francine

The Uber driver threw uneasy glances in every direction.  “You sure this is where you want to stop?” 
          “This is it. This’ll be fine,” Francine gasped. The tiny wizened woman sat in the back seat with a clear plastic hose running from her nostrils to twin oxygen tanks in a wheeled cart. The car was parked next to one of the begrimed steel supports for the overhead freeway that ran along the 13th Street sidewalks like pillars in a steampunk cathedral. The air was thick with particulates and noxious fumes and the noise of passing traffic. 
          “You want out here?” the driver asked again. People with oxygen tanks almost always traveled between homes and hospitals. This four-lane boulevard was lined on both sides with bent and rusting fragments of chain-link fencing, tents, lean-tos, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, and crutches. Dumping this frail old woman on the squatter stretch of 13th didn’t seem right. 
          Francine opened the door with a bony hand and began the arduous process of swinging her legs outside the car. The driver jumped out and ran around to help. “I’m fine, I’m okay,” Francine said as she waved him off. She straightened up and shuffled a few steps away. “But I could use a hand with those,” she said, nodding to the tanks. 
          The driver pulled out the cart, setting it down on the sidewalk. “You sure you’re okay here?”
          “I’m fine, I’m fine.” She spoke softly, half-gasping out the words. The driver had to lean forward to hear her over the traffic. “I’ve got my phone,” she said, reaching into the side pocket of her jacket and pulling out an iPhone. “I’ll call for a ride when I need it.” 
          “You might want to be careful with that out here,” the driver shouted back as they were buffeted by the slipstream of a passing eighteen-wheeler. “Somebody’s liable to take that from you.” 
          Francine’s taut, drawn features brightened into a smile.  Given how heavily lined and wrinkled her skin was, it looked like her face had suddenly cracked.  “Oh, I’m not worried about that,” she gasped. “Nothing to lose.” She started stepping slowly down the sidewalk, pulling her oxygen cart behind her. “They’re going to love me here,” she called over her shoulder. 
          The overhead freeway blocked direct sunlight, casting the street in an almost Dickensian dreariness. The only color came from the tents and tattered blue tarps set up along on the sidewalks and against the walls of the surrounding buildings. Shopping carts stuffed with sleeping bags and blankets were parked outside the shelters like bicycles in a schoolyard.
          A couple of yards down Francine encountered an ancient homeless man, his gaunt body swimming in multiple layers of coats, sweaters, and jackets badly in need of laundering. He staggered out from his tarpaulin lean-to just as she tottered by, her emaciated hand gripping the handle of the tank cart like the rudder on a sailboat. The old man stopped, startled at the sight of the frail old woman, the sallow leathery skin of her face stretched so tightly over her cheekbones that her blue eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. 
          “Good morning,” Francine said, panting like she had just sprinted uphill. 
          “All right,” the man croaked, regarding her with hazy eyes fogged with untreated cataracts. 
          “Do you know where I could buy some heroin?” Francine asked. 
          The man blinked and looked at her with a mixture of confusion and suspicion. 
          “I don’t suppose you sell any?”
          “Me? I don’t mess with none of that stuff,” he scoffed.  “Them needle heads out there in the street.” His eyes darted in the direction of some tents set up in the traffic island in the middle of the avenue. “Bunch of junkies up in there,” he added, spitting with contempt. 
          Francine looked where the man indicated. “Thank you,” she said.  She turned and started shuffling slowly toward the nearest crosswalk.
          “You watch yourself,” the man warned. “Them motherfuckers rob you blind, leave you in the street. You don’t wanna mess with ‘em.”
          Francine stopped, looked back at the man and smiled. She reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a small zippered purse. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and held it out to the man. “Thanks so much for your help.”
          The man’s eyes widened. He reached out slowly as if she might pull it away at the last second. But she didn’t, and he snatched the money from her hand and watched as Francine continued making her way to the crosswalk, pulling her oxygen cart slowly and deliberately behind her. “All right,” he croaked again. 
