Page 188 - In Five Years

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?