Upstander by James Preller (free ereaders .TXT) 📕

She wiped the hair from his face, touched him gently, and after a few more minutes she supported his torso and helped him sit up.

He gave a deep exhale. He spat. Just saliva, not blood anymore. A good sign. Eric looked at Mary questioningly.

“I’ve seen worse,” Mary said, “but only in slasher movies.”

He laughed like it hurt.

She helped him stand.

“Let’s get you home.”

35[narcan]

Vivian Connelly nearly died on a Saturday night in late October from an opioid overdose. By some measures, she did die. Her heart stopped. If not for the swift actions of a librarian at the town library and the emergency medical technicians who arrived a few minutes later, the Connellys would have been planning the funeral of their twenty-one-year-old daughter.

The next morning, a rainy Sunday, Mary’s family gathered around the kitchen table. A visibly shaken Jonny recounted the events of the previous night. He looked ill, gaunt and rattled. He sat with his legs crossed, left arm wrapped awkwardly across his chest and his right hand free to run through his hair, pick at scabs on his face, or fidget nervously on the tabletop. He wore baggy, beltless jeans and a baseball tee and gray hoodie. Had he changed clothes since yesterday? Mary didn’t think so.

“We scored that afternoon. Vivvy and I planned to get high together. There’s that little park by the library we sometimes go to. It’s a nice spot, you know, pretty and out of the way,” he said, glancing at Mary. “We used to go there as kids.

“Saturday was our date night,” he said without realizing the awfulness of what he’d said. “We always got really high on Saturdays…” His voice trailed away, abandoning the thought as if the sentence no longer interested him. He reached for a tall, thin glass of orange juice. Didn’t lift it off the table, just turned it in his fingers. He spoke the next part directly to the orange juice glass, forehead knitted in concentration. “Vivvy was having trouble finding her veins, so I had to put aside my kit to help her. Otherwise it might have been me to take the first push. There was something wrong with this batch. We didn’t get it from our regular source—maybe it was cut with fentanyl or rat poison or something, I don’t know.

“After I gave Vivvy her dose, she smiled, so peaceful and beautiful, then her eyes got real big and she went sickly pale and slumped to the grass. I knew something wasn’t right.”

Mrs. O’Malley’s hand found Mary’s fingers beneath the table and squeezed, the two hands entwined, holding tight while their bodies sat rigid.

“I tried to carry Vivvy into the library, but her body was so floppy—I could barely lift her up. Her head kept lolling to the side. I stumbled and fell and kind of spilled her onto the lawn. I looked up and this woman came tearing through the front doors of the library, pulling on blue plastic gloves with her teeth as she ran.” Jonny’s body shivered from a sudden chill. He bit down hard on his lip. His words came faster now, more agitated, in droning, trancelike succession. “I was screaming, you know? Just screaming: ‘Vivvy, Vivvy!’ Out of my mind. The people in the library must have heard me.

“The woman pushed me aside and started asking me: ‘Is this an overdose? Is this an overdose?’ and I told her, ‘Yes, yes, help her, please.’ And she was at Vivvy’s side and I saw her hands ripping open the Narcan kit, filling the needle from the vial—it was taking forever—and I’m just sitting there, holding my knees, yelling, ‘Save her, save her!’—and she looks at me and says, as cool as you can imagine: ‘You need to be quiet now, I have to concentrate if we want to save your friend,’ and so I didn’t say another word. I just shut my mouth and watched her jab that needle into Vivvy’s shoulder. More people gathered around, somebody said the EMTs were on their way, and a man joined in. He gave her CPR and was saying, ‘Come on, girl, come back to us, come on, come back to us.’

“It was like a chant, you know, or a prayer, whispering over and over, ‘Come on, girl, come back to us, come on.’”

Mary felt like her fingers might snap off, her mother was squeezing so hard. She looked at Ernesto, and she saw that he was fighting back his emotions, lips a tight thin line, one finger tensely twirling his beard. Jonny looked totally distraught, so far lost into the memory of that scene that his eyes filled with horror, like he was staring into the face of some terrible beast.

Jonny said, “And the lady was getting scared, I could tell, because nothing’s happening, so she said, ‘I have another, I’m giving her another shot. Turn her, help me turn her,’ and she’s ripping open a new box. The man shifted Vivvy to her side, so now she’s facing me and I can see her face. Totally lifeless, you know, like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Not sleep, not rest, not anything. It was just blank, empty. And this time the woman stabbed the needle into Vivvy’s other shoulder. After a minute I could see her eyelids flutter like butterfly wings and open. Vivvy looked right at me, but I couldn’t tell if she saw me or not. I don’t even know what world she was in right then—I think maybe some land between life and death.

“She tried to sit up, but they were like, ‘No, no, stay down, you’ve got to rest on your side in the recovery position,’ and that’s when the ambulance pulled up, and the cop cars, and the EMTs rushed up carrying bags and gear and they’re pumping us with a hundred questions, all the details. It’s like they had to know everything. Calling me ‘sir this’ and ‘sir that.’ And that’s when I saw Vivvy go away