The Virtues of Oxygen (22 page)

“The tree is beautiful, honey,” she said. “It really makes me happy that you boys thoug
ht of it.”

“Everything’s going to be okay, Mom,” Connor said. “Really,
it will.”

“You think so?” she said, squeezing his shoulder. It made her simultaneously sad and proud that he would try to co
mfort her.

“My band director says hard times make us appreciate the good ones, and you may never know why you’re being tested,” he said. “Some things are just mea
nt to be.”

Just as she could not dispute Vivian’s logic, she couldn’t dispute Connor
’s either.

“I’m sure your band director is right, sweetheart,” Holly said, rubbing
his head.

She sometimes wondered how her boys might have turned out had she been able to give them whatever they asked for. Entitlement had its own
pitfalls.

“He’s absolutely right,” she said. “Now g
o to bed.”

CHAPTER 25

Vivian’s Unaired
Podcast #9

I
was one of the first to use a long stylus between my teeth that let me manipulate a cursor. I would work at it for hours, because it gave me something I had always craved—direct connection. I could write—write!—without dictating to someone else, just by pressing letters with the stylus on my customized overhead keyboard. It was painstaking, but I was so grateful to eliminate the middleman that I didn’t care how long
it took.

As far as the online world was concerned, I was no longer a medical anomaly trapped inside a machine; I was the equal of everyone else with a computer—just as whole, just as nimble, just another seeker, no longer in-valid. My screen name was VBucks—genderless, ageless, without disability, suggestive of wealth. I was a complete person who could navigate the world and its resources without moving more tha
n my head.

It would be years before the rest of the world reached my level of Internet obsession. I was one of the first to start an online diary, which later evolved into a blog and eventually into my weekly podcast. I felt like a prisoner who finally emerges from captivity, blinking into the
daylight.

Of course, connectivity had its downside. I repeatedly fell in love with people I met online and always had to tell them eventually that a face-to-face meeting would never happen. Once I let it go too far with a guy named Dennis (screen name: Indie D). We met in a forum devoted to independent films, one of my passions, and began corresponding via instan
t message:

VBucks: Can’t believe Steven Soderbergh is willing to direct Andie MacDowell in anoth
er movie.

Indie D: He’s in love with her. Can’t you tell from the long, lingering close-ups of
her face?

VBucks: You must be right. There’s no other ex
planation.

Indie D: I’m definitely right. Mark my words, they’ll be married within a year and divorced six months later
. . .
You ever bee
n married?

VBucks: No
. . . you?

Indie D: Once, but it didn’t last much longer than what I predict for the MacSoderberghs . . . You know, it’s been so great talking to you. I feel like we have so much i
n common.

VBucks
: Me too.

Indie D: I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but would you send me
a picture?

L
ong pause.

VBucks: OK, but you’ll have to send me
one, too.

I knew it was risky, but I didn’t want to lose contact with Dennis, so I had Marveen take a picture of my face without showing the iron lung. When he sent me his, I almost cried. He was a lovely man, probably in his midforties—a little tired and lonely around the eyes. We talked every day, sometimes for hours. He finally said he would be in New York for business and wanted to know if I’d meet him in
the city.

I had to end it there. I couldn’t bear to tell him about my condition online, and I certainly didn’t want him to see me. I did the cowardly thing. I switched my screen name and never went on that forum again. I didn’t respond to any of his IMs or e-mails. In the moments before I fell asleep each night, I pined for Indie D the way I had pined for my fellow iron lunger Lance and for an end to my life when I was
seventeen.

I never talked about these crushes with my caregivers, though, because of the inevitable questions. No, I could never have a physical relationship with another person, or at least not from the neck down. But that just proves that love is primarily a mental connection. What we truly crave—at least from what I understand of it—is a reflection of ourselves. People can’t walk around with a mirror in front of their faces all day, so they seek out someone who reflects back their own self-worth. Love, when you think about it, is a value proposition, much like the stock market, which is probably why I never quite gave
up on it.

