In Five Years: A Novel (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

September is busy season at work. If everyone agrees to take a collective breath at the end of August, then September is a full-on sprint. I come back from the beach to a pile of documents and don’t look up from them until Friday. Bella calls me on Wednesday, gasping with laughter.

“I told him!” she says. She squeals, and I hear Aaron there next to her. I imagine his arms around her, around her chest, careful with her, with this life now between them.

“And?”

“Dannie says ‘and,’ ” Bella says.

I hear static, and then Aaron is on the line. “Dannie. Hey.”

“Hi,” I say. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“Are you happy?”

He pauses. I feel my stomach tighten. But then, when I hear him speak, it’s the purest, most obvious resonance of joy. It fills up the phone. “You know,” he says. “I really, really am.”

On Saturday, Bella and I pick up coffees at Le Pain Quotidien on Broadway because she wants to go shopping. I expect we’ll hit up the stores on lower Fifth, maybe pop into Anthropologie, J.Crew, or Zara. But, instead, I find myself, Americano in hand, standing outside of Jacadi, the French baby store on Twenty-First Street.

“We have to go in,” she says. “Everything is too adorable.” I follow her.

There are rows of tiny onesies with matching cotton hats, knit sweaters, tiny overalls. It is a shrunken department store—full of petite Mary Janes and patent-leather loafers, all in minute, pocketable sizes. Bella is wearing a pink silk slip dress with an oversize white cotton sweater tied at the waist. Her hair is wild. She is glowing. She looks beautiful, radiant. Like a goddess.

It’s not that I don’t want kids, but I’ve just never felt particularly drawn to motherhood. Babies don’t make me coo and weaken, and I’ve never experienced any sort of biological clock about my reproductive window. I think David would be a good father, and that we’ll probably go ahead and have kids one day, but when I think about that future picture, us with a child, I often come up blank.

“When is your doctor’s appointment?” I ask her.

Bella holds up a little yellow-and-white-polka-dot jumper. “Do you think this is gender neutral?”

I shrug.

“The baby will be here in the spring, so we’ll need some long-sleeved stuff. She hands me the jumper and pulls two off-white cable-knit sweaters from the table in different sizes.

“How is Aaron?” I ask.

She smiles dreamily. “He’s great; he’s excited. I mean it’s sudden, of course, but he seems really happy. We’re not twenty-five anymore.”

“Right,” I say. “Are you guys going to get married?”

Bella rolls her eyes and hands me a pair of socks with tiny anchors on them. “Don’t be so obvious,” she says.

“You’re having a baby; it’s a legitimate question.”

She turns to me. Her whole body focused now. “We haven’t even discussed it. This seems like enough for now.”

“So when’s the doctor?” I ask, switching gears. “I want to see that sonogram pic.”

Bella smiles. “Next week. They said not to rush coming in. When it’s this early, there isn’t much to do anyway.”

“But shop,” I say. My arms are full of small items now. I shuffle toward the register counter.

“I think it’s a girl,” Bella says.

I have an image of her, sitting in a rocking chair, holding an infant wrapped in a soft pink blanket.

“A girl would be great,” I say.

She pulls me in and tucks me to her side. “Now you have to get started, too,” she says.

I imagine being pregnant. Shopping in this store for my own tiny creation. It makes me want a cocktail.

On Sunday, I go over to her apartment. I ring the bell twice. When the door finally opens Aaron is there, or at least his head is. He pulls the door back, and I’m met with at least a dozen packages—boxes and baskets and all sorts of gifts—littering the entryway.

“Did you guys rob a department store?” I ask.

Aaron shrugs. “She’s excited,” he says. “So she’s shopping?” I watch his face closely, looking for signs of judgment or hesitation, but I find none, only a little amusement. He’s dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, no socks. I wonder if he’s moved some stuff in yet. If he will. They’ll have to live together, won’t they?

He kicks a box to the side and the door swings open. I enter and close it behind me. “Congratulations,” I say.

“Oh, yeah, thanks.” He’s stacking a garment bag on top of an Amazon delivery. He stops. He stands, tucks his hands into his pockets. “I know it’s pretty soon.”

“Bella has always been impatient,” I say. “So it doesn’t totally surprise me.”

He laughs, but it seems more for my benefit. “I just want you to know I really am happy. She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

He looks right at me when he says it, the same way he did at the beach. I blink away.

“Good,” I say. “I’m glad.”

Just then Bella’s voice floats in from the other room. “Dannie? Are you here?”

