In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

  “I just came from there.”

  Dr. Shaw takes a step closer to me. He peers at my binder disapprovingly. “Do you need some coffee?” he asks.

  I found some crappy vending machine stuff earlier, but it’s wearing off quickly.

  “It kind of sucks here,” I say.

  He holds a pointed finger out to me. “That’s because you do not know the tricks. Follow me.”

  We wind through the ground floor of the treatment center to the back and down a hallway. At the end is a little atrium, with a Starbucks cart. I swear, it’s like seeing a miracle. My eyes go wide. Dr. Shaw notices.

  “I know, right?” he says. “It’s the best-kept hospital secret. Come on.”

  He leads me to the cart where a woman in her mid-twenties with two French braids smiles wide at him. “The usual?” she asks.

  He turns to me. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a tea drinker. That’s why Irina here has to know my order.”

  “The hospital is big on coffee?” I ask.

  “More manly,” he says, gesturing for me to step forward.

  I order an Americano, and when our drinks are ready, Dr. Shaw takes a seat at a little metal table. I join him.

  “I don’t want to keep you,” I say. “I appreciate the coffee referral.”

  “It’s good for me,” he says. He takes his lid off, letting the steam rise. “Do you know surgeons are notorious for having the worst bedside manner?”

  “Really,” I say. But I know.

  “Yes. We’re monstrous. So every Wednesday I try and have coffee with a commoner.”

  He smiles. I laugh because I know the moment requires it.

  “So how is Bella?” he asks. His pager beeps and he looks at it, setting it on the table.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You’ve seen her more recently than I have.”

  He looks confused; I keep talking.

  “We had a fight. I’m not allowed upstairs.”

  “Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?”

  I’m cognizant of the time, of how little he has. “I’m controlling,” I say, getting to the punch.

  Dr. Shaw laughs. It’s a nice laugh, odd in this hospital setting. “I’m familiar with this dynamic,” he says. “But she’ll come around.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “She will,” he says. “You’re here. One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t try and make this experience above the simplicity of humanity, it won’t work.”

  I stare at him. I’m not sure what he means, he can tell.

  “You’re still you, she’s still her. You still have emotions. You’ll still fight. You can try and be perfect, but it will backfire. Just keep being here, instead.”

  His pager goes off again. This time he snaps the lid back down on his cup. “Unfortunately, duty calls.” He stands and extends his hand. “Hang in there,” he says. “I know the road isn’t easy, but stay the course. You’re doing good.”

  I stay sitting near the Starbucks cart for another hour, until I know Bella has finished treatment and is safely out of the building. When I head home I call David, but there is no answer.

  * * *

  The following week, I’m not at the hospital but instead on a plane with Aldridge to Los Angeles. Aldridge is seeing another client while we’re out there, a pharmaceutical giant who sends their jet for our use. We board with Kelly James, a litigating partner I’ve never said more than twenty words to over the course of my nearly five years at Wachtell.

  It’s a ten-seater, and I take the one in the rear, by the window. I lean my head against the glass. I said yes to this trip without considering what it means. It is, of course, an answer to Aldridge’s original question. Yes. Yes, I’ll take on the case. Yes, I’ll commit to this.

  “You’re doing the right thing,” David told me last night. “This could be huge for your career. And you love this company.”

  “I do,” I say. “I just can’t help but feel like people here need me.”

  “We’ll survive,” he said. “I promise we’ll all survive.”

  And now here I am, flying over an endless mountain range in pursuit of the ocean.

  We’re staying at Casa del Mar, in Santa Monica, right on the beach. My room is on the ground level, with a terrace that extends onto the boardwalk. The hotel is shabby-chic Hamptons meets European opulence. I like it.

  We have a dinner meeting with Jordi and Anya tonight, but when I reach my room, it’s only 11 a.m. We picked up half a day on our way across the country.

  I change into shorts, a T-shirt, and a sun hat—my Russian Jew skin has never met a sun it particularly got on with—and decide to take a walk on the beach. The temperature is warm and getting hotter—in the mid-eighties by lunchtime—but there’s a cool breeze off the ocean. For the first time in weeks, I feel as if I am not simply surviving.

