The Virtues of Oxygen (11 page)

They applauded just as loudly after the second piece, but they seemed a little deflated, as if they couldn’t sustain the effort of an extended trip down memory lane. Then Marshall, oblivious to the shifting mood of the audience, dove into a Cole Porter medley. The crowd had been pleased to hear one song and enjoyed the second but now wanted out. They had not been warned that this might be a full-fledged concert. As Marshall busted his way through “I Get a Kick Out of You,” one shuffling old man actually left the room with the help of a walker, and Holly could see a few others follow him with jea
lous eyes.

Holly tried to signal to Marshall that he should wrap it up, but he had his eyes closed, blissfully one with the music. The medley went on for six or seven minutes, significantly past the time an audience starts to resent a musician for enjoying himself so much. When Marshall finished, Holly applauded loudly, but everyone else just nodded and scattered before he could st
art again.

As the room emptied, Marshall sat down at a nearby card table and played with the spit valve on his trumpet while Connor picked up a throw pillow from a stained couch and swung it a few times, making light-sabe
r noises.

Celia had her eyes closed, and Holly couldn’t tell whether she was reliving the performance or had fallen asleep. As they followed the nurse and the wheelchair back to Celia’s room, Holly wondered how much longer her mother would exist in this abbreviated state. Would the boys know her longer this way than in her former incarnation as an active member of society? For how many years would they visit her out of obligation before her body let go of its automated functioning? Celia might end up as Vivian’s opposite, an inert brain trapped inside a body that wouldn’t stop
breathing.

On the way home, Holly noticed that Connor was exceptionally quiet in the
backseat.

“Everything okay back there?” she said over one
shoulder.

“Not really,” Con
nor said.

“I know it’s hard seeing Grandma that way, boys. But it’s important that she knows we care a
bout her.”

“Could she get better?” Conn
or asked.

Holly didn’t know how to answer him. If this was the most they could expect, Celia would have another month or two in the rehab and then be moved to a nursing home to live out her days. Holly didn’t know if that was what her mother would have wanted, but since Celia didn’t need extraordinary measures to stay alive, they had no choice but to watch
and wait.

CHAPTER 11

H
olly peered into the windows of The Gold Depot at ten fifteen on a Saturday morning and wondered why the door was locked. She had worked up enough courage to approach Racine about how business was going so she could report back to Vivian, and now she would have to start all over again. A few inches of snow had fallen the night before, so she killed a few minutes making impressions with the waffle bottom of her snow boot while deciding whether or not to splurge on a small coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts. Lately, she had been buying Maxwell House instant, which was like drinking hot water that only aspired to b
e coffee.

Just as she decided to skip the coffee and stop by Vivian’s on her way home, Racine came around th
e corner.

“Holly,” he said. “What are you do
ing here?”

“Just checking on Vivian’s investment,” she said with an awkward smile. “Don’t we ope
n at ten?”

“Totally my fault,” Racine said. He opened the door with his key and motioned for her to go inside as he held it. “I drove in from the city this morning and hit some unexpected
traffic.”

“Do you drive back and forth e
very day?”

“I usually stay over a few nights at the Homewood Suites, so it’s not
too bad.”

Holly put her purse down on one of the gleaming glass counters. She had to give Racine credit for keeping the store clean and welcoming inside, though she knew many people in town would never cross the threshold to find out. There was still something mildly shameful and moderately humiliating about trading jewelry for cash. As if to dispute her assumption, Narina Patel, the wife of the high school principal, came in the door b
ehind her.

“Hi, Holly,” she said. “What are you do
ing here?”

“I’m helping Vivian. She’s one of the store’s investors, so she asked me to help get it
launched.”

“Well, I, for one, think we’re long overdue for this place,” Narina said. “My relatives keep sending me their broken jewelry to get the best exchange rate, and I’ve been driving into the city with it. This feels a little saf
er to me.”

Narina took a silk pouch from her purse and spilled its contents on the counter. Heavy gold bangles and hoop earrings chimed on the glass
surface.

“Let me help you with that,” Racine said, gathering up the jewelry and taking it to one of the booths in the back, where a visored gentleman had suddenly appeared without Holly noticing. As Narina sat down, Racine motioned for Holly to follow him into the rear office, whic
h she did.

