The Virtues of Oxygen (21 page)

Marshall started in. “We said we did, but instead we went to the park with my friend Brian, and he had his dad’s
handsaw—”

“And,” Connor interjected, “we brought work gloves, so it was complet
ely safe.”

Marshall continued: “And we went way back into the forested part—you know, behind the dugout on the baseball field—and we found this perfect tree and cut it down and brought it home. We’re not completely done with the decorations, but it’s getti
ng there.”

Holly dropped to the couch and put her hands in front of her face. She knew she should tell them that chopping down a tree on public property was a criminal offense, but she couldn’t. An avalanche of affection for her children swept her into a place of overwhelming
gratitude.

“Boys, this is the nicest present anyone has ever given me,” she said, tears running down. “C’mere,
you two.”

The boys sat down, one on each side of her, and she pulled each one toward her, alternately kissing them on the top of
the head.

“Okay, Mom, jeez,” Connor said, pulling out of her grasp, though Holly could see that he was pleased with her
reaction.

“We know it’s been hard lately,” Marshall said. Of course they knew, she thought. She tried to hide it, but they were old enough to see her stress when the bills arrived. “We wanted to
help out.”

“You did,” Holly said, wiping her face with a tissue. “So much more than
you know.”

CHAPTER 24

H
olly put in a few early hours at the newspaper so that she could accompany Vivian to the gold store. When she arrived at Vivian’s, she had to walk half a block because of all the cars and vans near Vivian’s house. Inside, she was greeted by Vivian’s medical team and a half dozen of her volunteers, all of them running into each other in the suffocating space of Vivian’s li
ving room.

“I’ve got the generator,” one doctor was saying to a nurse. “I’m going to put that in the van first, and then we’ll wheel the
lung out.”

“Holly,” Vivian called to her. “I’m almo
st ready.”

Holly made her way through the crowd as various technicians fussed aroun
d Vivian.

“What a production, right?” Vivian said, already looking a little tired. “It’s like a circus
in here.”

“You’re excited, though, right?” Holly said. “It’ll be great to get you
outside.”

“Absolutely,” Vivian said. “The only thing I’m worried about is Racine. He doesn’t know I’
m coming.”

“I thought you were going to
tell him.”

“I changed my mind. I decided that he would behave differently if he knew about”—she looked around—“
all this.”

“But he’ll know as soon as we squeeze you through
the door.”

“Right, but he won’t have time to prepare. I’ll see the operation just
as it is.”

A nurse put a straw into Vivian’s mouth to give her a sip of water as Holly unwrapped one of the mints Vivian kept on a tray for her volunteers. She was now overly conscious of her breath around Racine, to whom she had not spoken since she ran out of his apartment. Holly stepped aside as the medical team approached to wheel Vivian’s lung into the wa
iting van.

“Onward!” Vivian said as the wheels began
to move.

Holly thought she sensed a slightly manic edge to Vivian’s sudden cheerfulness, but she dutifully followed the iron lung out to the van and crouched inside as the other volunteers huddled in a group on Vivian’s lawn, their arms wrapped around their chests, since they had left their coats in the house. A doctor stood next to Vivian’s head monitoring her oxygen levels during the ten-minute ride to the gold store. At one point Holly heard a siren, which she assumed meant that the van had a poli
ce escort.

“This town would do anything for you, Vivian,” H
olly said.

“Oh, stop,” Vivian said, though Holly could tell that she e
njoyed it.

When the van pulled up in front of the gold store, the technicians had to perform a number of complicated maneuvers to set up a ramp and release the iron lung from the restraints that kept it from sliding around in the van. Holly wondered if she should go inside to warn Racine, but she sensed that Vivian wanted to make a grand entrance. The store’s entrance was at street level, and fortunately the front door was fairly wide, which meant that Vivian could be wheeled inside on the gurney that supported her iron lung without too much banging and cursing. Holly followed at the foot of the lung and came inside just in time to see Racine emerge from the back room. He looke
d stunned.

“Racine!” Vivian called out as the technicians pushed her into the center of the room. “I’m Vivian. So nice to finally
meet you.”

Racine looked toward Holly, who gave him a slightly embarrassed shrug. Then he turned on the high-beam smile, as though he saw iron lungs every day, and opened his
arms wide.

“Vivian! I’m so glad you’re here! So what do you think?” he said, gesturing toward the glass cases and the three customers in the back of the store having their gold e
valuated.

Holly could see that Vivian’s vision was limited, so she said, much more loudly than necessary, “Vivian, can you see the c
ustomers?”

“Turn me around,” Vivian said to the team of technicians. It required a three-point maneuver, but they managed to turn Vivian so that she could look toward the back of
the store.

“Excellent,” she said. “I apologize for dropping in like this, Racine, but I wanted to check the place out for myself. I like the way you’ve set up these front
counters.”

“Thanks,” Racine said. “We’ve actually seen an uptick recently in our resale items because of the
holiday.”

As Vivian and Racine chatted, Holly took a moment to gaze into the glass cases and look at the watches, brooches, strings of pearls, and rings she could never afford. Jewelry had never consumed her the way it did some of her mother’s housewife friends, who collected precious stones over the years as recompense for their boredom, but she appreciated the workmanship. Her eyes then fell on a black-velvet-lined case of engagement and wedding rings, which called to mind her recent trip to the pawn shop. She scanned the diamond rings, most of them standard solitaires, but then saw a large pear-shaped stone with emerald baguettes on e
ach side.

Her moth
er’s ring.

