Blue Nights Read Online Free

might damage my brain (or my heart or my kidneys or my nervous system) and survive, continue living.
    Had there been an instant when Tasha was afraid not to die?
    Had there been an instant when Quintana was afraid not to die?
    Toward the very end, say, for example on the August morning when I walked into the ICU overlooking the river at New York-Cornell and one of what must have been twenty doctors in the unit happened to mention (a point of interest, a teachable moment, Grand Rounds for two students, the husband and the mother of the patient) that they were doing hand compression because the patient could no longer get enough oxygen through the ventilator? Only he did not say “the ventilator,” he said “the vent”? And I asked dutifully (the attentive student, up on the vernacular) how long it had been since the patient could get enough oxygen through the vent? And the doctor said it had been at least an hour?
    Did I get this all wrong?
    Did I misunderstand a key point?
    Could they have actually let an hour go by without mentioning to me that her brain had already been damaged by insufficient oxygen?
    Put the question another way: what if the attentive student had never asked?
    Would they have mentioned it at all?
    One further turn of the screw: if I had never asked would she still be alive?
    Warehoused somewhere?
    No longer sentient but alive, not dead?
    What greater grief can there be for mortals than to see their children dead?
    Was there an instant when she knew what was in store for her that August morning in the ICU overlooking the river at New York–Cornell?
    Did the instant occur that August morning when she was in fact dying?
    Or had it occurred years before, when she thought she was?

4
    “W hen Quintana was a little girl, we moved to Malibu, to a house overlooking the Pacific.” So began the toast John delivered in the Cathedral house at St. John the Divine on the afternoon she wove the stephanotis into her braid and cut the peach-colored cake from Payard. There were aspects of living in that house overlooking the Pacific that he failed to mention—he failed to mention for example the way the wind would blow down through the canyons and whine under the eaves and lift the roof and coat the white walls with ash from the fireplace, he failed to mention for example the king snakes that dropped from the rafters of the garage into the open Corvette I parked below, he failed to mention for example that king snakes were locally considered a valuable asset because the presence of a king snake in your Corvette was understood to mean (I was never convinced that it did) that you didn’t have a rattlesnake in your Corvette—but the following is what he did mention. I can quote what he mentioned exactly because after he mentioned it he wrote it down. He wanted her to have it in his words, his exact memory, in his exact words, of her childhood:
The house didn’t have any heat—it had old baseboard heaters, but we were always afraid they’d burn the place up—and so we heated it from this huge walk-in fireplace in the living room. In the morning I’d get up and bring in wood for the day—we used about a cord of wood a week—and then I’d get Q up and make her breakfast and get her ready for school. Joan was trying to finish a book that year, and she would work until two or three in the morning, then have a drink and read some poetry before she came to bed. She always made Q’s lunch the night before, and put it in this little blue lunchbox. You should have seen those lunches: they weren’t your basic peanut butter and jelly school-box lunch. Thin little sandwiches with their crusts cut off, cut into four triangular pieces, kept fresh in Saran Wrap. Or else there would be homemade fried chicken, with little salt and pepper shakers. And for dessert, stemmed strawberries, with sour cream and brown sugar.
So I’d take Q to school, and she’d walk down this steep hill. All the kids wore uniforms—Quintana wore