A bit of happiness, perhaps.

She lit a cigarette and opened the blinds. They were brand new, but they sagged in the middle. Frowning. She always shut them upwards, so that the afternoon light missed her eyes when she lay in bed in the daytime. She likes to smoke Parliament Lights until the ash is half as long as what's left un-burnt between her fingers. It made her happy. She waited as long as she could before the ash fell from its own weight onto the mahogany of the hand carved and unnoticed nightstand. He bought it because he could- money made him happy. She hid the ashtray underneath it; it pissed the maid off and that too, made her happy.

She sat up in bed pulling her right leg out from beneath the duvet. She slept naked. She always had. Her bed was a place of existence. She hated her husband, but she loved her new comforter.

She took another drag of her parliament and laid her head back on the pillow. Her brown hair was greasy. She was still beautiful. She threatened to shave it in high school once, but he left her anyway. Before that she loved him. He had made her happy. It was fifteen years ago. She rested her face on the unwashed mess and crisp cotton of a thousand count Egyptian cotton sheets. The throw pillow on the floor beside her read aMa in wealthy cursive. Alex and April McNamara. People thought matching A's were cute. She wished she didn't have a name. She watched the smoke slide between her lips and scale from the corner of the bed to its banishment in the torn light reflecting off blinds in the background. She reached her hand out beyond the bed toward the closed window. It was nice out today. But she wouldn't care if it weren't. She admired the bones in her wrist and hands, and took her last drag as her fingers weakly danced in an empty ballroom of smoke. In the surgeon general's warnings. The phone rang. She didn't answer. She never answered.

Ollie didn't believe in love. He believed in drugs. He told those that would listen that people escape reality through whatever means works best for them. His mom, used religion, a way to make a Valium addiction and a bad divorce a little easier to handle. His best friend Sam used the belief in an extra terrestrial world to numb the fact that his father beat his mother and at age twenty-seven, he still lived in his father's basement and did nothing about it. Ollie didn't believe in God or Aliens. He believed in nothing. But what he liked, were drugs. They made him happy. The ones that expanded his moments to margins far beyond those of the people who according to him, lived within borders, boxes, margins, and thus he, like Sam and his mother could try to define happiness.

Tonight he watched his mother laugh at a joke he made that wasn't funny. She'd been doing that since he was young, and thirty years later, she still didn't care. He hated dinner. He hated his mother, and his father who left them for happy. She dripped in diamonds given to her by men who never loved her. He didn't see her that often anymore, in fact, even when seated beside her, he no longer saw the woman who once held him to her breast for life, lately, he saw nothing at all.

Ollie caught his mother's glassy eyes focusing on the cupboard full of required yet never used crystal glasses behind them. The chairs were uncomfortable and the wallpaper was decorated with flowers you'd only use in a room you never spent much time in. Mother and son were sitting in the dining room, surrounded by left over conversations and bland turkey dinners she hadn't cooked. Resembling each other only in smiles as fragile as the china they'd eaten from, Ollie wondered if sometimes those faces fell off as they left the room, crashing into shards of ceramic and slivering their remains into peoples' bare feet as they walked over the rug that had never been correctly vacuumed there after. His mom was the kind of woman who cared about vacuums. He mentioned it to his mom; she rolled her eyes after asking him to repeat it and said he was always too serious.

"This is what's wrong with you Ollie. You're too in your own head. You're boring to people. Why do you have to take everything so seriously?" she slurred as she finished the red puddle of wine left in the glass she'd refilled several times but hadn't put down since the micro waved appetizers.

"That's the problem with you. That's why you can't get a girlfriend; you just take it all too seriously. Girls like happy. Try happy."

As they spoke, Ollie stabbed his fork into the top of his hand under the white lace of the tablecloth. He stared into his mother's eyes and thought about being happy. He could feel the polished silver thongs breaking the skin on his knuckles, and he wished in this moment that he were the fork. What a life that would be he thought -- until he decided had he been created as a fork, he'd be the one dropped behind the dishwasher. Or at least set at the bottom of the drawer under all the spoons, thus still existing in a life of being misplaced. He was wearing a brown tweed suit he had purchased at the Salvation Army for seven dollars and thirty-seven cents. The pants weren't quite long enough and the sleeves of the blazer were fraying near the palms of his hands. He wore a purple polo shirt he couldn't remember the origin of, and he never combed his hair. Perhaps this was happy.

