If the Body Allows It

by Megan Cummins

  Every so often I think of the ways his kidnapping might have gone differently, or might not have happened at all. If Byron had had a phone—he’d lost his in the scuffle in the parking lot—or if he’d felt for the handle and jumped out of the car or screamed and kicked until he’d frightened Duck enough to let him go. I knew Duck. Duck would have caved, under the right pressure—but how could Byron have known this? I think these things because even after all of this, I still believe Duck thought he was playing a joke—a cruel trick for which he should have had to atone, but a joke that meant no lasting harm. He couldn’t have known what would happen to Byron alone on the roads in the middle of the night. But Byron thought Duck had brought this particular fate to our doorstep and was responsible for all of what happened—and this was where Byron and I had always disagreed.

  Byron had gotten lost trying to find his way home and had asked the wrong person for help along the way. He spent three days locked in a basement convinced he wasn’t going to live. No food, and though the man who’d taken him hadn’t touched him, he’d sat at the top of the stairs and talked low and darkly about what he was going to do when, he said, the time was right. Byron escaped by chance: Carl Sands’s uncle had come over unannounced while Sands was out, had gone into the basement looking for the industrial fan he’d loaned his nephew, and found Byron so petrified he was unable to speak. Byron was rescued; the bodies of Sands’s past victims were found.

  I don’t know why I didn’t circle the wagons around Duck like my parents had. Instead I started visiting Byron during the day at his house after his rescue. The feeling I’d had on the side of the road, the electric charge at the sight of him, had stayed with me. I brought him books and slices of cake in individual plastic boxes, the folded forks you snapped in place taped to their lids. There was nothing to do but talk and no one was watching us so we got to know each other without awkwardness. I’d visit in the hours after school, before his parents got off work. We fell a little bit in love. He was traumatized, desperate to be loved, as I was but in a different, undamaged way. I was touched that he liked me even though Duck was my brother. Romeo and Juliet—that’s who I thought we were.

  But he didn’t know I’d seen him that night. That I could’ve ended the trouble with one quick call on my cell phone.

  After high school we both went to Florida State where we were free from the town and our parents who said we shouldn’t be together, who had kept us apart for the last two years we lived at home. I remember the feeling of finally relaxing in each other’s arms. Before I told him the truth. We would have sex in empty basement classrooms if my roommate or his wouldn’t leave the room. Dust floated in the columns of light that seeped in through the tilt-turn windows at the top of the walls. Once I pressed a handprint of chalk against the blackboard when we were done, and it was still there when I’d gone back to the classroom for my French class the next day, and seeing it there beneath the conjugations turned me on. Byron, at the time, was in denial about what had happened to him. He’d stopped going to therapy. When I finally told him the truth—it had welled up in me, metastasized, and by that point I’d felt secure enough in Byron’s love to anticipate forgiveness—I thought enough time had passed for him to have distanced himself from what had happened. Naively, I thought the fact he’d stopped going to therapy was a sign of his recovery.

  He wouldn’t look at me while he told me how terrible I was. That was the worst part, that he wouldn’t meet my eyes. I’d done nothing the night I’d seen him in Duck’s car, nothing the day after, or the following day. I hadn’t noticed when he hadn’t shown up to school even though we were in the same lab group in biology. It was only after he returned, famous, that I took an interest in him. I tried to tell him that wasn’t how it was. He said I was as bad as my brother.

  * * *

  I suppose I assumed that because Byron had spoken to me and was now driving me home, he no longer thought I was a terrible person. I suppose I assumed he’d forgiven me.

  The frantic flurries made it seem like we were driving through static, and indeed there was something exciting about impending weather and something very sexy about being together in it. We were partners in a little bit of danger. I gave him directions, but his phone gave him better ones.

