In Five Years: A Novel - Rebecca Serle Page 0,60
to believe it was a mistake calling him. What was I thinking?
He shakes his head. “You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”
Our eyes lock, and I think that maybe he can read it there. Everything that happened. That maybe, somehow, he has reached back. That he knows. In that moment, I want to tell. I want to tell him, if only so he can carry this thing with me.
“Aaron,” I start, and then his cell phone rings. He takes it out.
“It’s work,” he says. “Hang on.”
He stands up and leaves the booth. I see him gesturing out by the glass doors emblazoned with the diner’s name: Daddy’s. The waitress comes over. Do we want any food? I shake my head. Just the check, please.
She hands me the bill. She hadn’t expected us to stick around, I guess. I leave cash on the table and get my bag. I join Aaron at the door, where he’s hanging up.
“Sorry about that,” he says.
“It’s okay. I’m going to head out. I should go back to the office.”
“It’s Saturday,” he says.
“Corporate law,” I mutter. “And I’ve been gone a lot.”
He gives me a small smile. He looks disappointed.
“Thank you for meeting me,” I say. “Really, thanks for showing up. I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he says. “Dannie—you can call me anytime. You know that, right?”
I smile. I nod.
The bells on the door jingle on my way out.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
It’s the first week of November, and Bella won’t speak to me. I call her. I send David over with food. “Just give her a little time,” he tells me. I don’t express the absurdity of his statement to him. I can’t even think it, much less say it out loud.
Dr. Christine is no more surprised to see me back in her office than I am to be there. She wants to know about my family, and so I tell her about Michael. I remember him less and less these days. What he was like. I try and focus on the details. His laugh, the strange way his forearms hung from his elbows, like there was just too much limb. His brown, curly hair, like baby ringlets, and his wide brown eyes. How he used to call me “pal.” How he’d always invite me to hang out in the tent in our backyard, even if his friends were over. He didn’t seem to have any of the hang-ups older brothers usually have about their little sisters. We fought, sure, but I always knew he loved me, that he wanted me around.
Dr. Christine tells me I am learning to deal with a life I cannot control. What she doesn’t say, what she doesn’t have to, is that I’m failing at it.
I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished.
The following Wednesday, Dr. Shaw walks by. I’m sitting on a cement ledge, some fake foliage dangling below me, doing some paperwork.
“Humpty Dumpty,” he says.
I look up, so startled I nearly fall.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Bella,” I say. I gesture with my free arm, the one not holding my array of folders, upward, to the room where Bella lies, chemicals being pumped into her.
“I just came from there.”
Dr. Shaw takes a step closer to me. He peers at my binder disapprovingly. “Do you need some coffee?” he asks.
I found some crappy vending machine stuff earlier, but it’s wearing off quickly.
“It kind of sucks here,” I say.
He holds a pointed finger out to me. “That’s because you do not know the tricks. Follow me.”
We wind through the ground floor of the treatment center to the back and down a hallway. At the end is a little atrium, with a Starbucks cart. I swear, it’s like seeing Jesus. My eyes go wide. Dr. Shaw notices.
“I know, right?” he says. “It’s the best-kept hospital secret. Come on.”
He leads me to the cart where a woman in her mid-twenties with two French braids smiles wide at him. “The usual?” she asks.
He turns to me. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m a tea drinker. That’s why Irina here has to know my order.”
“The hospital is big on coffee?” I ask.
“More manly,” he says, gesturing for me to step forward.
I order