But I can’t. It would be a lie. And he deserves more than that — he deserves everything. This is the thing, the only thing, I have to offer him. The truth. Finally.
“David,” I say. Start. “I don’t know why. You’re perfect for me. I love our life together. But—”
He sits back. He tosses his napkin onto the table. The proverbial towel.
We sit in silence for what feels like minutes. The clock on the wall ticks forward. I want to throw it out the window. Stop. Stop moving. Stop marching us forward. Everything terrible lies ahead.
The moment stretches so far it threatens to break. Finally, I speak. “What now?” I ask.
David pushes back his chair. “Now you leave,” he says.
He goes into the bedroom and closes the door. I take the food and put it, mindlessly, into containers. I wash the dishes. I put them away.
Then I go to sit on the couch. I know I can’t be here in the morning. I take out my phone.
“Dannie?” Her voice is sleepy but strong when she answers. “What’s up?”
“Can I come over?” I ask her.
“Of course.”
I travel the twenty blocks south. She’s on the couch when I get there, not in bed. She has a colorful bandana on her head and the TV is on, an old rerun of Seinfeld. Comfort food.
I drop my bag down. I go to her. And then I’m crying. Big, hiccupping sobs.
“Shh,” she says. “It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
She’s wrong, of course. Nothing is okay. But it feels so good to be comforted by her now. She runs her hands through my hair, rubs circles over my back. She hushes and soothes and consoles in the way only she can.
I have held her so many times. After so many breakups and parental disappointments, but here, now, I feel like I’ve had it backward. I thought I was her protector. That she was flighty and irresponsible and frivolous. That it was my job to protect her. That I was the strong one, counterbalancing her weakness, her whimsy. But I was wrong. I wasn’t the strong one, she was. Because this is what it feels like — to take a risk, to step out of line, to make decisions not based on fact but on feeling. And it hurts. It feels like a tornado raging inside my soul. It feels like I may not survive it.
“You will,” she tells me. “You already have.”
And it’s not until she says it that I realize I’ve spoken the words out loud. We stay like this, me in a ball in her lap, her curled over me, for what feels like hours. We stay long enough to try and capture it, bottle it, and tuck it away. Save enough of it to last, enough of it for a lifetime.
Love doesn’t require a future.
For a moment in time, we release what is coming.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I move into Bella’s apartment the first week of December. To the guest room that still has clouds on the walls. Aaron helps me with the boxes. I do not see David. I leave a note on the table when my necessities are gone. He can buy me out or we can sell, whatever he wants.
I’m so sorry, I write.
I don’t expect to hear from him, but he sends me an email three days later with some logistical things. He signs it: Please keep me posted on Bella. David.
All that time, all those years, all those plans, gone. We’re strangers, now. I cannot fathom it.
Hospital. Work. Home.
Bella and I are curled in her bed. We inhale early two thousands romantic comedies like popcorn kernels while she hurls, sometimes too weak to turn her head all the way to the side. She has no appetite. I fill up bowls and bowls of ice cream to the brim for her. They all melt. I throw their milky remains down the drain.
“Canker sores, open wounds, the taste of bile,” she whispers to me, shivering under the blankets.
“No,” I say.
“Chemicals being pumped through my veins, veins that feel like fire, fingers up my spine, grabbing at my bones, cracking them.”
“Not yet,” I say.
“The taste of vomit, the feeling of my skin crawling with fire. That it’s getting harder to breathe.”
“Stop,” I tell her.
“I knew the breathing would get you,” she says.
I bend down closer to her. “I’ll be here for it all,” I say.
She looks at me. Her hollow eyes are frightened. “I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” she says.
“You can.” I say. “You have to.”
“I’m wasting it,” she says. “I’m wasting the time I have left.”
I think about Bella. Her life. Dropping out of college. Flying to Europe on a whim. Falling in love, falling onward. Beginning projects and abandoning them.
Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew there wasn’t time to waste, that she couldn’t go through the motions, steps, build. That the linear trajectory would bring her only to the middle.
“You’re not,” I say. “You’re here. You’re right here.”
Aaron sleeps next to her at night. Together with Svedka, we move around the apartment, choreographing our own silent dance of support.
I come home from work the following week to find that the boxes in my room are gone. My clothes, my bathrobe, everything.
Bella is sleeping, as she has been for most of the day. Svedka comes in and out of her room, carrying nothing.
I call Aaron.
“Hey,” he says. “Where are you?”
“Home. But my stuff isn’t here. Did you move the boxes down to storage?”
Aaron pauses. I can hear his breath on the other end of the phone. “Can you meet me somewhere?” he asks me.
“Where?”
“Thirty-Seven Bridge Street.”
“The apartment,” I say. I feel a pull from deep down inside of me, far behind my sternum, the place where my gut might be, if I believed in its existence.
“Yeah.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t. Something happened to my stuff and I have to—”
“Dannie, please,” Aaron says. He sounds, all at once, a very long way away. A foreign country, the other side of a decade. “This is a directive from Bella.”
How can I say no?
Aaron is downstairs, outside the apartment when I get there, smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.
He looks at the cigarette between his fingers as if considering it for the first time. “Me neither.”
The last time we were here it was summer, everything was blooming. The river was wild in green and growth. Now — the metaphor is too much to bear.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. He’s wearing a jacket, open despite the cold. I can barely see out of my hood and scarf.
“What do you need?” I ask.
He tosses the end of the cigarette down, snuffs it out with his foot. “I’ll show you.”
I follow him back through the familiar door, into the building and up the rickety, wobbly elevator.
At the apartment door, he takes out the keys. I have the desire to put my hand over his, yank it away. Stop him from doing what he does next. But I’m frozen. I feel like I cannot move my arms. And when the door swings open I see it all, splayed out before me like the inside of my heart.
The renovation, exactly as it was. The kitchen. The stools. The bed over there, by the windows. The blue velvet chairs.
“Welcome home,” he whispers.
I look up at him. He’s smiling. It’s the happiest I’ve seen anyone in months.
“What?” I ask him.