Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

She laughs, and then starts coughing. Her lungs are full.

“I’m sorry,” I say. I check her pain pump. I give her a minute.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“No, Bella, please.”

“No,” she says. “I am. I wanted to be here for you for all of it.”

“But you have,” I say. “You’ve been here for everything.”

“Not everything,” she whispers. I feel her search for my hand under the sheets. I give it to her. “Love,” she says.

I think about David, in our old shared apartment, and Bella’s words: Because that’s the way you love me.

“You’ve never had it,” she says. “I want the real thing for you.”

“You’re wrong,” I tell her.

“I’m not,” she says. “You’ve never really been in love. You’ve never really had your heart broken.”

I think about Bella at the park, Bella at school, Bella at the beach. Bella lying on the floor of my first New York City apartment. Bella with a bottle of wine in the rain. Bella on the fire escape 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 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