* * *
On Saturday, I go to Bella’s chemo appointment with her. She chats amicably to a nurse named Janine, who wears white scrubs with a hand-painted rainbow emblazoned on the back, as she hooks her up to the IV. Chemo is in a center on East One Hundred Second Street, two blocks up from where her surgery was performed. The chairs are wide, and the blankets are soft on the third floor of the Ruttenberg Treatment Center. Bella has a cashmere throw with her. “Janine is letting me store a basket here,” she tells me in a conspiratorial whisper.
Aaron shows up, and the three of us suck on Popsicles and pass the time. Two hours later, we’re in an Uber going back downtown when Bella suddenly clutches my arm.
“Can we stop?” she asks. And then, more urgently, “Pull over.”
We do, on the corner of Park Avenue and Thirty-Ninth Street, and she climbs over Aaron to retch in the street. She starts puking with ferocity; the remains of a technicolor Popsicle spew out with the bile.
“Hold her hair,” I tell Aaron, who gently rubs her back in small circles.
She waves us off, breathing heavily over bent knees. “I’m fine,” she says.
“Do you have any tissues?” I ask the Uber driver, who mercifully hasn’t said anything.
“Here.” He hands a box back. There are clouds on the cardboard.
I pluck out three tissues and hand them to Bella, who takes them and wipes her mouth. “Well, that was fun,” she says.
She climbs back into the car, but there’s a change in her. She knows now that what’s to come is hers to face alone. I can’t take this part from her, I can’t even share it. I have the instinct to reach out, to try and keep the jaws open, but they have clamped shut too quickly. She leans on Aaron. I see the rise and fall of her body, matched in step to her breathing. The first evidence is in, and it isn’t good.
Aaron helps her upstairs. Svedka is still there, washing dishes that have never been dirty. Bella hasn’t fully recovered from surgery, and small things like a few stairs or bending down are still difficult. It will take her months to fully recover, and then there is the chemo.
“Let’s get you into bed,” I say.
Bella is wearing a blue lace Zimmermann dress with a butter-soft chocolate leather jacket, and I help her take them off. Aaron stays in the other room. When she’s undressed, I can see her scars, some still bandaged, and how much thinner she has gotten in just a few short weeks. She must have lost fifteen pounds.
I smile, forcing the tide back down. “Here,” I say. She holds her head out like a child, and I loop a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt over her head, then slide on some soft gray drawstring sweatpants. I pull down the freshly laundered duvet and tuck her inside, fluffing the pillows behind her.
“You’re so good to me,” she says. She reaches up for my hand, curls her tiny palm into mine. Bella has always had the smallest hands, too little for her body.
“You make it easy,” I say. “You’ll be better in no time.”
We look at each other for a beat. Long enough for us to recognize the terrible fear we’re both facing.
“I got you something!” Bella says. Her face breaks out into a smile. She tucks some hair behind her ears. Hair that will soon be gone.
“Bella, come on,” I say. “That’s not—”
She shakes her head. “No, for your birthday!”
“My birthday is next week.”
“So it’s early. I have an excuse to do things now, don’t you think?”
I say nothing.
“Greg, can you come help me?”
Aaron comes into the room, wiping his hands on his jeans. “What’s up?”
Bella sits up in bed, pointing excitedly to a gift-wrapped package that leans against her closet wall.
Aaron picks it up. I can tell it’s not light. “On the bed?” he asks.
“Yeah, here.” Bella removes a throw from her feet and moves her legs into a cross-legged position. She taps the space next to her, and I go to sit. “Open it.”
The wrapping paper is gold, with a white-and-silver silk ribbon. Bella is a master gift wrapper, and it gives me some solace, some sign, that she did this herself. It feels like proof of stability, of order. I tear it away.
Inside is a large frame. A piece of art. “Turn it over,” she says.
I do, with Aaron’s help.
“I saw a print of this on Instagram and immediately knew you needed it. It took forever to find the Allen Grubesic one. I think he only made twelve. Everyone at the gallery has been trying to track it down for you, and we found it two months ago. A woman in Italy was selling it. We pounced. I’m obsessed. Please tell me you love it?”
I look at the print in my hands. It’s an eye chart, and it reads: I WAS YOUNG I NEEDED THE MONEY. My hands feel numb.
“Do you like it?” she asks, her voice an octave lower.
“Yes,” I say. I swallow. “I love it.”
“I thought you would.”
“Aaron,” I say. I can feel him standing there. It seems crazy, impossible, that he doesn’t know. “Whatever happened to that Dumbo apartment?”
Bella laughs. “Why do you call him Aaron?” she asks.
“It’s fine,” he says abruptly. “I don’t mind.”
“I know you don’t mind,” Bella says. “But why?”
“It’s his first name,” I say. “Isn’t it?” I turn my attention to the gift. I run my hand over the glass.
“I bought it, the apartment,” she tells me. The Aaron argument dissolves as quickly as it presented. “The rest is for me to know and you to find out.”
