If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  Byron stood completely still, unmelted snowflakes intact in his hair, his face frozen in an emotion I couldn’t discern, and I realized then we’d never been able to read each other. It was how we’d managed to keep secrets for so long and why we’d caused each other so much pain. I didn’t know if I was trying to get him to admit that he loved me or to admit that he forgave me. Maybe, for me, the two were the same. But it didn’t matter what I felt, what I wanted. I’d trapped him here. I’d known he would get stuck. And whether or not he’d offered the ride, it had been my responsibility to turn it down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling foolish. “I’ll help you with the car.”

  It was important that he know I was willing to help him escape me.

  The work was never finished because the snow never stopped falling. When the plows did come, they would bury his car again with an icy wall of snow. The intersection up ahead was impassable. Byron craned his neck, looking for a way out, and though there was none, he kept shoveling.

  “This is all such a mess,” I said, “and it’s all because I love you. You know that, right? All the things I said—I said because I love you.”

  Had I expected him to return my love just because the day was so dramatic? He didn’t. He rolled his eyes. He said, “Jesus fucking Christ.” He pierced the snow with his shovel and left it sticking up that way; he shoved his hands in his pockets and went inside. I stood there next to the car for a while. A frat boy inched toward me. “Are you okay?” he asked, and though it would have felt good to share my emotions, I knew it wasn’t what this boy wanted, so I nodded and smiled, and felt embarrassed because a child had witnessed me arguing. These frat boys might be obnoxious but they were my frat boys.

  In any other situation, this would have been the end of things. But neither of us could go anywhere. The streets were choked with snow. I went after Byron, in some ways feeling like I shouldn’t, though it was my house, and where else did I have to go?

  * * *

  No matter who loved whom, we were tired of each other. Byron sighed, restless. I went into my room and, finally, got dressed.

  I hated that he was bored and anxious. I hated that I had to leave him alone. I typed in the password to my laptop and handed it to him—not because I didn’t trust him enough to give him the password but because it was a complicated string of letters and numbers and it was easier just to do it myself.

  The light outside faded. I made soup for no reason other than it was a time of day one might eat a meal. By made soup, I meant that I opened cans and heated their contents on the stove. The flames beneath the pot glowed bright blue.

  In a way I felt closer to Byron when were in separate rooms, as though we were close enough emotionally to spend time apart while under the same roof. As though we lived together. A peaceful feeling pulled up behind me, its headlights on, but then the headlights snapped off and I knew what I was feeling wasn’t true. But I was good at pretending so I called Byron to the table when the soup was hot—offering him the option to decline, of course, I said he was welcome to anything in the fridge if he wanted to eat alone.

  “My grandma used to say something at dinner,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Byron said into his soup.

  “There’s a little love in every meal.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  He saw my face.

  “I’m sorry,” he added. “I don’t mean to be hurtful.”

  I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. I felt he did mean to be hurtful, and in a way so did I, or at least I’d meant to make him feel guilty for not forgiving me and Duck—which is hurtful in its own way.

  “This was a bad idea,” he said. “I mean, how many more ways can the universe tell us it’s not meant to be.”

  He gestured outside at the still falling snow. I knew he was right that it wasn’t going to work between us. Maybe after this I would believe it for good. How quickly things had turned sour—one name mentioned, one phone call had completely destroyed the closeness we’d felt the night before. But I wished he would stop saying we weren’t meant to be. I was being stubborn about it, but it made me feel despised by fate, because if fate existed, he was clearly the good guy, and me the bad.

  “I mean, Jesus,” Byron said. “All those cell phone alarms? Warning! Danger! Telling me to go home, that the storm was going to be bad.”

  He let his spoon slip silently into the soup.

  “Could I have been dumber?” He started laughing.

