If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  Still, she came even though it was winter and bitter cold. She slept by his bed while he was in the hospital. The night before the surgery found Harris tangled in sleeplessness. IV bags of liquid medication were strung above them like mistletoe. Machines coughed out numbers. The blood pressure pump inflated around his arm automatically once every hour, but Ella dozed through all of this. Earlier that day, when his hospital gown had slipped off his shoulder and exposed his bare ass, she was a good sport. She said, “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” and good memories of their old life together flooded back to him. But as the nurses wheeled Harris into the OR, and as the mask was fitted over his face, the memories became sad. He thought of the days when he and Ella shared prosperity if not happiness, when their togetherness had felt natural and perpetual, and how those days were gone forever, and then the anesthesia massaged his brain to sleep.

  When he came out of sedation after the surgery, the pain was so great and the world pulsed in a disorienting way that made him believe he was dying. His heart rate soared and Ella held his hand as they put him back under—to give him a little more time to rest.

  She stayed for two weeks. When he went home to his one-bedroom apartment (Ella had gotten the house all those years ago, but had lost it to the bank during the housing crisis, and now lived in a similar apartment herself), they watched movies together. The break from loneliness did his recovering heart a lot of good. He had someone to talk to. He told Ella about the good news he’d had right before the surgery: the advertising agency where he used to work before he’d been fired (for being drunk too often) had hidden pension funds from their employees. A retirement account with a hundred thousand dollars in it was to be set up in Harris’s name. This came just in time: his savings were dwindling. He hadn’t worked in a couple years, though for a while he’d worked for a small agency in Sioux Falls. Then the recession hit, and he was let go in a last-one-hired / first-one-fired sort of situation. Luckily, he was allowed to keep his old health insurance and pay for it himself. He had a vague idea that Obama was to thank for this, and he was indeed thankful.

  Before the surgery, he’d flung hundreds of applications into the void of the internet. He had a profile on every job site there was. He’d even flown to Missouri for an interview, though he could tell as soon as he sat down that they had no real intention of hiring him.

  Ella congratulated him when he told her about the money. “You worked hard at that agency,” she said, “up until the end, at least.”

  It was true. He’d won awards. He’d had a corner office. It had all collapsed around him, but for years his creativity flowed and he made money for the company by snapping his fingers. He’d made his and Ella’s money disappear by snapping his fingers, too. There’d always been another paycheck, until the day the severance ran out.

  Ella left Sioux Falls and Harris kept going to physical therapy. A month passed. Harris and Ella talked at first, but then Ella stopped calling. She was distracted by her own life. Lindsey didn’t call much either, but that wasn’t unusual. The last time they had spoken, she had made a comment about always being tired, and Harris worried she was depressed—he was sometimes depressed and had spent years feeling overlooked until he finally started taking drugs for it—but she didn’t sound sad. Harris told her to call him if she needed anything. Another month passed and Harris felt a dark cloud engulf him once again.

  He emailed Lindsey and told her how he was feeling.

  I’m lonely out here, he wrote. Send me a note when you have time and tell me how you are.

  Lindsey didn’t respond. Harris’s sadness sharpened into anger and roared through him like a motorcycle alone on the road in the middle of the night. Lindsey was a cold girl. But then the bad feelings deflated. His contempt for his unhappy angel never lasted long.

  Then the money came in, gloriously six figured, and the money worked alchemy on his feelings, mixing them until they were golden and happy.

  Harris turned fifty-six, another year having come and gone. He started dating a woman from AA named Claudia—a lifelong South Dakotan who wore camouflage and never cut her hair. She inspected wastewater treatment plants for the state but was planning to retire soon. Harris newly had a job as a copywriter for another agency. He’d had the same title in his twenties—he was a senior copywriter before he’d even turned thirty—but these were different times. He would have taken anything that came his way.