          Traffic was always heavy on 13th Street, except for the wee hours of the morning. Now, in the middle of the day, it ran full bore. Twin automotive rivers flowing in opposite directions, one carrying people to the freeway on-ramp three blocks down, the other bearing them back into the maze of stoplights and one-way avenues that made up the city streets. 
          Francine was buffeted several times by vehicle slipstreams as she waited for the pedestrian signal to turn. When it did, she was grateful for the ADA-compliant slope in the sidewalk. It allowed her to roll her cart down onto the crosswalk without having to lump it over a curb, where the wheels might hit the street at different times and knock the unwieldy twin-tank carrier over on its side. 
          There was another welcome slope on the median island. She rolled her tanks up and made her way to the cluster of tents. As she approached the first one a tall, gangly young man unzipped the flap and crawled out. He was wearing a dirty Baja pullover, with coils of long greasy matted hair stretching past his shoulders. He stopped, startled to see a tiny, emaciated woman with bright blue eyes standing there with a length of clear plastic tubing running along her upper lip, across her furrowed cheeks, and up over her ears. 
          Francine always had stern facial features, even in her younger and healthier years. The ravages of age and advanced pulmonary disease had maximized those features, drawing the skin back from her eyes and high cheekbones in a way that, combined with her dark eyes and wide, thin mouth, gave her a somewhat reptilian look. But that same mouth could just as quickly broaden into a wide disarming smile, as it did now. 
          “Hi,” she said, her voice almost drowned out by the incessant traffic. The young man had to lean forward to catch her next words. “Do you know where I could buy some heroin?”
          “What?” The man straightened up as if he had been slapped. 
          “That man over there said you might know where I could buy some heroin,” Francine tried to shout, nodding toward the blue lean-to across the street. Then she stopped and bent forward, huffing from exertion. 
The young man looked around with alarm, but the man Francine had spoken with had disappeared. He looked back at Francine, who was teetering now, hands on her knees, inhaling heavily through her nose and exhaling with great, pained wheezes. 
          “Are you all right?” the man asked.
          “I think . . . I need . . . to sit down,” Francine gasped. The young man looked around, then disappeared around a corner of his tent and reappeared a moment later with a green plastic milk crate. He placed it on its side next to Francine and she carefully lowered herself down on it. 
          “Thanks,” she whispered, nodding and closing her eyes as she caught her breath. The man watched as she slowly regained her composure. “So,” she said at last. “Have I come to the right place?”
          The man’s eyes narrowed. “You want to buy heroin?” 
          “Yep. Or smack? Is that what you call it? Junk?”
          The man shook his head in disbelief. “You need to get right?”  
          Francine gave him a puzzled look. Get right? Then it dawned on her. “Oh! You mean do I need a—what do you call it, a fix?” She chuckled, more a throaty cackle than a laugh. “No, no, I’ve never done it before. I just want to get some and learn how to use it.”
          The man’s expression darkened. “Lady, this ain’t no school for junkies. Get your skinny ass—”
          He stopped abruptly as Francine reached inside her bag and held out two twenty-dollar bills, like an entry pass. “How about you go get some for us? I’m buying.”
          The man’s eyes were instantly riveted on the two bills. He glanced around nervously at the cars whooshing by, kicking occasional bits of roadside gravel in their direction and filling the air with exhaust fumes, but his gaze kept returning to the money. 
          Francine could see the hunger in the man’s eyes, the urge to snatch at the proffered money. But she could tell there were also alarm bells going off. Situations like this didn’t just up and present themselves without some kind of catch. 
          “Look, my name is Francine. As you can see, I’m not in very good shape.” She paused and took several deep breaths, her eyes locked on the man’s wary gaze, imploring him to hold on while her oxygenation caught up. When her breathing relaxed, she continued, “I want to buy some heroin and I want someone to show me how to use it. Can you do that?” 