Aaron smiles and steps to the side, holding his arm out for me to pass.

I follow the sound of her voice down the hallway, past the kitchen and her bedroom and into the guest room. The bed has been pushed to the side, the dresser placed into the center of the room, and Bella, in overalls and a head scarf, is painting white marshmallow clouds on the walls.

“Bells,” I say. “What’s going on?”

She looks at me. “Baby’s room,” she says. “What do you think?”

She stands back, putting her hands on her hips and surveying her work.

“I think you’re ahead of the curve for the first time in your life,” I say. “And it’s freaking me out. Isn’t the nursery usually a month seven project?”

She laughs, her back to me. “It’s fun,” she says. “I haven’t really painted in a long time.”

“I know.” I go to stand next to her and lob an arm over her shoulder. She leans into me. The clouds are off-white and the sky a pale salmon color with shades of baby blue and lavender. It’s a masterpiece.

“You really want this,” I say, but it’s not really to her. It’s to the wall. To whatever beyond has brought forth this reality. For a moment, I don’t remember the future I once saw. I am overcome by the one that is solidly, undeniably present here.

Chapter Eighteen

David and I are supposed to meet with the wedding planner next Saturday morning. It’s now mid-September, and I’ve been told, in no uncertain terms, that if I do not choose flowers now I will be using dead leaves as centerpieces.

The week is crazy at work—we get hit with a ton of due diligence on two time-sensitive cases Monday, and I barely make it home except to sleep all week. I take out my phone as I walk to the elevators the following Friday night to tell David we may need to push the meeting—I’m desperate for some sleep—when I see I have four missed calls from an unknown number.

Scam calls have been rampant lately, but they’re usually marked. I check my voicemail on my way downstairs, hanging up and re-trying when I get down to the lobby. I’m just passing through the glass doors when I hear the message.

“Dannie, it’s Aaron. We went to the doctor today, for the baby, and— Can you call me? I think you need to come down here.”

My heart plummets to my feet as I hit call back immediately with shaking hands. Something is wrong. Something is wrong with the baby. Bella had her doctor’s appointment today. They were going to hear the heartbeat for the first time. I should have protected her. I should have stopped her from buying all those clothes, making all those plans. It was too soon.

“Dannie?” Aaron’s voice is hoarse through the phone.

“Hey. Hi. Sorry. I was . . . where is she?”

“Here,” he says. “Dannie, it’s not good.”

“Is something wrong with the baby?”

Aaron pauses. When his voice comes through, it breaks at the onset. “There’s no baby.”

I toss my heels into my bag, pull on my slides, and get on the subway down to Tribeca. I always wondered how people who had just been delivered tragic news and had to fly on airplanes did it. Every plane must carry someone who is going to their dying mother’s bedside, their friend’s car accident, the sight of their burned home. Those minutes on the subway are the longest of my life.

Aaron answers the door. He’s wearing jeans and a button-down, half untucked. He looks stunned, his eyes red-rimmed. My heart sinks again. It’s through the floorboards, now.

“Where is she?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer, just points. I follow his finger into the bedroom, to where Bella is crouched in the fetal position in bed, dwarfed by pillows, a hoodie up and sweatpants on. I snap my shoes off and go to her, getting right in around her.

“Bells,” I say. “Hey. I’m here.” I drop my lips down and kiss the top of her sweatshirt-covered head. She doesn’t move. I look at Aaron by the door. He stands there, his hands hanging helplessly at his sides.

“Bells,” I try again. I rub a hand down her back. “Come on. Sit up.”

She shifts. She looks up at me. She looks confused, frightened. She looks the way she did on my trundle bed decades ago when she’d wake up from a bad dream.

“Did he tell you?” she asks me.

I nod. “He said you lost the baby,” I say. I feel sick at the words. I think about her, just last week, painting, preparing. “Bells I’m so sorry. I—”

She sits up. She puts a hand over her mouth. I think she might be sick.

“No,” she says. “I was wrong. I wasn’t pregnant.”

I search her face. I look to Aaron, who is still in the doorway. “What are you talking about?”

“Dannie,” she says. She looks straight at me. Her eyes are wet, wide. I see something in them I’ve only ever seen once before, a long time ago at a door in Philadelphia. “They think I have ovarian cancer.”

Chapter Nineteen

She says a lot of things then. About how ovarian cancer, in very rare cases, can cause a false positive. About how the symptoms sometimes mimic pregnancy. Missed period, bloated abdomen, nausea, low energy. But all I hear is a humming, a buzz in my ears that gets louder and louder the more she talks until it’s impossible to hear her. Her mouth is opening and all that’s coming out are a thousand bees, zinging and stinging their way to my face until my eyes are swollen shut.

