Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

Bella squeezes my hand. “You’re crazy,” she says. “But fine. I promise you. I’m not going to move in there.”

The chemo goes from good to bad to gruesome quickly, too quickly. Next week she’s sick, the following one she’s weak, and after that she is sunken, her body practically concave. The one saving grace is that her hair doesn’t fall out. Session after session, week after week, not even a strand.

“It happens sometimes,” Dr. Shaw tells me. He comes to her chemo sessions to check up on her and run through any recent bloodwork. Today, Jill is there. Which might explain why Dr. Shaw and I are in the hallway, a whole room away from where Bella’s mother pretends to be dutiful. “A patient who doesn’t lose their hair. It’s rare, though. She’s one of the lucky ones.”

“Lucky.” I taste the word in my mouth. Rotted.

“Poor choice of words,” he says. “We doctors aren’t always the most sensitive. I apologize.”

“No,” I say. “She has great hair.”

Dr. Shaw smiles at me. Colorful Nikes peak out from the bottom of his jeans. They point to some kind of life beyond these walls. Does he go home to children? How does he shake the everyday of these patients, shrinking inside?

“She’s lucky that she has such a good support system,” he tells me. It isn’t the first time he’s said it. “Some patients have to do this alone.”

“She has two more weeks of this,” I say. “And then she’ll do another test?”

“Yes.” We’ll check to see if the cancer has been localized. But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment. The likelihood of remission in ovarian cancers…”

“No,” I say. “She’s different. She has her hair! She’s different.”

Dr. Shaw puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. But he doesn’t say anything.

I want to ask him more. Like whether he’s seen a case like this before. Like what we should prepare for. I want to ask him to tell me. Tell me what is going to happen. Give me the answers. But he can’t. He doesn’t know. And whatever he has to say, I’m not interested in hearing.

I go back in the room. Bella’s leaning her head against the side of her armchair, her eyes closed. She opens them when I’m in front of her.

“Guess what?” she tells me, her voice sleepy. “Mom is going to take me to dinner and to see the Barbra Streisand musical. Do you want to come?”

Jill, dressed in black crepe slacks and a floral print silk blouse with a pussy bow, leans over. “It’ll be fun. We’ll go to Sardi’s before and have some martinis.”

“Bella…” I can feel the anger start to simmer in me. She can barely sit up. She’s going to go to dinner? To a theater?

Bella rolls her eyes. “Oh, come on. I can do it.”

“You’re not really supposed to be out right now. Dr. Shaw did say that, and he definitely mentioned that alcohol could interfere with your medi—”

“Stop! What are you, my parole officer?” Bella fires at me. It feels like a shot to the stomach.

“No,” I say, calmly. “I’m not trying to keep you from anything; I’m just trying to keep you well. I’m the one who has been here, and who has listened to the doctors.”

Jill doesn’t even bristle. She doesn’t even seem to understand the slight.

“So have I,” Bella says. She reaches down and tugs her blanket up. I see how thin her legs have become, like two arms. She notices me noticing.

“I’m going to get some iced tea,” Jill says. “Bella, can I get you some iced tea?”

“Bella doesn’t drink iced tea,” I say. “She hates it. She always has.”

“Well,” Jill says. “Coffee then!” She doesn’t wait for a response, just saunters out of the room like she’s in sweaters and headed now toward the shoe department.

“What is wrong with you?” Bella hisses when she’s left.

“What is wrong with me? What is wrong with you? You can’t do this tonight. You know that. Why are you acting this way?”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I don’t need you to tell me how I feel? That maybe I know?”

“No,” I say. “It didn’t, because that’s ridiculous. This isn’t about how you feel, which by the way, is like shit. You threw up three times in the car on the way here.”

Bella looks away. I feel struck by sadness, but it does not push the anger out. Because that is what I feel: angry. And for the first time since her diagnosis, I let it take over. I let the righteous indignation burn a hole through me, through her, through this godforsaken chemical den.