  Even at the beginning of what they were calling a historic blizzard, the streets of New York were crowded, but then we crossed into New Jersey and the bright buzz of the city thinned as we emerged from the Holland Tunnel into Jersey City and the arteries of freeways that led us to Newark, which spread before us with its empty outstretched palms. We passed city hall and its bright golden dome. I almost pointed it out. There was some story about how the city had gotten that golden dome from someone rich who’d later been indicted for something, but I couldn’t remember it. I glanced at Byron. He still held my hand, but limply, and I could see that the quiet and the emptiness unsettled him. We’d been talking cheerfully up until now. In the crowd of people at the party he’d been at ease, as he’d been driving in a sea of other cars, but the sudden aloneness of Newark at night was like going to a beach and finding no water. At least that was how it had felt to me when I first moved there. I wanted to tell him it was a feeling you got used to, living in a big city whose streets emptied of people at night, but his face now looked as stern as the rows of buildings on either side of us.

  “I’m surprised you keep a car in the city.” I wanted to keep the conversation going. “I don’t know many people who drive.”

  Byron’s face darkened. He disentangled his hand from mine and adjusted the vents. He placed both hands on the wheel.

  “I drive almost everywhere,” he said.

  It wouldn’t be until later, when a state of emergency was declared and the travel ban put into place, that I realized Byron needed to control his own movements, though it should’ve been obvious to me. We were in our thirties now; fifteen years had passed, but for Byron the fear of dying had only gotten worse.

  We passed the building where I taught, and the café where I got coffee. I wanted to share these small, inconsequential pieces of my life with Byron but worried he wouldn’t care. I also had this feeling that because of what I’d done I didn’t deserve to do things like teach young people or get takeout coffee. So I just directed him to my street, a row of residential brownstones with a few frat houses mixed in. The frat boys were out and partying; a line of people waited to get inside one of the houses, a tall boy at the door holding out his hand for the five-dollar cover. I lived a few houses down and liked the proximity to these young people and the way the street came alive on weekend nights.

  I gestured to the empty side of the street in front of my building, where I rented the first floor. There was nothing but room to park, but even so it was permit parking only, so I fished in my purse for the hanging permit I’d gotten from the city though I didn’t have a car myself. I’d given the permit to the poet so he could park his car at my house, and just the other day he’d left it in my mailbox in the History Department.

  Byron had relaxed after seeing all the people on the street and the glowing lights in my neighbors’ houses. He killed the engine. I lived across the street from a hospital. Lights glowed behind each of its many windows. Byron twisted his neck to look up through the windshield. It was a Catholic hospital, and snow swirled in a frenzy around the cement cross stationed at the top of the hospital’s highest gable. I touched his shoulder. He looked down into his lap. We left the car and climbed the porch steps. The things going through my mind were basic: my bathroom wasn’t clean enough, and I didn’t have anything to eat in the fridge.

  Inside, I dropped my purse and coat on a chair by the door and went through the house switching on the lights, as though I needed to reassure Byron I wasn’t hiding anything. I never used the overhead lights, they gave me a headache, but I had lamps stationed like sentries in every corner. I caught sight of my reflection in the kitchen window as I tugged the cord to lower the blinds. I was surprised to see I looked ha
ppy, that my expression betrayed none of the wild uncertainty I felt. I invited Byron to sit down, gesturing through a pair of pocket doors into the living room, and he loped into it with his hands shoved in his pockets, admiring the marble fireplace while I snapped a lighter, trying to get a few candles lit.

  We probably should have had a conversation, but instead we had sex. Byron crossed the room and took the burning candle from my hand, set it on the bookshelf behind me. He dipped his face toward mine and kissed me. The hunger I felt was no longer just hunger for anyone to relieve my loneliness, but hunger for him specifically. The feeling was so strong it made it seem like there was no risk to anything, no risk of waking up tomorrow and wishing we hadn’t done this. Everything would be okay if we just kept our bodies close.

