Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

“We have a nine a.m. appointment. Bella Gold?”

The receptionist nods and hands me a clipboard full of papers. “Are you the patient?”

I look behind me to where Bella stands. “No,” Bella says. “I am.”

The woman smiles at her. She wears two braids down her back and a nametag that says “Brenda.”

“Hi, Bella,” she says. “Can I ask you to fill out these forms?”

She speaks in a soothing, motherly tone, and I know that is why she is here. To soften the blow of whatever happens when patients disappear behind those doors.

“Yes,” Bella says. “Thank you.”

“And can I make a copy of your insurance card?”

Bella riffles in her bag and pulls out her wallet. She hands a Blue Cross card over. I wasn’t sure Bella had insurance or kept a card on her. I’m impressed at the number of steps she’d needed to go through to get there. Does she buy it through the gallery? Who set that up for her?

“Blue Cross?” I say when we’re walking back to the waiting chairs.

“They have good out-of-network,” she says.

I raise my eyebrows at her, and she smiles. The first moment of levity we’ve experienced since Friday.

I called her dad on Friday. He didn’t pick up. On Saturday, I left him a voicemail: It’s about Bella’s health. You need to call me immediately.

Bella has often said her parents were too young to have a child, and I understand what she’s saying but I don’t think that’s it, at least not entirely. It’s that they never had any interest in being parents. They had Bella because having children was a thing they thought you should do, but they didn’t want to raise her, not really.

Mine were always around — for both Michael and me. They signed us up for soccer and went to all the games — jumping at things like snack duty and uniforms. They were protective and strict. They expected things from me: good grades, excellent scores, impeccable manners. And I gave them all of that, especially after Michael, because he would have, and had. I didn’t want them to miss out any more than they were. But they loved me through the downturns, too — the B minus in calc, the rejection from Brown. I knew that they knew that I was more than a resume.

Bella was smart in school, but disinterested. She floated through English and history with the ease of someone who knows it doesn’t really matter. And it didn’t. She was a great writer — still is. But it was art where she really found her stride. We went to a public school and funding was nonexistent, but the parent participation was hefty, and we were granted a studio with oil paints, canvases, and an instructor dedicated to our creative achievement.

Bella would always draw when we were kids, and her sketches were good — preternaturally good. But in studio she started producing work that was extraordinary. Students and teachers would come from different classrooms just to see. A landscape, a self-portrait, a bowl of rotting fruit on the counter. Once she did a painting of Irving, the nerdy sophomore from Cherry Hill. After she drew him, his entire reputation changed. He was elusive, compelling. People saw him as she sketched him. It was like she had this ability to uncork whatever was inside and let it spill out joyfully, excessively, messily.

Her father, Frederick, called me Saturday afternoon, from Paris. I told him what we knew: Bella had thought she was pregnant, she went in for an ultrasound to confirm, they did some tests, and she left with an ovarian cancer diagnosis.

I was met with stunned silence. And then a call to arms.

“I’ll call Dr. Finky,” he said. “I’ll tell him we need an appointment first thing Monday. Stand by.”

“Thank you,” I said, which felt natural but shouldn’t have.

“Will you call her mother?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

Bella’s mother started sobbing instantly on the phone, I knew she would. Jill has always had a flair for the dramatic.

“I’m getting on the next flight,” she said, even though, presumably, she was in Philadelphia and could drive here in just under double the time it would take to get to the airport.

“We’re getting an appointment for Monday morning,” I said. “Would you like me to send you the details?”

“I’m calling Bella,” she said, and hung up.

Last I heard Jill had a boyfriend our age. She was married once more, after Bella’s father, to a Greek shipping heir who cheated on her rampantly and publicly. She’s never made good choices. If I’m honest, she’s modeled Bella’s romantic history — but hopefully not anymore, not with Aaron.

Monday morning, sitting in the office filling out papers, I don’t ask about Jill because I don’t have to. I know what happened. She lost the paper with the time, or she had a massage she couldn’t cancel, or she forgot to buy a train ticket and figured she’d come tomorrow. It’s always a million different reasons that all say the same thing.