As the Internet became more accessible and more people bought home computers, my list of volunteers grew exponentially. Everyone wanted to get my advice about what kind of computer to buy, how to set up an e-mail account, and to ask me what a gigabyte was. I was the Steve Jobs of Bertra
m Corners.

It was around that time that I met Holly, who had come back to live in the town where she grew up. She was newly married and working as a reporter for the local weekly, but she had some time on her hands and volunteered to sit with me a few times a week during the unpopular 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift. We clicked instantly. Holly seemed like the kind of person I would have become had it not been for the polio. She was bright and funny, open and caring, attractive but not obsessed with her looks. She loved a good pun. She was one of the few caregivers I was always sad to see go at the end of her shift. “I really admire you, Vivian,” she said once, after we’d known each other for abo
ut a year.

“Why?”

“Because you say what you think. I’ve never been able to do that. I usually say what I think people want
to hear.”

“But you’re a reporter. Don’t you have to challenge politicians and dig up dirt o
n people?”

“I’ll let you in on a little journalism secret. Most of what I do could be categoriz
ed as PR.”

“Why did you go into journal
ism then?”

“You can’t know what it’s like until you’re actually doing it. And maybe it would have been different on a big-city daily, but Chris and I wanted to live in a small town. I loved growing up here. So you take what you can get. And I won’t be doing this
forever.”

I recall being a little disappointed in her attitude. You don’t just take what you can get when you’re young and able-bodied and reasonably intelligent. You set lofty goals, climb the ladder, fighting for every step. You scoot up to the wall between the sane and the insane and at least look over. Does anyone have an excuse to live an ordinary life? Not when you have all the resources you need to succeed. Not when it’s just about m
otivation.

It wasn’t long before Holly was pregnant with Marshall and settled into a fixer-upper that would never get fixed up or outgrown or paid off. Connor arrived three years later, and despite her new-mother responsibilities, Holly never took a leave from her schedule on the rotation. Sometimes she even brought one of the boys with her in a ca
r carrier.

“Do you ever wish you could be alone?” she asked me one day. “The kids need me constantly. Sometimes I just fantasize about renting a cheap motel room and bringing a stack of paperbacks so I don’t have to interact with anyone at all. Just for, lik
e, a day.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been left alone for more than a few minutes,” I told her. “I guess I can’t crave what I never had, although it does get tedious sometimes when some of my volunteers want to chat and I’m worn out. Sometimes I just close my eyes and pretend to be asleep. They eventually
shut up.”

We bonded, Holly and I, because she asked me those kinds of questions and because she came back week after week, year after year, as others got too busy and dropped off the list or couldn’t handle being close to someone who represented their worst medical fears. No one but Holly thought I would want to talk about the obvious difficulties, but I did. A part of me wanted everyone to know just how hard it was
to be me.

CHAPTER 26

H
olly ate an aging apple from the fruit bowl on Marveen’s abandoned desk before walking down to the gold store. The apple sloshed around in her otherwise empty stomach as she passed the pharmacy where Darla would be ringing up customers. The economy, as broken as it was, still chugged on for most people, she realized. Even with high unemployment, the vast majority of people had some kind of job, squeezing every last benefit for all it was worth. Only a small minority would be spit out altogether by the economic engine, she thought as she approached Dunkin’ Donuts, the aroma of which almost made her faint. She hadn’t had a good cup of coffee in ages. She stopped in front of the plate-glass window at Dunkin’ Donuts and put on a quick coat of the only lipstick she owned that didn’t require a Q-tip. She pressed her lips together and noticed how the cold air accentuated the lines around
her eyes.

The gold store was busy when she came in, so she waited until Racine finished with a
customer.

“Can we talk?”
she said.

“We need to,” he said, leading her toward the
back room.