          The man slowly lowered himself into a squat so that he was on eye level with Francine. As his knees bulged forward, Francine noticed for the first time how stained and tattered his dark baggy, pajama-like pants were and also that he was barefoot, the tops of his feet caked with grime to match the color of the street.                     “Francine,” he said, thoughtfully. His eyes were fixated on the twin twenties. For a moment she thought he might pounce at her, and he certainly could have pushed her over and grabbed both bills with very little effort. But then he laughed. “What is this, some kind of bucket list thing? Bougie lady from the suburbs out slumming, looking to ride the tiger?” 
          Francine shrugged. “I really don’t have time to dawdle,” she said, indicating her oxygen tanks. “You think you can help me?”
          The man stared at her for a long uncomfortable stretch of time, his eyes gleaming with a mixture of suspicion, distrust and hunger.  Suddenly his face relaxed into a gray-toothed smile. “Okay,” he said. “Old lady wants a fix, old lady gets a fix.” He started to reach for the twenties, then held up. “You gonna trust me with the money?”
          Francine handed the bills over. The man snatched them. “I know you’ll be back,” Francine said. “Because that’s not all I have.” She reached into her bag and pulled out two insulin syringes, still in their sterile packaging. “I’ve got more where those came from.”  
          “Man, you are some kinda off the wall something,” he marveled. “I’ve had social workers stop by with clean needles, but they’re never looking to get right themselves.” He looked at Francine’s bag. “I suppose you got alcohol swabs in there too? Mask and gloves?”
          “As a matter of fact.” 
          “Are you a fucking nurse or something?”
          “No, I taught the classics in community college,” Francine said. “But I’m retired now. I just happen to have a lot of medical supplies at home these days.”
          “Then you should be supplying me, not the other way around. You can probably get some good pharmaceuticals.”
          Francine gave a grim chuckle. “You’d have a hard time getting high off albuterol. And for what I need, my doctors aren’t a whole lot of help.”
          “Got that right. Doctors always got something against people getting high.” He stood up and stretched. “All right then. You wait here. I’ll be back.”
          “Looking forward to it. Hey, before you go, what’s your name?”
          “Ronnie.”
          “Ronnie. Well, thank you in advance, Ronnie.” She watched as he turned and jogged up the street.
          Francine squirmed on the milk crate. She kept a wary eye on the oxygen gauge, watching the needle creep toward red. She knew her second tank was full. Months of experience had taught her to estimate the amount of time left before she would need to get home and connect to her concentrator, the machine that harvested oxygen from the room air and kept her supplied around the clock as long as the electricity stayed on. 
          So many things to be aware of when your lungs are slowly giving up the ghost. She had come to regard errands like her current one (although this one was unusual) as akin to scuba diving on solid ground. The amount of time you could be out, the distance you could travel, the things you could do, everything was constrained by the amount of oxygen you could carry with you.
          The two-tank cart was a godsend, immediately doubling her range. A single tank could barely get her through a church service. Two tanks could accommodate both a lengthy sermon and a plodding communion ritual. But even with expanded capacity, she never risked going far enough away from home that an unforeseen event could put her in a bind. Except for this outing. 
          Out here, sitting on a traffic island surrounded by car exhaust and fluttering road trash, she felt like she was stranded in a wilderness. She caught glimpses of faces through the passing windshields. People with homes and jobs. People who could breathe. Twin currents of normal life flowing past her, oblivious to her situation.   She was about as far as she could get from the safe haven of a hospital room, where endless supplies of oxygen came out of a nozzle in the wall at flow rates that could inflate a truck tire. Francine was aware she was sitting on the edge, with only a smart phone and a 911 call to fall back on should her oxygen fail. 
          She was very tired. When the alveoli stop perfusing, the simplest activities—drying off after a shower, brushing your teeth—become as challenging as sprinting up the steps in a football stadium. Walking the short distance from where the Uber driver had dropped her off had sapped her strength. And then there was the energy it took to shout over the traffic noise at Ronnie. 
          She was starting to nod off when he finally returned. 
          “Yo, Franny,” he said, dancing like a little kid needing to pee. “The Eagle has landed.”
          Startled into wakefulness, Francine frowned. “My name is Francine.” She struggled up from the milk crate, holding on to the handle of her cart to steady herself. “Well, let’s see it.” 