  We go to dinner at Ivy at the Shore, a restaurant down the street from Casa del Mar, but Aldridge still calls a car. Kelly is in town to see another client, so it’s just Aldridge and me. I’m wearing a navy shift dress with lilac flowers and navy espadrilles, the most casual I’ve ever been in a work environment. But it’s California, these women are young, and we’re by the ocean. I want to wear flowers.

  We get to the restaurant first. Rattan chairs with floral backs and pillows pepper the restaurant as diners in jeans and dinner jackets clink glasses, laughing.

  We sit. “I’m going to insist on the calamari,” Aldridge says. “It’s delectable.”

  He’s wearing a light gray suit with a purple paisley shirt. If you photographed us together, you might think it had been planned.

  “Is there anything we should go over?” I ask him. “I have the company stats memorized, but—”

  “This is just a get-to-know-you meeting, so they feel comfortable. You know the ropes.”

  “No meeting is ‘just’ anything,” I say.

  “That is true. But if you try for an agenda, you often get an undesired outcome.”

  Jordi and Anya arrive in tandem. Jordi is tall, in high-waisted pants and a cowl-neck sweater. Her hair is down and wet at the ends. She looks like a bohemian dream, and I am reminded, for not the first time, of Bella. Anya wears jeans, a T-shirt, and a blazer. Her hair is short and slicked back. She talks with her eyes.

  “Are we late?” she says. She’s skittish. I can tell. No matter. We’ll win them over.

  “Not at all,” Aldridge says. “You know us New Yorkers. We don’t know anything about your traffic patterns.”

  Jordi sits next to me. Her perfume is heady and dense.

  “Ladies, I’d like you to meet Danielle Kohan. She’s our best and brightest senior associate. And she’s been a huge boon to your IPO evaluation already.”

  “You can call me Dannie,” I say, shaking each of their hands.

  “We love Aldridge,” Jordi tells me. “But does he have a first name?”

  “It’s never to be used,” I tell her, before mouthing: Miles.

  Aldridge smiles. “What are we drinking tonight?” he asks the group.

  A waiter materializes, and Aldridge orders a bottle of champagne and a bottle of red, for dinner. “Cocktails, anyone?” he inquires.

  Anya gets an iced tea. “How long do you think this will take?” she asks.

  “Dinner, or taking your company public?” Aldridge does not look up from his menu.

  “I’ve been a big fan of yours for a while now,” I say. “I think what you’ve done with the space is brilliant.”

  “Thank—” Jordi starts, but Anya cuts her off.

  “We didn’t do anything with the existing space. We created a new one,” she says. She eyes Jordi as if to say, Lock it up.

  “I’m curious, though,” I say. I aim my question at both of them, equally. “Why now?”

  At this, Aldridge looks up from his menu and grabs a passing waiter. “We’d like the calamari immediately, please.” Aldridge winks at me.

  Jordi looks
to Anya, as if unsure how to answer, and I feel a question answered before it has been raised. I swallow it back down. Not now.

  “We’re at the point where we don’t want to work as hard as we have been on the same thing,” Jordi says. “We’d like the revenue to be able to turn our attentions to new ventures.”

  I feel the familiarity in her speech. The measured, calculated words. Maybe it’s all true, but none of it feels authentic. So I push.

  “Why give away control of something you own when you don’t have to?”

  At this, Jordi busies herself with her water glass. Anya’s eyes narrow. I can feel Aldridge shift next to me. I have no idea why I’m doing this. I know exactly why I’m doing this.

  “Are you trying to talk us out of this?” Anya asks. She directs her question to Aldridge. “Because I was under the impression this was a kickoff dinner.”

  I look at Aldridge, who stays silent. He is, I realize, not going to answer for me.

  “No,” I say. “I just like to understand motivation. It helps me do my job.”

  Anya likes this answer, I can tell. Her shoulders drop perceptively. “The truth is, I’m not sure. We’ve spoken a lot about this. Jordi knows I’m on the fence.”

