked. You’re all better now.
There’s no way to make this disappear.
“Keep me company while I grade these?” she says. “Let’s put on a movie. We haven’t done that in a while, either.”
“B’seder.” Okay.
Ima doesn’t ask if we should invite Tovah down, and I don’t suggest it. I put on an old Audrey Hepburn movie and pull a textbook from my backpack, but the words swim in front of my eyes. I’m stitched into the fabric of the sofa, mesmerized by the sight of my mother. She has become someone always in motion, prone to wild jerks that used to be occasional twitches.
I watch, when she isn’t looking, with more scrutiny than I ever have before.
I can’t sleep. The sheets are twisted around my ankles and my skin is damp with sweat. My period made an appearance earlier tonight, and my abdomen is all knotted up like it usually is on day one. Absently, I wonder how many more periods I’ll have in my lifetime. If I’ll ever hit menopause.
I peel myself out of bed and turn on my laptop. Again I watch the videos. Again I listen to the way people with Huntington’s talk. My mother’s sentences used to sound like songs. In the coming years, she’ll stutter through both her Hebrew and English, and one day her rich voice will be gone.
I can’t clear my mind for long before it traps me back in this place. This place where it loops over the reality that my mother is going to die, not of old age but in five or ten, or if we’re lucky, fifteen years. It will be brutal and entirely unfair, watching her wither and waste away. And then it will happen to me.
Unless—unless I don’t live that long.
Unless I make certain I never become my mother.
I sit completely still for a few minutes. An unfamiliar charged thrill zips through me.
But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that. A strange sound gets caught in my throat—a laugh? Apparently, some half-asleep part of me finds this idea half-funny, though it is absolutely not. God, I must be delirious.
What if I could?
I smash the laptop shut, as though the screen had some kind of macabre instruction manual on it. The room is plunged into darkness again, and I hug the sheets tights around me and try to fall asleep. The possibilities, realistic or not, haunt me into the morning.