“So are you satisfied that we’re on the up-and-up?” Racine said, gesturing toward a chair in front of the small office desk. Racine sat on the edge of the desk, which meant that Holly could see the fine weave of the socks he wore with his Europ
ean shoes.

“I wasn’t . . . I mean, I’m sure you’re on the up-and-up,” Holly said, feeling her che
eks warm.

“But you’re wondering—or Vivian is wondering—when she’ll see her first dividends,” Racine said. He crossed one leg over the other, as if he had all the time in the world for her. This was his gift: to make women of any age feel as if they
mattered.

“How old are you, Racine?” Holly asked. “I can’t tell. You could be a mature thirty-two or a very well-preserved fo
rty-nine.”

“Closer to that second one,” he said. “I just turned f
orty-two.”

“Oh good.”

“Why is t
hat good?”

Holly thought for a moment. It was good because had he been forty-nine, she might have felt compelled to flirt with him. Even if there were no good foreseeable outcome, she would have given herself the pep talk about diving back into the dating pool—a mental tic that surfaced at the sighting of the rare available man. But since he was her age and no doubt dated women ten or fifteen years younger, she could just keep her fantasies to herself. No
harm done.

“It just means that you have some experience in life,”
she said.

“I do,” he said. “Which is why I can tell you that the store is settling in nicely. A few more customers like Mrs. Patel, and we’ll be well on
our way.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Holly said, though the “well on our way” could mean anything from tomorrow to next year. She avoided looking into his eyes, which were so dark brown that she couldn’t distinguish the pupils from th
e irises.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “I know this is important to Vivian, and I’m sure it’s important to you as well. I won’t let
you down.”

Holly nodded solemnly. She sensed that Racine had the mistaken impression she would get more out of the gold shop’s success than the fee Vivian paid her, but she did nothing to disabuse him of that notion. She had felt lately that the universe didn’t much care if her family had a roof over its head or food on the table—maybe the universe was even conspiring to bring her down from the peg to which she had already fallen—so she accepted Racine’s concern and pocketed it as insurance for the next trul
y bad day.

On the way back to her car, Holly stopped at the ATM across the street to view her balance. She was worried a check she had just written to the dentist might have bounced if she hadn’t balanced her checkbook to the penny. The machine spit out the receipt showing her balance: $0.00. No more or less. Her eyes remained on the figure. The zeroes reproached her with their clean and final e
mptiness.

Every dollar of her next paycheck was already assigned to a bill she had yet to pay or a fee she owed for the kids. Again, she came back to the wedding ring in her jewelry box. Selling it might give her a tiny bit of the breathing room she so craved. But again, she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine herself walking into the gold store and facing the men in the green visors, or leaving the symbol of her marriage behind, destined for the melting pot. She looked at the receipt again and sighed. At least it wasn’t less
than zero.

Holly opened Vivian’s door with her key, then wondered why Vivian even bothered keeping it locked when half the town had keys. Gretchen Carlsbad, who was holding a cell phone near Vivian’s mouth, switched hands to wave to Holly as sh
e came in.

“She’s talking to my graduate school adviser,” Gretchen said in a whisper. “He couldn’t believe some of the things I’ve told him a
bout her.”

“Yes, I did graduate from high school,” Vivian was saying. “College, too. I have a business degree, which I use e
very day.”

“She’s amazing,” Gretchen said to Holly. “There’s no one
like her.”

“I know,” Holly said, gathering up some used tissues and napkins from the rolling tray near Vivian’s head. She had found that the younger the companion, the less likely they were to pick up Vivian’s sur
roundings.

“So that’s about all there is to say,” Vivian said into the phone. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m a little fatigued right now. It’s been delightful chatting with you
, though.”

Vivian closed her eyes as Gretchen put away her phone and picked up her coat a
nd purse.

“I’d love to come again, Vivian,” Gretchen said. “You’ll let me know if you have any openings on your schedul
e, right?”

“Of course, dear,” Vivian said. “You’ll be the first on
e I call.”

Gretchen let herself out as Holly finished cleaning up and brought Vivian some fre
sh water.

“If she ever comes in here again, I will find a way to pull the plug on this machine with my teeth,” Vivian said. “What a bore. And she kept me on the phone with her professor for almost an hour. As if I have nothing better to do. She’s trying to squeeze me for inf
ormation.”