She put her purse down on a small desk next to which was a single metal folding chair. She noticed that Racine had done nothing to personalize the space in the months the store had been open. Besides the desk and chair, there was a laptop, a phone, and a power strip. The walls were bare, more evidence that Racine would vacuum Bertram Corners for its gold and leave it with nothing but a trace of cologne and the memory of his magne
tic smile.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Racine said. He ran a hand over his hair and then dropped it down by
his side.

Holly had been so focused on her mother’s ring that she forgot about Vivian’s surpr
ise visit.

“I had no idea what was coming through the door,” he said, his voice strained. “I’ve never even heard of an iron lung before. I had to look it up online after
you left.”

“I’m sorry, but Vivian asked me not to say anything,” Holly said. “She said her business partners get nervous when they know about her di
sability.”

“Then why did she
show up?”

Holly paused, not wanting to tell Racine that Vivian mainly wanted to ogle him like the rest of the town. She wondered if he understood just how much he stood out in Bertram Corners. To the residents of a small town, he was like the okapi at the zoo—so unusual that it dre
w a crowd.

“I think she just wanted an excuse to get out,” Holly said. “She spends all her time in one room, and she gets bored sometimes. I think also she wanted to shake you up
a little.”

“Mission accomplished,” he said, running a hand over his ha
ir again.

“Really? Because I thought you handled it so well. You were compl
etely on.”

“On?”

“The charm. You turned it right on, like you do for all the c
ustomers.”

“It’s not something I’m conscious of turning on and off,” Racine said, pulling his should
ers back.

“Don’t get upset. It’s a hu
ge asset.”

Racine let his shoulders drop and looked down. “I just wish you had warned me. I thought we had something more than a business rela
tionship.”

Holly wasn’t sure what to say. Part of her was relieved to hear Racine use the word “relationship.” Another part of her thought he was being unfair. She still had to do her job f
or Vivian.

“We do,” she said. “And you’re right. I should have warned you. But the reason I came over today has nothing to do with that, or wit
h Vivian.”

Racine sat down on the desk. “W
hat then?”

“You know that ring I asked to see y
esterday?”

“The diamond with the emerald b
aguettes.”

“Yes. Do you know where it c
ame from?”

Racine ran a hand over his jawline, which had a day’s worth of stubble on it. He looked like he hadn’t slept much the nig
ht before.

“We get most of our resale jewelry from the stores in New Y
ork. Why?”

“It’s my mothe
r’s ring.”

Holly was sure that Racine would deny it, but instead he began shuffling through a pile of papers on
the desk.

“Are
you sure?”

“Positive. She’s in a nursing home in Connecticut now, but it went missing a few months ago from her rehab place right after she had a stroke. The staff said we shouldn’t have brought in valuables, so there’s nothing we can do. We’ve been hoping it would turn up, but I never expected to see
it here.”

Racine continued rifling through papers until he pulled one out. “It came with a shipment from New York l
ast week.”

“I guess I can’t really prove it’s my mother’s ring. It’s unusual, but I’m not sure it was one o
f a kind.”

Racine walked out of the back room, unlocked the cabinet, and came back with the ring. “This one, right?” She looked at it again in his palm and nodded, reaching out to take it. Racine closed his hand before she could. “I’ll try to track down what happened. Don’t worry, though. I’ll keep it safe and get it back to you as soon
as I can.”

Holly nodded again. If she couldn’t trust him, she needed to know
that now.

“I’m sure it’s my mother’s ring,” she said. “And I do need
it back.”

“I won’t let you down,” Racine said. He squeezed the ring and held up his fist. “You might not believe it, because of the business I’m in, but I don’t put things before
people.”

Then Racine kissed her in a way that could have meant
Can’t wait to see you again
or
Good-bye
.

On the way back to the office, Holly stopped into Radio Shack to see what she could buy her boys for Christmas. The cell phones they wanted were far too much money and required monthly payment plans. Anything else was either too expensive or essentially worthless to them—accessories for the phones and game systems they could n
ever have.

She left empty-handed, then walked idly into a used-book store that was closing. She wandered the crammed aisles, examining the titles, when she came upon a hardcover of
Where the Red Fern Grows
. She pulled it out and examined the worn jacket. This had been Chris’s favorite book as a child, one he’d never had a chance to read to the boys. She started to put it back but changed
her mind.

