In Five Years

Chapter Fifteen

When Bella and I were in high school, we used to play a game we called Stop. We’d see how far we could get in describing the grossest, nastiest thing before the other would be so revolted they’d have to yell out stop. It started with an unfortunate piece of forgotten freezer meat and carried on from there. There were ant hills, poison ivy welts, the intestines of a cow, and the microenvironment at the bottom of the community swimming pool.

This game comes to mind the next morning when I come upon a dead seagull on my run. Its head is bent at an impossible angle and its wings are shredded, the meaty portion, or what’s left of it, being feasted on by flies. A piece of its red spine sits disconnected from its body.

I remember reading once that when a seagull dies it falls out of sky on the spot. You could be just sitting on the beach, enjoying an orange ice pop, and wham, seagull to the head.

The fog is thick — a hazy mist that hangs over sand like a blanket. If I could see for a mile, which I can’t, I might spot a fellow morning jogger, out training for the fall marathon. But as far as my eye can see, it’s just me here now.

I bend down closer to the seagull. I don’t think it has been dead a long time. but here, out in nature, things evolve quickly.

I snap a picture to show Bella.

No one was awake when I got up. David was snoring next to me, and the upstairs was still, but then it was barely six. Sometimes Ariel gets up to do work. I tried last summer to get her to jog with me, but there were so many excuses and it took so long that this year I vowed to invite no one.

I’ve never been a late sleeper, but these days anything past seven feels like noon. I need the morning. There’s something about being the first one awake that feels precious, rare. I feel accomplished before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. The whole day is better.

The return is short, no more than two miles, and when I get back the house is still asleep. I take the gray-shingled stairs to the kitchen and edge the sliding door open. My shirt is damp from my run — a combination of sweat and sea mist. I take it off, toss it over the back of a chair, and head toward the coffeepot, just in my sports bra.

Lid up, filter in, four giant scoops and an extra for the pot. It’s a full house. I’m leaning forward, elbows on the counter waiting for the first drips of caffeine, when I hear Bella’s feet on the stairs. I can always tell it’s her. I know the way her body sounds. I can hear the way she walks, honed from decades of sleepovers, her cushioned feet padding around the kitchen for late-night snacks. If I were blind, I think, I’d be able to tell every time she entered a room.

“You’re up early,” I say.

“I didn’t drink last night.” I hear her slide onto a stool, and I take a second mug down from the cabinet. “Did you sleep well?”

David is a silent sleeper. No snoring, no movement. Being in bed with him is like being alone. “I love waking up to the ocean,” I say.

“It reminds me of when your parents had that place at the shore, remember?”

The coffee starts to descend in a sputtering fit. I turn toward Bella. Her hair is down and tangled around her, and she’s wearing a white lace nightgown with a long terrycloth bathrobe, opened, over it.

“You came there?” I ask.

She looks at me like I’m crazy. “Yeah. You guys had it until we were like fourteen.”

I shake my head. “We got rid of it after Michael—,” I say. Still, all these years later, I can’t bring myself to use the word.

“No, you didn’t,” she says. “You kept it for like four more summers. The place in Margate. The one with the blue awning?”

I take the pot out. It hisses in anger — it’s not time — and I pour her half a cup, setting it down on the counter in front of her. “That wasn’t ours.”

“No, it was,” Bella says. “It was on the ocean block. That little white house with the blue awning. The blue awning!”

“There was no awning,” I say. I go to the refrigerator and take out almond milk and hazelnut Coffee Mate. Bella remembered and picked it up for me.

“Yes there was,” she says. “It was two blocks from the Wawa, and you guys kept bikes down there and we’d lock them up at the condos with the blue awnings!”

I hand her the almond milk. She shakes and pours.

“There was a dead seagull on the beach today,” I say.

“Gross. Rotting carcass? Snapped spine into bone-popping shreds? Fly-eaten eyes pecked down to hollow sockets?”

“Stop.” I slide her my phone, and she looks.

“I’ve seen worse.”

“You know they fall out of the sky when they die?” I say.

“Yeah? What else would you expect them to do?”

The coffee machine downshifts into maintenance, and I pour myself a full cup, adding a hefty portion of creamer.

I go to sit next to Bella at the counter.

“Doesn’t look like a beach day,” she says. She swivels on her stool and looks outside.

“It’ll burn off.”

She shrugs, takes a sip, makes a face.

“I don’t know how you drink that almond water,” I say. “Why suffer? Do you know how good this is?” I hold my cup out to her.

“It’s milk,” she says.

“It’s really not.”

“It’s me,” she says. “I’ve just been feeling funky all week.”

“Are you sick?”

She swallows. I feel something catch in my throat.

“I’m pregnant,” she says. “I mean, I’m pretty sure.”

I look at her. Her whole face is shining. It’s like staring at the sun.

“You think or you know?”

“Think,” she says. “Know?”

“Bella.”

“I know. It’s crazy. I started feeling strange last week, though.”

“Have you taken a test?”

She shakes her head.

Bella was pregnant once before. A guy named Markus, whom she loved as much as he loved cocaine. She never told him. We were twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. Our first stumbling, dazzling year in New York.

“I missed my period,” she says. “I sort of thought maybe I’d get it, but I haven’t. My stomach feels weird, my boobs feel weird. I’ve been putting it off, but I think…” She trails off.

“Did you tell Aaron?”

She shakes her head. “I wasn’t sure there’d be anything to tell.”

“How long ago was your missed period?”

She takes another sip. She looks at me. “Eleven days ago.”

We go to the store as we are — she in the nightgown with a sweatshirt thrown over, me in my running clothes. There is no one at the small-town drugstore but the woman who works there, and she smiles when we hand over the test. It always surprises me that we’re old enough to receive smiles now, have these moments be blessings, not curses.

When we get back, the house is still quiet, asleep. We crouch in the downstairs bathroom, just the two of us, sitting nervously on the edge of the tub stealing glances at the counter.

The timer dings.

“You look,” she says. “You tell me. I can’t do it.”

Two pink lines.

“It’s positive,” I say.

Her face falls into a sea of relief so powerful I have no choice. My eyes fill with tears.

“Bella,” I say. Stunned.

“A baby,” she mouths.

We close the space between us, and she is in my arms — my Bella. She smells like talcum powder and lavender and all things dewy and precious and young. I feel so protective over these two beating hearts in my arms that I can barely breathe.

We pull apart, misty-eyed and incredulous and laughing.

“Do you think he’ll be mad?” she asks me suddenly.

All at once, she’s in the driver’s seat of her silver Range Rover and we’re listening to Anna Begins with the windows down. It’s summer, and it’s late. We were supposed to be home hours ago, but no one is at Bella’s house. Her mother is in New York for the opening of a restaurant and her father is traveling for work.

We’re coming from Josh’s house—,or is it Trey’s? They both have pools. We’re still wearing our bathing suits, but they’re dry now. The air is hot and sticky, and I have this sense in me — born of youth and vodka and the Counting Crows — that we are invincible. I look over at Bella, sitting back at the wheel, mouth open, singing, and I think that I never want to be without her — and then, that I never want to share her. That she belongs to me. That we belong to each other.

“I don’t know,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter. This is our baby.”

She giggles. “I love him,” she says. “I know it sounds crazy. I know you think I’m crazy. But I really, really do.” She puts a hand on her belly, right on top of her nightgown.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I say. “I trust you.”

“That’s a first,” she says. Her hand is still resting there on her belly. I see it growing, floating out in front of her like an inflatable balloon.

“Well,” I say. “Then it’s about time.”