          Ronnie glanced around and shook his head, smiling like a middle-schooler with a secret. “Not out here,” he stage whispered. “Don’t want to share the wealth.” He reached down and held open the zippered flap of his tent. “Come on in.”  
          Francine gave the tent a dubious look, then turned her gaze back on Ronnie who was almost shivering with—what, excitement? Withdrawal? He wiggled the flap, encouraging her to enter. “Come on,” he said. “This is what you came for, isn’t it?”
          Francine peered into the tent. She could just make out a pile of blankets in the gloom. She took a step forward and hesitated, looking up again at Ronnie. 
          “Come on, I don’t bite,” he said. 
          Francine took another tentative step, then slumped her shoulders. “In for a penny,” she sighed, stepping over the nylon threshold. 
          The interior smelled of unwashed bodies and musty blankets. The floor was a jumble of dirty bedding, sleeping bags and the quilted blankets that movers use to protect furniture. Francine stood just inside the entrance, unsure of where to step. She was short enough that she didn’t have to stoop, unlike Ronnie who followed her on hands and knees. He crawled to one side then pointed to a spot where Francine could sit. 
Francine pulled her wheeled cart after her. It didn’t roll very easily over the wadded-up bedding and almost tipped over once, but she was able to maneuver it into position. When it was stable enough for her to release her grip she slowly lowered herself down, first onto her knees, then onto her hip with her legs folded awkwardly to the side. She faced Ronnie at last, gasping from the exertion. 
          “You okay?” Ronnie looked at her dubiously.
          Francine closed her eyes and nodded, the universal sign of assent from the oxygen-deprived. Suddenly the mass of bedding next to Ronnie moved, and a woman’s head popped up from under the covers, a rough, ruddy face ringed with strands of thin, greasy blonde hair, a face that bespoke years of hard living on the streets.           “Who’s this?” the woman asked in a sleepy voice. 
          “This, is Santa Claus,” Ronnie announced. 
          “My name’s Francine.” 
          “She comes bearing gifts.” Ronnie reached into the pocket of his shirt. He pulled out several small brown paper bindles. The woman under the covers sat up, instantly alert. 
          “What’s the catch?” she asked, her eyes, bright and hungry, fixed on the packets in Ronnie’s hand.
          “Told you it was Christmas,” Ronnie said. “Francine here wants to learn how to get high.”
          The woman threw off more covers and crawled closer to Ronnie, smiling and increasingly agitated. “Hell, Ronnie, we can help her with that, can’t we?”
          “You bet, babe.” 
          “Wait a minute,” the woman said, her eyes narrowing. “You’re not a narc, are you?”
          “Do I look like a narc?” Francine asked.
          The woman took in the fragile old woman, sitting cross-legged in the dim light with a nasal cannula running under her nostrils and across her face. She glanced at the tall green oxygen tanks next to her. “That’s some rocking undercover if you are.”  
          “Nan, if she was a cop they’d have busted us by now,” Ronnie said. 
          Francine chuckled, as close to a full-on laugh as she was capable of. “That’s right. I’m going to arrest you any minute now. Just as soon as I catch my breath.”
          “You don’t look too good,” Nan said. 
          “No, I’m not doing too good.” Francine nodded at the bindles in Ronnie’s hand. “Can we get on with it?”
          Ronnie grabbed a battered backpack stuffed among the bedding and pulled out a pair of dubious-looking syringes, a bent spoon, and a cigarette lighter. He set the paraphernalia down on a small cracked serving tray, then rummaged around again in the backpack until he produced a plastic bottle containing a light yellowish liquid. 
          “What’s that?” Francine asked. 
          “Just water, with a little bit of lemon juice. We need this to mix it all up. Do you want to do it yourself or do you just want me to fix you up?”
          “I want to see how it’s done,” Francine said, leaning forward. “I want to see how much you use.”
          “Depends on how high you want to get. To a point.” He gave Francine a stern look. “You don’t want to OD. Especially somebody like you, not used to it.”
          “I know. I want to know where that point is. Exactly where it is.”
