The Virtues of Oxygen (26 page)

“So,” Racine continued, “I did something I probably should have told you about before, and that’s why I needed to talk to you
tonight.”

“What did
you do?”

“I talked to Vivian, and we canvassed her caregiver network. Then we created a website so that people in town could contribute to a fund to buy your newspaper from the chain—for a song, by the way. They jumped on it. No one wanted the
Chronicle
to close. I can help you get it up to speed with an online presence, but it’s yours to run. As long as it breaks even, you can keep pu
blishing.”

Holly looked out at the snow, which made her dizzy as she viewed it through a prism of tears. Did the universe suddenly decide she deserved a break? That she would be allowed to stay employed, at least, instead of facing the vast, black unknown of a paycheck-less future? That she could keep her kids housed, clothed
, and fed?

“Do they realize,” she said, “that this business has no future? That’s what everyone says anyway. And if you’ll help me, does that mean you’re going
to stay?”

Racine blinked and leaned closer so she could hear him over the wind. “I just bought the Dunkin’ Donuts franchise on Main Street,” he said. “You’re stuck
with me.”

Holly pulled his face closer to hers, a mitten on either ear. “Are you sure you want that?” She felt warm inside, even as the tip of her nose froze in the cold
night air.

Racine kissed her. “You let me in here. You made me feel like part of this. And the time we had in New York. I don’t know what it was, but I can’t stop thinking about it. That’s all anyone wants, Holly. To find t
hat . . .”

As Racine searched for the right word, Holly suddenly heard a voice cutting through the wind. She got up from the bench and ran outside the bus shelter to see that the lights were now completely dark on Vivian’s street. Her view had been blocked by
the mural.

“
Mom! Mom!”

Connor was leaning outside Vivian’s front door, screaming into the snow and the wind and the d
ark night.

“Help! The power’s out! What
do I do?”

Holly took lunging footsteps to cut across the snow on the lawn to Vivian’s front door, with Racine right behind her. When she came inside, she heard Marshall on the phone with the police. It somehow seemed darker inside than it di
d outside.

“No, the generator didn’t come on,” he said, his voice rising to a frantic pitch. “And she can’t
breathe.”

Holly ran to a drawer in the kitchen that she knew had a f
lashlight.

“Oh my God,” she said. “How could thi
s happen?”

Holly shone the flashlight onto Vivian’s face, which looked contorted and blue. Her eyes were s
hut tight.

“The generator,” Holly said. “It’s brand-new. Why isn’t it
working?”

She looked toward it and saw that the cord had been pulled out from the wall. She ran over to plug it back in. Before she inserted it, she looked back at Vivian, whose eyes were now open wide. Vivian shook her head deliberately, her eyes pleading with Holly. The message was clear, but Holly turned back to the outlet, her hand hovering, shaking, just above it with
the plug.

“I have to, Vivian,” she said, crying. She looked back at Vivian. “I have to. I can’t le
t you go.”

Vivian let out a strangled cry. “Please,” she said, her voice just a rasp.
“I can’t.”

Holly shook her head, pushing the plug halfway, then she stopped. She hung her head, defeated, and pulled it out again, dropping
the cord.

Vivian gasped for air, and Holly ran over, taking Vivian’s head in her hands. Vivian looked up at her. Her face was pinched and contorted, and yet her eyes told Holly that she needed
a way out.

“Thank . . . you,” Vivian said, hoarsely expelling the last of her breath. She closed her eyes, and her face finally relaxed as Holly stood sobbing, tears dripping down onto Vivian’s now-sla
ck cheeks.

The sirens cut through the sound of the wind as police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks all converged on Vivian’s house. The paramedics came in first and put a portable oxygen mask on Vivian’s face, though Holly knew that was pointless without the machine pumping at her lungs. The firemen went right to the
generator.

“It’s unplugged,” one of them said
. “Jesus.”

One of the firemen went to plug in the generator, but Holly shook her head, speaking through
her sobs.

