In Five Years

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.