  “We’ve been at QuTe for almost ten years,” Jordi says, repeating what is no doubt a familiar line. “It’s time for something else.”

  “I don’t know why we have to give up control in order to have that,” Anya says.

  The champagne arrives in a flourish of glasses and bubbles. Aldridge pours.

  “To QuTe,” he says. “A smooth IPO process and a lot of money.”

  Jordi clinks his glass, but Anya and I keep our eyes on each other. I see her searching me, asking the question that will never be spoken at this table: What would you do?

  Chapter Thirty

  Two hours later, I’m at the bar upstairs at the hotel. I should sleep, but I can’t. Every time I try I think about Bella, about what a terrible friend I am to be this far away, and my eyes shoot back open. I’m leaning over my second dirty martini when Aldridge comes in. I squint. I’m too drunk for this.

  “Dannie,” he says. “May I?” He doesn’t wait for my response but takes the seat next to me.

  “Tonight was good,” I say, trying for steady. I think I’m slurring my words.

  “You were very engaged,” he says. “Must have felt good.”

  “Sure,” I deadpan. “Wonderful.”

  Aldridge’s eyes flit down to my martini glass and back to me. “Danielle,” he says. “Are you all right?”

  I’m suddenly aware that if I speak I will cry, and I have never cried in front of a boss, not once, not even at the DA’s office, where morale was so bad that we had a designated room for hysterical outbursts. I pick up my water glass. I sip. I set it back down.

  “No,” I say.

  He gestures to the waiter. “I’ll have a Ketel on the rocks, two lemons,” he says. The waiter turns, but Aldridge calls him back. “No, actually, I’ll have a scotch. Neat.”

  He takes off his suit jacket, drapes it over the empty stool next to him, and then goes about rolling back his sleeves. Neither of us speaks during this interval, and by the time the ritual is complete, his drink is in front of him and I no longer feel as if I’m going to cry.

  “So,” he says. “You can begin or I can do my ankle cuffs next.”

  I laugh. The alcohol has made everything loose. I feel the emotions there, right on the surface, not tucked and tidy where I normally keep them.

  “I’m not sure I’m a good person,” I say. I didn’t know that’s what was inside my head, but once I say it, I know it’s true.

  “Interesting,” he says. “A good person.”

  “My best friend is very sick.”

  “Yes,” Aldridge says. “I know that.”

  “And we’re in a fight.”

  He takes a sip of scotch. “What happened?”

  “She thinks I’m controlling,” I say, repeating the truth.

  At this, Aldridge laughs, just like Dr. Shaw. It’s a hearty belly laugh.

  “Why does everyone think that’s so funny?” I ask.

  “Because you are,” he says. “You were quite controlling tonight, for example.”

  “Was that bad?”

  Aldridge shrugs. “I guess we’ll see. How did it feel?”

  “That’s the problem,” I say. “It felt great. I loved it. My best friend is—she’s sick, and tonight I’m in California, happy about some clients at dinner. What kind of a person does that make me?”

  Aldridge nods, like he understands it now. Gets what this is about. “You are upset because you think you need to quit your life and be by her side.”

  “No, she won’t let me. I just shouldn’t be happy doing this.”

  “Ah. Right. Happiness. The enemy of all suffering.”

  He takes another sip. We drink in silence for a moment.

  “Did I ever tell you what I originally wanted to be?”

  I stare at him. We’re not exactly braiding-each-other’s-hair besties. How would I know?

  “I’m assuming this is a trick question and that you’re going to say lawyer.”

  Aldridge laughs. “No, no. I was going to be a shrink. My father was a psychiatrist, so is my brother. It’s a strange career choice, for a teen, but it always seemed the right one.”

  I blink at him. “Shrink?”

  “I would have been terrible at it. All that listening, I don’t have it in me.”

  I can feel the alcohol weaving its way through my system. Making everything hazy and rosy and faded. “What happened?”

  “I went to Yale, and my first day there I had a philosophy course. First-Order Logic. A discussion of metatheory. It was for my major, but the professor was a lawyer, and I just thought—why diagnose when you can determine?”

