All the Happiness in the World

She staggered through the security checkpoint holding on to his arm for dear life. The brick faces of TSA stared at the odd pair in their socked feet, suspecting them of being a couple of high-end dopers who just shot up the last of their junk out in their Volvo. Marlboro wrappers and dirty syringes probably scattered over the floorboards. When you work for TSA so long, you get jaded and you feel at some point that you have seen it all. Everyone is a doper or a terrorist, even when they haven’t doped or terrorized a day in their life. But this couple wasn’t on dope and they don't drive a Volvo. 

His shoes and her dog slippers are in a gray tote on the conveyor belt being X-rayed for explosive material. His belt is coiled like a snake. She didn’t even bring a purse. Not even a pack of chewing gum, or a tampon. She is wearing black ostrich-egg sunglasses, gray sweat pants and a matching sweatshirt. Her hair is in a crooked pony-tail and she looks a mess, but through the mess is the civilization of a beautiful woman and everyone can see her for what she is. Her skin, the color of sand. And there are sphinxes in her eyes. He confronts everyone’s stare with a resolute smile, like playing chicken, which makes them look away. He never thought he would make it this far without being arrested, but here they are, in the airport, nearly ready to board an international flight to somewhere.

“Caroline, come with me,” he said gently. She holds on to his arm and mutters something and he talks to her softly and calmly the way someone soothes a temperamental animal. “Since the accident,” he said to the TSA manager who was scrutinizing them closely, “she has been this way. Seven years now.”

“Seven years?” the TSA man repeated. “I’m sorry.” His face was a conflict of emotion. The sternness of the job was temporarily washed away. Perhaps, in Caroline he saw his wife or daughter’s face, superimposed just long enough for him to genuinely empathize. Harry put on his belt and shoes and carried Caroline’s dog slippers in his left hand and held her up with his right. The TSA man offered them a wheelchair and Harry gratefully accepted it and they gently sat her down as though she has a rectum full of nitroglycerin. Harry shook the TSA man’s large brown hand and thanked him profusely for his kindness. The TSA man pointed towards their gate and told Harry to let the folks down there know she is, he paused, then said no more. He meant to say disabled, or special needs, or handicapped, but the words didn’t come. He said they could board first. Well, after first-class, anyway.

Harry smiled, sure it was all going to work out now. This harebrained idea of his. Nothing could go wrong. He sat in a curved plastic chair next to Caroline in the wheelchair, away from everyone else, and looked at her the way he used to look at her. He saw her the way he saw her seven years ago for a moment while the gray dull light of a rainy Ohio afternoon glowed gloomily upon her face – what wasn’t hidden under those enormous Jackie-O glasses. She drooled some and he wiped her mouth with a napkin he had stuffed in his pocket after lunch. Her chin slumped down to her chest for a moment, then her head bobbed around like a bobblehead. And between one of those slumps and bobs, Harry wondered if he was doing the right thing. Sure, he was, he told himself. This is what she wanted to do, even if she later said she didn’t want to do it. It was her birthday tomorrow, after all. 

Caroline was a beautiful woman. Thin, with dark hair. Big dark eyes. Sphinxes and sand and jeweled tombs under the surface. Even sloppy, she’s beautiful. Even in gray sweats and dog slippers and no make-up. He replayed the evening before in his head several times then quickly dismissed it. He recalled what his third-grade teacher once told him about dwelling in the negatives. “Think positive, Harry,” he could hear her say through thirty years of life that got away from him. “Sometimes you got to put in work with some good-old American ingenuity and elbow grease and do hard things to get the best outcome.” He didn’t know why he thought of his third-grade teacher just then, but he did. She was pretty, tall like a giraffe, and had black, curly hair. He could remember her wearing a purple dress and pearls. He could remember the shape of her calves.   

Caroline stirred as Harry was getting restless. She tried to get up from the wheelchair, but he held her hand and convinced her to stay seated. Then she mumbled something and he looked down and saw a black spot on the crotch of her gray sweats that expanded like the universe once supposedly expanded until it became the size of a football.

“Oh, no,” he sighed.

Her head swirled around again and she sat there having pissed herself. He never thought of getting her adult diapers. In all the details of the plan, that hadn’t made the list. The smell was pungent and palled the aroma of her perfume he sprayed on her before they left as a substitute for a shower. He quickly wheeled her to a family bathroom and locked the door. The room was all stainless-steel and gave him the feeling of being inside of a microwave oven. He splashed some water on his face and tried to think if this was such a good idea after all, looking at himself in the mirror as she bayed like a sick goat in the background. He had spent years planning it.

