In Five Years(35)

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, oohing and ahhing. 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.