Holly looked at the iron lung. “And you’re not easy to
squeeze.”

Vivian’s face relaxed. “Of course I am,” she said, winking. “I’m full of lemony goodness . . . with very lit
tle pulp.”

Holly laughed. She knew that Vivian loved to tell her story but loved even more to pretend that it was an i
mposition.

“So I stopped by the gold place and had a chat with Racine today,” Holly said. “He seemed to think you’ll be seeing a return on your investment fai
rly soon.”

“Really?” Vivian said. “I wasn’t expecting anything right away. I assumed he’d need some time to recoup what he spent on the ren
ovations.”

Holly wondered again how Vivian could tie up a significant amount of money without any certainty as to when it would
pay off.

“What’s the podcast about this week?” Holly asked, hoping to be d
istracted.

Vivian lifted her eyebrows. “Are you ready
for this?”

“I
’m ready.”

“It’s about how even Ivy League graduates don’t know when to use ‘who’ or ‘whom.’ With all the texting and e-mailing, we judge people more by their grammar now than we ever did before. When you lose the copy editors, you strip naked the power elite. Blockbuster, huh? I’m expecting quite a
reaction.”

“I like it, but it won’t bring back my copy editors,” Holly said. “They’re a lu
xury now.”

“My point is that the powerbrokers can’t hide behind them anymore. People don’t come out and say it, but they look down their noses at anyone who breaks a grammatical rule that they happen to know or spells something wrong that they know how to spell. There’s no hiding it now, unless you hire someone to proof all your tweets and Facebook posts. Autocorrect doesn’t fix ev
erything.”

Holly had a Facebook account but rarely looked at it, and she barely knew how to use Twitter, but Vivian was a master of social media. Thousands listened to her weekly
podcast.

“Did you see my new generator?” Vivian said, turning her head in the direction of a bright red box about the size of an air conditioner. “I’m told it will keep me going through a Category 4 hurricane that knocks out the power fo
r a week.”

“What happens in a Cat
egory 5?”

“That was my question. I was told that we’ve never had one in this part of New York, but I still worry that I’m tempt
ing fate.”

“If a Category 5 hurricane hits this town, the only thing left standing will be you
r house.”

“You could be right. Back in the ’90s, a tree fell on a transformer and burned three houses to the ground, including the one next door. I remember watching from the window as my parents hosed down the front of the house. I still miss them, Holly. They kept me going through some da
rk times.”

Dark times. Listening to Vivian always made Holly realize that her lot in life, while no red-carpet walk in recent years, could not compare to what Vivian had endured—and risen above. She sat down in the chair closest to Vivian, who had closed her eyes in preparation for one of her epic
memories.

“I was seven when they moved my lung back home,” she began, her eyes still shut. “My parents took turns at night, each one sleeping for a few hours while the other one sat with me in case my airway had to be cleared. I had chronic bronchitis back then, and all my food had to be pureed so that I wouldn’t choke while eating. I was awful sometimes, spitting out mashed peas and sticking my tongue out at my mother when I didn’t like something. I remember one time that my mother got fed up with me and threw her dishcloth right over my face. I didn’t even try to shake it off; I just cried into it, Holly. It wasn’t her fault what happened to me, but I was a miserable piece of work back then. If I had been her, I probably would have strangled me a hundred times over . . . I’m so tired all of a sudden. Can I have my little pi
llow now?”

Holly placed a flattened water-filled pad under Vivian’s head—it prevented bedsores—and put a hand on Vivian’s forehead as she closed her eyes. She left her hand there until she saw Vivian’s mouth fall open slightly. Because of the iron lung’s forced and even respiration, it was sometimes hard to tell when Vivian was asleep, but Holly knew t
he signs.

As Vivian slept, Holly checked her calendar and saw that Marshall had a rehearsal later that night in preparation for the band’s visit to Disney World. She couldn’t afford her mortgage or her loans or the car repairs that surely lurked in her not-distant future, but at least she had been able to scrape together the money for Marshall to go on his trip. She would wait as long as possible to tell her sons that their lean existence might get even leaner. If Vivian could live with uncertainty every day, then so could she. She woul
d have to.