“She’s gone, okay? It’s
too late.”

The fireman dropped the cord. The room, full of first responders, fell silent. Connor buried his face in Hol
ly’s coat.

“What happened, Connor?” Holly said. “You need to
tell me.”

“She woke up when the lights went out,” he said, now crying convulsively. “She told me to unplug that machine over there, the red one, because she said it could short out her iron lung when the power came back on. I didn’t know, Mom. I just did what she asked, and then she started gasping. She told me not to get you, but I was calling for you anyway, and I got Marshall to call 911. You didn’t hear me, Mom. I kept calling, but you didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t
see you.”

“It’s my fault,” Holly said, putting an arm around Connor. She turned to the firemen. “I left them for a few minutes, and I didn’t know the power went out. He didn’t have the training. It’s completely
my fault.”

Racine was standing with the cluster of policemen, who were all looking
at Vivian.

“It’s what she wanted,” Racine said quietly. “She told Connor to unplug the generator. She was ready to go, and he was her chance. No one else would have
done it.”

A policeman came forward with a clipboard in his hand to begin the paperwork that would usher Vivian from
the world.

“But I wasn’t ready,” Holly said, knowing as she said it that her readiness didn’t matter. Racine put a hand on her shoulder. “I still ne
eded her.”

Then Darla, who had heard the ambulances on her way to Vivian’s house, pushed her way through
the crowd.

“Oh my God,” she said, her voice quivering. “She can’t
be gone.”

Holly slowly nodded her head, though it took what she noticed was a surprising amount
of effort.

“I’ll take care of everything,” Darla said to Holly. “I’ll get the rest of the crew together and we’ll manage. You take care of
the boys.”

Holly nodded weakly. She turned to Racine, who looked
confused.

“Special edition,” she said. “If anything ever justified it, this is it. We’ll want to have them printed by morning and delivered to every house
in town.”

He nodded.

The paramedics worked around the lung, detaching cords and unlatching the rubber collar, as one of the policeman ushered the boys and Racine into the kitchen. Holly stayed to see them remove Vivian from the lung. Her body, dressed in one of the loose white hospital gowns that had become her only wardrobe, looked so small and frail as they placed her on a stretcher that was half the size of the one that held up he
r machine.

The machine now looked forlorn, stripped of its purpose. Holly walked over to it and closed it back up so that it didn’t look so exposed. She wondered what would happen to it. Surely, no one else would use it, but where would it end up? In a junkyard? A scrap heap? A museum of antiquated medical devices? She couldn’t imagine. She touched the smooth enamel surface and silently thanked the machine for keeping Vivian alive for
so long.

CHAPTER 31

Vivian’s Unaired P
odcast #11

I
’m fascinated by this new company called Facebook, which allows me to live vicariously to an unprecedented degree. I’m trying to get Holly and Marveen to join, but they keep saying they have better thi
ngs to do.

“You would love it,” I told Marveen after I discovered it. “You can share your photos with friends and find out what everyone’s doing. It’s like gossip on
steroids.”

“C’mon, Vivian. It’s nothing more than a bunch of kids talking about getting drunk and a bunch of bored moms telling you about every single poop little Jimmy has ever taken. Who has time
for that?”

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” I said. “You get on this thing, and I guarantee you’ll be hearing from old boyfriends and reconnecting with your best friend from nurser
y school.”

I, in fact, was able to track down Timmy Gallagher, the boy I hadn’t seen since elementary school. And, remarkably, we were able to talk as if we had lived next door to each other fo
r decades.

“I remember that day my mother took me to your house to see your new television set,” Timmy wrote to me. “After she pushed me out the door, she couldn’t stop talking about how terrible it must be for you, trapped inside that machine. The thing is, you seemed fine. What she really meant was that it made her uncomfortable to see you
that way.”

“And you never came back,” I wrote back, not to make him feel guilty but just to sta
te a fact.

“I missed you, though. You were the wittiest girl i
n school.”