          “Depends on how big you are, how much tolerance you’ve built up. Somebody like you, first timer . . .” He left unsaid what Francine already knew. Somebody as frail as she was. Somebody a light breeze could knock over. 
          “Come on, Ronnie, what are we waiting for?” Nan urged, leaning closer to Ronnie, impatient with all the talk, rolling up the sleeve of her tattered sweatshirt. 
          Ronnie spread the paraphernalia out on the tray. As he started opening one of the bindles, Francine reached into her bag and pulled out a handful of insulin syringes, still in their sterile packaging. “Maybe you want to use these? Aren’t clean needles important?”
          Ronnie stopped in mid-motion. “A walking needle exchange.” He shook his head in wonder. “What’s your game, anyway? You come in here, looking to buy smack, set up with clean needles. What gives?”
          Francine’s gaze stayed fixed on Ronnie’s. “I just need to know how to do it,” she said, in a voice so soft it was almost drowned out by the rumbling of a passing truck.
          “And I say bullshit!”  Ronnie glared at Francine like an angry parent ordering his kid to cut the crap.         Then just as abruptly his face softened. “But we all got our own shit to deal with, don’t we? Live and let live, right?” 
          Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed the needles and ripped at the sterile packaging, extracting the syringes and laying them carefully on the tray.  Silence settled over the tent. Nan’s eyes stayed glued to the bindles in Ronnie’s scaly chapped hands as he carefully unwrapped the paper, revealing the precious brown powder inside. 
          Francine watched Ronnie’s hands just as intently, but with a different hunger in her eyes. She made careful note of the way he tapped the powder into the spoon, adding a few drops of liquid from the plastic bottle, then heating the mixture with the lighter. She watched as the powder quickly melted into slush, which then began bubbling brightly. 
          “All right babe, load up,” Ronnie whispered, as if breathing might disrupt the delicate chemistry at work in the spoon. Nan clutched at one of the syringes but Ronnie pushed her back with his arm. “Easy, take it easy.” 
          Nan caught herself and took a deep breath. She reached slowly now for one of the fresh needles, picked it up, pulled off the cap, and carefully set the tip into the bubbling liquid. She pulled back the plunger and drew the fluid into the syringe. As she did, Francine noticed the lines of black bruises running up the inside of her forearm, tracing the outlines of her scarred and tortured veins. 
          Ronnie took the syringe, then produced a length of rubber tubing and wrapped it tightly across Nan’s bicep, knotting it in place. Nan kept her arm out, hand balled into a fist, as Ronnie searched for a relatively unscathed place to poke for a vein. Francine watched as he chose a spot and inserted the needle. 
          Nan rolled her head back and let out a sigh. “Oh, that’s good, that’s good,” she said in a sleepy voice as she lay back against the rumpled bedding. She closed her eyes and started humming. 
          “Now it’s all good,” Ronnie agreed, as Nan sprawled out on the blankets. “Hard life on the streets, hanging with the crazies, rousted by the cops—one little bump and it all goes away.” He started to prepare the next syringe. “Is that what you’re looking for, to make all that go away?” He nodded toward her oxygen tanks.
          Francine smiled but didn’t answer. She looked at Ronnie, then at Nan lolling peacefully next to him, her face slack, expressionless, lost in whatever mental state the drug had given her. “Show me again how you do that,” she said in a stronger, more determined voice. Her face was set, her expression grim. “Show me how much you use.” She leaned forward to peer at Ronnie’s hands as he prepared the fix. 
          Ronnie obliged, then offered her the loaded syringe. “You next?”
          Francine looked at Nan. “How long will she be out?” 
          Ronnie shrugged. “A couple hours, maybe. Depends.”
          Francine shook her head. “I’m going to have to take those home. My oxygen won’t last that long.” 
          There were three unopened bindles remaining on the tray. Ronnie quickly scooped them up.  “I don’t think I’m gonna let you do that,” he said, with a sudden hint of menace in his voice. 
          Francine was startled by the implied threat. Then she realized—the bindles were as important to Ronnie as her own oxygen tanks were for her. “Oh, okay, I get it.” She thought for a minute then continued, “How about this? You let me take those home, and I’ll leave you with some extra needles and enough money to buy twice that.”
