In Five Years(66)

We gather at dusk. Berg and Carl, from our twenties in New York. Morgan and Ariel. The gallery girls. Two friends from Paris, and a few girlfriends from college. The guys from a reading series she used to participate in. These people who have all loved her, appreciated her, and saw different parts of her flourishing, pulsing soul.

We gather on that slice of terrace, shivering, coats bundled, but needing to be outside, to be in the air. Morgan refills my wineglass. Ariel clears her throat.

“I’d like to read something,” she says.

“Of course,” I tell her.

We gather in a little horseshoe. Spread out.

Of the two, Ariel is shier, a little more reserved than Morgan. She begins.

“Bella sent me this poem about a month ago. She asked me to read it. She was a great artist, but she was also a really great writer. Was—” She shakes her head. “Anyway, I wanted to share it tonight.”

She clears her throat. She begins to read:

There is a path of land that exists Beyond the sea and the sky.

It is behind the mountains,

Past even the hills—

Those of luscious green that

Roll up into the heavens.

I have been there, with you.

It is not big, although not too small.

Perhaps you could perch a house on its width, But we have never considered it.

What would be the use?

We already live there.

When the night closes

And the city stills,

I am there, with you.

Our mouths laughing, our heads vacant Of all but what is.

And what is? I ask.

This, you say. You and I, here.

We are all silent after she finishes. I know what place. It is a field, surrounded by mountains and fog, where a river runs through. It is quiet and peaceful and eternal. It is that apartment.

I pull my coat tighter around me. It’s cold, but the cold feels good. It reminds me for the first time in a week that I am here, that I have flesh, that I am real. Berg steps forward next. He reads from Chaucer, a favorite stanza of hers from graduate school. He puts on a voice. Everyone laughs.

There is champagne and her favorite cookies, from Birdbath on Seventh. There is also pizza from Rubirosa, but no one has touched it. We need her to return, smiling, full of life, gifting us back our appetites.

Finally, it is my turn.

“Thank you all for coming,” I tell them. “Greg and I knew she’d want something with the people she loved that wasn’t so formal.”

“Although Bella loved black tie,” Morgan chimes in.

We laugh. “That she did. She was a spinning, spiraling spirit that touched all of us. I miss her,” I say. “I will forever. “

The wind whistles over the city, and I think it’s her, saying a final farewell.



We stay until our fingers are frozen and our faces are chapped, and then it’s time to go home. I hug Morgan and Ariel goodbye. They promise to come over next week and help us sort through Bella’s stuff. Berg and Carl leave. The gallery girls tell me to come by—I say I will. They have a new exhibit going up. She was proud of it. I should see.

Then it’s just the two of us. Aaron doesn’t ask if he can come with me, but when the car arrives, he gets in. We travel downtown in silence. We speed across the Brooklyn Bridge, miraculously devoid of traffic. No roadblocks. Not anymore. We pull up to the building.

They keys, now in my possession.

Through the door, up the elevator, into the apartment. Everything I’ve fought against, now made manifest at my very own hands.

I take off my shoes. I go to the bed. I lie down. I know what is going to happen. I know exactly how we will live it.





Chapter Forty-One


I must fall asleep because I wake up, and he’s here, and the reality of it, of Bella’s loss, of the last few months, swirls around us like the impending storm.

“Hey,” Aaron says. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

He sighs. He walks over to me. “You fell asleep.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask him, because I want to know. I want him to say it. I want to get it out, now, into the open.

“Come on,” he says, refusing. Although if it’s the refusal of the inevitable, or the unwillingness to answer the question, I do not know.

“Do you know me?”

I want to explain to him, although I suspect he understands, that I am not this person. That what has happened, what is happening, here, between us, is not me. That I would never betray her. But that she’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not know what to do with this—with everything she left in her wake.

He puts a knee on the bed. “Dannie,” he says. “Are you really asking me that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know where I am.”

“It was a good night,” he says, gently, reminding me. “Wasn’t it?”

Of course it was. It was what she would have wanted. This gathering of what she stood for. Spontaneity, love. A good Manhattan view.

“Yeah,” I say. It was.

I catch the TV. A storm is coming, circling it’s way closer to us. Seven inches of snow, they’re predicting.

“Are you hungry?” he asks me. Neither of us ate tonight.