In Five Years(62)

“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.”