In Five Years

Chapter Forty-One

I must fall asleep because I wake up, and he’s here, and the reality of it, of Bella’s loss, of the last few months, swirls around us like the impending storm.

“Hey,” Aaron says. “Are you okay?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not.”

He sighs. He walks over to me. “You fell asleep.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask him, because I want to know. I want him to say it. I want to get it out, now, into the open.

“Come on,” he says, refusing. Although if it’s the refusal of the inevitable, or the unwillingness to answer the question, I do not know.

“Do you know me?”

I want to explain to him, although I suspect he understands, that I am not this person. That what has happened, what is happening, here, between us, is not me. That I would never betray her. But that she’s gone. She’s gone, and I do not know what to do with this — with everything she left in her wake.

He puts a knee on the bed. “Dannie,” he says. “Are you really asking me that?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know where I am.”

“It was a good night,” he says, gently, reminding me. “Wasn’t it?”

Of course it was. It was what she would have wanted. This gathering of what she stood for. Spontaneity, love. A good Manhattan view.

“Yeah,” I say. It was.

I catch the TV. A storm is coming, circling it’s way closer to us. Seven inches of snow, they’re predicting.

“Are you hungry?” he asks me. Neither of us ate tonight.

I wave him off. No. But he presses, and my stomach answers in return. Yes, actually. I’m starving.

I follow Aaron into the closet, itching to get out of this dress. He pulls his sweatpants, the ones he still has here from all the work he did on the apartment, out of the drawer along with a T-shirt he left behind. The only things here that aren’t mine.

“I moved to Dumbo,” I say, incredulous. Aaron laughs. It’s all so ridiculous, neither one of us can help ourselves. Five years later, I have left Murray Hill and Gramercy and moved to Dumbo.

I change and wash my face. I put some cream on. I wander back into the living room. Aaron calls from the kitchen that he’s making pasta.

I find Aaron’s pants flung over the chair. I fold them and his wallet slides out. I open it. Inside is the Stumptown punch card. And then I see it — the photo of Bella. She’s laughing, her hair tangled around her face like a maypole. It’s from the beach. Amagansett this summer. I took it. It seems years ago, now.

We decide on pesto for the pasta. I go to sit at the counter.

“Am I still a lawyer?” I ask him, wearily. I haven’t been to the office in nearly two weeks.

“Of course,” he answers. He holds out an open bottle of red, and I nod. He fills my glass.

We eat. It feels good, necessary. It seems to ground me. When we’re done, we take our wineglasses to the other side of the room. But I’m not ready, not yet. I sit down in a blue chair. I think about leaving, maybe. Not going through with what happens next.

I even make a move for the door.

“Hey, where are you going?” Aaron asks me.

“Just the deli.”

“The deli?”

And then Aaron is upon me. His hands on my face, the way they were just weeks ago, on the other side of the world. “Stay,” he says. “Please.”

And I do. Of course I do. I was always going to. I fold to him in that apartment like water into a wave. It all feels so fluid, so necessary. Like it’s already happened.

He holds me in his arms, and then he kisses me. Slowly and then faster, trying to communicate something, trying to break through.

We undress quickly.

His skin on mine feels hot and raw and urgent. His touch goes from languid to fire. I feel it around us, all around us. I want to scream. I want to tear us apart.

We make love in that bed. That bed that Bella bought. This union that Bella built. He traces his fingers over my shoulders and down my breasts. He kisses my neck, the hollow of my collarbone. His body on top of mine feels heavy and real. He exhales out sharply into my hair, says my name. We’re going to break apart too quickly. I never want this to end.

And then it’s over, and when it is, when he collapses on top of me — kissing, caressing, shuddering — I feel clarity, like it has clobbered me in the back of my head. I see it in the stars. Everywhere. All above us.

I knew it all five years ago; I saw everything. I even saw this moment. But staring at Aaron next to me, now, I realize something I did not know before, not until this very moment: 11:59 p.m.

I saw what was coming, but I did not see what it would mean.

I look down at the ring I am wearing. It is on my middle finger, where it has been since I put it on. It is hers, of course, not mine. It is the thing I wear to feel close to her.

The dress, a funeral shroud.

This feeling.

This full, endless, insurmountable feeling. It fills up the apartment. It threatens to break the windows. But it is not love, no. I mistook it. I mistook it because I did not know; I had not seen everything that would get us here. It is not love, this feeling.

It is grief.

The clock turns.