“Who told you this?”

“The doctor,” she says. “We went for a scan today.”

“They did a CT scan.” It’s Aaron, at the door. “And a blood test.”

“We need a second opinion,” I say.

“I said the same thing,” Aaron says. “There’s a great—”

I cut him off with my hand. “Where are your parents?”

Bella looks from Aaron to me. “My dad is in France, I think. Mom is home.”

“Did you call them?”

She shakes her head.

“Okay. I’m going to call Frederick and ask him for a roster of his friends at Sinai. He’s on the board of cardiac, right?”

Bella nods.

“Ok. We’ll make an appointment with the top oncologist.” I swallow the word down. It tastes like darkness.

But this is what I know how to do; this is what I’m good at. The more I talk, the more the buzzing dims. Facts. Documents. Who knows what crack-brained doctor they went to? An ob-gyn is not an oncologist. We don’t know anything yet. He’s probably mistaken. He must be.

“Bella,” I say. I take her hands in mine. “It’s going to be fine, okay? Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out. You’re going to be fine.”

On Monday morning, we’re at the office of Dr. Finky—the best oncologist in New York City. I meet Bella at the Ninety-Eighth Street entrance to Mount Sinai. She gets out of the car, and Aaron is with her. I’m surprised to see him. I didn’t think he was coming. Now that she’s not pregnant, now that we’re faced with this, the biggest of all news, I don’t know that I expected him to stick around. They’ve spent one summer together.

Dr. Finky’s office is on the fourth floor. In the elevator ride up, we’re met with a dewy pregnant mother. I feel Bella turn inward, behind me, toward Aaron. I hit the floor key harder.

The waiting room is nice. Cheerful. Yellow-striped wallpaper, potted sunflowers, and a variety of magazines. The good ones.
Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue.
There are only two people waiting, an elderly couple who seem to be FaceTiming their grandchild. They wave at the camera,
ooh
ing and
ahh
ing. Bella cringes.

“We have a nine a.m. appointment. Bella Gold?”

The receptionist nods and hands me a clipboard full of papers. “Are you the patient?”

I look behind me to where Bella stands. “No,” Bella says. “I am.”

The woman smiles at her. She wears two braids down her back and a nametag that says “Brenda.”

“Hi, Bella,” she says. “Can I ask you to fill out these forms?”

She speaks in a soothing, motherly tone, and I know that is why she is here. To soften the blow of whatever happens when patients disappear behind those doors.

“Yes,” Bella says. “Thank you.”

“And can I make a copy of your insurance card?”

Bella riffles in her bag and pulls out her wallet. She hands a Blue Cross card over. I wasn’t sure Bella had insurance or kept a card on her. I’m impressed at the number of steps she’d needed to go through to get there. Does she buy it through the gallery? Who set that up for her?

“Blue Cross?” I say when we’re walking back to the waiting chairs.

“They have good out-of-network,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows at her, and she smiles. The first moment of levity we’ve experienced since Friday.

I called her dad on Friday. He didn’t pick up. On Saturday, I left him a voicemail:
It’s about Bella’s health. You need to call me immediately.

Bella has often said her parents were too young to have a child, and I understand what she’s saying but I don’t think that’s it, at least not entirely. It’s that they never had any interest in being parents. They had Bella because having children was a thing they thought you should do, but they didn’t want to raise her, not really.

Mine were always around—for both Michael and me. They signed us up for soccer and went to all the games—jumping at things like snack duty and uniforms. They were protective and strict. They expected things from me: good grades, excellent scores, impeccable manners. And I gave them all of that, especially after Michael, because he would have, and had. I didn’t want them to miss out any more than they were. But they loved me through the downturns, too—the B minus in calc, the rejection from Brown. I knew that they knew that I was more than a resume.

Bella was smart in school, but disinterested. She floated through English and history with the ease of someone who knows it doesn’t really matter. And it didn’t. She was a great writer—still is. But it was art where she really found her stride. We went to a public school and funding was nonexistent, but the parent participation was hefty, and we were granted a studio with oil paints, canvases, and an instructor dedicated to our creative achievement.

