Rebecca Serle - In Five Years

It’s now mid-November and Bella hasn’t spoken to me in two weeks. She’s finishing her second round of chemo on Saturday, and David tells me not to bother her until it’s over. I’ve heeded his advice, impossibly. It’s excruciating, not being there. Not knowing.

The wedding invitations have gone out, we’re receiving RSVPs. The menu is set. The flowers are ordered. All that is left is getting a dress, so here I am, standing in it.

“Like I said, with this time frame it’s really off-the-rack, so it’s pretty much only the dresses hanging here.” The saleslady gestures to the three dresses to our right — one eggshell, two white. She crosses her arms, checks her watch. She seems to think I’m wasting her time. But doesn’t she know? This is a sure sale. I have to leave with a dress today.

“This one seems fine,” I say. It’s the first one I’ve tried on.

I was never one of those girls who dreamed about her wedding. That was always Bella. I remember her standing in front of my mirror with a pillowcase over her head, reciting vows to the glass. She knew exactly what the dress would look like— silk organza with spools of unfolding tulle. A long lace veil. She dreamed of the flowers: white calla lilies, puffy peonies, and tiny tea candles. There would be a harpist. Everyone would ooh and ahh when she stepped out of the shadows and into the aisle. They’d stand. She’d float down to the faceless, nameless man. The one who made her feel like the entire universe was conspiring for her love, and hers alone.

I knew I’d get married in the way you know you’ll get older, and that Saturday comes after Friday. I didn’t think that much about it. And then I met David and everything fit and I knew it was what I had been looking for, that we were meant to unfold these chapters together, side by side. But I never thought about the wedding. I never thought about the dress. I never pictured myself in this moment, standing here now. And if I had, I never would have seen this.

The dress I wear is silk and lace. It has a string of buttons down the back. The bodice fits poorly. I don’t fill it out properly. I shake my arms, and the saleswoman races into frame. She pinches the back of the dress with a giant clothespin.

“We can fix that,” she says. She looks at me in the mirror. Her face betrays sympathy. Who comes here alone and buys the first dress they try on? “We’ll have to rush it, but we can do that.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I feel like I might cry, and I do not want these tears being misinterpreted as nuptial joy. I do not want to hear her delighted squeals, or see her knowing glance: so in love. I turn swiftly to the side. “I’ll take it.”

Her face registers confusion, and then brightens. She’s just made a sale. Three thousand dollars in thirteen minutes. Must be some kind of record. Maybe I’m pregnant. She probably thinks I’m pregnant.

“Wonderful,” she says. “I love this neckline on you, it’s so flattering. Let’s just take some measurements.”

She pins me. The curve of my waist and the length of the hem. The lay of the shoulders.

When she leaves, I look at myself in the mirror. The neckline is high. She is wrong, of course. It does not flatter me at all. It does nothing to show off my collarbones, the slope of my neck. For a brief, wondrous moment I think about calling David. Telling him we need to postpone the wedding. We’ll get married next year, at The Plaza, or upstate at The Wheatleigh. I’ll get a ridiculous dress you have to custom order, the Oscar de la Renta one with the brocade flowers. We’ll have the top florist, the best band. We’ll dance to “The Way You Look Tonight” under the most delicate strands of white-and-gold twinkle lights. The entire ceiling will be made of roses. We’ll plan a honeymoon in Tahiti or Bora Bora. We’ll leave our cell phones in the bungalow and swim out to the edge of the earth. We’ll drink champagne under the stars, and I’ll wear white, only white, for ten days straight.

We’ll make all the right decisions.

But then I hear the clock on the wall. The tick tick ticking of the second hand, bringing us closer and closer to December 15.

I take the dress off. I pay for it.

On my walk home, Aaron calls me. “We got the test results back from the last round,” he says. “It’s not good.”

I should feel surprised, shouldn’t I? I should feel like I’m stopped dead in my tracks. The world now, in light of this news, should slow down, stop spinning. The taxis should sputter still, the music on the street should stretch until silent.

But I’m not. I’ve been waiting.

“Ask her if she wants me there,” I tell him.

He pauses. I hear a lapse in breathing, the white noise sounds of apartment motion, somewhere a few rooms over. I wait. After about two minutes — an eternity — he comes back to the phone.

“She says yes.”

I run.

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.

“Don’t talk like that,” I say. But if I know Bella’s tells, she, of course, knows mine. She is no less equipped than I am at reading the impressions of my moods and thoughts as they saunter and sprint across my face.

It works both ways.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I tell her. “We’re going to fight this just as we always have.”

And in that moment it’s true. It’s true because it has to be. It’s true because there are no other options. Despite that chemo hasn’t kept it at bay. Despite that it’s spread to her abdomen. Despite. Despite. Despite.

“Look,” she says. She holds up her hand. On it is an engagement ring, perched daintily on her finger.

“You’re getting married?” I ask her.

“When I’m better,” she says.

I get in bed next to her. “You got engaged and you didn’t call me?”

“It happened at home last night,” she tells me. “He was bringing me dinner.”

“What?”

She looks at me, her eyebrows knit. “Pasta from Wild.”

I make a face. “I still can’t believe you like it there.”

“It’s gluten free,” she says. “Not poison. They have good spaghetti.”

“So anyway.”

“So anyway,” she says. “He brought me the pasta, and on top of the Parmesan was the ring.”

“What did he say?”

She looks at me and she’s right there — Bella, my Bella. Her face bright and her eyes lit. “You’ll think it’s corny.”

“I won’t,” I whisper. “I promise.”

“He told me that he’s been looking for me forever and, even though the situation is less than ideal, he knows that I’m his soul mate, and that he was always fated to end up with me.” She blushes pink.

Fated.

I swallow. “He’s right,” I say. “You always wanted someone who would just know it was you. You always wanted your soul mate. And you found him.”

Bella turns to me. She takes her hand and places it on the duvet between us.

“I’m going to ask you something,” she says. “And if I’m wrong, you don’t have to answer.”

I feel my heart rate accelerate. What if…? She couldn’t…

“I know you think we’re really different, and we are, I get that. I’ll never be someone who checks my weather app before I go outside or knows the number of days eggs can last in the fridge. I haven’t strategically built my life the way you have. But you’re wrong in thinking…” She wets her lips. “I think you’re capable of this kind of love, too. And I don’t think you have it.”

I let that sit between us for a moment. “What’s making you say that?” I ask her.

“Don’t you think there’s a reason you never got married? Don’t you think there’s a reason you’ve been engaged for almost five years? A five-year engagement was never in your plan.”

“We’re getting married now,” I say.

“Because,” Bella says. Her voice gets small. She seems to fold into herself next to me. “You think you’re on a clock.”

December 15.

“That’s not true. I love David.”

“I know you do,” she says. “But you’re not in love with him. You may have been at first, but if you were I never really saw it, and I don’t have the luxury of pretending anymore. And what I realized is that you don’t, either. If there’s a clock ticking toward anything, it should be your happiness.”