I push the print to the side. I take her hands in mine. “Bella, listen to me. You cannot renovate that apartment. It will be a good investment as raw space. You bought it, fine, just sell it. Promise me you’re not going to move in there. Promise.”
Bella squeezes my hand. “You’re crazy,” she says. “But fine. I promise you. I’m not going to move in there.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The chemo goes from good to bad to gruesome quickly, too quickly. Next week she’s sick, the following one she’s weak, and after that she is sunken, her body practically concave. The one saving grace is that her hair doesn’t fall out. Session after session, week after week, not even a strand.
“It happens sometimes,” Dr. Shaw tells me. He comes to her chemo sessions to check up on her and run through any recent blood work. Today, Jill is there. Which might explain why Dr. Shaw and I are in the hallway, a whole room away from where Bella’s mother pretends to be dutiful. “A patient who doesn’t lose their hair. It’s rare, though. She’s one of the lucky ones.”
“Lucky.” I taste the word in my mouth. Rotted.
“Poor choice of words,” he says. “We doctors aren’t always the most sensitive. I apologize.”
“No,” I say. “She has great hair.”
Dr. Shaw smiles at me. Colorful Nikes peek out from the bottom of his jeans. They point to some kind of life beyond these walls. Does he go home to children? How does he shake the everyday of these patients, shrinking inside?
“She’s lucky that she has such a good support system,” he tells me. It isn’t the first time he’s said it. “Some patients have to do this alone.”
“She has two more weeks of this,” I say. “And then she’ll do another test?”
“Yes. We’ll check to see if the cancer has been localized. But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment. The likelihood of remission in ovarian cancers…”
“No,” I say. “She’s different. She has her hair! She’s different.”
Dr. Shaw puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. But he doesn’t say anything.
I want to ask him more. Like whether he’s ever seen a case like this. Like what we should prepare for. I want to ask him to tell me. Tell me what is going to happen. Give me the answers. But he can’t. He doesn’t know. And whatever he has to say, I’m not interested in hearing.
I go back in
the room. Bella’s leaning her head against the side of her armchair, her eyes closed. She opens them when I’m in front of her.
“Guess what?” she tells me, her voice sleepy. “Mom is going to take me to dinner and to see the Barbra Streisand musical. Do you want to come?”
Jill, dressed in black crepe slacks and a floral-print silk blouse with a pussy bow, leans over. “It’ll be fun. We’ll go to Sardi’s before and have some martinis.”
“Bella…” I can feel the anger start to simmer in me. She can barely sit up. She’s going to go to dinner? To a theater?
Bella rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on. I can do it.”
“You’re not really supposed to be out right now. Dr. Shaw did say that, and he definitely mentioned that alcohol could interfere with your medi—”
“Stop! What are you, my parole officer?” Bella fires at me. It feels like a shot to the stomach.
“No,” I say calmly. “I’m not trying to keep you from anything; I’m just trying to keep you well. I’m the one who has been here, and who has listened to the doctors.”
Jill doesn’t even bristle. She doesn’t even seem to understand the slight.
“So have I,” Bella says. She reaches down and tugs her blanket up. I see how thin her legs have become, like two arms. She notices me noticing.
“I’m going to get some iced tea,” Jill says. “Bella, can I get you some iced tea?”
“Bella doesn’t drink iced tea,” I say. “She hates it. She always has.”
“Well,” Jill says. “Coffee, then!” She doesn’t wait for a response, just saunters out of the room like she’s in sweaters and headed now toward the shoe department.
“What is wrong with you?” Bella hisses when she’s left.
“What is wrong with me? What is wrong with you? You can’t do this tonight. You know that. Why are you acting this way?”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don’t need you to tell me how I feel? That maybe I know?”
“No,” I say. “It didn’t, because that’s ridiculous. This isn’t about how you feel, which, by the way, is like shit. You threw up three times in the car on the way here.”
Bella looks away. I feel struck by sadness, but it does not push the anger out. Because that is what I feel: angry. And for the first time since her diagnosis, I let it take over. I let the righteous indignation burn a hole through me, through her, through this godforsaken chemical den.
“Shut up,” Bella says. Something she hasn’t said to me since we were twelve years old, in the back of my parents’ station wagon, fighting over god knows what. Not her life. Not cancer. “I’m not your project. I’m not some little girl you have to save. You don’t know what’s better for me than I do.” She struggles to sit up and winces, the needle in her arm shifting. I am overcome with a helplessness so deep it threatens to topple me into her chair.
“I’m sorry, Bella. I’m sorry,” I say, gently now. For all the things she’s going through, for everything. “It’s okay. Let’s just finish, and I’ll take you home.”
“No,” Bella says. There is a ferocity in her tone that does not give. “I don’t want you here anymore.”
“Bells—”
“Don’t ‘Bells’ me. You always do this. You’ve done this forever. You think you know everything. But it’s my body, not yours, okay? You’re not my mother.”
“I never said I was.”