  Things got serious with Claudia quickly. They both thought, What the hell? After a few months, they decided to move in together. After looking for rentals was unsatisfactory, they put a down payment on a house together, a small ranch with a big yard right on the edge of Sioux Falls, where the city met the prairie. Harris stood in the front yard as Claudia wrestled the big wooden For Sale sign out of the ground (the realtor was taking too long to come and get it, she said) and he thought it was nice to have one’s own front yard.

  They hadn’t finished unpacking when Ella called, just a few weeks later. She said she’d done some thinking. She said it broke her heart to do this, but she felt she had no other choice.

  “Half that money is mine,” she said. “It’s from a job you had when we were married.”

  * * *

  Harris got a lawyer, who said there was no use fighting it because Ella was right. It wasn’t so simple as just giving her half, so Harris still had to pay the lawyer, even though all the lawyer had done was tell Harris he’d lost. Harris’s lawyer talked to Ella’s lawyer to hammer out the details of Harris’s losing. He charged five hundred dollars for each hour it took him to figure out how best to give Ella half the money.

  Then the lawyer asked if Harris had a will, and Harris said he might as well make one, so they did that too, and he made it so everything would go to Lindsey. The two of them, Ella and Lindsey, had punted him out of their lives, and here he was giving them all his money.

  He calmed down quickly. He was always getting angry and then calming down.

  He left his lawyer’s office after signing the paperwork and climbed into the Ford Escape he’d bought after the money had come in. He was still driving around with the temporary license plate taped to the back window. He wondered if they would buy it back, and how much of a hit he would take just for having driven it around for a month. He’d taken pretty good care of it. There was a stale muffin crumbling on the passenger-side floor, but he could vacuum that up with the car vac outside the Sinclair. It cost twenty-five cents for the car vac to run for a few minutes, which was all the time he needed.

  Maybe he was getting ahead of himself. He rolled down the windows, adjusted the mirrors, and eased his way into the light Sioux Falls traffic. Maybe he wouldn’t need to sell the car.

  The bigger problem was that he hadn’t told Claudia about Ella or the lawyers, maybe hoping Ella would change her mind. Now money that should be going toward the house was in Ella’s pocket, and he hadn’t put a brake on expenses he should have put a brake on.

  He’d just had a pool guy over, and the pool guy had marked off the dimensions for a pool with posts and spray paint. There probably wouldn’t be a pool now, just paint on the grass and posts with plastic flags flapping in the wind until Harris mowed everything away.

  He tried to do calculations in his head but the numbers were recalcitrant to his efforts. He could only hold one figure at a time. It was like choosing fruit at the grocery store, only to have the whole pile topple because you picked the wrong apple from the middle, an apple that was really crucial to holding everything up.

  Instead of going home, he drove to the DMV to get the plates for his car. It had taken him long enough. It was a thirty-minute drive to the DMV. Summer was upon them, and the neat rows of fields scrambled together, meeting at a point in the distance, then blew apart as Harris sped down the country road. Involuntarily Harris felt himself brighten. This gorgeous day spread before him, ready for him to fill it. Irrigation pivots snapped their heads back and forth in the fields. The first hint of green
cabbages appeared.

  Harris would’ve died without the surgery. He wasn’t out of the woods, though. He needed to be careful. He’d had a cigarette the other day. The urge to smoke had felt like such a brilliant solution to all his problems, so he’d lit one up. It hadn’t solved anything, just made him worry Claudia would smell it on him.

  He approached the little city that held the county seat. Harris had to drive all this way because he lived in the part of Sioux Falls that crept into Lincoln County. It was a small town, its streets tree lined and quiet. At a stop sign he fiddled with the glove compartment until the latch popped open and his amber canister of Chantix appeared, the pills rattling, practically promising they would help him quit smoking. He took one. The tiny pill felt heavy on his tongue.

  He waited in lines, took numbers, approached windows, filled out forms, and finally he left with his license plates. He would put them on right away. He kept tools in the trunk. He tore the temporary plate from the back window, crumpled it up, and tossed it in a garbage can at the edge of the parking lot.