  Clothes came off. Pressed together, we took big awkward steps toward the armchair. We tripped on my cat who’d slunk in to say hello and who screamed and scattered from underfoot. We laughed into each other’s mouths. I pushed him into the chair and slipped off my panties. He pulled me on top of him. We said only dirty, meaningless things. We didn’t use protection, as though we were still eighteen and we’d never been with anyone else.

  We found our way to the floor. The varnished wood was cold and hard against my bones. For a minute, when we were entangled, I felt that this was everything, that our bodies had fixed everything. Melted the past. Love had come out of something awful.

  We were so close I couldn’t see his whole face.

  The lamps bathed us in yellow light. I liked to get up and clean myself right after sex but I was afraid to disrupt the connection between us.

  “Stay here,” I whispered finally. Maybe it would be good to give him a minute to collect himself, so we might avoid an awkward conversation that would lead to his leaving. In the bathroom I found my cat on the windowsill, eyeing me as I washed. “Don’t judge,” I said to him. And then, for no other reason than because I needed the release, I let out one quick dry sob. So much weight had been lifted, and so much love had taken its place. Seeping into my heart was the feeling that Byron wouldn’t be here if he didn’t want to be, that he’d felt the same dive into rapture I had.

  I returned with blankets and pillows. We’d left the party late and it had gotten even later. The storm was picking up but hadn’t accumulated much yet. The window for him to leave safely was closing. Still open, but closing. “Stay the night?” I said when I’d sunk to the floor.

  Byron lifted his head from the floor and squinted to read the face of the wall clock. His skull met the floor with the sound of a heavy coin dropping.

  “I won’t go anywhere until the plows come through,” he said.

  It wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for. I could sense Byron drifting into sleep, myself too, but I tried to fight it, knowing we’d have to get reacquainted in the morning. Outside the wind was picking apart the world.

  * * *

  I didn’t want to think of the past as I tried to sleep, but it crept in like cold air through the poorly insulated windows. I thought of Byron on the dark country road after Duck had expelled him from the Mustang. Fear dried out Byron’s mouth; in the space I occupied, between sleep and wakefulness, my tongue stuck to a dry mouth, too, and plaque crusted my teeth. I kicked the blankets away. The laces on Byron’s sneakers were fraying and wouldn’t stay tied, so he kept bending to fix them. He felt less lonely and less frightened when he allowed himself to listen to the chorus of insects and birds. In Newark, as I dozed, my cat tracked the progress of the storm in the window, every so often chattering at falling snow. Florida was a loud and lively place at night. A full moon hung low in the sky. A transparent cloud passed over it, like a threadbare towel hung on a knob. The brightness of the moon distracted Byron. He didn’t hear the car coming up behind him, and when he finally turned he could feel the heat of its engine. Outside my window the first plows could be heard waking up the city. Byron weighing options in the glare of one working headlight. Byron getting in the car, the car picking up speed as Byron asked for a ride back to the beach.

  I slipped into sleep, and suddenly in the dream I was the one behind the wheel.

  * * *

  I woke up to find Byron looking at me calmly. There’s sometimes a loss of meaning when you translate night into morning. He blinked, a small scowl creasing his face.

  The room was cold, and my bones felt bruised from sleeping too long on the hard wood without rolling over.

  “Is it late?” I asked

  “It’s not early,” Byron said.

  I wanted to ask him how long he’d been awake and watching me. I felt ashamed for sleeping late with him here, as though sleeping in was something I should’ve grown out of.

  “Have the plows come through?”

  “No,” Byron said, “and there’s a travel ban. So it looks like you’re stuck with me.”

  He tried to laugh, but the laugh couldn’t gain enough momentum to leave his throat, and he choked on it.

  “Did you know they would issue a travel ban?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “How could I have known that?”

  Byron shrugged. “Just—maybe it’s something Newark is quick to do, that you might have known could happen.”

  “This is my first winter here,” I said.

  There was an accusation hidden in Byron’s question, but I didn’t address it. I let it turn to ice and break apart in the frigid morning.