“Shut up,” Bella says. Something she hasn’t said to me since we were twelve years old, in the back of my parents’ station wagon, fighting over god knows what. Not her life. Not cancer. “I’m not your project. I’m not some little girl you have to save. You don’t know what’s better for me than I do.” She struggles to sit up and winces, the needle in her arm shifting. I am overcome with a helplessness so deep it threatens to topple me into her chair.

“I’m sorry, Bella. I’m sorry,” I say, gently now. For all the things she’s going through, for everything. “It’s okay. Let’s just finish, and I’ll take you home.”

“No,” Bella says. There is a ferocity in her tone that does not give. “I don’t want you here anymore.”

“Bells—”

“Don’t Bells me. You always do this. You’ve done this forever. You think you know everything. But it’s my body, not yours, okay? You’re not my mother.”

“I never said I was.”

“You didn’t have to. You treat me like a child. You think I’m incapable. But I don’t need you.”

“Bella, this is insane. Come on.”

“Please stop coming to these appointments.”

“I’m not going to—”

“I’m not asking you!” she says. She’s practically screaming now. “I’m telling you. You need to leave.” She swallows. There are sores in her mouth. I can tell it takes effort. “Now.”

I wander outside. Jill is there, juggling a coffee and a tea. “Oh, hello darling,” she says. “Cappuccino?”

I don’t answer her. I keep walking. I keep walking until I start running.

I take out my phone. Before I am down the hall, before I have any clear grasp on what I’m doing, I’m scrolling to his name and hitting the green button. He answers after the third ring.

“Hey,” he says. “What’s wrong? Is she okay?”

I start to speak and then, instead of words, I’m met with big, hiccupping sobs. I crouch down in the corner of the hallway, let them rake over me. Nurses pass by, unmoved. This is the chemo floor, after all. Nothing new to see here. Just the end of the world over and over and over again.

“I’ll be right there,” he says, and hangs up.

“She doesn’t mean it,” Aaron says. We’re sitting at a diner on Lexington, some late-night one named Big Daddy’s or Daddy Dan’s or something like that. The kind of place that can’t afford to be downtown. I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve creamer.

“She does,” I say. We’ve been going through this script for the last twenty minutes, since Aaron ran up to the hospital’s double doors to find me crouching outside. “She always felt this way. She just never said it.”

“She’s scared.”

“She was so angry with me. I’ve never even seen her like that before. Like she wanted to kill me.”

“She’s the one going through it,” he says. “Right now, she has to think that she’s capable of anything, even alcohol.”

I ignore his attempt at levity.

“She is,” I say. I bite my lip. I don’t want to cry anymore. Not in front of him. It’s too vulnerable, too close, too near. “I just can’t believe her parents are behaving this way. You don’t know what they’re like—”

Aaron removes an invisible eyelash from his face.

“You don’t know,” I repeat.

“Maybe not,” Aaron says. “They seem to care. That’s good, right?”

“They’ll leave,” I say. “They always do. When she really needs them, they’ll be gone.”

“But Dannie,” Aaron says. He sits forward. I can feel the air molecules around us stiffen. “They’re here now. And she really needs them. Isn’t that what matters?”

I think about his promise on the street corner. I always believed it was just Bella and me. There was no one she could count on but me. There was no one who would really be there, forever, but me.

“Not if they’ll eventually leave,” I say.

Aaron keeps hovering closer. “I think you’re wrong.”

“I think you don’t know,” I say. I’m starting to believe it was a mistake calling him. What was I thinking?

He shakes his head. “You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”

Our eyes lock, and I think that maybe he can read it there. Everything that happened. That maybe, somehow, he has reached back. That he knows. In that moment, I want to tell. I want to tell him, if only so he can carry this thing with me.

“Aaron,” I start, and then his cell phone rings. He takes it out.

“It’s work,” he says. “Hang on.”

He stands up and leaves the booth. I see him gesturing out by the glass doors emblazoned with the diner’s name: Daddy’s. The waitress comes over. Do we want any food? I shake my head. Just the check, please.

She hands me the bill. She hadn’t expected us to stick around, I guess. I leave cash on the table and get my bag. I join Aaron at the door, where he’s hanging up.

“Sorry about that,” he says.

“It’s okay. I’m going to head out. I should go back to the office.”