Page 172 - In Five Years

Chapter Thirty-Two

To my relief, and also grief, she looks like she did three weeks ago. No worse,
no better. She still has her hair, and her eyes still have that sunken, hollow
quality.

She isn’t crying. She isn’t smiling. Her face looks blank, and it is this that
terrifies me the most. Seeing her cry is not, out of context, a cause for alarm. She
has always worn her emotions inside out, the soft, nubile vicissitudes subject to

every change in wind. But her stoicism, her unreadability, I am not used to. I’ve
always been able to look at Bella and read it all there, see exactly what she
needed. Now, I cannot.

“Bella—” I start. “I heard—”
She shakes her head. “Let’s deal with us first.”
I nod. I come to stand next to the bed, but I do not sit on it.

“I’m scared,” she says.
“I know,” I say, gently.

“No,” she says. Her voice gets stronger. “I’m scared of leaving you with this.”
I don’t say anything. Because all at once I’m twelve. I’m standing in the
doorway of my room as my mother screams. I’m listening to my father—my
strong, brave, good father trying to make sense, asking the questions: “But who

was driving?” “But he was going the speed limit?” As if it mattered, as if reason
could bring him back.

I’ve always been waiting, haven’t I? For tragedy to show up once again on
my doorstep. Evil that blindsides. And what is cancer if not that? If not the
manifestation of everything I’ve spent my life trying to ward off. But Bella. It
should have been me. If this is my story, then it should have been mine.