In Five Years: A Novel - Rebecca Serle Page 0,76

at 3 a.m. Bella’s voice on New Year’s Eve, cracking through the Parisian phone. Bella. Always.

“Yes,” I whisper. “I have.”

Her breath catches, and she looks at me. I see it all. The cascade of our friendship. The decades of time. The decades to come—more, even, without her.

“It’s not fair,” she says.

“No,” I say. “It’s not.”

I feel her exhaustion move over both of us like a wave. It drags us under. Her hand softens in mine.

Chapter Forty

It happens on Thursday. I am asleep. Aaron is on the couch. Jill and the nurse are beside her. Those impossibly long, gruesome final moments—I miss them. I am in the apartment twenty feet away, not by her side. By the time I am awake, she is gone.

Jill plans the funeral. Frederick flies in. They obsess about the flowers. Frederick wants a cathedral. An eight-piece orchestra. Where do you find a full gospel choir in Manhattan?

“This isn’t right,” Aaron says. We are in her apartment, late at night, two days after she has left us. We are drinking wine. Too much wine. I haven’t been sober in forty-eight hours. “This isn’t what she would want.” He means the funeral, I think, although maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he means the whole thing. He would be right.

“So we should plan what she would,” I say, deciding for him. “Let’s throw our own.”

“Celebration of life?”

I stick my tongue out at the word. I don’t want to celebrate. This is all unfair. This is all not what should have been.

But Bella loved her life, every last moment of it. She loved the way she lived it. She loved her art and her travel and her croque monsieur. She loved Paris for the weekend and Morocco for the week and Long Island at sunset. She loved her friends; she loved them gathered; she loved running around the room, topping up glasses, and making everyone promise to stay long into the night. She would want this.

“Yes,” I say. “Okay.”

“Where?”

Somewhere high, somewhere above, somewhere with a terrace. Somewhere with a view of the city she loved.

“Do you still have those keys?” I ask Aaron.

Five days later. December 15. We get through the funeral. Through the relatives and the speeches. We get through being relegated, if not to the back, then to the side. Are you family?

We get through the logistics. The stone, the fire, the documents. We get through the paperwork and the emails and the phone calls. What? people say. No. How could it be? I didn’t even know she was sick.

Frederick will keep the gallery open. They’ll find someone to run it. It will still bear her name. The apartment isn’t the only thing you finished, I want to tell her. Why didn’t I see it? The way she ran that place. Why didn’t I tell her? I want to tell her now, taking inventory of her life, that I see all of it—all of her completion.

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