Season Finale: Oxygen

Story 20 - Oxygen

It was the coldest night on record in Springdale.

Rebekah sat at her kitchen table, the chill of the tile below her feet ebbing into her legs, sending dull aches through her body.

Now 40 years old, she had erroneously assumed that age might dull the anguish of grief. With the invoice of her mother’s funeral before her, she felt as orphaned as a nestless chick, and every bit as exposed to the cold.

The clock rang at 11:00 pm, just as it had at 7:00 and 5:00. The news blared soundlessly, its anchor rehearsing the same message: It was the most frigid night on record in Springdale. Though her bed called from an adjacent room, a blanket would do nothing to warm her.

She arose to turn off the light, pins and needles punishing her feet for the sudden use. As her hand touched the switch, she was seized with a startling light that usurped her mind and quieted her senses. Though her body remained motionless, her soul reverberated with a transcendental command:

Go and buy gas.

Rebekah was stunned, then disgusted. She had no destination or use for fuel, particularly at such a dark hour. 

God had come too late. Her knees ached from praying for comfort. And now, after days of importuning, her supplication was answered: Fill up the gas tank of a dilapidated station wagon. 

The minute hand sauntered forward as she grappled with the idea that God might be apathetic. The foreignness of an austere God in the Old Testament now felt more plausible.

As she tried to support the weight of her revelation by placing her arm on the kitchen counter, she knocked over a photo of her son. He was bald, resting on a gurney, but cancer-free, his thumb indicating the good news. Tears trailed a familiar channel down her cheeks. She could not dismiss God as careless yet. After all, she needed a parent more than ever.

She flung her front door open, inviting in a wave of merciless chill.

It was the coldest night on record in Springdale.

She paused before breaking the ice around the door handle of her car. A flicker of doubt stayed her hand. Then, after generous coaxing of the key, she forced the ignition and set off in the direction of a gas station. 

As flakes settled around her, the amber glow of illuminated windows in passing homes emanated a radiant warmth. One window caught her eye. The silhouette of a family seemed animated, jovial, and inviting. It was odd, even irreverent, that her grief and their joy could coexist. They could not see what crushed her.

The hypnosis of driving evaporated as her vehicle caught ice, relenting to inertia like a matchbox car. Her tears transformed into beads of sweat as the effort tried her joints, her hands shuddering as she clutched the wheel. The vehicle fishtailed unpredictably, the tires screaming in protest. With a guttural bellow, and with every ounce of energy not consumed by grief, her arms maintained their position on the wheel, restoring control of the car. The station wagon petered its way to the shoulder and rested.

The surge of adrenaline forced her subdued feelings to emerge violently. She screamed with such anguish that her vocal cords strained to match her grief. Then, she wept. She cried like she did when the voice on the other end of the line told her that a drunk driver had struck her mother. It was a new grief, one that embedded its ice in her blood.

She exited the vehicle and craned her head to the sky, the stars blurred by a light snow. Through tears, they seemed to melt back down to earth. On other nights, the panorama of the cosmos often evoked a sense of wonder and divine awe. Tonight, she saw balls of burning gas suspended in a void, lightless and unremarkable.

With no fanfare, she reentered the car. The ignition hummed, the exhaust graying the snow. She shuddered.

It was the coldest night on record in Springdale.

Her blinker shone and wavered, signaling to other drivers her intent to continue. She, too, flickered between action and inaction, oscillating between departure and defeat, faith and doubt, life and death.

Feebly, she drove. The momentum carried her forward, willed only by a light touch to the pedal, urged by the vaguest conviction of somewhere to go, and something to do.

Soon, she was greeted by a dinosaur with a scarf at an empty Sinclair station. Surprisingly, it didn’t appear that anyone else felt the same stroke of midnight urgency to refuel their vehicle. 

Her headlights shone on rows of unoccupied pumps. The fuel gauge of her own vehicle sat exactly on the halfway mark, seemingly tepid to the urgency of God’s command. The convenience store was closed. Her car rested at a pump that was out of order. There was no Isaac to sacrifice, no still, small voice to greet her.