Timmy, I found out, later went by Tim. A few years after our television party, his family moved to Houston, where he graduated from high school before joining the navy. He married young, at twenty, and had four children, who had all gone on to liberal arts colleges, the kind I had always wanted t
o attend.

After we caught up, we talked rarely, but I liked knowing what had happened to Timmy. I liked knowing that he was a good citizen with a solid family and less heartache than most. And I liked that his recollections of our school days gave me a different impression of my own past. I liked being called “the wittiest girl i
n school.”

It wasn’t long before Holly, Marveen, and the rest of Bertram Corners had Facebook profiles, and it meant that I could schedule the volunteer rotation without having to send out e-mails to a long list of people and wait for them
to reply.

It was Facebook that gave me the idea of investing in the cash-for-gold business. I saw a few people talking about how they traded in broken jewelry for cash and comparing the best ways to do it. I had already decided that I wanted a solid investment right here in town so that I could adopt one of those orphaned storefronts and bring some little segment of the town center back to life. The cash-for-gold idea just seemed like a good investment, too, with investors getting skittish about the stock market and pushing up the pric
e of gold.

Here’s the thing about investing: all the information is out there in the market coverage, prospectuses, annual reports, and the like. But almost no one takes the time to read any of it. They’d rather work at pointless dehumanizing jobs to make tiny paychecks than sift through a spreadsheet and figure out which stocks to buy. Money makes more money. It’s really not that hard to u
nderstand.

Bertram Corners has its comfortable residents, the ones who drive a Lexus and use “summer” as a verb. But in the twenty-plus years I’ve lived here, I’ve seen a generation lose ground—people like Holly, who grew up in a manor house and now can’t afford to put her kids through college. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but she acts like she can’t do anything
about it.

“I can show you how to invest, Holly,” I told her. “You’re a smart woman. You’d get the ha
ng of it.”

“Vivian, I barely made it through algebra,”
she said.

“Why does everyone think there’s high-level math involved? It’s more logic than anyth
ing else.”

“I’m just nervous about the stock market. If it went down and I lost that money, I’d never forgive myself. To me, it’s like sticking money in a slot
machine.”

The Bertram Corners of twenty years ago wasn’t the most progressive place on earth, but I feel it contracting in its worldview. People seem to move here out of resignation. Decent but not outstanding schools. High but not outrageous real estate prices. Crumbling but not completely deserted town center. It’s like the Wendy’s of towns—a notch above McDonald’s but still fast food. I want better for Holly and her kids, so I keep trying, because it’s what keeps
me going.

More and more, though, I have days where I’m not sure why I continue to wake up or what I contribute to this planet. I find myself reading the obituaries and feeling strangely envious. The struggle is over. “Is” becomes “was.” No more pain, no more sorrow, no reason to fret about that extra ten pounds or the drug-addled nephew. J
ust peace.

Holly, I assume you’ll be the one to find these podcasts—which I recorded when my nurses were here and otherwise occupied. If you have, that means I found a way out. Like Lance, I just couldn’t stay motivated anymore, and once I knew your family would have a stable future I decided it was okay
to leave.

You more than anyone in my life besides my parents were able to look past the ghastly machine that kept me alive and see into my soul. You didn’t judge me, you didn’t try to minimize my predicament, and you didn’t find an excuse to leave me, even when you had enough problems of your own. You mostly just listened, and for that I will always be
grateful.

I’m sure you know by now that I left you my house so that you never have to worry about having a roof over your head. I didn’t leave you the rest of my money—what was left of it—because I believe so strongly that you will find your own way. I didn’t want you to feel that I bailed you out, or that you wouldn’t have succeeded on
your own.

Good-bye, my dear friend. Know that I am in a better place—or no place, which is stil
l better.

—Know that you
helped me.

—Know that you are a beautiful person and a devoted mother, and that your sons are growing up into fine
young men.

—Know that you have resources deep w
ithin you.

—Know that you
are loved.