In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

  He comes back in, buttoning the blue one. “Happy?”

  “Very,” I say. “Will you call a car?”

  David busies himself with his phone, and I check to make sure I have our keys, my cell phone, and Bella’s gold-beaded bracelet. I borrowed it six months ago and never gave it back.

  “Two minutes.”

  When we get to the restaurant, Bella is standing outside. My first instinct is confusion—she beat me, again. My second is that it’s already over with Greg and we’re going to be having dinner alone. This has happened twice before (Gallery Daniel and, I think, Bartender Daniel). I feel a wave of irritation, followed by one of sympathy and inevitability. Here we go again. Always the same thing.

  I get out of the car first. “I’m sorry,” I start, just as the restaurant door opens and out onto the pavement walks Greg. Except he’s not Greg. He’s Aaron.

  Aaron.

  Aaron, whose face and name have been running in my head, on a loop, for the last four and a half years. The center of so many questions and daydreams and forced replays made manifest on the sidewalk now.

  It wasn’t a dream. Of course it wasn’t. He’s standing here now, and there is no one else he could be. Not a man I’ve spotted at the movies, not an associate I once traded work jabs with. Not someone I shared a plane ride seated next to. He is only the man from the apartment.

  I reel back. I do not know whether to scream or run. Instead, I’m cemented. My feet have merged with the pavement. The answer: my best friend’s boyfriend.

  “Babe, this is my best friend, Dannie. Dannie, this is Greg!” She snuggles into him, her arms looping around his shoulders.

  “Hey,” he says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  He picks up my hand to shake it. I search his face for any sign of recognition, but, of course, I come up empty. Whatever has happened between us… hasn’t yet.

  David extends his hand. I’m just standing there, my mouth hanging open, neglecting to introduce him.

  “This is David,” I sputter. David in the blue shirt shakes Aaron in the white shirt’s hand. Bella smiles. I feel as if all the air on the sidewalk has been sucked back into the sky. We’re going to suffocate out here.

  “Shall we?”

  I follow Greg/Aaron up the steps and into the crowded restaurant. “Aaron Gregory,” he says to the hostess. Aaron Gregory. I flash on his license in my hand. Of course.

  “Aaron?”

  “Oh, yeah. My last name is Gregory. Greg just kind of stuck.” He gives me a small smile. It feels too familiar. I don’t like it.

  I feel like I’m sinking. Like I’m falling through the floor, or maybe the floor is falling, too, except no one else is moving. It’s just me, catapulting through space.

  Time.

  “Aaron.”

  He looks at me. Dead on. I hear David behind us laugh at something Bella has said. I smell her perfume—French rose. The kind you can only buy at the drugstores in Paris. “I’m not one of the bad ones,” he tells me. “Just because I know you think I am.”

  I exhale. I feel dizzy. “I do?”

  “You do,” he says. We start following the hostess. We snake around the bar, in between the two-top tables with couples bent together over pizza and deep glasses of red. “I can tell by the way you’re looking at me. And what Bella has said.”

  “What has she said?”

  We pass through an archway and Aaron hangs back, holding his arm out to let me pass. My shoulder brushes his hand. This isn’t happening.

  “That she has dated some guys who maybe didn’t treat her right, and that you’re an amazing friend, and you’re always there to pick up the pieces. And that I should be warned you’ll probably hate me at first.”

  We’ve arrived at the table. It’s in the back room, pushed up against the left-hand wall. David and Bella are upon us.

  “I’ll slide in the corner,” Bella says. She shoves herself in first and pulls me down next to her. David and Aaron sit across from us.

  “What’s good here?” Aaron asks. He gives Bella a wide smile and reaches across the table for her hand. He strokes her knuckles.

  I don’t need to look at the menu, but I do anyway. The arugula pizza and Rubirosa salad are what we always get.

  “Everything,” Bella says. She squeezes and releases his hand and shimmies her torso. She’s wearing a short black ruffled dress with roses on it that I bought with her on a shopping trip to The Kooples. She has neon-green suede heels tucked under her, and dangly green plastic earrings clank against her cheeks.