“It’s too late to go back now, Harry,” his confident self told his uncertain self in the mirror. Oswald probably said the same thing, he thought. The tickets were bought, and they had made it through security. It was too late, he knew, so he took off her sweat pants as she sat in the seat. There was nothing sexy in it, as much as he had fantasized about taking off her pants since they split up. The moment of grabbing the sides of her pants and panties with both fists and pulling them down slowly over the curves of her thighs. But not this way. How did Bill Cosby do it? How does someone get aroused with a vegetable? Isn’t the satisfaction in her consent? The acceptance into her prestigious vaginal hall of honor. The enshrinement. A bust of your head and a pale yellow sports blazer, to boot.

She put her hand down on her crotch, which he pushed away. She did it again and he asked her nicely to keep her hand on the armrest of the wheelchair and she did for a few seconds before she again pawed at her lap. He was no dummy. He had changed diapers before. He had cleaned up accidents in panties. They had a nine year-old girl who was home with his mother. But there is no comparison between changing a child’s diaper or cleaning up her accident, and cleaning up her 40-year-old mom’s puddle of pungent piss.

As he gathered wet paper towels, some with soap, some without, some dry ones, and knelt between her legs, parting her knees, he was pretty sure this act constituted some form of sexual assault. Add that to the list of charges, he thought, prosecuting himself in his own mind. Love was his only defense, but he knew it wouldn’t hold water in a court of law.

He spread her legs further open and took a deep breath. Under the foul stench of urine there was that sweet smell of her oasis, her fertile Nile, his dope. And he salivated for a moment like a thirsty lion at a clear Saharan watering hole. No other wet divot on this earth had ever made him so crazy or so passionate, and after her it was as though none existed. But it was not how he remembered it. And it looked back at him as though to say hello. The way some old friend says hello to someone they deleted off Facebook in an awkward chance meeting in an elevator. It was pink and pretty and it smiled nervously back at Harry as he dabbed it with soapy paper towels, then wiped it with plain wet ones.

Hello, Harry, it said nervously. Hey, Harry said back. I have missed you, it said. I have missed you, too, Harry replied, not believing a word it had to say. It acted as though it were independent from Caroline’s brain, like some saboteur caught behind enemy lines. It was clearly nervous about any kind of forthcoming interrogation, but Harry eased its fears by not asking what it had been up to and he stuck with cleaning it, not knowing who had passed through, and not wanting to think of it anymore. It didn’t matter. But it seemed to be a bit spited with Harry’s apparent rejection, or at least with his nonchalance about it the way Medusa might be with someone she doesn’t turn to stone with a fateful glance.

Secretly, Harry was titillating, though he kept a solemn poker face. He felt like Romeo below Juliet’s garden balcony, and given time he might have composed a worthy imploration to it. A wet soliloquy. But someone tried to open the door and he could hear some kids outside saying “Mommy, but I have to go!” repeatedly, so he was plucked from his romantic reverie and hurled back to the task at hand. He had to stand her up and lean her back on him with one hand as he soaked up the pool of piss in the wheelchair seat with a dozen or so paper towels with the other. She lay against him like dead weight and he recalled the first time they danced in a bar they used to go to together, to “Harvest Moon” by Neil Young. But through the restroom speakers some terrible upbeat song crackled about fire and a break-up by someone with too much lung who never met a note she couldn’t bludgeon to death with her tongue.

Her cheek lay on his shoulder and he could feel her drool as he awkwardly cleaned up the seat and sat her back down. Then the door shook again and someone knocked. “Just a minute,” he said annoyed. It wasn’t as though this was the only restroom in the airport for chrissake. The person on the other side of the door had no compassion for a special needs woman who was in an accident seven years ago that made her a vegetable. And he recalled The Challenger exploding on the TV that was strapped to the cart in his third-grade classroom and his teacher covering her mouth and crying in that purple dress and those pearls and her pear-shaped calves. He felt something like The Challenger on the launch pad. And he remembered the astronauts and that teacher whose name he cannot remember now, smiling before she boarded the shuttle, waving at everyone like everything was going to be okay.

“Where am I?” she moaned. Her sunglasses were pushed to the side of her face, but he fixed them and told her that they were on a trip and everything would be better in the morning and that she should just go to sleep. And she nodded her head and looked like she was going to go to sleep as he sat her back down in the chair, but her head popped back up and she murmured in some language similar to English, “Well, where’re we goin’, Buster Brown?”