  Someone new to the room might think he was truly joyful, but I knew he was a little delirious, we both were after the long day and the drinking and then the yelling and the past pounding on the door, demanding to be let in, claiming it had us surrounded. The more he laughed, the stronger the sting behind my eyes. I no longer cared if I cried in front of him. It seemed right to weep. I dropped my spoon, beads of soup went flying, and between sobs I told Byron not to tell me to stop crying. When I’d gathered myself a little I said, “Don’t you see? It was just us here today. No bigger plan. We made the decision, and it was the wrong one, but we got to decide.”

  “Maybe you did.” Byron’s mouth shrunk into a lopsided frown. “But not me.”

  We were at odds. We’d probably always be at odds, until we found a way to forget about each other completely. He believed in destiny and he thought Duck was meant to be one of the guilty ones, an enduring villain in the story of his life. While I thought nothing was meant to be at all, that we just were and we lived with our decisions and life became much more pleasant if we could . . . if not forgive, at least move on. But I’d never been through anything close to the pain Byron had experienced. That big heart I lacked. I couldn’t muster the empathy to understand why he couldn’t forgive us.

  We ate more soup. Byron told me he liked it. There remained the fact that we were stuck together until the storm let up.

  “Is there a way we can turn this around?” I asked.

  “Don’t start,” Byron said sharply.

  “No,” I said. “I just don’t want to be devastated by this weekend. We can’t undo it, we can agree not to be friends, not to speak, but while we’re stuck here can we agree on something, anything, just to make life after this a little easier? Can we watch a movie or something?”

  Byron reached across the table and squeezed my hand. That hope again, inside me, a bird raising its wings. He looked at me almost tenderly. “I think we should stop talking,” he said, “so we don’t kill each other.”

  * * *

  In the morning the snow had stopped but the streets still hadn’t been plowed. There was a car blocking the intersection ahead, someone who’d tried to go somewhere during the travel ban. The trains were running, though, and Byron said he would take one of them and return for his car another day. I didn’t think we’d ever be at peace, and we could agree that we both wanted peace. That would have to be enough because we had to leave each other alone now.

  I still thought, though, that the weekend could have gone differently. If only I’d let him go back to sleep.

  I wrote out my phone number and asked him to text me when he got home so I’d know he was safe. It was genuine, my request, something my mother asked me to do all the time, even in my thirties. Something I’d started asking people I cared about because so much could go wrong during one trip home. Byron agreed, and he seemed to appreciate that I’d asked him, and it took me the rest of the day to stop checking my phone, to realize he wasn’t going to text me.

  * * *

  He waited a few days before picking up his car. It was there one morning when I left to teach and gone when I returned home for lunch. For a minute I felt something of mine had gone missing and I had the urge to call the police to report the car stolen, but of course it had just been Byron taking back what was his. I wondered if he’d knocked on my door and I’d missed him. Probably not. I think he would have texted me.

  I talked to Duck later that week and the urge to tell him
everything was strong, but I felt I’d done enough damage for one week. Maybe one day, when we moved to the same city, we could talk about it. During the future breakfasts I imagined for us. During those breakfasts we were always happy, and when the past came up we would recall our former selves with love and forgiveness. That was the thing—there was always the option of forgiving yourself if you could just ignore the fact the people you’d hurt had never forgiven you.

  I stayed home the next weekend and watched sad movies to let my feelings run their course. My cat curled up on my lap and looked at me with his head tilted as I cried. I imagined myself finding and losing love like the people in the movies, but it wasn’t the same because I wasn’t as beautiful as the actors, plus the thought of going out and finding someone to take me home reminded me I’d never gotten the parking permit back from Byron. I wondered if the city of Newark would give me another one, or if they would think I was trying to trick them into giving me two. I didn’t find out because on Monday an envelope with no return address arrived in my mailbox. Byron had returned the permit, though he hadn’t included a note.

