Free Double Helix by Nancy Werlin

even in the early days, back when we lived in a big house near Harvard Square, back when my mother was only experiencing clumsiness . . . then having weird, frightening mood swings . . . and walking so oddly, as if she were drunk. Then, one time, she pulled every glass out of the cabinets and threw them violently at my father and me.
    I was thirteen.
    After that, a nurse had moved in with us for a while, until a nursing home could be found. I could never even remember that live-in nurse’s name. Felicia? Francesca? I had some kind of mental block about it.
    Unless the memory problems were an early symptom of HD in me. Early onset or juvenile HD. It wasn’t supposed to happen so early, it was highly unusual, but . . . it could. It was possible.
    In my regular life, I tried not to think about it, but when I visited my mother, it was impossible to escape the disease’s shadow, its questions. I even sometimes believed that I could tell that the nurses and aides and doctors were thinking about it as they looked at me. I could hear their voices, whispering.
    Her son. Eli Samuels. Of course he has the usual chance of inheriting HD himself. What a terrible disease. Nothing to be done . . . you can take the test nowadays and find out if you have it or not, but if you do have it, then you just wait for the symptoms.
    No treatment. No cure.
    If I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t have had children at all. She must have known she was at risk, even if the test wasn’t yet available. How could she put her own child at risk, too? How could her husband?
    I wonder if the boy will take the test to find out? You can take it anytime after you’re eighteen. There are reasons not to. I mean, what kind of a life can you live, if you find out at eighteen or twenty that you’re going to get HD at thirty-five, or forty, or fifty ... sometime. How can you live with the certainty that you’ll get it, that only the timing is unclear?
    Imagining their voices, imagining what they were thinking—knowing that it was really what I was thinking myself, the beginning of what I was thinking, deep down, deep down in the places I didn’t want to go—made me feel . . . well. It made me feel insane.
    I thought about my father’s HD-negative test letter. Someday I would ask him about it . . . someday. I found that I was not feeling so angry about it anymore. He, like me, like my mother, had been at risk. Now that I had absorbed the shock of that, it was easier to accept. Maybe their vulnerability and uncertainty about the future had been something he and my mother had shared, something that had made them feel closer to each other, love each other. Maybe it was why he had been able to remain with her and take care of her when she began to be symptomatic. Maybe, for my father, it had been, There but for the grace of God, go I . I could respect that. I could respect his privacy and his choices—even if I didn’t yet know why he’d made those choices, or even why he’d used Dr. Wyatt as an intermediary when he took the test.
    Maybe it was easier, too, to accept others’ actions if you believed, as Dr. Wyatt did, that there was no free will.
    My head cleared a little in the open air. I wheeled my mother down the path into the garden. Pushing her chair was good; I felt active, and I didn’t have to look at her much as I talked. I told her the plot of a movie I’d seen on TV the other night. I told her about a new building, a skyscraper, that they were putting up in Boston. She used to be very interested in architecture.
    I didn’t say anything about my father to her, or about Viv, or about me. I didn’t mention my new job, or Dr. Wyatt, or anything real in life. What was the point? What was the point of pretending that Ava Louise Lange Samuels was someone who meant anything in my day-to-day life?
    Nowadays she was kept very much in a drugged state anyway.
    I parked her wheelchair next to a