The absurdity of her mission struck home.

With her hands on the wheel and her heart immobilized, Rebekah shattered. There, in a futile crucible, she could not resist that original paradox: 

Why love when loss inevitably awaits?

There were no tears, this time. Only cold and the scent of petroleum. Grief had sent her here, not God. The apathy of reality whistled through her. Her blinker clicked.

It was the coldest night on record in Springdale.

Another station wagon lumbered through the ice, its engine sputtering in cacophony. It seemed barely drivable, with one window covered in cellophane and a donut tire far past its expiration. It parked across from Rebekah. 

An elderly woman emerged, an oxygen tube tightly adorning her nose. She was skeletal and bent. Her clothes were stained with something greasy, creating a unique palette for a faded, floral pattern. She looked pathetic in the snow.

The woman reached back into the car and strained. Her breathing was audible from within Rebekah’s own station wagon, coming in deep, resonant bellows. She rasped as her hands shook, her veins threatening to reveal their contents.

The woman pried an enormous oxygen tank from the back of her vehicle, the chassis groaning as the tank rattled on the pavement. With a strange reverence, she secured the tank to a cart and twisted a knob. Her posture raised in relief. Air rushed into her lungs.

Then, as the woman coaxed the tank through the stubborn snow, the travail left her, again, breathless. Her esophagus bartered with the air, only permitting its entrance in stingy portions. When she arrived at the pump, she turned the dial again.

As the woman repeated her Sisyphean routine, Rebekah was struck by her condition. For this dyspneic, every breath was borrowed. The same tank that nourished her lungs also pushed them to their limit. Rebekah’s mother had also required an oxygen tank, albeit a more portable one, but she didn’t recall her experience being a fraction as awful.

With her own throat still sore from screaming, Rebekah watched her in pity.

Then, like the hush of a tree in a forest with nobody around, the woman suddenly toppled, her body soundlessly meeting the snow.

Rebekah scrambled for her seatbelt, threw her car door open, and sprinted through the cold. The woman’s breathing was railing against the silence. Thick flakes fell in an unrelenting barrage of white.

Rebekah took the woman into her arms, her figure resembling a chalk line in a forensic scene. Up close, the woman was even more ghastly than she first surmised. The stench alone resisted her act of compassion. 

With wild eyes, the woman waved a gnarled hand in the direction of the tank and then held up six fingers, imploring Rebekah to save her. Rebekah clawed for the tank, pulling it out of its coffin of snow. The meter danced faintly at the zero mark.

Rebekah hesitated. She looked at the woman, now heaving in hypoxic distress. Her eyes fluttered. With untrained hands and a wordless prayer, Rebekah gingerly moved the knob to six. The snow muffled the hiss of oxygen.

In full, vivifying breaths, the woman’s posture softened in relief. Rebekah returned to her, holding her head up to meet her own. The woman rasped shakily, but consistently. Her eyes gently opened. Then, the woman wept hoarsely. 

With tears dropping to meet the ice, the woman looked into Rebekah’s eyes with faltering lucidity. She spoke quietly.

“Why do I keep breathing? It hurts so badly.”

Rebekah stared at her. Her own tears came now. She held this woman, moribund and trembling, with the tenderness of her own child. Her mother flashed before her.

Then, she embraced her. They lay in the snow, vessels of compassion, love, anguish, grief, malice, and joy, and patrons of Sinclair. They were people, both wrought by suffering, melting the snow around them as their shared warmth cut through ice.

For the remaining years of the woman’s life, Rebekah visited her regularly, bringing food and laughter to her shabby home. Her life had been prolonged by a newer, more effective oxygen tank, courtesy of Rebekah’s mother. When the woman eventually ran out of oxygen, Rebekah was the only one to attend her funeral. 

As her coffin was placed in the earth, Rebekah grieved then, too, but her grief was not senseless. That night, she saw the cosmos as lively, expansive, and artful. She saw the stars, standing in the center of a universe of contradictions. She saw her mother, her form somewhere in the constellations. 

It was warm.