In Five Years (ARC)

by Rebecca Serle

  My shoulders shake. I can feel myself crying. Tears run down my face in cool, icy tracks. “Yes I do.”

  “No,” he says. “You don’t.” But he’s looking at me, and I can tell he’s not convinced of his own argument, not entirely.

  He’s asking me to prove him wrong. And I could. I can tell that if I wanted to, I could convince him. I could keep crying. I could reach for him. I could say all the things I know he needs to hear. I could lay out the evidence. That I dream about marrying him. That every time he walks into a room my stomach tightens. I could tell him the things I love about him: the curl of his hair and how warm his torso is, and how I feel at home in his heart.

  But I can’t. It would be a lie. And he deserves more than that—he deserves everything. This is the thing, the only thing, I have to offer him. The truth. Finally.

  “David,” I say. Start. “I don’t know why. You’re perfect for me. I love our life together. But—”

  He sits back. He tosses his napkin onto the table. The proverbial towel.

  We sit in silence for what feels like minutes. The clock on the wall ticks forward. I want to throw it out the window. Stop. Stop moving. Stop marching us forward. Everything terrible lies ahead.

  The moment stretches so far it threatens to break. Finally, I speak. “What now?” I ask.

  David pushes back his chair. “Now you leave,” he says.

  He goes into the bedroom and closes the door. I take the food and put it, mindlessly, into containers. I wash the dishes. I put them away.

  Then I go to sit on the couch. I know I can’t be here in the morning. I take out my phone.

  “Dannie?” Her voice is sleepy but strong when she answers. “What’s up?”

  “Can I come over?” I ask her.

  “Of course.”

  I travel the twenty blocks south. She’s on the couch when I get there, not in bed. She has a colorful bandana on her head and the TV is on, an old rerun of Seinfeld. Comfort food.

  I drop my bag down. I go to her. And then I’m crying. Big, hiccupping sobs.

  “Shh,” she says. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”

  She’s wrong, of course. Nothing is okay. But it feels so good to be comforted by her now. She runs her hands through my hair, rubs circles over my back. She hushes and soothes and consoles in the way only she can.

  I have held her so many times. After so many breakups and parental disappointments, but here, now, I feel like I’ve had it backward. I thought I was her protector. That she was flighty and irresponsible and frivolous. That it was my job to protect her. That I was the strong one, counterbalancing her weakness, her whimsy. But I was wrong. I wasn’t the strong one, she was. Because this is what it feels like—to take a risk, to step out of line, to make decisions not based on fact but on feeling. And it hurts. It feels like a tornado raging inside my soul. It feels like I may not survive it.

  “You will,” she tells me. “You already have.”

  And it’s not until she says it that I realize I’ve spoken the words out loud. We stay like this, me in a ball in her lap, her curled over me, for what feels like hours. We stay long enough to try and capture it, bottle it, and tuck it away. Save enough of it to last, enough of it for a lifetime.

  Love doesn’t require a future.

  For a moment in time, we release what is coming.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  I move into Bella’s apartment the first week of December. To the guest room that still has clouds on the walls. Aaron helps me with the boxes. I do not see David. I leave a note on the table when my necessities are gone. He can buy me out or we can sell, whatever he wants.

  I’m so sorry, I write.

  I don’t expect to hear from him, but he sends me an email three days later with some logistical things. He signs it: Please keep me posted on Bella. David.

  All that time, all those years, all those plans, gone. We’re strangers, now. I cannot fathom it.

  Hospital. Work. Home.

  Bella and I are curled in her bed. We inhale early two thousands romantic comedies like popcorn kernels while she hurls, sometimes too weak to turn her head all the way to the side. She has no appetite. I fill up bowls and bowls of ice cream to the brim for her. They all melt. I throw their milky remains down the drain.

  “Canker sores, open wounds, the taste of bile,” she whispers to me, shivering under the blankets.

  “No,” I say.

  “Chemicals being pumped through my veins, veins that feel like fire, fingers up my spine, grabbing at my bones, cracking them.”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  “The taste of vomit, the feeling of my skin crawling with fire. That it’s getting harder to breathe.”

  “Stop,” I tell her.

  “I knew the breathing would get you,” she says.

  I bend down closer to her. “I’ll be here for it all,” I say.

  She looks at me. Her hollow eyes are frightened. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she says.

  “You can.” I say. “You have to.”

  “I’m wasting it,” she says. “I’m wasting the time I have left.”

  I think about Bella. Her life. Dropping out of college. Flying to Europe on a whim. Falling in love, falling onward. Beginning projects and abandoning them.

  Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew there wasn’t time to waste, that she couldn’t go through the motions, steps, build. That the linear trajectory would bring her only to the middle.

  “You’re not,” I say. “You’re here. You’re right here.”

  Aaron sleeps next to her at night. Together with Svedka, we move around the apartment, choreographing our own silent dance of support.

  I come home from work the following week to find that the boxes in my room are gone. My clothes, my bathrobe, everything.