  “I’ll turn up the heat,” I said, as though I could warm Byron up that way. “And make some breakfast.”

  I started to rise, but Byron pulled me back down, kissed me, ran his fingers down my neck. He was hard and I looped my legs around his back and he slipped easily inside of me. We were both trying; maybe this could work.

  In the kitchen I rummaged through the fridge and pulled eggs and orange juice from deep inside. As I flipped the eggs in the pan and toasted stale bread I worried he was right, that I must’ve known that he wouldn’t be able to leave. Was that what had driven me to convince him to stay? But now I had to fill the day with conversation and activity, and I worried what he’d felt for me, what had led him to offer me the ride, had crumbled overnight, replaced by cold reality and the knowledge that he was trapped. Spending more time with me was no longer a choice, but rather something the city had mandated.

  When we’d eaten we were quiet while we did things like dress and plug in our phones. My phone had died, but when a charge had taken and it came back to life, a few text messages tripped over one another trying to make their presence known. The chiming made Byron look up.

  “Who was that?” he asked.

  The messages were from my ex-husband, who still worried about me, though he no longer loved me. “Ex-husband,” I told Byron. “He lives in California.”

  “Are you close?”

  I shrugged. In truth I didn’t know. Some days I still had conversations with him in my mind. Other days I felt free of him. Of course losing the poet had freshened the wound from the loss of my husband, too. Once someone took a place in my life I didn’t like to let that person go, even if they’d let me go. As was the case with Byron, who looked at me skeptically, though he’d never met my husband and knew nothing about my divorce. I remembered something about Byron’s jealousy. Our relationship, all those years ago, had been about holding each other up, being there for each other. If my attention went somewhere else it meant Byron had less of it.

  I pulled the blinds to look at the snow for the first time. The wind moved big drifts of it around. Snow crawled halfway up Byron’s car. It gathered on the side-view mirrors into little peaks, cascaded to the ground, repeated.

  Byron said, “It has to stop snowing soon, right?”

  “Well. I don’t know about soon. But eventually.”

  Byron squinted into the storm. He looked far away. I thought the best way to recover the easiness of the night before was to start drinking. I wanted us to get comfortable again; there’d been space between us all morning and we’d have to cl
ose it. So without asking him what he wanted I mixed us drinks in the kitchen and returned with the glasses. The room was cold still, the heat in my apartment poor, and I sat on top of the heating grate. “There’s room on the grate,” I said to him, hoping to draw him close, and after a moment of hesitation Byron sat down next to me.

  It turned out Byron had gotten rich in television. He’d produced a popular show I’d never heard of. He’d just moved from LA to New York a year ago, and now he owned a company that made political videos, social awareness videos, the kind you might see in your news feed as you scrolled. I told him about the class I taught, the shiftless undergraduates, but the conversation halted and the awkwardness, I felt, came from the urge to talk of deeper things, so I asked him about love, I wanted to know how many times he’d fallen into it, and he laughed at me.

  “That’s quite a question.”

  “But just a question.” I picked up his fingers and squeezed them.

  I thought I saw a trace of a grimace shade Byron’s face, but it left as quickly as it had come. He pushed hair away from his eyes. “Three,” he said. “I was with someone for eight years in my twenties, and then we broke up.” He added this last part as though to explain why he hadn’t fallen in love with more people, as though loving sparely indicated a lack of conviviality or gameness, but the number sounded reasonable to me, and I told him so. I’d only ever loved three people, too, I said. I didn’t tell him that he was one of my three, and I didn’t ask if I was one of his, though I felt it must have been true, and I hoped he would tell me so. But he didn’t.

  “Eight years is a long time to be with someone and not get married,” I said.

  “That was just it,” he said. “We didn’t want to be together anymore but spent a long time denying that fact.”

  “Do you feel like you wasted time?” I asked.

  Byron shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t go down that road,” he said.