Joan Didion - The Year of Magical Thinking

Just an ordinary day.

“And then — gone.”

The day of the flight, when it came, had seemed to unfold with the nonsequential inexorability of a dream. When I turned on the news in the early morning there was a guerrilla action on the freeways, truckers protesting the price of gasoline. Huge semi trucks had been deliberately jackknifed and abandoned on Interstate 5. Witnesses reported that the first semis to stop had carried the TV crews. SUVs had been waiting to take the truckers themselves from the blocked freeway. The video as I watched it had seemed dislocatingly French, 1968. “Avoid the 5 if you can,” the newscaster advised, then warned that according to “sources” (presumably the same TV crews who were traveling with the truckers) the truckers would also block other freeways, specifically the 710, the 60, and the 10. In the normal course of this kind of disruption it would have seemed unlikely that we could get from UCLA to the plane, but by the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital the entire French event seemed to have dematerialized, that phase of the dream forgotten.

There were other phases to come. I had been told the plane would be at Santa Monica Airport. The ambulance crew had been told Burbank. Someone made a call and was told Van Nuys. When we reached Van Nuys there were no planes in sight, only helicopters. That must be because you’re going by helicopter, one of the ambulance attendants said, clearly ready to hand us off and get on with his day. I don’t think so, I said, it’s three thousand miles. The ambulance attendant shrugged and disappeared. The plane was located, a jet Cessna with room for the two pilots, the two paramedics, the stretcher to which Quintana was strapped, and, if I sat on a bench over the oxygen canisters, me. We took off. We flew for a while. One of the paramedics had a digital camera and was taking pictures of what he kept referring to as the Grand Canyon. I said I believed it was Lake Mead, Hoover Dam. I pointed out Las Vegas.

The paramedic continued taking pictures.

He also continued referring to it as the Grand Canyon.

Why do you always have to be right, I remembered John saying.

It was a complaint, a charge, part of a fight.

He never understood that in my own mind I was never right. Once in 1971, when we were moving from Franklin Avenue to Malibu, I found a message stuck behind a picture I was taking down. The message was from someone to whom I had been close before I married John. He had spent a few weeks with us in the house on Franklin Avenue. This was the message: “You were wrong.” I did not know what I had been wrong about but the possibilities seemed infinite. I burned the message. I never mentioned it to John.

All right it’s the Grand Canyon, I thought, shifting position on the bench over the oxygen canisters so that I could no longer see out the window.

Later we landed in a cornfield in Kansas to refuel. The pilots struck a deal with the two teenagers who managed the airstrip: during the refueling they would take their pickup to a McDonald’s and bring back hamburgers. While we waited the paramedics suggested that we take turns getting some exercise. When my turn came I stood frozen on the tarmac for a moment, ashamed to be free and outside when Quintana could not be, then walked to where the runway ended and the corn started. There was a little rain and unstable air and I imagined a tornado coming. Quintana and I were Dorothy. We were both free. In fact we were out of here. John had written a tornado into Nothing Lost. I remembered reading the last-pass galleys in Quintana’s room at Presbyterian and crying when I hit the passage with the tornado. The protagonists, J.J. McClure and Teresa Kean, see the tornado “in the far distance, black and then milky when the sun caught it, moving like a huge reticulated vertical snake.” J.J. tells Teresa not to worry, this stretch had been hit before, twisters never hit the same place twice.

The tornado finally set down without incident just across the Wyoming line. That night in the Step Right Inn, at the junction between Higginson and Higgins, Teresa asked if it was true that tornadoes never hit the same place twice. “I don’t know,” J.J. said. “It seemed logical. Like lightning. You were worried. I didn’t want you worried.” It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.

Back in the plane, alone with Quintana, I took one of the hamburgers the teenagers had brought and tore it into pieces so that she and I could share. After a few bites she shook her head. She had been allowed solid food for only a week or so and could not eat more. There was still a feeding tube in place in case she could not eat at all.

“Am I going to make it,” she asked then.

I chose to believe that she was asking if she would make it to New York.

“Definitely,” I told her.

I’m here. You’re safe.

Definitely she would be okay in California, I remembered telling her five weeks before.

That night when we arrived at the Rusk Institute Gerry and Tony were waiting outside to meet the ambulance. Gerry asked how the flight had been. I said that we had shared a Big Mac in a cornfield in Kansas. “It wasn’t a Big Mac,” Quintana said. “It was a Quarter Pounder.”

It had seemed to me on the day in Quintana’s room at Presbyterian when I read the final proof for Nothing Lost that there might be a grammatical error in the last sentence of the passage about J.J. McClure and Teresa Kean and the tornado. I never actually learned the rules of grammar, relying instead only on what sounded right, but there was something here that I was not sure sounded right. The sentence in the last-pass galleys read: “It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.” I would have added a preposition: “It was as close to a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making.”

I sat by the window and watched the ice floes on the Hudson and thought about the sentence. It was as close a declaration of love as J.J. was capable of making. It was not the kind of sentence, if you had written it, you would want wrong, but neither was it the kind of sentence, if that was the way you had written it, you would want changed. How had he written it? What did he have in mind? How would he want it? The decision was left to me. Any choice I made could carry the potential for abandonment, even betrayal. That was one reason I was crying in Quintana’s hospital room. When I got home that night I checked the previous galleys and manuscripts. The error, if it was an error, had been there from the beginning. I left it as it was.

Why do you always have to be right.

Why do you always have to have the last word.

For once in your life just let it go.

The day on which Quintana and I flew east on the Cessna that refueled in the cornfield in Kansas was April 30, 2004. During May and June and the half of July that she spent at the Rusk Institute there was very little I could do for her. I could go down to East Thirty-fourth Street to see her in the late afternoons, and most afternoons I did, but she was in therapy from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon and exhausted by six-thirty or seven. She was medically stable. She could eat, the feeding tube was still in place but no longer necessary. She was beginning to regain movement in her right leg and arm. She was regaining the mobility in her right eye that she needed to read. On weekend days when she did not have therapy Gerry would take her to lunch and a movie in the neighborhood. He would eat dinner with her. Friends would join them for picnic lunches. For as long as she was at Rusk I could water the plants on her windowsill, I could find the marginally different sneakers her therapist had decreed, I could sit with her in the greenhouse off the Rusk lobby watching the koi in the pond, but once she left Rusk I would no longer be able to do even that. She was reaching a point at which she would need once again to be, if she was to recover, on her own.