In Five Years(56)

Her face registers confusion, and then brightens. She’s just made a sale. Three thousand dollars in thirteen minutes. Must be some kind of record. Maybe I’m pregnant. She probably thinks I’m pregnant.

“Wonderful,” she says. “I love this neckline on you, it’s so flattering. Let’s just take some measurements.”

She pins me. The curve of my waist and the length of the hem. The lay of the shoulders.

When she leaves, I look at myself in the mirror. The neckline is high. She is wrong, of course. It does not flatter me at all. It does nothing to show off my collarbones, the slope of my neck. For a brief, wondrous moment I think about calling David. Telling him we need to postpone the wedding. We’ll get married next year, at The Plaza, or upstate at The Wheatleigh. I’ll get a ridiculous dress you have to custom order, the Oscar de la Renta one with the brocade flowers. We’ll have the top florist, the best band. We’ll dance to “The Way You Look Tonight” under the most delicate strands of white-and-gold twinkle lights. The entire ceiling will be made of roses. We’ll plan a honeymoon in Tahiti or Bora Bora. We’ll leave our cell phones in the bungalow and swim out to the edge of the earth. We’ll drink champagne under the stars, and I’ll wear white, only white, for ten days straight.

We’ll make all the right decisions.

But then I hear the clock on the wall. The tick tick ticking of the second hand, bringing us closer and closer to December 15.

I take the dress off. I pay for it.

On my walk home, Aaron calls me. “We got the test results back from the last round,” he says. “It’s not good.”

I should feel surprised, shouldn’t I? I should feel like I’m stopped dead in my tracks. The world now, in light of this news, should slow down, stop spinning. The taxis should sputter still, the music on the street should stretch until silent.

But I’m not. I’ve been waiting.

“Ask her if she wants me there,” I tell him.

He pauses. I hear a lapse in breathing, the white noise sounds of apartment motion, somewhere a few rooms over. I wait. After about two minutes—an eternity—he comes back to the phone.

“She says yes.”

I run.





Chapter Thirty-Two


To my relief, and also grief, she looks like she did three weeks ago. No worse, no better. She still has her hair, and her eyes still have that sunken, hollow quality.

She isn’t crying. She isn’t smiling. Her face looks blank, and it is this that terrifies me the most. Seeing her cry is not, out of context, a cause for alarm. She has always worn her emotions inside out, the soft, nubile vicissitudes subject to every change in wind. But her stoicism, her unreadability, I am not used to. I’ve always been able to look at Bella and read it all there, see exactly what she needed. Now, I cannot.

“Bella—” I start. “I heard—”

She shakes her head. “Let’s deal with us first.”

I nod. I come to stand next to the bed, but I do not sit on it.

“I’m scared,” she says.

“I know,” I say, gently.

“No,” she says. Her voice gets stronger. “I’m scared of leaving you with this.”

I don’t say anything. Because all at once I’m twelve. I’m standing in the doorway of my room as my mother screams. I’m listening to my father—my strong, brave, good father trying to make sense, asking the questions: “But who was driving?” “But he was going the speed limit?” As if it mattered, as if reason could bring him back.

I’ve always been waiting, haven’t I? For tragedy to show up once again on my doorstep. Evil that blindsides. And what is cancer if not that? If not the manifestation of everything I’ve spent my life trying to ward off. But Bella. It should have been me. If this is my story, then it should have been mine.

“Don’t talk like that,” I say. But if I know Bella’s tells, she, of course, knows mine. She is no less equipped than I am at reading the impressions of my moods and thoughts as they saunter and sprint across my face.

It works both ways.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I tell her. “We’re going to fight this just as we always have.”

And in that moment it’s true. It’s true because it has to be. It’s true because there are no other options. Despite that chemo hasn’t kept it at bay. Despite that it’s spread to her abdomen. Despite. Despite. Despite.

“Look,” she says. She holds up her hand. On it is an engagement ring, perched daintily on her finger.

“You’re getting married?” I ask her.

“When I’m better,” she says.

I get in bed next to her. “You got engaged and you didn’t call me?”

“It happened at home last night,” she tells me. “He was bringing me dinner.”

“What?”

She looks at me, her eyebrows knit. “Pasta from Wild.”

I make a face. “I still can’t believe you like it there.”

“It’s gluten free,” she says. “Not poison. They have good spaghetti.”

“So anyway.”

“So anyway,” she says. “He brought me the pasta, and on top of the Parmesan was the ring.”