Free Blue Nights by Joan Didion Page B

later followed the California search for fourteen-year-old Stephanie Bryan, who vanished while walking home from her Berkeley junior high school through the parking lot of the Claremont Hotel, her customary shortcut, and was next seen several hundred miles from Berkeley, buried in a shallow grave in California’s most northern mountains. Five months after Stephanie Bryan’s disappearance a twenty-seven-year-old University of California accounting student was arrested, charged with her death, and within two years convicted and executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin.
    Since the events surrounding the disappearances and deaths of both Suzanne Degnan and Stephanie Bryan occurred in circulation areas served by aggressive Hearst papers, both cases were extensively and luridly covered. The lesson taught by the coverage was clear: childhood is by definition perilous. To be a child is to be small, weak, inexperienced, the dead bottom of the food chain. Every child knows this, or did.
    Knowing this is why children call Camarillo.
    Knowing this is why children call Twentieth Century–Fox.
    “This case has been a haunting one all my life as I was a grown-up eight-year-old when it happened and followed it every day in the Oakland Tribune from day one till the end.” So wrote an internet correspondent in response to a recent look back at the Stephanie Bryan case. “I had to read it when my parents weren’t around as they didn’t think it was fitting to be reading about a homicide at my age.”
    As adults we lose memory of the gravity and terrors of childhood.
    Hello, Quintana. I’m going to lock you here in the garage .
    After I became five I never ever dreamed about him .
    I have to know about this .
    One of her abiding fears, I learned much later, was that John would die and there would be no one but her to take care of me.
    How could she have even imagined that I would not take care of her?
    I used to ask that.
    Now I ask the reverse:
    How could she have even imagined that I could take care of her?
    She saw me as needing care myself.
    She saw me as frail.
    Was that her anxiety or mine?
    I learned about this fear when she was temporarily off the ventilator in one or another ICU, I have no memory which.
    I told you, they were all the same.
    The blue-and-white printed curtains. The gurgling through plastic tubing. The dripping from the IV line, the rales, the alarms.
    The codes. The crash cart.
    This was never supposed to happen to her .
    It must have been the ICU at UCLA.
    Only at UCLA was she off the ventilator long enough to have had this conversation.
    You have your wonderful memories .
    I do, but they blur.
    They fade into one another.
    They become, as Quintana a month or two later described the only memory she could summon of the five weeks she spent in the ICU at UCLA, “all mudgy.”
    I tried to tell her: I too have trouble remembering.
    Languages mingle: do I need an abogado or do I need an avocat?
    Names vanish. The names for example of California counties, once so familiar that I recited them in alphabetized order (Alameda and Alpine and Amador, Calaveras and Colusa and Contra Costa, Madera and Marin and Mariposa) now elude me.
    The name of one county I do remember.
    The name of this single county I always remember.
    I had my own Broken Man.
    I had my own stories about which I had to know.
    Trinity .
    The name of the county in which Stephanie Bryan had been found buried in the shallow grave was Trinity.
    The name of the test site at Alamogordo that had led to the photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki was also Trinity.

19
    “W hat we need here is a montage, music over.
    How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx—
    “xx,” he said.
    “xxx,” she said.
    “ How she:
    “ How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx—
    “How he, and also she—”
    T he above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted . I offer them