  Bella is sleeping, as she has been for most of the day. Svedka comes in and out of her room, carrying nothing.

  I call Aaron.

  “Hey,” he says. “Where are you?”

  “Home. But my stuff isn’t here. Did you move the boxes down to storage?”

  Aaron pauses. I can hear his breath on the other end of the phone. “Can you meet me somewhere?” he asks me.

  “Where?”

  “Thirty-Seven Bridge Street.”

  “The apartment,” I say. I feel a pull from deep down inside of me, far behind my sternum, the place where my gut might be, if I believed in its existence.

  “Yeah.”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t. Something happened to my stuff and I have to—”

  “Dannie, please,” Aaron says. He sounds, all at once, a very long way away. A foreign country, the other side of a decade. “This is a directive from Bella.”

  How can I say no?

  Aaron is downstairs, outside the apartment when I get there, smoking a cigarette.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.

  He looks at the cigarette between his fingers as if considering it for the first time. “Me neither.”

  The last time we were here it was summer, everything was blooming. The river was wild in green and growth. Now—the metaphor is too much to bear.

  “Thanks for coming,” he says. He’s wearing a jacket, open despite the cold. I can barely see out of my hood and scarf.

  “What do you need?” I ask.

  He tosses the end of the cigarette down, snuffs it out with his foot. “I’ll show you.”

  I follow him back through the familiar door, into the building and up the rickety, wobbly elevator.

  At the apartment door, he takes out the keys. I have the desire to put my hand over his, yank it away. Stop him from doing what he does next. But I’m frozen. I feel like I cannot move my arms. And when the door swings open I see it all, splayed out before me like the inside of my hea
rt.

  The renovation, exactly as it was. The kitchen. The stools. The bed over there, by the windows. The blue velvet chairs.

  “Welcome home,” he whispers.

  I look up at him. He’s smiling. It’s the happiest I’ve seen anyone in months.

  “What?” I ask him.

  “It’s your new home,” he says. “Bella and I have been working on it for months. She wanted to renovate it for you.”

  “For me?”

  “Bella saw this place ages ago when I was assigned the building renovation. Something about the layout and the light, the view and the bones of the old warehouse. She told me she knew you belonged here.” He smiles. “And you know Bella, she wants what she wants. And I think this project has helped. It has given her something creative to focus on.”

  “She did all this?” I ask.

  “She picked out everything,” he says. “Down to the studs. Even when you guys were fighting.”

  I wander around the apartment, as if in a trance. It’s all exactly the way I remember. It’s all here. It has all happened.

  I turn back to Aaron, standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the apartment. All at once it appears as if the world is rotating around us. Like we are the fulcrum and everything, everything is spinning outward from right here, taking its cues from us, and us alone.

  I walk to him. I get close to him, too close. He does not move.

  “Why?” I ask.

  “She loves you,” he says.

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Why you?”

  I used to think that the present determined the future. That if I worked hard and long, I’d get the things I wanted. The job, the apartment, the life. That the future was simply a mound of clay waiting to be told by the present what form to take. But that isn’t true. It can’t be. Because I did everything right. I got engaged to David. I stayed away from Aaron. I got Bella to forget about that apartment. And yet my best friend is lying in bed on the other side of the river, barely eighty pounds, fighting for her life. And I’m standing here, the very place of my dreams.

  He blinks at me, confused. And then he’s not. And then it’s like he reads the question there, and I see him uncurl, unfold himself to what I have really asked.

  Slowly, gently, as if he’s afraid he’ll burn me, he puts his hands on my face in answer. They’re cold. They smell like cigarette smoke. They are the deepest, truest form of relief. Water after seventy-three days in the desert.

  “Dannie,” he says. Just my name. Just the one word.

  He touches his lips down to mine, and then we’re kissing and I forget it all, everything. I am ashamed to admit there is blankness there, in his kiss. Bella, the apartment, the last five and a half months, the ring that sits on her finger. None of it plays.

  All I can think, feel, is this. This realization of everything that has, impossibly, turned out to be true.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  He pulls back first. He drops his hand. We stare at each other, breathing hard. My coat is on the floor, crumbled like a body after a car crash. I turn my eyes from him and pick it up.

  “I—” he starts. I close my eyes. I don’t want him to say I’m sorry. He doesn’t. He leaves it there.

  I walk to the wall. I know what I’ll find, but I want to see it. The final, culminating piece of evidence. There, hanging on the wall, is Bella’s birthday gift: I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Aaron says from somewhere behind me.

  I don’t turn around. “It’s okay.” I say. “I don’t, either.”

  “All of this—” he says. “It’s all so wrong. None of this should be happening.”

  He’s right, of course. It shouldn’t. What could we have done differently? How could we have avoided this? This impossible, unthinkable end.

  I turn around. I look at him. His golden, shining face. This thing that sits between us, now made manifest.

  “You should go,” I say. “Or I should.”

  “I should,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “Your stuff is all unpacked. Bella hired someone to do the closet. Your things are all here.”