Bella would always draw when we were kids, and her sketches were good—preternaturally good. But in studio she started producing work that was extraordinary. Students and teachers would come from different classrooms just to see. A landscape, a self-portrait, a bowl of rotting fruit on the counter. Once she did a painting of Irving, the nerdy sophomore from Cherry Hill. After she drew him, his entire reputation changed. He was elusive, compelling. People saw him as she sketched him. It was like she had this ability to uncork whatever was inside and let it spill out joyfully, excessively, messily.

Her father, Frederick, called me Saturday afternoon, from Paris. I told him what we knew: Bella had thought she was pregnant, she went in for an ultrasound to confirm, they did some tests, and she left with an ovarian cancer diagnosis.

I was met with stunned silence. And then a call to arms.

“I’ll call Dr. Finky,” he said. “I’ll tell him we need an appointment first thing Monday. Stand by.”

“Thank you,” I said, which felt natural but shouldn’t have.

“Will you call her mother?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

Bella’s mother started sobbing instantly on the phone, I knew she would. Jill has always had a flair for the dramatic.

“I’m getting on the next flight,” she said, even though, presumably, she was in Philadelphia and could drive here in just under double the time it would take to get to the airport.

“We’re getting an appointment for Monday morning,” I said. “Would you like me to send you the details?”

“I’m calling Bella,” she said, and hung up.

Last I heard Jill had a boyfriend our age. She was married once more, after Bella’s father, to a Greek shipping heir who cheated on her rampantly and publicly. She’s never made good choices. If I’m honest, she’s modeled Bella’s romantic history—but hopefully not anymore, not with Aaron.

Monday morning, sitting in the office filling out papers, I don’t ask about Jill because I don’t have to. I know what happened. She lost the paper with the time, or she had a massage she couldn’t cancel, or she forgot to buy a train ticket and figured she’d come tomorrow. It’s always a million different reasons that all say the same thing.

Bella makes her way through the paperwork, and Aaron and I sit stonily, flanking her. I see him pop his foot over his leg, jiggling it nervously. He rubs a hand over his forehead.

Bella is wearing jeans and an orange sweater even though it’s too hot outside for either of those things. Summer will not quit, even though we’re now nearing the end of September.

“Ms. Gold?”

A young male nurse or doctor’s assistant wearing wire-rimmed glasses appears in front of a glass door.

Bella shifts the paperwork nervously in her lap. “I didn’t finish,” she says.

Brenda at the desk smiles. “It’s okay. We can get to it after.” She looks from me to Aaron. “Are both of you headed back?”

“Yes,” Aaron answers.

The nurse, Benji, chats happily to us as we move down the hallway. Again, with the cheer. You would think we were walking to an ice cream parlor or waiting in line for the Ferris wheel.

“Right this way.”

He holds his arm across a doorway to a white room, and the three of us enter in the same formation: me, Bella, Aaron. There are two seats in the corner and an examining chair. I stand.

“We’ll just do some quick stats while we wait for Dr. Finky.”

Benji takes Bella’s vitals—her pulse, her temperature—and looks inside her throat and ears. He has her get on the scale and takes her weight and height. Aaron doesn’t sit either and. with the two chairs and us standing, the room seems small, almost claustrophobic. I’m not sure how we’re going to fit another person in there.

Finally, the door opens.

“Bella, I haven’t seen you since you were ten years old. Hello.”

Dr. Finky is a short man—round and plump—who moves with a precise and almost dart-like speed.

“Hi,” Bella says. She extends her hand, and he takes it.

“Who are these people?”

“This is my boyfriend, Greg.” Aaron extends his hand. Finky shakes it. “And my best friend, Dannie.” We do the same.

“You have a good support system; that’s nice,” he says. I feel my stomach clench and release. He shouldn’t have said that. I don’t like it.

“So you came to the doctor thinking you were pregnant? How about you explain how you arrived in my office today?”

Finky puts on his glasses, takes out his notebook, and starts nodding and writing. Bella explains it all, again: The missed period. The bloating. The false positive on the pregnancy test. Going to the doctor. The CT scan. The blood test results.

“We need to run some additional tests,” he says. “I don’t want to say anything yet.”

“Can we do that today?” I ask. I’ve been taking notes, writing down everything that comes out of his mouth in my book, the one that’s supposed to be functioning as a wedding planner.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m going to have the nurse come back in to get you started.”

“What’s your opinion?” I ask him.

He takes off his glasses. He looks at Bella. “I think we need to run some additional tests,” he tells her.

He doesn’t have to say anything more. I’m a lawyer. I know what words mean, what silences mean, what repetition means. And I know, there in black and white, what he thinks. What he suspects. Maybe, even, what he already knows. They were right.