“. . . so as I’ve told Holly, we’re set to make all our targets this month,” Racine was telling Vivian. “I think you’ll be very
pleased.”

“Racine,” Holly said. “Can I look at t
he rings?”

Racine looked reluctant to leave Vivian’s side, but he walked around to the back of the counter and unlocked the sliding door of the glass display case, putting the rin
gs on top.

“Are you in the market?” Viv
ian asked.

“I just saw one that reminded me of my mother’s,” she said, picking it up. Holly slipped it over her left ring finger and felt a chill. Her own hands—blue veined and almost translucent in the harsh fluorescent light—looked just like her mother’s had looked when Holly had been a teenager. She was sure this was her mother’s ring, but she didn’t want to alarm Vivian until she could talk to Racine. She put the ring back i
n the box.

“Well, everything looks tip-top,” Vivian said, sounding ready to leave. “I’m sure you can see now, Racine, why I hired Holly to be my stand-in, since I literally cannot stand. I hope I haven’t star
tled you.”

Racine shook his head. “Of course not, Vivian. You’re welcome here
anytime.”

Holly admired Racine’s composure, because she knew it was Vivian’s intention to rattle him a bit. The thought of Vivian “dropping in” again would surely keep him on his toes more than Holly’s occasion
al visits.

Holly stayed behind as the technicians prepared to move Vivian back out into
the van.

“Do you have a minute?” she said t
o Racine.

“O
f course.”

“You told me once that the resale items come from different stores. Is there any way to tr
ace them?”

Racine looked back at the case, but before he could answer, Vivian called from th
e doorway.

“Holly, let’s go,” she said. “I’d like to be back in time for
Ju
dge Judy
.”

“I’ll stop back in tomorrow,” Holly said, following Vivian, though she was reluctant to part from the ring, which now represented all that had been lost when her mother—her real mother—disappeared down the rabbit hole. At the same time, she had no idea how to tell Racine that her own mother’s missing ring was in his jewelry case. He would surely tell her there was some mistake. Money, especially easy money, had a tendency to make people lie. She had seen it time and again while reporting on the larceny and embezzlement that happened even in a quiet place like Bertram Corners. And if she sensed he was lying, she wouldn’t be able to trust him. She would never again be broken like an egg and
revealed.

“So what did you think?” Ho
lly asked.

The technicians and volunteers were all gone,
Judge Judy
was over, and Holly sat once again alone wi
th Vivian.

“He was pretty much as I imagined him to be,” Vivian said. “His voice is very much like his appearance. There’s something incredibly smooth about him. Maybe a little to
o smooth.”

“I meant the store. But I know what you’re saying. It’s tough to be around someone who is twice as charming and attractive as
you are.”

“I don’t know about
twice
,” Vivian said
, smiling.

“What about the store, though? Is it what you envisioned? Do you think it will ma
ke money?”

“I think Racine will make money. The minute he walks out to start up a new one, it’s not going to be nearly as enticing to
go there.”

“Does that w
orry you?”

“It’ll be okay. The unemployment rate isn’t likely to go down soon, so we’ll have a decent base of c
ustomers.”

Holly could not dispute the wisdom of that unfortunate statement. She changed th
e subject.

“Did I tell you that Marveen asked me for a leave of absence so she could renovate her kitchen? Some people aren’t doing so badly in this
economy.”

“Some people always benefit from the misery of the masses. I guess I should include myself, since I’m the one backing this store . . . Still, I feel sorry for Marveen sometimes. She’s married to that house like it’s a living thing. If she had children, she wouldn’t care about having the latest nickel-plated faucet. And what does it get her in the end? How does society benefit from an overdecora
ted home?”

Holly had never heard Vivian criticize Marveen in quite that way. She agreed completely, but something made her want to stick up for Marveen, since she wasn’t there to defen
d herself.

“At least she’s keeping the kitchen people employed,” Holly said, though she didn’t mention that Marveen’s husband had gotten promoted by laying pe
ople off.

“This is true,” Vivian said, suddenly sounding tired again. “Marveen should do what makes h
er happy.”

“Not having to pay her salary might give us another few months of life at the
Chronicle
,” Holly said, trying to sound cheerful. “Maybe it was mea
nt to be.”

Vivian’s eyebrows pulled together in a look that Holly had seen only once before, when one of her volunteers accidently threw out her telephon
e headset.

“Nothing is ever ‘meant to be,’ Holly,” she said. “It’s nothing more than an excuse. I’m the perfect example of that kind of thinking—everyone’s always telling me I was spared for a reason, and I’m getting too old for it
anymore.”

Like most people, Holly wanted to believe there was some lesson to be learned in her own misfortune, some developmental pain required to reach a gentler phase of life. If she didn’t subscribe to that notion, she would have a hard time putting one foot in front of the other. And yet she knew that Vivian was probab
ly right.

She said none of this to Vivian, who, she suddenly realized, might secretly hold the opposite point of view. Otherwise, how could
she go on?

Holly found a letter from the bank in her mailbox when she got home later that night. This one wasn’t from her old friend Vince but from some corporate official, who told her she had until January to submit her missing mortgage payments. If she failed to do so, foreclosure proceedings would begin. She had no idea if foreclosure took a month or year, but the thought of closing the door to her house one last time and being out on the street with her boys and all her belongings gave her another panic attack—which is what a WebMD search told her she had had before—as she sat alone in her kitchen. She put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. When the attack subsided, she went into the living room and saw the fully decorated Christmas tree, its white lights aglow in the semidarkness. Connor was on the living-room couch doing some homework. She sat down and put her arm around his
shoulder.