  “The closet.”

  His cell phone rings then, disrupting the air molecules, disentangling us from the moment. He answers.

  “Hey,” he says gently. Too gently. “Yes. Yes. We’re here. Hang on.”

  He holds the phone out to me. I take it.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Bella’s voice is soft and bright. “Well,” she says. “Do you like it?”

  I want to tell her she’s crazy, that I can’t accept this, she cannot buy and gift me an apartment. But what would be the point? Of course she can. She has. “This is insane,” I say. “I can’t believe you did this.”

  “Do you like the chairs? How about the kitchen? Did Greg show you the green tile sink?!”

  “It’s all perfect,” I say.

  “I know the stools are a little edgy for you, but I think it’s good. I think—”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “You always tell me I never finish anything,” she says. “I wanted to finish this. For you.”

  Tears roll down my cheeks. I didn’t even know I was crying. “Bells,” I say. “It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. I could never. I would never—It’s home.”

  “I know,” she says.

  I want her to be here. I want us to cook in this kitchen, making a mess of materials, running to the corner store because we don’t have vanilla extract or cracked pepper. I want us to play in that closet, to have her make fun of everything I want to wear. I want her to sleep over, tucked in that bed, in safety, ensconced here. What could happen to her under my watch? What bad thing could touch her if I never, ever looked away?

  But I understand she will not be. I understand, standing here now, in this manifestation of both dream and nightmare, that I will be here, in this home she built me, alone. I am here because she will not be. Because she needed to give me something to hold on to, something to protect me. A literal roof over my head. Shelter from the storm.

  “I love you,” I tell her. Fiercely. “I love you so much.”

  “Dannie,” she says. I hear her through the phone. Bella. My Bella. “Forever.”

  Aaron leaves. I wander through the apartment, running my fingers over every surface. The green tile of the sink, the white porcelain of the tub. A claw-foot. I go through the kitchen—the cabinets stacked with pasta, wine, a bottle of Dom chilling, waiting, in the refrigerator. I go through the medicine cabinet, with my products, the closet with my clothes. I run my hand over the dresses there. One is facing out. I already know which one it’ll be. There’s a note attached: Wear this, it says. I always liked it on you.

  It’s scrawled in her handwriting. Her loopy calligraphy.

  I clutch it to my chest. I go to the window, right by the bed. I look out on that view. The water, the bridge, the lights. Manhattan on the water, shimmering like a promise. I think about how much life the city holds, how much heartbreak, how much love. I think about everything I have lost there, this fading island before me.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  It happens quickly and then slowly. We plummet fast, and then we exist at the bottom of the ocean for eight days, an impossible amount of time to breathe only water.

  Bella stops treatment. Dr. Shaw speaks to us; he tells us what we already know, what we have seen up close with our own eyes—that there is no point anymore, that it is making her sicker, that she needs to be home. He is calm and collected, and I hate him, I want to ram him into the wall. I want to scream at him. I need someone to blame, someone to be responsible for all of this. Because who is? Fate? Is the hellscape we’ve found ourselves in the work of some form of divine intervention? What kind of monster has decided that this is the ending we deserve? T
hat she does?

  It moves upward, to her lungs. She ends up in the hospital. They remove the fluid. They send her home. She can barely breathe.

  Jill isn’t there. She’s staying at a hotel in Times Square, and on Friday I find myself putting on my boots and coat and leaving Bella and Aaron alone in the apartment. I truck up to Midtown, through the lights of Broadway—all those people. They’re about to go to the theater, see a show. Maybe this is a celebratory night. A promotion, a trip to the city. They’re splurging on a feel-good musical or the latest celebrity play. They live in a different realm. We do not meet. We do not see one another anymore.

  I find her at the W Hotel bar. I hadn’t really known my plan, what I was going to do once I got there—call her cell? Demand her room number? But no further steps are necessary. She’s sitting in the lobby, a vodka martini in front of her.

  I know it’s vodka because it’s what Bella drinks. Jill used to let us have sips of hers when we were very young, and then make them for us later, when we were still not legal.

  She has on an orange pantsuit, crepe silk, with a neck scarf, and I feel my stomach boil in anger that she had the energy to get dressed like this. That she has on accessories. That she still is able to believe it matters.

  “Jill.”

  She startles when she sees me. The martini wobbles.

  “How— Is everything alright?”

  I think about the question. I want to laugh. What possible answer is there? Her daughter is dying.

  “Why aren’t you there?” I say.

  She hasn’t been downtown for forty-eight hours. She calls Aaron, but she hasn’t actually made her physical presence known.

  Jill opens her eyes wide. Her forehead doesn’t move. An effect of injections, of the side of medicine she is fortunate enough to elect to use while her cells are not multiplying into monsters.

  I sit down next to her. I’m wearing yoga pants and an old UPenn sweatshirt, something of David’s I kept, despite.

  “Do you want a drink?” she asks me. A bartender hovers at the ready.