“Do you have a basket?” she asked the ponytailed man at th
e counter.

He nodded and handed her a plastic container with a handle. She spent the next half hour pulling books from the shelves and CDs from the dusty bins in the back. She pulled anything she thought that Chris would have liked and would have wanted the boys to have:
Treasure Island
and
Catcher in the Rye
, CDs of Miles Davis and Nirvana and the Beastie Boys. She filled the basket, and the total came to $89.49, which left her enough money to buy them some candy for their stockings. She left the store feeling that she had hit upon the one gift that wouldn’t be obsolete or out of fashion by January. The one and only thing that wou
ld matter.

On Christmas Day each boy had a stack of presents under the tree. Holly watched them open each book and CD and read the inscriptions telling them about Chris’s connection to that story or that music. They took turns reading aloud from
The Hobbit
, inside which Holly had written “This was your dad’s favorite book in middle school. He used to say he couldn’t wait to read it with the two of you.” In the glow of the tree her sons had cut down illegally just to show her how much they loved her, she thought that she had never had a more perfect
Christmas.

Stan knocked on Holly’s office door as she was putting together the four-page holiday edition that came out between Christmas and New Year’s. It was always the smallest edition of the year so that her staff could take a break over the holidays. Stan looked as if he had eaten some
bad clams.

“God, Stan, you look awful,” Holly said. “Sit down. What’s wro
. . . oh.”

Holly was certain that the bad-clam expression was now on her
own face.

“We’re closing,” said Stan, who nodded, then left his
head down.

Holly felt as if she had been punched in th
e abdomen.

“I’m so sorry, Holly,” he said, finally looking up. “You have until the end of January. The directors were hoping the holiday ads would pick us up, but the
y didn’t.”

“Is there any hope?” she said, panic starting to rise in her chest again. “Any chance they’ll change the
ir minds?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, slumping down in his chair. “No one’s buying anything. No one’s advertising anything. They’re all just waiting to see what happens, and waiting kills ne
wspapers.”

“Marveen took a leave of absence,” Holly said. “Won’t that buy us a lit
tle time?”

“It’s over, Holly. We can offer people the vacation pay that’s coming to them after we close. They have the option to buy into the state insurance plan for up to a year, but essentially everyone should start a job search as soon as
possible.”

“In an economy where no one’
s hiring.”

“You don’t have to remind me. I’m out, too. My last day is the same
as yours.”

“But your kids are in
college.”

Stan put his elbows on Holly’s desk and put his head in his hands. He looked up with a sad smile. “Remember when we were idealistic young journalists who thought we could make the world a better place? We wanted to chase out corrupt politicians and uncover fraud and investigate murders. It turns out we were just filling space around the ads, and nobody really cared that much about what
we wrote.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret. I never really wanted to do the hard stuff,” Holly said. “I wanted to write stories about the school plays and the Eagle Scout awards and the town budget. I thought that was the import
ant part.”

“It was, Lois,” Stan said, his voice thick. “It was all important. Every word you ever wrote. And don’t for
get that.”

“So put on your Superman cape and spin the world backward to turn back time, Clark,” she said, with her own sad smile. “That should fix the
problem.”

Stan let out a tired laugh. “The cape’s at the dry cleaner’s, Lois,” he said, “which I can no longe
r afford.”

By New Year’s Eve, Holly had gotten a few uninformative texts from Racine, but he wasn’t returning her calls. The gold store was opened each day by the appraisers, but she saw few customer
s inside.

“You’ve tried his cell phone?” Vivian asked her as the clock ticked toward midnight. Vivian’s regular Thursday night volunteer had had New Year’s Eve plans, so Holly had stepped in. The boys were both at parties that involved sleepovers, and she didn’t relish watching the ball drop by herself, nursing a cup of weak tea. Vivian, at least, was goo
d company.