“To the moon, honey,” he said. She smiled and it made him feel good that she smiled. He got a pair of pajama pants out of the carry-on bag and gently slid them up her beautiful legs. And as he slid them over her knees that old friend said goodbye this time and promised to keep in touch on Facebook, but he said that it didn’t matter and that it was never about you anyway, as much as he enjoyed his time in and out of her. And that old friend frowned for a moment until he admitted that he really missed her and that there was no one like her in the world. And she said how would you know and to avoid an argument he pulled those pants up all the way and he was ready to go. He threw the sweats away and walked out of the door and a little fat kid was standing there squeezing his crotch as though he were going to burst and his mom scowled at Harry and Caroline like she was suspicious of them having sex in the bathroom or something until she saw Caroline drool and then she huffed and told her little Joey to go potty before they miss their plane. But Joey was already halfway home by the time mommy said a word.

They boarded, after first-class, and the flight attendant ushered them onboard and helped transfer Caroline to the seat. Then she gave Harry an admiring smile as though he were the Pope or something and folded up the wheelchair and took it back off the plane before the other passengers funneled down the long corridor. Caroline’s head thumped on the window and Harry pulled a small pillow out of the carryon bag and wedged it between her head and the cabin wall. Then he covered her up with a blanket, satisfied that his crazy plan was really going to work. At least, so it appeared.

He didn’t sleep on the flight. He drank seven gingerales and bourbons and looked at pictures of him and Caroline on his phone and smiled at the good memories they induced. It was something like drinking to look at pictures of them. That warm beautiful euphoric feeling when the alcohol mixes and settles in the blood stream, when hope swells like the tide swells over a midnight beach leaving a trove of seashells that little kids scamper to pick up and put in little plastic buckets to take home to Iowa or Kentucky, wherever they are from. But those shells are never the same when they get home. They are never what they are in the moment. But those pictures of them, and their daughter, never lost any luster to Harry and he was forever a child on a beach collecting shells. That is something like it is to be in love with someone who doesn’t love you. To live in pictures and buckets of seashells. To collect the pieces of your own broken heart and to smile at them like a fool.

She didn’t wake up until they were in Dublin, and she was still woozy. But the anesthetic was wearing off fast and Harry got antsy as the plane taxied too slow across the runway, seemingly in no hurry to help him out. Harry soothed her by quietly singing a song to her. It was the song that played when they got engaged years ago before she broke it off. I should have known better with a girl like you. That I would love everything that you do. And I do! And I do! And I do! 

She smiled and sat back in the seat. And finally, when it was time to deplane, the flight attendant brought a wheelchair and Harry flopped her in it and hurried up the jetway like he was pushing an Indy car from a fire. And all the way up the jetway Caroline continued to sing their engagement song, loudly. If this is love you got to give me more! Give me more! Hey, hey, hey! Give me more!

They took a taxi to the bed and breakfast. It was a room above a family-owned bar called Marty O’Boyle’s. Most everything in the room was red and what wasn’t red was either green or gold. The owner, an old stout man built by the pint, helped Harry carry Caroline to their room up a flight of creaky-old wooden steps. They lay her down on the green-and-gold quilted bed and she lay there with her arms spread wide-open and Harry looked at the old man and the old man looked at Harry, neither sure what to say to the other.

“It’s a right damn good thing ya did. Bring’n yer, wife, here wit ya like ya did, lad. In the shape she’s in an’ all.”

“We were never married,” Harry confessed.

“Well, it still’s a damn good thing.”

They looked down at Caroline like she was a beautiful corpse and they were befuddled angels, figuring how they would carry her soul to the afterlife. She was still wearing those sunglasses and she didn’t move at all. Harry knew it was only a matter of time before she woke up and he had no idea what he was going to say to her at all. That was never part of the plan.

“Come down and have ya a drink while the misses she sleeps,” the old man implored.

“I think I should be here when she wakes up.”

The old man looked Caroline over again. “You ain’t need’n to be here. Let 'er sleep and let yerself have a drink, lad. On the house.”

Harry shook his head and took the old man up on the offer. It was a small place and the glass mugs were big and the beer was room temperature. It was good that way, Harry thought with a frothy lip of Guinness, sitting on a stool as a band tuned acoustic guitars. They looked like a family. A handsome father and two beautiful daughters. One of the girls wasn’t wearing shoes and they both wore beautiful white summer dresses. After a beer, they were still tuning their instruments and talking amongst themselves and to tourists who smiled at them and asked them questions. Harry went over and had a few words with them, as well. Then they smiled at Harry and nodded their heads in agreement and he went back to his barstool to drink.