  He stares at me for a long time. Finally, he puts a hand on my shoulder.

  “You are not wrong for loving what you do,” he says. “You are lucky. Life doesn’t hand everyone a passion in their profession; you and I won that round.”

  “It doesn’t feel like winning,” I say.

  “No,” Aldridge says. “It often doesn’t. That dinner, over there?” He points outside, past the lobby and the palm tree prints. “We didn’t cement that. You loved it because, for you, the win is the game. That’s how you know you’re meant for it.”

  He takes his hand off my shoulder. He downs the rest of his drink in a neat sip.

  “You’re a great lawyer, Dannie. You’re also a good friend and a good person. Don’t let your own bias throw the case.”

  * * *

  The next morning, I take a car up to Montana Avenue. It’s overcast, the fog of the morning won’t burn off until noon, but by then we’ll already be up in the air. I stop at Peet’s Coffee and take a stroll down the little shopping street—even though everything is still closed. A few Lycra-clad mothers wheel their distracted toddlers while they talk. The morning bike crew passes by on their way out to Malibu.

  I used to think I could never live in Los Angeles. It was for people who couldn’t make it in New York. The easy way out. Moving would mean admitting that you had been wrong. That everything you’d said about New York: that there was nowhere else in the world to live, that the winters didn’t bother you, that carrying four grocery bags back home in the pouring rain or hailing snow wasn’t an inconvenience. That having your own car was, in fact, your dream. That life wasn’t, isn’t, hard.

  But there is so much space out here. It feels like there is room—to not have to store every single piece of off-season clothing under your bed. Maybe even to make a mistake.

  I take my coffee back to the hotel. I walk across the concrete bike path, into the sand, and down to the ocean. Far to the left, I can see some surfers zigzagging through the waves, around one another, like their movements are choreographed. A big, oceanic ballet. Moving continuously toward the shore.

  I snap a picture.

  I lo
ve you, I write. What else is there to say?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “It’s really a question of eggshell or white,” the woman says.

  I am standing in the middle of Mark Ingram, a bridal salon in Midtown, an untouched flute of champagne on a glass coffee table, alone.

  My mother was supposed to come in, but the university called a last-minute staff meeting to discuss a confidential matter, re: donations for next year, and she’s stuck in Philadelphia. I’m supposed to send her pictures.

  It’s now mid-November and Bella hasn’t spoken to me in two weeks. She’s finishing her second round of chemo on Saturday, and David tells me not to bother her until it’s over. I’ve heeded his advice, impossibly. It’s excruciating, not being there. Not knowing.

  The wedding invitations have gone out, we’re receiving RSVPs. The menu is set. The flowers are ordered. All that is left is getting a dress, so here I am, standing in it.

  “Like I said, with this time frame it’s really off-the-rack, so it’s pretty much only the dresses hanging here.” The saleslady gestures to the three dresses to our right—one eggshell, two white. She crosses her arms, checks her watch. She seems to think I’m wasting her time. But doesn’t she know? This is a sure sale. I have to leave with a dress today.

  “This one seems fine,” I say. It’s the first one I’ve tried on.

  I was never one of those girls who dreamed about her wedding. That was always Bella. I remember her standing in front of my mirror with a pillowcase over her head, reciting vows to the glass. She knew exactly what the dress would look like—silk organza with spools of unfolding tulle. A long lace veil. She dreamed of the decor: white calla lilies, puffy peonies, and tiny tea candles. There would be a harpist. Everyone would ooh and aah when she stepped out of the shadows and into the aisle. They’d stand. She’d float down to the faceless, nameless man. The one who made her feel like the entire universe was conspiring for her love, and hers alone.

  I knew I’d get married in the way you know you’ll get older, and that Saturday comes after Friday. I didn’t think that much about it. And then I met David and everything fit and I knew it was what I had been looking for, that we were meant to unfold these chapters together, side by side. But I never thought about the wedding. I never thought about the dress. I never pictured myself in this moment, standing here now. And if I had, I never would have seen this.