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Authors: Rebecca Serle

In Five Years: A Novel (19 page)

BOOK: In Five Years: A Novel
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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, taking 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, crumbled 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.

I don’t turn around. “It’s okay.” I say. “I don’t, either.”

“All of this—” he says. “It’s all so wrong. None of this should be happening.”

He’s right, of course. It shouldn’t. What could we have done differently? How could we have avoided this? This impossible, unthinkable end.

I turn around. I look at him. His golden, shining face. This thing that sits between us, now made manifest.

“You should go,” I say. “Or I should.”

“I should,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Your stuff is all unpacked. Bella hired someone to do the closet. Your things are all here.”

“The closet.”

His cell phone rings then, disrupting the air molecules, disentangling us from the moment. He answers.

“Hey,” he says gently. Too gently. “Yes. Yes. We’re here. Hang on.”

He holds the phone out to me. I take it.

“Hi,” I say.

Bella’s voice is soft and bright. “Well,” she says. “Do you like it?”

I want to tell her she’s crazy, that I can’t accept this, she cannot buy and gift me an apartment. But what would be the point? Of course she can. She has. “This is insane,” I say. “I can’t believe you did this.”

“Do you like the chairs? How about the kitchen? Did Greg show you the green tile sink?!”

“It’s all perfect,” I say.

“I know the stools are a little edgy for you, but I think it’s good. I think—”

“It’s perfect.”

“You always tell me I never finish anything,” she says. “I wanted to finish this. For you.”

Tears roll down my cheeks. I didn’t even know I was crying. “Bells,” I say. “It’s incredible. It’s beautiful. I could never. I would never—It’s home.”

“I know,” she says.

I want her to be here. I want us to cook in this kitchen, making a mess of materials, running to the corner store because we don’t have vanilla extract or cracked pepper. I want us to play in that closet, to have her make fun of everything I want to wear. I want her to sleep over, tucked in that bed, in safety, ensconced here. What could happen to her under my watch? What bad thing could touch her if I never, ever looked away?

But I understand she will not be. I understand, standing here now, in this manifestation of both dream and nightmare, that I will be here, in this home she built me, alone. I am here because she will not be. Because she needed to give me something to hold on to, something to protect me. A literal roof over my head. Shelter from the storm.

“I love you,” I tell her. Fiercely. “I love you so much.”

“Dannie,” she says. I hear her through the phone. Bella. My Bella. “Forever.”

Aaron leaves. I wander through the apartment, running my fingers over every surface. The green tile of the sink, the white porcelain of the tub. A claw-foot. I go through the kitchen—the cabinets stacked with pasta, wine, a bottle of Dom chilling, waiting, in the refrigerator. I go through the medicine cabinet, with my products, the closet with my clothes. I run my hand over the dresses there. One is facing out. I already know which one it’ll be. There’s a note attached:
Wear this
, it says
. I always liked it on you.

It’s scrawled in her handwriting. Her loopy calligraphy.

I clutch it to my chest. I go to the window, right by the bed. I look out on that view. The water, the bridge, the lights. Manhattan on the water, shimmering like a promise. I think about how much life the city holds, how much heartbreak, how much love. I think about everything I have lost there, this fading island before me.

BOOK: In Five Years: A Novel
11.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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