“You didn’t have to. You treat me like a child. You think I’m incapable. But I don’t need you.”
“Bella, this is insane. Come on.”
“Please stop coming to these appointments.”
“I’m not going to—”
“I’m not asking you!” she says. She’s practically screaming now. “I’m telling you. You need to leave.” She swallows. There are sores in her mouth. I can tell it takes effort. “Now.”
I wander outside. Jill is there, juggling a coffee and a tea. “Oh, hello, darling,” she says. “Cappuccino?”
I don’t answer her. I keep walking. I keep walking until I start running.
I take out my phone. Before I am down the hall, before I have any clear grasp on what I’m doing, I’m scrolling to his name and hitting the green button. He answers after the third ring.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s wrong? Is she okay?”
I start to speak and then, instead of words, I’m met with big, hiccupping sobs. I crouch down in the corner of the hallway, let them rake over me. Nurses pass by, unmoved. This is the chemo floor, after all. Nothing new to see here. Just the end of the world over and over and over again.
“I’ll be right there,” he says, and hangs up.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“She doesn’t mean it,” Aaron says. We’re sitting at a diner on Lexington, some late-night one named Big Daddy’s or Daddy Dan’s or something like that. The kind of place that can’t afford to be downtown. I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve cream.
“She does,” I say. We’ve been going through this script for the last twenty minutes, since Aaron ran up to the hospital’s double doors to find me crouching outside. “She always felt this way. She just never said it.”
“She’s scared.”
“She was so angry with me. I’ve never even seen her like that before. Like she wanted to kill me.”
“She’s the one going through it,” he says. “Right now, she has to think that she’s capable of anything, even alcohol.”
I ignore his attempt at levity.
“She is,” I say. I bite my lip. I don’t want to cry anymore. Not in front of him. It’s too vulnerable, too close, too near. “I just can’t believe her parents are behaving this way. You don’t know what they’re like—”
Aaron removes an invisible eyelash from his face.
“You don’t know,” I repeat.
“Maybe not,” Aaron says. “They seem to care. That’s good, right?”
“They’ll leave,” I say. “They always do. When she really needs them, they’ll be gone.”
“But, Dannie,” Aaron says. He sits forward. I can feel the air molecules around us stiffen. “They’re here now. And she really needs them. Isn’t that what matters?”
I think about his promise on the street corner. I always believed it was just Bella and me. There was no one she could count on but me. There was no one who would really be there, forever, but me.
“Not if they’ll eventually leave,” I say.
Aaron keeps hovering closer. “I think you’re wrong.”
“I think you don’t know,” I say. I’m starting to believe it was a mistake calling him. What was I thinking?
He shakes his head. “You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”
Our eyes lock, and I think that maybe he can read it there. Everything that happened. That maybe, somehow, he has reached back. That he knows. In that moment, I want to tell. I want to tell him, if only so he can carry this thing with me.
“Aaron,” I start, and then his cell phone rings. He takes it out.
“It’s work,” he says. “Hang on.”
He stands up and leaves the booth. I see him gesturing out by the glass doors emblazoned with the diner’s name: Daddy’s. The waitress comes over. Do we want any food? I shake my head. Just the check, please.
She hands me the bill. She hadn’t expected us to stick around, I guess. I leave cash on the table and get my bag. I join Aaron at the door, where he’s hanging up.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
“It’s okay. I’m going to head out. I should go back to the office.”
“It’s Saturday,” he says.
“Corporate law,” I mutter. “And I’ve been gone a lot.”
He gives me a small smile. He looks disappointed.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say
. “Really, thanks for showing up. I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he says. “Dannie—you can call me anytime. You know that, right?”
I smile. I nod.
The bells on the door jingle on my way out.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It’s the first week of November, and Bella won’t speak to me. I call her. I send David over with food. “Just give her a little time,” he tells me. I don’t express the absurdity of his statement to him. I can’t even think it, much less say it out loud.
Dr. Christine is no more surprised to see me back in her office than I am to be there. She wants to know about my family, and so I tell her about Michael. I remember him less and less these days. What he was like. I try and focus on the details. His laugh, the strange way his forearms hung from his elbows, like there was just too much limb. His brown curly hair, like baby ringlets, and his wide brown eyes. How he used to call me “pal.” How he’d always invite me to hang out in the tent in our backyard, even if his friends were over. He didn’t seem to have any of the hang-ups older brothers usually have about their little sisters. We fought, sure, but I always knew he loved me, that he wanted me around.
Dr. Christine tells me I am learning to deal with a life I cannot control. What she doesn’t say, what she doesn’t have to, is that I’m failing at it.
I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished.
The following Wednesday, Dr. Shaw walks by. I’m sitting on a cement ledge, some fake foliage dangling below me, doing some paperwork.
“Humpty Dumpty,” he says.
I look up, so startled I nearly fall.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bella,” I say. I gesture with my free arm, the one not holding my array of folders, upward, to the room where Bella lies, chemicals being pumped into her.
In Five Years Page 15