April dressed in the musty dark of avoided sunlight. She took three Xanax with a gulp of whiskey left in the glass of the night before and shook her head enough to get it down. She didn't need liquid to swallow pills. Not anymore. She glanced at herself in the mirror – and saw nothing. "He only loves you because you look like that. He'll only love you till you don't anymore." Her mother had told her on her wedding day. April had expected nothing less, her mother didn't believe in things that were unharmed. She reached toward the glassy mirrored image of herself and pulled it forward, opening the medicine cabinet to her daily bundle of prescriptions (although not hers) pills. Maybe that's why she married a Doctor.

She took a white T-shirt from the towel hook by the shower and put it on, stretching it over her pregnant stomach. They'd been trying to have a baby for three years. Her husband often told people that when they learned about what April referred to as her "status". "But," he'd say, "poor April found herself dealing with the horror of miscarriages." He'd written the same once in a letter to his brother in Philadelphia. "Yes," She remembered saying as he read the letter to her, his tears welling up at what was such a devastating struggle for him, "Poor April".

Across the street, dinner was still not over, and since it had started at two, Ollie began to dig the fork into his flesh to the point of blood. After almost an hour of a silence his mother still hadn't noticed, she broke in again.

"What is it you do all day Ollie?" asked his mother, tapping violently at her wine glass-- waiting for the maid she couldn't afford anymore to emerge from the kitchen she refused to clean. Ollie and his mother shared two things in common: they hated each other, and they hated the rest of the world more.

"Work Mom," he said half sure she wouldn't buy it but interested in seeing if she would. "I work."

"Right. Work". She shrugged him off as she usually did She threw her soiled napkin onto her plate and pushed her chair abrasively catching the rug, but surprisingly not following. He pictured her falling. More then he should have. She used to scold Ollie for making that noise on the freshly polished wooden floor, but she used to do a lot of things. Ollie looked at his watch: Four thirty-seven. He was alone at the table. He ducked his head around the curve of the drapery. He stared at the white house across the street. She'd leave soon. He could hear the clanging of his mother's bracelet on the metal bedpost in the room above him that was still made for two people, but barely housed a half. He repeated the dropping of a napkin he'd eventually have to clean anyway. But he had to go. She would be too drunk too notice him leaving early anyway.

April listened as Oprah gave perfect instructions on creating the ideal table for dinner parties her husband put together but April was usually too drunk to sit through. Her bubbly blonde guest gave intimate details of her own "easily maintained" garden, and her "modest" million-dollar home. April wondered if this woman's significant other ever minded that his wife used dirt from their lawn to accent the expensive crystal. Perhaps bark-mulch made her feel happy. Or at least loved. April supposed that if she were this woman, she'd slit her wrists. Bark-mulch from Oprah was still just dirt. It was four thirty-seven; she would leave in an hour.

Ollie sat at the airport. Every Monday and Thursday, in the same seat, by Terminal B baggage claim. Five thirty to seven fifteen. It was ample time to see what it was he wanted to see. Ollie had never been on an airplane. He had nowhere to go. But he enjoyed watching people who did. People who were coming from somewhere, or leaving to somewhere, or people that had people that loved them enough to care either way. Wives, husbands, friends, mothers would stand, for hours if they had to, staring at screens of numbers, telling their awaiting eyes where exactly the air had devoured their loved ones and when if lucky, they could get them back. So, they would wait. Until that moment where like a vein, silence would pulse into a stream of people carrying black bags filled with laptops, umbrellas and men wearing shiny shoes. Ollie would watch the eyes of those who had been waiting, scan the crowd, looking for something, needing, waiting for a plane delivering happiness.

Then the moment- people seemed happy- and two sets of anxious eyes met. Ollie saw in their faces something he'd never felt for himself. Perhaps this was happy. Ollie decided happiness was the airport - terminal B, baggage claim. But Ollie knew that happiness, like love, was not something real. Love was something to numb the fear of being alone.

This was when he'd see her- the woman from the white house whose curtains were drawn when she was alone. Who created Ollie's time frame of sitting. She was there every other Monday and Thursday, but she was never waiting. She was always late enough. He went to the airport to see her, the woman whose eyes were empty- like happiness.

