David keeps a spreadsheet of really great meals we’ve had—what we drank and what we ate—for future reference. He keeps it accessible on his phone for such situations.
“David—” I start. I exhale. “The florist ordered us three thousand gardenias.”
“What for?”
“The wedding,” I say.
“I’m aware of that,” he tells me. “But why?”
“I don’t know. Some mix-up at the florist. They’re all going to be brown by the time we take any photos. They last for like two hours.”
“Well, if it’s their mistake, they should cover the cost. Did you speak with them?”
I take my napkin and fold it over my pants. “I was on the phone with them but had to hang up to deal with work.”
David takes a sip of water. “I’ll handle it,” he says.
“Thanks.” I clear my throat. “David,” I say. “Before I say this, you can’t get mad at me.”
“That’s impossible to guarantee, but okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Just say it,” he says.
I exhale. “Maybe we should postpone the wedding.”
He looks at me in confusion but something else, too. In the back of his eyes, behind the pupils and the firing optic nerve, is relief. Confirmation. Because he’s known, hasn’t he? He’s suspected that I’d let him down.
“Why do you say that?” he asks, measured.
“Bella is sick,” I say. “I don’t think she’ll be able to make it. I don’t want to get married without her.”
David nods. “So what are you saying? You want more time?” He shakes his head.
“That we postpone till the summer. Maybe even get the venue we want.”
“We don’t want this venue?” David sits back. He’s irritated. It’s not an emotion he wears often. “Dannie,” he says. “I need to ask you something.”
I stay perfectly still. I hear the wind outside howling. Ushering in the impending freeze.
“Do you really want to get married?”
Relief sputters and then floods my veins like a faucet after a water outage. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, of course.”
Our wine comes then. We busy ourselves with witnessing and then participating: the uncorking and tasting and pouring and toasting. David congratulates me on QuTe.
“Are you sure?” he says, picking the thread back up. “Because sometimes I don’t…” He shakes his head. “Sometimes I’m not so sure.”
“Forget about my suggestion,” I say. “It was dumb. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Everything is already set.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes.”
We order, but we barely touch our food. We both know the truth of what sits now between us. And I should be scared, I should be terrified, but the thing I keep thinking, the thing that makes me answer in the affirmative, is that he didn’t ask the other question, the one I cannot conceive.
What happens if she doesn’t make it?
Chapter Thirty-Five
The chemo is brutal. Far, far worse than the last round. Standing up is hard for Bella now, and she doesn’t leave the apartment except for treatment. She sits in bed, emailing with the gallery, looking over digital exhibits. I visit her in the mornings sometimes. Svedka lets me in, and I sit on the edge of the bed, even as she’s sleeping.
She starts to lose her hair.
My wedding dress arrives. It fits. It even looks good. The saleslady was right, the neckline isn’t as bad as I thought it was.
David does not mention the wedding to me for a week. For a week, I leave emails from the planner unanswered, dodge calls, hold off on writing checks. And then I come home from work to find him at the dining room table, a bowl of pasta and two salads set out in front of him.
“Hey,” he says. “Come sit.” Hey. Come sit.
Aldridge said I have a good gut, but I always thought the concept of intuition was bullshit. All you are feeling is an absorption of the facts. You are assessing all the information you have: words, body language, environment, the proximity of your human form to a moving vehicle, and deriving a conclusion. It is not my gut that leads me to sit down at that table knowing what is coming. It is the truth of what is.
I sit.
The pasta looks cold. It’s been out a long time.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You’re not late,” he says. He’s right. We didn’t schedule anything tonight, and it’s only eight-thirty. This is the time I’m usually home.
“This looks good,” I say.
David exhales. At least he’s not going to make me wait for it.
“Look,” he says. “We need to talk.”
I turn to face him. He looks tired, withdrawn, the same temperature as the food before us.
“Okay,” I say.
“I—” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I’m the one who has to do this.” His tone sounds just a little bit bitter.
“I’m sorry.”
He ignores me. “Do you know what this feels like?”
“No,” I admit. “I don’t.”
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you, too.”
He shakes his head. “I love you, but I’m sick of being the person who fits in your life but not your… fuck it, your heart.”
I feel it in my body. It punches me right there, right on the tender underside.
“David,” I say. My stomach clenches. “You do.”
He shakes his head. “You may love me, but I think we both know you don’t want to marry me.”
I hear Bella’s words echoed, here, with David. You’re not in love with him.
“How can you say that? We’re engaged, we’re planning a wedding. We’ve been together for seven and a half years.”
“And we’ve been engaged for five. If you wanted to marry me, you would have already.”
“But Bella—”
“It’s not about Bella!” he says. He raises his voice, another thing he never does. “It’s not. If it were. God, Dannie, I feel horrible about all of this. I know what she means to you. I love her, too. But what I’m saying is… it’s not the issue. This isn’t happening because she got sick. You were dragging your heels way before that.”
“We were busy,” I say. “We were working. Life. That was both of us.”
“I asked the question!” David says. “You knew where I stood. I was trying to be patient. How long am I supposed to wait?”
“Until the summer,” I say. I smooth a napkin down on my lap. Focus on the plan. “What is the big deal with six months?”
“Because it’s not just six months,” he says. “In the summer, there will be something else, some other reason.”
“There won’t!” I say.
“There will! Because you don’t really want to marry me.”
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. St
op 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 heart.
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, taki
ng 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, crumpled 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.
In Five Years Page 18