  We Are Holding Our Own

  Opal was a town of passing through. On Lake Huron, freighters hauled their cargo, and in the warm months tourists chopped through the waves on their Jet Skis. Between holidays, the out-of-towners beetled downstate, leaving their boats to slumber in the marina, where gulls screamed above the water. Those who stayed, the locals, kept up shop, many days the same, but every so often there was a really good storm, and big waves toppled over one another on their way to the shore. Alex had not been born in Opal but he counted himself one of them. He was a barfly at the Evergreen Tavern and a fry cook at the Big Boy in Tawas, and he worked a second job taking care of one of the second homes.

  Both jobs Alex had held since he was nineteen, more than a dozen years now, and all that vanished time rattled around inside him like engine knock. He couldn’t account for much of it, and when things had changed, they’d done so in expected ways. He married a woman he worked with named Dolores. His mom passed, and so did Jack Leland, the owner of the cottage on the lake that Alex patched up and battened down. Jack left the property to his son, Peter, who was not very well liked. But Alex had known that day would come and was not surprised when it did.

  Peter Leland’s drinking had thinned his hair and made his skin sallow, something his money could have fixed if he’d chosen, but he chose not to. Everyone except Alex had liked Jack better. Jack never sidestepped from what he thought was right; he had an uncompromising morality admired by some but which Alex found boring. Nothing was so simple to him as it had been to Jack. Peter, however, concerned himself only with having fun. He often drank to teetering and said whatever his mind loosed, but none of it offended Alex. Of all his problems (money, boredom, sexual frustration), Alex considered the way Peter acted in Opal the least of them, and Peter left him unperturbed, though that began to change in the summer of 1994.

  The night Alex first slept with Beau, he watched Dolores slip into Peter Leland’s car like a kerchief caught by a gust. She had squeezed into candy-red shorts, and the tattered ends of her hair flitted around her waist like a crowd of moths. Their laughter when they turned around and saw Alex run after the car and kick its bumper filled him with shame. Her heart was as small as a postage stamp.

  Down the way Lake Huron threw itself against the shore and retreated, and Alex went back into the Evergreen. The Fourth of July had just passed. Up and down the beach, the air popped and fizzled with leftover illegal fireworks bought in Ohio and sold out of the back room of the bait shop. Alex hoisted himself back onto his stool and talked to Beau, the owner of the bar. Her voice had a rasp Alex liked and she used it to gossip and laugh into the night. She was nearly forty, about Peter’s age, and rumored by some to be a lesbian. She provided the town with most of its gossip, and Alex was attracted to her.

  Alex didn’t find many people interesting enough to think about for long, his mind moving like a swarm migration, but Beau was different. Beau was able to wrangle Alex’s ego, and he even felt shy around her, until he’d had a few. She had full lips and long fingers. Her hair, dark yellow, looked windswept. Beau, his gaze lingered on.

  That night, he drank until his reflection above the bathroom sink was fluid. Only a few regulars hung around the bar, so Beau let Alex buy her a drink, then a few more. Alex could feel the two or three other patrons look up from their pool-shooting camaraderie at them—Beau laughing loudly, Alex guzzling booze—but Alex let their attention amble by. The night—the alcohol, the attraction—orbited its own sun. When the bar closed and Beau locked the door behind her, Alex said, “You want me to take you home or something?”

  * * *

  Alex listened to Beau’s breathing slow into sleep and thought about Dolores in Peter’s bed. He would have to see them both eventually, a notion that numbed the night. To himself he hurled insults at Peter, and to Dolores, he said this was all her fault, that she had pulled the trigger, but he knew that wasn’t true. When Alex and Beau had sat in his car, a thrill had gone through his body, and what they were about to do had crackled before them like a downed power line, and there was Alex, stepping forward but somehow invincible.

  But while Beau was affectionate with Alex that night, she didn’t entertain much conversation. Her job was to talk, she said, and she talked constantly. It was the Evergreen that made her voice hoarse. Beau fell asleep early, leaving Alex awake and alone in her wood-paneled cottage on the Au Sable River, sketches of owls eyeing him from the wall while the current moved silently outside, the water headed for the lake. Beau had laughed once at something Alex had said, a single short chuckle that made his chest rise like a flock of cranes, but come midmorning, Beau wanted him gone, and she answered vaguely when Alex asked what she had planned for the next evening.