          “How about I just take your money and needles and throw your ass out of here?”
          Francine sighed. “I suppose you could do that. I certainly couldn’t stop you. Is that what you want to do?”           They locked eyes for several seconds. Then Ronnie laughed. 
          “It’s cool, it’s cool,” he assured her. “I’m a peaceful man. Live and let live, remember? We can do it your way.” He handed the bindles to Francine, then held his palm out. It trembled, almost as if shaken by the force of the passing traffic 
          Francine reached into her bag, pulled out a handful of insulin needles, then reached into her bag again and pulled out a wad of twenties. 
          Ronnie’s eyes widened at the sight of the roll of cash. “Jesus, you are one crazy lady. Coming down here with all that cash on you.”
          “Well, now it’s your problem.” Francine handed him the money. “Now you be careful.”
          Ronnie slipped the bills into the pocket of his shirt. He looked down at the tray on the blanket. There was still some powder left in the open bindle. “You sure you don’t want a little bump to get you home? You could probably snort that little bit.”
          “I think I can wait,” Francine said, placing the bindles into her small zippered purse. “I’ve waited this long. I want to be in my own bed when the time comes.” 
          “Yeah, I guess I can get that.” Ronnie wrapped the rubber band around his own arm. “I used to have a bed once.” He tightened the band and began slapping his forearm. “Remember to start slow,” he cautioned as he zeroed in on a promising vein. “You don’t want to do too much, especially at first.”
          “I heard you,” Francine said, slowly getting to her feet. She confirmed she had her bag slung over her shoulder, then reached into her pocket to feel for her smartphone. She grabbed the handle of her oxygen cart and tried to pull it over the bunched-up blankets. The wheels, impeded by the fabric, refused to roll easily.         “Could you . . . could you give me a hand with this?” 
          Ronnie paused just as he was about to inject himself. He gave an irritated grunt, then carefully set the syringe down, rolled onto his knees and lifted Francine’s cart over the lip of the entrance out onto the gravelly blacktop. Francine followed, guiding her oxygen hose so as not to trip or catch it on anything. When she got outside, she leaned on the handle of her cart and stood to catch her breath. Then she looked down at the gauges on her tanks. “Shit!” she whispered. She turned her face up to the grimy underbelly of the freeway above them and wailed, “I can’t believe I did this! I can’t believe I did this!”
          Ronnie’s head was still poking out of the tent. “Hey Franny, it’s still your choice if you want to do this. The best time to stop is if you haven’t started yet.”
          She looked down at his scraggly face, a mixture of fear and panic in her eyes. “It’s not that. I messed up. The valve somehow got open on the second tank. I usually check them both but I must have been in a hurry when the Uber came.”
          “So what’s that mean?”
          “I’m almost out. I don’t have enough to get home.”  Francine suddenly started taking deep, convulsive breaths, her shoulders heaving as she gasped for air. She sank to one knee with one hand on the handle, head bowed like a mourner at a gravesite.
          Ronnie’s eyes widened as he watched her sink down, struggling to breathe. Her eyes were closed, and she started to wobble.  
          “Shit fuck!” he fumed. He rolled back into the tent. “Hey Nan, we got a problem.” The shapeless form under the blankets shifted slightly. Ronnie looked back out. Francine had dropped to both knees now, and was sitting back on her haunches, still gasping for air.  
          “God damn it!” Ronnie hissed, pounding his fist on his thigh. His head swiveled hungrily between the loaded syringe and Francine. Finally with an exasperated growl he scrambled out of the tent and went to Francine’s side. Yanking her bag off her shoulder, he ransacked it, pulling out the bindles and remaining syringes.  He quickly stashed them in the pouch of his shirt.  Then he crawled back into the tent and began pulling together his own stash, carefully collecting the loaded syringe and the rest of the bindles and paraphernalia. 
          “Nan! Nan!” he called, slapping her lumpy form beneath the blankets. “Nan, get up! We gotta get out of here.”