  I need to avoid Aaron’s face. His entire person—him—seated twelve inches across the table from me.

  “Bella tells us you’re an architect,” David says, and my heart squeezes with affection for him. He always knows the things you’re supposed to ask—how you’re supposed to behave. He always remembers the protocol.

  “Indeed,” Aaron says.

  “I thought architects didn’t really exist,” I say. I’m keeping my eyes on the menu.

  Aaron laughs. I glance up at him. He points to his chest. “Real. Pretty sure.”

  “She’s talking about this article Mindy Kaling wrote like a million years ago. She says that architects only exist in romantic comedies.” Bella rolls her eyes at me.

  “She does?” Aaron points to me.

  “No, Mindy,” Bella says. “Mindy says that.”

  I think it was in the Times. Titled something like: “Types of Women in Romantic Comedies Who Are Not Real.” The architect thing was anecdotal. Incidentally, Mindy also said that a workaholic and an ethereal dream girl were not believable stereotypes, either, yet here we are.

  “No handsome architects,” I say. “To clarify.”

  Bella laughs. She leans across the table and touches Aaron’s hand. “That’s about as close to a compliment as you’re going to get, so enjoy it.”

  “Well then, thank you.”

  “My dad is an architect,” David says, but no one responds. We’re now busying ourselves with the menu.

  “Do you guys want red or white?” Bella asks.

  “Red,” David and I say at the same time. We never drink white. Rosé, occasionally, in the summer, which it isn’t yet.

  When the waiter comes over, Bella orders a Barolo. When we were in high school, we all took shots of Smirnoff while Bella poured Cabernet into a decanter.

  I’ve never been a big drinker. In school it affected my ability to get up early and study or run before class, and now it does the same for work—only worse. Since I turned thirty, even a glass of wine makes me groggy. And after the accident no one was allowed to drink in our house, not even a thimbleful of wine. Completely dry. My parents still are, to this day.

  “I’m in the mood for some meat,” David says. We’ve never ordered anything other than the arugula or classic pizza here. Meat?

  “I’d split a sausage with you,” Aaron says.

  David smiles and looks at me. “I never get sausage. I like this guy.”

  I’ve been preoccupied, possessed, since I saw him on the sidewalk. For the first time, I consider the reality that this man is Bella’s boyfriend. Not the guy from the premonition—but the one sitting across from her now. For one thing, he seems good and solid. Funny and accommodating. It’s usually like pulling teeth to get one of her boyfriends to make eye contact.

  If he were anyone else, I might be thrilled for her. But he isn’t.

  “Where do you live?” I ask Aaron.

  I see flashes of the apartment. Those big, open walls. The bed that overlooked the city skyline.

  “Midtown,” he says.

  “Midtown?”

  He shrugs. “It’s close to my office.”

  “Excuse me,” I say.

  I get up from the table and wind my way to the bathroom, which exits off a little hallway.

  “What’s going on?” It’s David on my heels. “That was weird. Are you okay?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t feel well.”

&n
bsp; “What happened?”

  I look at him. His face is studying me with concern and… something else. Surprise? It’s close cousins with annoyance. But this is unusual behavior for me, and so I’m not sure.

  “Yeah, it just hit me. Can we go?”

  He glances back into the restaurant, as if his gaze will reach the table where Bella and Aaron sit, no doubt just as baffled.

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “Maybe.”

  This does it. He springs into action, placing a hand on my lower back. “I’ll let them know. Meet me outside; I’ll call a car.”

  I nod. I head outside. The temperature has dropped markedly since we arrived. I should have brought a jacket.

  David comes out with my bag, and Bella.

  “You hate him,” she says. She crosses her arms in front of her chest.

  “What? No. I don’t feel well.”

  “It was pretty spontaneous. I know you. You once muscled through the full-blown flu to fly to Tokyo.”

  “That was work,” I say. I’m clutching my stomach. I’m actually going to vomit. It’s all going to come out on her green suede shoes.

  “I like him,” David says. He looks to me. “Dannie does, too. She had a fever earlier. We just didn’t want to cancel.”

