In Five Years: A Novel - Rebecca Serle Page 0,59

tell me how I feel? That maybe I know?”

“No,” I say. “It didn’t, because that’s ridiculous. This isn’t about how you feel, which by the way, is like shit. You threw up three times in the car on the way here.”

Bella looks away. I feel struck by sadness, but it does not push the anger out. Because that is what I feel: angry. And for the first time since her diagnosis, I let it take over. I let the righteous indignation burn a hole through me, through her, through this godforsaken chemical den.

“Shut up,” Bella says. Something she hasn’t said to me since we were twelve years old, in the back of my parents’ station wagon, fighting over god knows what. Not her life. Not cancer. “I’m not your project. I’m not some little girl you have to save. You don’t know what’s better for me than I do.” She struggles to sit up and winces, the needle in her arm shifting. I am overcome with a helplessness so deep it threatens to topple me into her chair.

“I’m sorry, Bella. I’m sorry,” I say, gently now. For all the things she’s going through, for everything. “It’s okay. Let’s just finish, and I’ll take you home.”

“No,” Bella says. There is a ferocity in her tone that does not give. “I don’t want you here anymore.”

“Bells—”

“Don’t Bells me. You always do this. You’ve done this forever. You think you know everything. But it’s my body, not yours, okay? You’re not my mother.”

“I never said I was.”

“You didn’t have to. You treat me like a child. You think I’m incapable. But I don’t need you.”

“Bella, this is insane. Come on.”

“Please stop coming to these appointments.”

“I’m not going to—”

“I’m not asking you!” she says. She’s practically screaming now. “I’m telling you. You need to leave.” She swallows. There are sores in her mouth. I can tell it takes effort. “Now.”

I wander outside. Jill is there, juggling a coffee and a tea. “Oh, hello darling,” she says. “Cappuccino?”

I don’t answer her. I keep walking. I keep walking until I start running.

I take out my phone. Before I am down the hall, before I have any clear grasp on what I’m doing, I’m scrolling to his name and hitting the green button. He answers after the third ring.

“Hey,” he says. “What’s wrong? Is she okay?”

I start to speak and then, instead of words, I’m met with big, hiccupping sobs. I crouch down in the corner of the hallway, let them rake over me. Nurses pass by, unmoved. This is the chemo floor, after all. Nothing new to see here. Just the end of the world over and over and over again.

“I’ll be right there,” he says, and hangs up.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“She doesn’t mean it,” Aaron says. We’re sitting at a diner on Lexington, some late-night one named Big Daddy’s or Daddy Dan’s or something like that. The kind of place that can’t afford to be downtown. I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve creamer.

“She does,” I say. We’ve been going through this script for the last twenty minutes, since Aaron ran up to the hospital’s double doors to find me crouching outside. “She always felt this way. She just never said it.”

“She’s scared.”

“She was so angry with me. I’ve never even seen her like that before. Like she wanted to kill me.”

“She’s the one going through it,” he says. “Right now, she has to think that she’s capable of anything, even alcohol.”

I ignore his attempt at levity.

“She is,” I say. I bite my lip. I don’t want to cry anymore. Not in front of him. It’s too vulnerable, too close, too near. “I just can’t believe her parents are behaving this way. You don’t know what they’re like—”

Aaron removes an invisible eyelash from his face.

“You don’t know,” I repeat.

“Maybe not,” Aaron says. “They seem to care. That’s good, right?”

“They’ll leave,” I say. “They always do. When she really needs them, they’ll be gone.”

“But Dannie,” Aaron says. He sits forward. I can feel the air molecules around us stiffen. “They’re here now. And she really needs them. Isn’t that what matters?”

I think about his promise on the street corner. I always believed it was just Bella and me. There was no one she could count on but me. There was no one who would really be there, forever, but me.

“Not if they’ll eventually leave,” I say.

Aaron keeps hovering closer. “I think you’re wrong.”

“I think you don’t know,” I say. I’m starting