It was late evening and after half his second beer was gone, the band was joined by two older men and they all started playing some traditional Irish music and people were clapping and laughing along with them and the bar was loud with music and cheer. Harry had never heard traditional Irish music live before and he enjoyed himself sitting there, forgetting about everything else for a moment. The amber-colored room was crowded with many tourists and a few regulars who looked at the tourists and smiled. There was so much wood in the bar it felt to Harry like he was a mouse inside of a whisky barrel. Whisky and beer soaked the floor and the room got warm so the old man opened the pub door and more people came in with the night and very few people left.

Harry sat at the end of the bar and the old man who tended the bar, with the help of a young lady who might have been his granddaughter, took the time to talk to him, taking some peculiar interest in him, or maybe in the condition of the lady upstairs. Harry clarified that she wasn’t his girlfriend, either, which seemed to peak the old man’s curiosity even more. He went away here and there, but then came back and scratched his gray wiry beard and asked a few more subtler questions between songs. Then after a third or fourth beer, Harry said to hell with it and spilled his guts.

And it was just then that she came down the steps from their upstairs room and she stood in the doorway and Harry and the old man looked across the room at her like she was a ghost, or a goat in a room full of dynamite. And sheepishly, Harry waved and Caroline rubbed her eyes, and still in her pajama pants, gray sweatshirt, and dog slippers, she excused herself across the floor and made her way to Harry. The old man brought her a bottle of wine and poured it out into two clean glasses. The label faced her and read, “Lusca” and “Sauvignon Blanc.” And Harry recalled reading somewhere that Sauvignon Blanc is derived from the French for sauvage meaning “wild” and blanc meaning “white,” and he tried to think of that rather than what she was about to say to him. He even tried to look at her dog slippers rather than at her, but they stared back up at him angrily it seemed. Two beady-eyed Boston terriers who had somehow found their way to Ireland. What a story that was, he thought.

But right on cue the father and the two daughters having seen the woman come down from upstairs and having been asked by Harry earlier to do so, played an acoustic rendition of I Should Have Known Better that the barefooted girl sung very beautifully without bludgeoning any notes. She did not falter on any words and smiled at Harry and Caroline as she sung them and it was like an angel was singing their song. What would always be their song. It was as though she opened her mouth and a million tiny angels flew from her tongue to their ears strumming fantastic melodic harpsichords that tore through seven years of lost time and restored something that had been lost so abruptly and stupidly. 

Caroline sat down and took a drink of the wine and Harry thought of the grapes of sauvignon blanc to be native of West France in the Bordeaux until it bored him and he boldly held her hand and the old man took a few steps back to give the couple privacy, or to stand clear of the impending blast. The song ended as songs end. Waves lapped the beach and a million seashells gleamed in the moonlight for a little boy’s bottomless empty bucket. And defensively, perhaps, Harry smiled at Caroline not knowing what else to do because he hadn’t thought that far in advance.  

“Am I dreaming?” she asked him calmly.

“No,” he replied. “You’re in Ireland, Caroline.”

She looked around and then down at herself. “But I’m in my pajamas, Harry. And I smell like piss. And I haven’t seen you,” she paused, “since you picked up Rosie. Wait. Where is Rosie?”

“She is fine. She is with my mom.”

Caroline rubbed her head and took another drink. “This has to be a dream. How did I get here without knowing I – ”

“That is the difficult part,” Harry explained. “I kind of drugged you.”

“Drugged me?!”

“Yes, a little bit.”

“So, you kidnapped me?!”

“Well, kind of.”

“Harry. What the – ”

“Don’t be angry. You always wanted to go to Ireland. So, tomorrow is your birthday and I decided to make it happen. You only get so many birthdays.”

“You decided to make it happen?! Harry, I’m with someone else. We moved on. It’s been seven years! Are you insane?”

“I don’t care about him. And you don’t love him.”

Caroline laughed. “I don’t love him?”

“No. You don’t at all. It’s silly to say you do. You’re following a script.”

“A script? Do you think I love you?”

Harry looked her right in the sphinxes. “Yes, Caroline. I really do.”

She laughed. “Harry, you’re insane.”

“Maybe so. But this isn’t about getting you back. It’s just about taking you someplace you always wanted to go. We said we would honeymoon here, so we kind of just skipped the whole wedding thing.”