The diamond watch April had found under her pillow last Christmas was getting too loose on her tiny wrists. Most women would be jealous of April; she'd been cursed by it all her life. She pitied them, not because she had too, but because she could. The women at the dinner parties- who live in a world where there is beauty in six-month pregnant bellies and diamond watches. Four car garages and stuffed animal mobiles, pigs and horses in greens and yellows, which according to Oprah were the new pinks and blues. The women who knew that. Women who really grow gardens to create dirt that was perfect enough for the dining room table and call it an accent piece for the dinners they'd title to add meaning.

April took the last swig of Whisky and carried the glass down the marble stairs to the perfectly clean – and newly decorated -- kitchen. The kitchen made her feel like she was drowning. She often pictured a bloody handprint on the spotless white tiles her husband had picked out. When her husband invited women over to be her friends she thought about telling them blood would look nicer than a vase of Lilacs, it would compliment the curtains better. But she never did. She mostly spiked her tea and stared out the window. She washed the glass with soap and water and put it next to the others in the Dishwasher. She squeezed in the soap from beneath the sink and turned the dial to "run". She was always sure to use the juice glasses when he was at work, never the good crystal from the bar. Due to her status, she could only drink when he wasn't there. She threw her greasy hair up into a clip and headed towards the door to the garage. As her hand reached for the gold knob, she remembered the darkness. He hated it when she sat in the dark. He told her the whole world didn't need to know she was depressed. It wasn't a big deal; it was just in her head. He was a doctor. And it was just in her head. She returned to the bedroom and yanked the blinds up. Sunshine highlighted the red lettering of the monogrammed sheets she only noticed when the lights were on. She had always thought monogramming was pretentious

Ollie carried a newspaper under his arm, folded in half as he had seen most men sitting in the airport to be carrying theirs. He always brought the same newspaper, one from three years ago, the first day he decided to make his Airport watching a regular thing and carefully chose a variation of props in order to master the part. The age of the paper didn't concern Ollie - he'd never read it. He waited for one thing. He knew she'd be there and he knew she wouldn't see him. She was tragic. He knew no one could save her. She had nothing to believe in.

In the airport, people came together in a place where the line between real and forgiven is blurred, if only temporarily. He figured that's where his fascination for the every other Monday and Thursday woman came from. She seemed to inhabit a world of picking up the same man, in the same suit, with the same briefcase, wearing the same array of different colored shirts with fancy ties he'd never seen repeated. Her eyes were lifeless, drowning in an intoxicating beauty that claimed the same face she had before the doors opened, and the same one she would leave with as the suited man walked out beside her. He put her hand on her lower back and kissed her stomach now that it was big. She turned her head away when he did so, but she had no-where to go, and he never noticed. Unlike the others, her real never faded. She seemed to be the only one whose lines weren't one or the other; they were one and the same.

April was Exxon station that signified the intersection of highways where she always went left. She looked at her watch. She turned left.

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Ollie stared at the doors he had come in almost an hour ago. The suited man was always the first off the plane, and the Monday Thursday woman was always the last to arrive. Ollie watched daughters wearing college sweatshirts carrying backpacks with clinking key chains run to mothers waiting with smiles and open arms, as if life will always be so perfect. One man stood searching tip toed and wide eyed for a young girl who wheeled a pink suitcase behind her, she blushed as there eyes met. Ollie could never hear the conversations of these meetings, they were all combined into high pitch hellos and elongated "I missed you's", words muffled by scarves and thick winter jackets as people embraced.

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April parted the mechanical doors of terminal B, US Airways as she always did every other Monday and Thursday. These are the days Alex traveled. She walked far enough inside the doors the draft wasn't beating down her bare neck. She wasn't wearing a jacket. She liked being cold. The man at the door said something, and she smiled slightly and continued past him. She stared at her watch. The suited man picked up his jacket from its place slung over his suitcase and put it on. He pulled the handle up on his luggage and made his way towards her.

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Ollie watched, as her eyes remained on the back of her hand, eventually to the jeans she wiped nothing off of and then to passing cars outside the wall of windows behind her. The suited man walked to her side, and together they turned and left the airport. They said nothing. Their eyes never met. Perhaps, Ollie thought, this is happiness.