Bella makes her way through the paperwork, and Aaron and I sit stonily, flanking her. I see him pop his foot over his leg, jiggling it nervously. He rubs a hand over his forehead.

Bella is wearing jeans and an orange sweater even though it’s too hot outside for either of those things. Summer will not quit, even though we’re now nearing the end of September.

“Ms. Gold?”

A young male nurse or doctor’s assistant wearing wire-rimmed glasses appears in front of a glass door.

Bella shifts the paperwork nervously in her lap. “I didn’t finish,” she says.

Brenda at the desk smiles. “It’s okay. We can get to it after.” She looks from me to Aaron. “Are both of you headed back?”

“Yes,” Aaron answers.

The nurse, Benji, chats happily to us as we move down the hallway. Again, with the cheer. You would think we were walking to an ice cream parlor or waiting in line for the Ferris wheel.

“Right this way.”

He holds his arm across a doorway to a white room, and the three of us enter in the same formation: me, Bella, Aaron. There are two seats in the corner and an examining chair. I stand.

“We’ll just do some quick stats while we wait for Dr. Finky.”

Benji takes Bella’s vitals — her pulse, her temperature — and looks inside her throat and ears. He has her get on the scale and takes her weight and height. Aaron doesn’t sit either and. with the two chairs and us standing, the room seems small, almost claustrophobic. I’m not sure how we’re going to fit another person in there.

Finally, the door opens.

“Bella, I haven’t seen you since you were ten years old. Hello.”

Dr. Finky is a short man — round and plump — who moves with a precise and almost dart-like speed.

“Hi,” Bella says. She extends her hand, and he takes it.

“Who are these people?”

“This is my boyfriend, Greg.” Aaron extends his hand. Finky shakes it. “And my best friend, Dannie.” We do the same.

“You have a good support system; that’s nice,” he says. I feel my stomach clench and release. He shouldn’t have said that. I don’t like it.

“So you came to the doctor thinking you were pregnant? How about you explain how you arrived in my office today?”

Finky puts on his glasses, takes out his notebook, and starts nodding and writing. Bella explains it all, again: The missed period. The bloating. The false positive on the pregnancy test. Going to the doctor. The CT scan. The blood test results.

“We need to run some additional tests,” he says. “I don’t want to say anything yet.”

“Can we do that today?” I ask. I’ve been taking notes, writing down everything that comes out of his mouth in my book, the one that’s supposed to be functioning as a wedding planner.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m going to have the nurse come back in to get you started.”

“What’s your opinion?” I ask him.

He takes off his glasses. He looks at Bella. “I think we need to run some additional tests,” he tells her.

He doesn’t have to say anything more. I’m a lawyer. I know what words mean, what silences mean, what repetition means. And I know, there in black and white, what he thinks. What he suspects. Maybe, even, what he already knows. They were right.

Here is the thing no one tells you about cancer: they ease you into it. After the initial shock, after the diagnosis and the terror, they put you on the slow conveyor belt. They start you off nice and easy. You want some lemon water with that chemo? You got it. Radiation? No problem, everyone does it, it’s practically weed. We’ll serve you those chemicals with a smile. You’ll love them, you’ll see.

Bella does indeed have ovarian cancer. They suspect stage three, which means it has spread to nearby lymph nodes but not to surrounding organs. It’s treatable, we’re told. There is recourse. So many times, with ovarian cancer, there isn’t. You find it too late. It’s not too late.

I ask for the statistics, but Bella doesn’t want them. “Information like that gets in your head,” she says. “It’ll have a higher probability of affecting the outcome. I don’t want to know.”

“It’s numbers,” I say. “It’ll affect the outcome anyway. Hard data doesn’t move. We should know what we’re dealing with.”

“We get to determine what we’re dealing with.”

She puts an embargo on Google, but I search anyway: 46.5 percent. That is the survival rate of ovarian cancer patients over five years. Less than fifty-fifty.

David finds me on the tile floor of the shower.

“Fifty is good odds,” he tells me. He crouches down. He holds my hand through the glass door. “That’s half.” But he’s a terrible liar. I know he would never make a bet on those odds, not even drunk at a table in Vegas.