Page 201 - In Five Years

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.