  He returned home to find Dolores still away.

  Their house, a rental on one of Pearl Street’s small lots, had the same wood walls as Beau’s. A lithograph of a sinking ship that had belonged to Alex’s mother hung on one wall. He stared at the print and thought of taking it down and throwing it away, punching the glass into the trash can.

  He knew Dolores was scheduled to waitress at the Big Boy that afternoon, and he had heard Peter say he wanted to drive to Champagne Hill. The Leland beach house would be empty, so Alex showered and dressed and went to Peter’s, where the garden needed weeding and the snake grass that grew in the sand, throttling. The work was quicker and easier without Peter there—Peter always wanted to talk and always had a drink in his hand—and though Alex had been sure he would be alone today, he arrived to find Dolores and Peter on the beach together, lounging on folding chairs.

  When Peter saw Alex, he stood and spread his arms wide in greeting. The jealousy that had beset Alex the night before subsided, and he was not angry with Peter, a lack of feeling that troubled him. Kicking Peter’s bumper had been a drunken, meaningless act, and all the things Alex had thought to say to Peter and Dolores floundered at the sight of them. Their figures against the sand were almost unrecognizable, two people Alex did not know.

  Dolores only looked at her husband over the rim of her sunglasses before turning back to the water, but Peter moved toward Alex, who started for the garage to get the push mower. Peter stepped quickly through the sand, calling out for Alex to wait.

  “Hot, hot, hot,” Peter said, shaking sand from his bare feet. He wore swim trunks and an unbuttoned shirt. The ice in his drink chimed, and Alex noticed that Peter’s hand shook, almost imperceptibly, but Alex knew to look for it.

  “I’m starting with the lawn,” Alex said, but Peter waved the thought away.

  “No,” he said. “No, Alex, come to the water. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you still!”

  Alex watched Peter’s retreating back and thought of ignoring him, but soon his feet carried him to the beach. The wind was picking up, and sand stung Alex’s legs as he walked. The lake thrashed a canoe that Peter had tied to his dock, and
his American flag rattled against its pole. Dolores, upon seeing Alex approach, dragged her chair closer to the water, away from the men. She released the lounger’s joints so she could lie down. Her face shone with sweat.

  “Look at her,” Peter said under his breath as Dolores stretched out her arms to bake them in the sun. Alex braced himself for Peter to say something cruel, but instead he just said, “She looks happy.”

  Alex inspected his wife from the distance that separated them. Her eyes were closed, her face expressionless, but perhaps Peter was right. She did look serene. Was it possible that Peter, the devil who tore through the town, was the one who could make his wife happy, peaceful?

  Alex, startled by this thought, began to laugh. The laughter replenished him. “She does,” he said. “Doesn’t she?”

  * * *

  A hope rose inside Alex as the day went on that the arrangement might work, that he and Beau could go on with their affair, and so could Dolores with Peter. The next night, Alex drank at the Evergreen until close, and once again went home with Beau. The next one, too, and after a few weeks, Alex waited nightly at the bar for closing time, and the end of every evening approached like a hot-air balloon headed for a tree. Slow, disastrous, exciting. Beau was eight years older than Alex, and he felt like a teenager around her, reckless and wild and uncertain.

  At the same time, however, Alex feared the excitement would fade, as it had with Dolores and as it naturally would with Beau, and they wouldn’t find anything to replace it with.

  One day, they found a quiet place to talk. They rowed a hundred yards out onto Lake Huron in one of Peter’s rowboats and the lake heaved them up and down. Instead of not finding anything to talk about, as Alex had feared, they found themselves offering conversation so readily it was as though they were rolling dice. The wind threw pillows of air in their faces, and it helped, maybe, that they didn’t have to look at each other as they spoke, as busy as they were fluttering sunlight away from their eyes and Beau pulling strands of her hair from her mouth.