Stars Go Blue Read Online Free PDF

tell you what it’s like?”
    Renny looks in the cupboard and pulls out a can of green beans. Back when she loved her family, and there was a family to love, and back when Ben was there to smile over a dinner gone right, she grew beans and froze them herself. She hasn’t had a garden in a decade; all that work for naught. None of those fresh vegetables helped his brain. Or his heart. “Sometimes he talks about it. Once he said it was like being on a horse. First, like the disease was like being on a horse that was walking. And then trotting. And it is turning into a gallop. An out-and-out run.” She leans to look out the window. “And I am not a mean martyr. I have a fundamental spark. Jess does not. In that way, she reminds me of Rachel, and I worry she’s going to end up like Rachel.”
    â€œWell, Mom, it’s nice you care. Just be gentler.”
    â€œGentle gets nothing done.” Renny looks out the window and sees the horses gallop up to stand in the vee of the fence. Their breath mists out, one of them shakes, and one nuzzles the other’s hindquarters. They are involved in some sort of game, known only to them, and it makes them happy, and that makes them beautiful.
    Carolyn looks over her shoulder and sees them too. “So, Mom? Dad sees clearly that it’s coming? The disease is galloping into his mind?”
    â€œI think more that his mind is galloping into the disease.”
    Carolyn pours a canister of oats into a roasting pan and then a bag of almonds, then pours the melted honey over the oats and almonds. “And so he knows.”
    â€œWhat? That he’s dying? Dying a first death, before a second? Yes, he knows. He knows it’s going to be horrible. And it is,Carolyn. It is.” And suddenly, deeply, so much that it makes her gasp, Renny wants to tell Carolyn about the sodium pentobarbital. She opens her mouth, closes it. Feels her throat tighten. No, she won’t. She won’t do it. Because it’s Ben’s choice, and because it is that much of a hell, and Ben is trapped and scared and she can feel it. And because some silence is a gift. Instead, she finds herself saying, “I’ll watch your damn dog. While you go to Mexico.”
    The corner of Carolyn’s mouth lifts, but still she is silent. A few of the oats fall out and sizzle at the bottom of the oven.
    â€œIt bothers me too, Mom. That Ray has been let out of prison. ‘Earned time.’ We all wish for a bit of that.” Then she whispers, “That’s why I need to go, right now, and get out of here. If Ray is free, I need to go. I swear, in certain ways, that guy keeps killing us all.”

BEN
    I s it possible they know? He stands in the living room, trying to size up the situation. Renny is speaking to Carolyn in a calm, cadenced voice, and the surprise of this startles him into stopping. He has always thought of himself as an alert deer, ears lifted for the details, to avoid Renny’s usual oncoming crashness. He smiles, and then smiles because he has not, after all, forgotten to smile, and because he has not forgotten how to observe and mark the measure of a man or a moment.
    He has had his entire life to prepare for death, and he remembers, as a boy, a preacher telling the congregation exactly that. He sat between his parents in the small church in Greeley and stared at the filtered light and his mother took his hand. When you arrive at the door of death, the preacher had said, your main job is to open the door with courage and the sure knowledge that you have lived well and that you have become yourself. Let death find you with your chin up, your eyes steady.
    His mind holds that moment perfectly; not one detail is missing. On this topic, he can think clearly. It pains him that he has fallen short of that goal. Fear bloomed as he got older, bloomed more at his diagnosis. From time to time, too, he has failed in courage. When his daughter died, when he