Chapter 83: Forty Seconds in the Hall
Here is what I learned about the records of dead people in the ten days after that, mostly from a lawyer’s paralegal named Anthony who was kinder to me than his hourly rate required.
Anthony is twenty-eight and answers email at eleven at night.
A person’s medical records do not stop being private when they die.
They pass, in practical terms, to whoever is the personal representative of the estate.
For Ana Reyes-Blackwood that is her husband.
Not her mother. Not her sister. Not the pediatrician of her son. Her husband.
Her mother is alive. Her mother is in San Antonio. I put that here because it matters later.
I could not request them. Roz could not request them. Marco could not and Moreno could not.
My lawyer said a subpoena was possible in a proceeding, and that we did not have a proceeding, and were not going to have one before the summer at the earliest.
There was one other door and it was the door Moreno had already opened.
A child has a differential diagnosis. A differential includes family history.
A treating physician may ask the parent to authorise the release of a relative’s records where they bear on the child’s condition.
It is not a trick. It is medicine. It happens every week in every children’s hospital in the country.
It is also, if you are a twenty-six-year-old nanny standing in a hallway holding a clipboard, the most frightening piece of paper you have ever held.
The form is one page. Authorization for Release of Protected Health Information.
Six blanks and a signature line.
Moreno’s office filled in five of the six. The sixth is the signature and the date.
I had it in a folder in my bag for four days because Victor was in Houston.
He came back on the twenty-second of December on an evening flight.
I know the exact time because Marco told me the car was on the drive at 19:40 and I was in the corridor by the stairs at 19:44 with the folder.
Victor Blackwood is forty-one. He is a big man who has learned to move quietly in his own house, which I have always found strange.
He looked tired in the way that money looks tired, which is to say expensively.
“Lily.”
“Mr. Blackwood.”
He put his bag down. He asked whether Ethan had eaten.
I said he had, and that he had said a new word that week, which was a lie by three days, but I wanted to give him something.
He said, “Which word.”
“Uh-oh.”
He smiled. It was a real smile and it lasted about a second and a half.
Then I took the folder out.
“Dr. Moreno needs a signature,” I said.
I want to be exact about the next forty seconds, because I have gone over them under oath.
They are the whole of that man in one page of paper.
He took the form. He did not sit down.
He read the header. Authorization for Release of Protected Health Information.
He reads paper the way he does everything, which is thoroughly and eleven months late.
He said, “Is he all right?”
“He’s stable. This is history.”
He turned the page towards the light because the hall lamp is behind you when you stand there.
His eyes went down the page. I watched them. They stopped once.
They stopped on the line that says PATIENT WHOSE RECORDS ARE REQUESTED, where it is typed, in Bernice’s ten-point courier, ANA REYES-BLACKWOOD (DEC.).
He looked at it for what I would put at three seconds.
Then he said, “Have you got a pen.”
I had a pen. I had four pens. I had rehearsed which pocket the pen was in.
He signed against the wall, using his own forearm as the desk, the way people sign for a package.
Then he wrote the date wrong, crossed it out, initialled the correction, and wrote it again.
22 December 2026.
The correction is initialled V.J.B. I have a photograph of it.
He handed it back and picked up his bag.
“Tell Moreno to call me if it’s anything,” he said.
He went up the stairs to look at his son, who had been asleep for ninety minutes and would not know he was there.
I stood in the hall with the form in my hands.
Forty seconds. One question. He asked whether the child was all right, and the child was all right, so he stopped.
I have tried for years to decide whether that is decency or the opposite, and the honest answer is that it is neither, and that there is no word in English for what Victor Blackwood was.
I put the form in the folder and the folder in my bag.
Then I went upstairs and stood in the corridor and watched a man look at his sleeping son through a doorway for about a minute, with his coat on, in the dark, in a room where his wife used to sleep.