In Five Years: A Novel - Rebecca Serle Page 0,77

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.

I wave him off. No. But he presses, and my stomach answers in return. Yes, actually. I’m starving.

I follow Aaron into the closet, itching to get out of this dress. He pulls his sweatpants, the ones he still has here from all the work he did on the apartment, out of the drawer along with a T-shirt he left behind. The only things here that aren’t mine.

“I moved to Dumbo,” I say, incredulous. Aaron laughs. It’s all so ridiculous, neither one of us can help ourselves. Five years later, I have left Murray Hill and Gramercy and moved to Dumbo.

I change and wash my face. I put some cream on. I wander back into the living room. Aaron calls from the kitchen that he’s making pasta.

I find Aaron’s pants flung over the chair. I fold them and his wallet slides out. I open it. Inside