Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

I know it’s vodka because it’s what Bella drinks. Jill used to let us have sips of hers when we were very young, and then make them for us later, when we were still not legal.

She has on an orange pantsuit, crepe silk, with a neck scarf, and I feel my stomach boil in anger that she had the energy to get dressed like this. That she has on accessories. That she still is able to believe it matters.

“Jill.”

She startles when she sees me. The martini wobbles.

“How— Is everything alright?”

I think about the question. I want to laugh. What possible answer is there? Her daughter is dying.

“Why aren’t you there?” I say.

She hasn’t been downtown for forty-eight hours. She calls Aaron, but she hasn’t actually made her physical presence known.

Jill opens her eyes wide. Her forehead doesn’t move. An effect of injections, of the side of medicine she is fortunate enough to elect to use while her cells are not multiplying into monsters.

I sit down next to her. I’m wearing yoga pants and an old UPenn sweatshirt, something of David’s I kept, despite.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks me. A bartender hovers at the ready.

“A gin martini,” I find myself saying. I hadn’t expected to stay. Just to say what I came to say and turn around.

My drink comes quickly. She looks at me. Does she expect me to toast her? I take a sip hastily and set it back down.

“Why are you here?” I ask her. The same question, a different angle. Why are you here, in this city? Why are you here, at this hotel where your daughter is not?

“I want to be close,” she says. She states it matter-of-factly. No emotion.

“She’s—” I start, but I can’t. “She needs you there.”

Jill shakes her head. “I’m just in the way,” she says.

She’s been ordering delivery to the apartment, sending in maid service. On Monday, she came with flowers and wanted to know where the cutting sheers were.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “Frederick. Where is he?”

“France,” she says, simply.

I want to scream. I want to throttle her. I want to understand how, how, ho w. It’s Bella.

I take another sip.

“I remember when you and Bella met,” she says. “It was love at first sight.”

“That park,” I tell her.

Bella and I didn’t meet at school, but instead at a park in Cherry Hill. We had gone for a Fourth of July picnic. My cousins lived out in New Jersey and they were hosting. We rarely visited them. They were conservative to our reformed and had a lot of opinions on the level of Jewish we were. But for some reason we weren’t at the beach, so we went.

Separately, Bella and her family were at that same park, although they, like us, were setting up shop in a home twenty-five miles from there. They’d come for Frederick’s work—some kind of company barbecue. We met by a tree. She was wearing a blue lace dress and white sneakers, and her hair was in a red headband. It was a lot for a little girl from France. I remember thinking she had an accent, but she didn’t, not really. I just never heard anyone speak who wasn’t from Philadelphia before.

“She couldn’t stop talking about you. I was afraid she’d never see you again, so we put her in Harriton.”

I look up at her. “What do you mean, you put her in ­Harriton?”

“We weren’t sure she’d make any friends. But as soon as she met you, we knew we couldn’t separate you. Your mother said you were starting Harriton in the fall, and we enrolled her.”

“Because of me?”

Jill sighs. She adjusts the scarf at her neck. “I’ve been less than a great mother, I know that. Less than good, even. Sometimes, I think the only thing I did right was give her you.”

I feel the tears in my eyes spring up. They sting. Tiny bees in the lids. “She needs you,” I say.

Jill shakes her head. “You know her so much better than I do. What could I possibly give her now?”

I lean forward. I put a hand on her hand. She’s startled by the contact. I wonder when the last time anyone touched her was.

“You.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Jill comes home with me. She lingers at the door, and I hear Bella: “Dannie? Who is it?”

“It’s Mom,” Jill says.

I leave them be.

I go out. I walk. When my mom calls, I answer.

“Dannie,” she says. “How is she?”

And then, as soon as I hear her voice, I start to cry. I cry for my best friend, who in an apartment above, is fighting for the right to breathe. I cry for my mother, who knows this loss all too intimately. The wrong kind. The kind you should never have to bear. I cry for a relationship I’ve lost, a marriage, a future that will never be.

“Oh, darling,” she says. “Oh, I know.”

“David and I broke up,” I tell her.

“You did,” she says. She does not seem surprised. It is barely a question: “What happened?”

“We never got married,” I tell her.

“No,” she says. “I suppose you didn’t.”

There is silence for a moment.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Well,” she says. “That’s better than some alternatives. Do you need help?”

It’s just a simple question, one she has asked me over and over again throughout the course of my life. Do you need help with homework? Do you need help with that car payment? Do you need help carrying that laundry basket up the stairs?

I have been asked if I’ve needed help so many times that I have been allowed to forget the question, the significance of it. I see, now, the way the love in my life has woven into a tapestry that I’ve been blessed enough to get to ignore. But not now, not anymore.

“Yes,” I tell her.

She says she will email David, she will make sure we get refunds where we can. She will handle the returns and the calls. She is my mother. She will help. That is what she does.

I go back upstairs. Jill is gone. Aaron is in the other room, maybe, working. I do not see him. At the door to the bedroom, I see that Bella is awake.

“Dannie,” she whispers. Her voice is light.

“Yes?”

“Come up,” she says.

I do. I come around the other side of the bed, getting in next to her. It hurts for me to look at her. She’s all bones. Gone are her curves, her flesh, the softness and mystery that has been her familiar body for so long.

“Your mom left?” I ask.

“Thank you,” she says.

I don’t answer. Just thread my fingers through hers.

“Do you remember,” she says. “The stars?”

At first I think she means the beach at night, maybe. Or that she doesn’t mean anything. That she’s seeing something I can’t now.

“The stars?”

“Your room,” she says.

“The stick-ons,” I say. “My ceiling.”

“Do you remember how we used to count them?”

“We never got there,” I say. “We couldn’t tell them apart.”

“I miss that.”

I take her whole hand in mine now. I want to take her whole body, too. To hold her. To press her close to me, where she can’t go anywhere.

“Dannie,” she says. “We need to talk about this.”

I don’t say anything. I can feel the tears running down my cheeks. Everything feels wet. Wet and cold—damp—we’ll never get dry.

“What?” I say, stupidly. Desperately.

“That I’m dying.”

I turn to her, because she can barely move anymore. Her eyes look into mine. Those same eyes. The eyes I have loved for so long. They are still there. She’s still in there. It’s impossible to think she won’t be.

But she won’t be. Soon, she won’t be. She is dying. And I cannot deny her this, this honesty.

“I don’t like it,” I say. “It’s bad policy.”