  I feel a wave of affection for him, for this lie.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I tell her. “Go enjoy your dinner.”

  Bella doesn’t budge from her place on the sidewalk, but our car comes and David holds the door open for me. I dive inside. He walks around and then we’re off down Mulberry, Bella disappearing behind us.

  “Do you think it’s food poisoning? What did you eat?” David asks.

  “Yeah, maybe.” I lean my head against the window, and David squeezes my shoulder before taking out his phone. When we get home, I change into sweats and crawl into bed.

  He comes and perches on the edge. “Can I do anything?” he asks me. He smoothes down the comforter, and I grab his hand before he lifts it off.

  “Lay down with me,” I say.

  “You’re probably contagious,” he says. He puts the back of his hand on my cheek. “I’m going to make you some tea.”

  I look at him. His brown eyes. The slight tufts of his hair. He never uses product, no matter how many times I tell him everyone needs it.

  “Go to sleep,” he says. “You’ll feel better in the morning.”

  He’s wrong, I think. I won’t. But I fall asleep anyway. When I dream, I’m back in that apartment. The one with the windows and the blue chairs. Aaron isn’t there. Instead, it’s Bella. She finds his sweatpants in the top drawer of the dresser. She holds them up and shakes them at me. What are these doing here? she wants to know. I don’t have an answer. But she keeps demanding one. She walks closer and closer to me. What are these doing here? Tell me, Dannie. Tell me the truth. When I go to speak, I realize the entire apartment is filled with water and I’m choking on everything I cannot say.

  Chapter Eight

  “It’s nice to see you again,” Dr. Christine says.

  The plant is still there. I assume, now, that it’s fake. Too much time has passed.

  “Yes, well,” I say. “I don’t really know who else to tell.”

  “Tell what?”

  The truth of what I have learned. That what I saw in that apartment is from the future. It will occur in exactly five months and nineteen days, on December 15. I graduated as valedictorian of Harriton High, magna cum laude from Yale, and top of my law class at Columbia. I’m not gullible, nor am I a fool. What happened wasn’t a dream; it was a premonition—a prophecy sketched to life—and now I need to know how and why it happened, so I can make sure it never does.

  “I met the man,” I tell her. “From the dream.”

  She swallows. It could be my imagination, but it seems like it’s taking some effort. I want to skip this part, the part where we have to determine what it is and how it happened, the process. The part where she thinks I’m maybe a little bit crazy. Hallucinating, possibly. Working out past trauma, etc. I’m only interested in prevention now.

  “How do you know it was him?”

  I give her a look. “I didn’t tell you we slept together.”

  “Oh.” She leans forward in her brown leather chair. Unlike the plant, it’s new. “That seems an important part. Why do you think you left it out?”

  “Because I’m engaged,” I tell her. “Obviously.”

  She leans forward. “Not to me.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I just didn’t. But I know it’s him, and he’s now dating my best friend.”

  Dr. Christine looks at her notes. “Bella.”

  I nod, although I don’t remember talking about her. I must have.

  “She’s very important to you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you feel guilty now.”

  “Well, technically, I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  She squints at me. I put a fist to my forehead and hold it there.

  “You mentioned you’re engaged,” she says. “To the same man you were with when we last spoke?”

  “Yes.”

  “It has been over four years since I saw you. Do you have plans to get married?”

  “Some couples decide not to.”

  She nods. “Is that what you and David have decided?”

  “Look,” I say. “I just want to make sure this doesn’t happen again, or happen at all. That’s why I’m here.”

  Dr. Christine sits back as if creating more space between us. A pathway to the door, maybe.

  “Dannie,” she says. “I think something is going on that you don’t understand, and that is frightening to you, as someone whose actual job it is to discover and prove causality.”

  “Causality,” I repeat.

  “If I do this, I’ll get this result.” She holds out her hands like a weighted Grecian scale. “This experience does not fit in your life, you have not taken any steps to have it, and yet here it is.”

  “Well, right,” I say. “That’s why I need it to not be.”

