The Extraordinary Journey of Vivienne Marshall by Shannon Kirk

Author:Shannon Kirk [Kirk, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Fiction, literary
Publisher: Reputation Books
Published: 2016-09-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter XV, BARELY BLOWLING BUBBLES TO FIND THE SURFACE

Two weeks and no letter. We were twenty-three. I ran to the wall mail slot hopeful once again. The block to my Back Bay, Boston apartment was in full spring: yellow forsythia bushes, lime leaves, and pink buds of double flowering plum trees. All of this concealed the rodent infestation of the townhomes lining my street, historical brick facades worthy of tourist drive-bys, but hiding health code violations within.

Clumps of fur, from my grad school study partner’s cat, clung to my blue sweatshirt—well, Noah’s faded Milberg High sweatshirt, the one I recovered from the trash when we were sixteen and Mr. Vinet cleaned Noah’s closet. “Noah won’t need these old clothes in Switzerland. The rehab has him in a uniform,” Mr. Vinet had said, eyeing me with a mixture of apology and hope. In the year after his accident, fifteen to sixteen, Noah had been to nine different specialists. The one in Switzerland was yet another hope by way of experimental electrotherapy combined with a certain surgery not condoned in the United States. Mr. Vinet had leveraged all of his contacts at KPMG to start a rather well-funded charitable trust for Noah’s welfare.

Seven years later, and I can tell you my and Noah’s life in numbers:

We were twenty-three;

I lived at 429 Loudon Street in Boston, #33, four flights up, no elevator (Noah couldn’t visit even if he would have);

Noah lived at his eighth rehab facility, this time in Milan;

He’d had ten different surgeries, thirty different doctors, nine false parts implanted;

I had seen him in person one time since his accident, and that was directly after;

Noah refused my pleas to visit him twenty-four thousand times;

He wrote me constantly: 2,233 letters;

I wrote him 2,333 letters.

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