          Nan poked her head sleepily from the pile and yawned. “Ronnie? Is that you?”
          “We gotta fly. Leave it all. I got the goods.”
          Nan slowly rolled over and lifted a leg out from under a moving blanket. “Wassup?” she slurred in a thick sleepy voice.
          “Franny’s fixing to die outside. We can’t be here when they find her.” He grabbed Nan’s forearm and started pulling her up. She teetered and stumbled against the side of the tent, then fell to her knees and peered outside at Francine. “She don’t look too good,” she mumbled.  
          “Wait!” Ronnie barked. Muttering curses under his breath, he crawled out and again grabbed Francine’s bag. He reached inside and pulled out her iPhone. The screen featured the grinning face of a Pomeranian. He started jabbing his finger repeatedly on the dog’s nose. “How do you work . . . can’t you just call 911 . . . fucking password!” 
          The sound of a car horn cut through the noise of the traffic, followed by a shout.
          “Mom!”
          Ronnie looked up to see a car stopped at the curb, traffic backing up behind it. The passenger door was open and a woman was running up the traffic island in their direction. Ronnie dropped the phone. 
          “What are you doing to her?” the woman shouted.    
          “Fuck!  We gotta go!” Ronnie grabbed Nan by the arm and pulled her out of the tent. Nan couldn’t exactly run, but she managed to stagger along as he dragged her up the street.   
          The woman ran up and knelt down next to Francine. “Mom!  Are you all right? What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at the hospital.”
          Francine looked up and began wearily shaking her head.  
          “Mom, don’t be ridiculous,” the woman scolded. “This is why we can’t let you go out by yourself. Something like this happens. John’s with me. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
          “My bag,” Francine whispered, looking around.  “I need my bag.”
          A man jumped out of the driver’s seat of the car, ignoring the honking cars behind him. He ran up and took Francine’s arm. “Fran, we were so worried. Let’s get you home.”
          The woman peered at the regulator gauges on the tanks. “My god, Mom. They’re both empty. What made you come out here?”
          John looked up at her. “Del, we’ll have plenty of time for that later.  We’ve got to get your Mom home.”
          “My bag,” Francine insisted.
          “I’ve got it, Mom,” Del said, holding it up so her mother could see. “Come on, let’s go. We’ve got your concentrator in the car.”
          “I’ll carry you,” John offered.
          “My bag,” Francine repeated, reaching out for it.  Her daughter gave her an exasperated look, then held the bag open. Francine reached inside and felt around.  
          “Is everything there? Were you robbed?”
          Francine looked up and nodded, tears of frustration welling up in her eyes. Del grabbed the bag and looked inside. “No, you’re good. Your wallet is still in there. And that guy dropped your phone. I’ve got it right here. Looks like we got here just in time. What on earth—”
          “Later, Del,” John insisted, scooping Francine up and cradling her like a child. Francine surrendered her body into his arms, all the fight gone out of her.   
          Del slung Francine’s bag over her shoulder, then grabbed the handle of the oxygen cart. She glared in the direction of Ronnie and Nan, who were watching from a good distance away, now that it was clear they weren’t being pursued. 
          “He took my stuff,” Francine murmured into John’s shoulder.
          “No, Mom,” Del insisted. “You’ve got everything. I checked. Everything’s here. We got here in time.”
          Francine threw a pleading look back at Ronnie and Nan as she was placed in the back seat of the car. Ronnie looked like he was the only thing holding Nan up, like if he let her go, she would slowly sink to the ground and curl up like a caterpillar.  
          Francine’s daughter climbed in the car next to her and set the cannula in place under her nostrils.  The oxygen concentrator sat on the floor between them, purring like a cat. Francine lay back against the leather seat and felt the cool stream of oxygen flowing into her nose on the way to her lacerated lungs. She leaned her head against the window, still looking out to where Ronnie and Nan stood motionless like twin discarded mannequins on the gritty tarmac. “He took my stuff,” she whispered, her forlorn gaze fixed on them until the car turned a corner and they disappeared into the shadows.