  Then he realized he only had a flathead screwdriver. He walked across the street, where there was a small hardware store, but they were sold out of Phillips-heads. Harris asked how that had happened, wasn’t that something they always had, given its popularity?

  The cashier shrugged.

  He went back inside the DMV, but they had no tools he could use. He looked for his paper plate in the trash, but someone had dumped coffee out on top of it.

  He stood by his car for a few minutes, thinking of what to do. A school bell rang. It was one of those bells you actually had to ring manually. Harris could see the schoolyard, kitty corner to the DMV. There was a kid in an orange safety vest pulling the rope and making the clapper swing. Harris decided he would just drive home without the plates on.

  He got pulled over halfway. The state trooper approached his car, unhurried. Harris was ready with the window down.

  “Where are your plates?” the trooper asked.

  Harris explained the situation. He held up the plates in their plastic package.

  “You’ll have to put them on before driving any further,” the trooper said.

  “Do you have a Phillips-head screwdriver?” Harris asked.

  The trooper seemed to be deciding whether or not it was reasonable for Harris not to have the right screwdriver with him. He stared off into distance, drummed his fingers on Harris’s car door, and eventually sighed and wrote him a ticket.

  “Go right away to the nearest hardware store and get a screwdriver.” The trooper tore away the ticket and gave it to Harris.

  Harris agreed, but instead he just went home, where he knew where he already had the right screwdriver.

  Claudia asked him where he’d been. She was sitting in their new breakfast nook with its half-moon table. A mug of tea before her sent spirals of steam into the air. The sun came strongly between them, the light level with their faces. Her eyes squinted and captured him suspiciously as he stood with his hands in his pockets, rattling change.

  He broke down and told her everything, finishing with the story about the screwdriver and how he really hadn’t meant to drive without plates.

  “Did you realize half that money was Ella’s when you started spending it?”

  Harris shook his head. “I was just glad it had come to me. I didn’t think about whether or not anyone else had a claim to it.”

  “You’ve been divorced for a long time,” Claudia said. “It’s reasonable that you wouldn’t remember.”

  She looked out of the window, just stared, like the trooper had done earlier, and Harris wondered what it was people were looking for when they stared off like that.

  “It sounds like Ella needs it,” Claudia continued. “From what you say about her.”

  “It’s true. Illness and debt.”

  “And she’s basically a good person?”

  “Yes, she’s good, more or less. The way anyone is good.”

  “Okay,” Claudia said. “I suppose I’m not upset, but you should have told me.”

  “I guess we need to look at finances,” Harris said.

  “I guess so.”

  They put it off, though. They said they would talk about it over the weekend, but they didn’t. They put the pool guy off, too, though Claudia didn’t want to take down the stakes—not yet. The grass grew long. Harris mowed around the stakes. One day when he was mowing Claudia came out onto the patio, waving the cordless phone. Harris killed the engine and it went out sputtering.

  It was Ella.

  “Claudia almost wouldn’t give me the phone,” Ella said. “She said she didn’t know if you wanted to talk to me.”

  “What did you say?” Harris asked, full of dread that Ella had called spitting fire.

  “I told her it concerned our daughter, whom she’s never met and didn’t raise.”

  “What about her, Ella?”

  She said Lindsey was in the hospital.

  * * *

  Harris bought a plane ticket that night. He called his supervisor at work and explained that his daughter was sick. “She’s in the ICU at the University of Michigan hospital,” he said, to prove things were serious.

  He was sure to get a window seat. He searched for the window seat because that’s what he always did, and then wondered if he shouldn’t have cared about what seat he got, if he should have just picked whichever one the mouse landed on, or not even have asked to pick one at all, because it was an emergency and in emergencies you don’t care where you sit. The window seat had been chosen, though, and there was no point in thinking about it further.