  “And how do you propose you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “That’s kind of why I’m here.”

  Predictably, our time is up.

  * * *

  I decide I need to go in search of the apartment. I need something concrete, some form of evidence.

  Sunday, David heads into the office and I tell him I’m going for a run. I used to run all the time in my twenties. Long runs. Down the West Side Highway and through the Financial District, between the tall buildings and across the cobblestones. I’ve run the loop in Central Park, around the reservoir, watching the leaves change from green to yellow to amber, the water reflecting the seasons. I’ve run two marathons and half a dozen halfs. Running does all the things for me it does for everyone else—clears my head, gives me time to think, makes my body feel good and loose. But it also has the added benefit of taking me places. When I first moved to the city I could only afford to live in Hell’s Kitchen, but I wanted to be everywhere. So I ran.

  In the early days of our relationship I used to try to get David to come with me, but he’d want to stop after a few blocks and get bagels so I started leaving him at home. Running is better alone anyway. More space to think.

  It’s 9 a.m. by the time I cross the Brooklyn Bridge, but it’s Sunday, early, so there aren’t that many tourists out yet. Just bikers and other joggers. I keep my head high, shoulders back, focusing on my core pulling forward. My breathing is ragged. It has been too long since I’ve been on a long run, and I feel my lungs rebelling against the exertion.

  I never saw the outside of the building. But from the view I’d have to place it somewhere close to the water, maybe near Plymouth. I get over the bridge and slow to a walk as I make my way down Washington Street toward the river. The sun has started to burn off the haze of the morning, and the water reflects in sparkles. I take off my sweatshirt and tie it around my waist.
/>   Dumbo, short for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, used to be a ferry landing and still has an industrial feel. Large warehouse buildings mix with overpriced grocer markets and all-glass apartment buildings. As my breathing slows, I realize I should have done a search before I came down. Apartment views, open listings. I could have made a spreadsheet and gone through it—why didn’t I think of that?

  I stop in front of Brooklyn Bridge Park, in front of a brick-and-glass building that takes up the entire block. Not it.

  I pull out my phone. Did I (do I?) buy this apartment? I make good money, more than most of my peers, but a two-million-dollar one-bedroom loft seems out of my price range. At least in the next six months. And it doesn’t make any logistical sense. We have our dream place in Gramercy, big enough to put a kid in, someday. Why would I want to be here?

  My stomach starts to rumble, and I walk west to see if I can find somewhere to grab an apple or a bagel, and think. I turn up Bridge Street and after a few blocks I find a deli with a black awning—Bridge Coffee Shop. It’s a tiny place, with a counter deli and a board menu. There’s a police officer there; that’s how you know it’s good. A woman with a wide smile stands behind the counter and converses in Spanish with a young mother with a sleeping baby. When they spot me, they wave goodbye to each other and the woman wheels her baby out. I hold the door open for her.

  I order a bagel with whitefish salad, my usual. The woman behind the counter nods in solidarity with my order.

  A man comes in and pays for a coffee. Two teenagers get bagels with cream cheese. Everyone here is a regular. Everyone says hello.

  My bagel sandwich comes up for pickup. I take the white paper bag, thank the woman, and make my way back down toward the water. Brooklyn Bridge Park is less a park and more a stretch of grass. The benches are full, and I pop down on a rock, right by the water’s edge. I open up my sandwich and take a bite. It’s good, really good. Surprisingly close to Sarge’s.

  I look out over the water—I’ve always loved the water. I’ve had little of it over the course of my life, but when I was younger, we used to spend July Fourth week at the Jersey Shore in Margate, a beach town that is practically an extended suburb of Philadelphia if you go by population. My parents would rent a condo, and for seven blissful days we’d eat shaved ice and run the crowded shore with hundreds of other kids, our parents happily situated in their beach chairs, watching from the sand. There was the night in Ocean City, on the rides, spinning on the Sizzler or riding the bumper cars. The dinner at Mack & Manco Pizza and cheese hoagies from Sack O’ Subs, dripping in oil and red wine vinegar, opened in paper at the beach.