“This is a felony, Harry. Several felonies. Maybe a dozen felonies!”

“Well, after you commit one, it’s really easy to commit more.”

“You’ve completely lost it.” She shook her head.

Harry took a drink of the wine and cringed. It’s always the first drink of wine that’s the hardest on the palette. The bitterness, or sweetness, depending on the type. The sweetness of a sauvignon blanc. After that, it all goes down smooth. Like felonies.

“Maybe so,” he said exhaling, listening to the band. Caroline sat down next to him.

“What did you tell my family?”

“I didn’t.”

“What about your mom?”

“That we were taking a trip to Ireland for a week.”

“And Rosie?”

“The same. We looked it up on the globe at the library.”

Caroline sighed. “How did you get through airport security and get me on the plane?”

“I told them you were in an accident seven years ago. You were handicapped.”

“Hell. Why do I smell like piss?”

“That’s another felony.”

“Hell. How’d you get the money? You never had any money, Harry.”

“It grows on trees.”

“Really, Harry?”

“I cashed out my retirement.”

“To kidnap me and to take me to Ireland?”

“Well, you always wanted to go.”

“Hell. How are you going to retire?”

“Federal prison, it appears.”

She shook her head. “Good point.”

Caroline took another drink and grabbed the bottle and refilled her glass herself. Her hand shook a little. One of her Boston terriers banged its fluffy head on the floor to the rhythm of the music. She poured too much into the glass and bent down to sip it as it sat on the bar so it wouldn’t spill. The old man smiled from a distance and gave Harry a wink of confidence. Harry looked back at him and said something cautiously hopeful with his eyes.

“Well,” Caroline huffed. “Did you at least pack me anything to wear?”

Harry took a deep breath and a drink of his beer and smiled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a lump of cash and handed it to her. “That should take care of it.”

“Good gravy, Harry!”

“You can go shopping, Caroline.”

“I’d say.”

The old man came forward with the young lady bartender who looked like his granddaughter still, even more so in such close proximity and in a different light, Harry thought. Not that it mattered at all. Just one of those things.

“I have a dress fer ya,” the young lady offered Caroline eagerly in her thick Irish accent. “An’ some shoes, too. Until ya ken go shoppin’ fer yerself.”

Caroline smiled to accept the offer and nodded to Harry warily, who smiled back. Then she disappeared with the girl and came back a half-hour later in a beautiful yellow summer dress and black shoes. Her hair was braided and her make-up was done simply, but perfectly. That was the way she looked best. Simply. She smelled of a new perfume and no longer like stale piss and airport hand-soap.

“I pissed myself?”

“Yes.”

“You cleaned me?”

“I tried. In the airport restroom.”

“What did you two talk about?”

“How did you know we did?”

“I know you, Harry.”

“We talked about lost time, and regret.”

“And you told them I was retarded?”

“Not in so many words.”

“That there was an accident?”

“Yes. There was an accident, Caroline. A very tragic accident.”

“What did you drug me with?”

“Mail-order Ketamine.”

“Hell.”

“I am sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“You’re right. No, I’m not. It was worth the all the felonies in the world.”

“At least you brought my sunglasses.”

Harry smiled, a little less nervous.

“What have you to offer me, Harry? Really? After the retirement money’s gone? When you get out of prison, of course. If you get out of prison.” She took another drink and Harry followed suit. His glass of wine sat abandoned on the bar as he had switched back to warm Guinness.

“I have what I have always had to offer you. What I will always offer you.”

“Don’t say love, Harry. Please, don’t say love.”

“No. That’s the given. I love you. But I want to love you, recklessly. Like this. Without a net when I fall. Without a parachute when I jump. At three hundred miles an hour without a seatbelt when I crash. I want to give you all the happiness in the world. I will make you smile and laugh and every birthday will always be special. Every day, every night, every minute will all be special. Not one will ever be taken for granted. I want to be your dope, Caroline.”

“I already overdosed once.”

“Do it again. Let's make it last.”

“You’re a real romantic, Harry Bannon. Drugging a girl and flying her halfway around the world to profess your unspoken love after all this time.” She smiled with the amber glow of the bar lights in her dark simmering eyes. Those moonlit sphinxes. Harry was mesmerized and tried not to stare as he always tried not to stare at her. Failing like always. “But what if I had died? Had an allergic reaction to the drug you doped me with?”

“Well, I guess I’d be drinking alone.”

And they laughed, drank several more, and went to bed.