  The ground fell away as the plane took off, and after a few tips of the wings the plane straightened and they roared east. He’d been surprised to learn, upon getting sober, that he loved flying. He always used to be drunk for flights. But today the plane couldn’t keep his attention.

  When the flight attendant stalked the aisle with the beverage cart, he almost ordered a scotch and soda, his old drink. The impulse bewildered and unsettled him; it reminded him of the haunted feeling he got whenever he had a dream he was drinking.

  Lindsey had no diagnosis but was in the hospital, having things done like blood transfusions and emergency surgery to remove a kidney. What were the doctors doing removing kidneys when they didn’t even know what was wrong? He felt a lot of built-up emotion rush through him as he sat on the plane. He was thrown back into the years of suffering he and Ella had put each other through. And now he was seeing Lindsey for the first time in six years. All those years had just vanished, and how could he have let them disappear? Maybe Lindsey didn’t want to see him, but he could have insisted. And he was only seeing her now because she’d almost died.

  Tears filled his eyes and he pressed the heels of his hands into his sockets. His seatmate shifted uncomfortably. Harris wanted to tell this stranger everything, but he didn’t.

  It was easy to forget that Ella was an addict, too, because she’d gotten clean and stayed clean, whereas Harris had relapsed time and again until the divorce. That was when Lindsey stopped liking him. She’d written him a letter right after he moved out, saying she never wanted to see him again. Her letter had finally brought hin to a place where he knew he only had two choices: get clean and scrape together the remains of a life, or die.

  Things would never be the same, but he was on this plane trying to make things right, or as right as could be. The loss of his family was mostly his fault, if not entirely. Even though he and Ella had met in rehab—even though their whole relationship had grown from that demented seed—he was the one who hadn’t recovered soon enough.

  * * *

  Harris found the hospital to be labyrinthine when he got to it. He asked many people for directions but still wandered the long echoing corridors whose overhead fluorescents made rectangular puddles of light on the floor. He found himself on a breezeway overlooking Ann Arbor. He briefly wondered if he was even in the hospital anymore. Maybe the hospital wa
s connected to a mall or something.

  He remembered the first time he’d met Ella. It hadn’t been that far from here. They were both in rehab in the early 1980s, a dank facility their parents were paying for. It was understaffed and full of shaking junkies. Ella was detoxing from a mix of stuff, and Harris heard her cry for help from the hallway. There were no nurses around, so Harris went in himself. She told him the room was filling with Ping-Pong balls. Her eyes were blue and wild and long blond hair fanned her pillow. She’d been tied to the bed with restraints.

  “I’m going to suffocate,” she’d said.

  Later, when she was a little better, they decided they looked familiar to each other. They listed mutual friends until they realized they must have seen each other before at parties in Ann Arbor, thrown by a cocaine dealer who’d been Ella’s boyfriend at the time.

  Harris stood on the sixteenth floor of the hospital, thinking of all this. He could see above the tree line. In every direction he could see trees. South Dakota didn’t have as many trees. Mostly just prairies and political billboards with Photoshopped fetuses on them. He’d ended up in South Dakota by accident. He’d gone to a fancy rehab in Minnesota after the divorce, and there he met a guy who knew a guy in advertising in Sioux Falls.

  If someone had told him, when he was in his twenties, that he was going to end up in Sioux Falls, that younger version of himself would have said there’d been a mistake. But then again, Harris thought, your former self was always turning into your current self, and the former self didn’t have much say in the matter of how all that went down.

  Finally, he found Lindsey in her bed. She had a little curtained cubicle that was crowded with machines and IV poles. One IV pushed thick red blood into her veins. It was someone else’s blood, but whose blood, and could they trust this person? An oxygen tube lined her cheekbones, sending oxygen into her nostrils. She was so thin. She looked like a pile of bones covered in a sheet; he couldn’t believe there was flesh beneath the blanket, but there was.