In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

  I help David unload the trunk, handing Morgan her roller as Bella comes out of the house. She has on a pale blue linen dress, the bottom of which has paint splotches on it. This fills me with a very particular kind of joy. To my knowledge she hasn’t painted all year, and the sight of her—hair wild in the wind, the atmosphere of creation hanging around her like mist—is wonderful to witness.

  “You made it!” She throws her arms around Morgan and gives me a big kiss on the side of my head.

  “I told Ariel we’d pick her up at the east station in like twenty minutes. David, can you grab her? I can’t figure out how to put the top up.” She gestures toward the perky convertible.

  “I can do it,” Morgan says.

  “It’s no problem.” This from David, even though traffic was horrific and we’d been in the car for nearly five hours. “Let me just drop our stuff.”

  Bella kisses me on both cheeks. “Come on in,” she says to Morgan. “I did room assignments.”

  David raises his eyebrows at me as we follow the two of them inside.

  The house is decorated in part like an old farmhouse and in part like a college girl’s first shabby-chic apartment. Old wooden boxes and furniture intermix with white oversize couches and Laura Ashley pillows.

  “You two are downstairs again,” Bella says to David and me. The downstairs bedroom is ours, and has been since we first rented the house, the summer Francesco came and he and Bella fought loudly in the kitchen for thirty-six hours before he pulled away in the middle of the night—with the one and only car we’d rented for the weekend.

  “Morgan and Ariel are upstairs with us.”

  “You know we don’t swing straight,” Morgan says, already on the stairs.

  “I’m not straight,” Bella says.

  “Yeah, but your boyfriend is.”

  David and I set our suitcases down in the bedroom. I sit on the bed, which is wicker, as is the dresser and rocking chair, and I’m hit with a nostalgia I don’t usually experience or entertain.

  “They got new sheets this year,” David says.

  I look down, and he’s right. They’re white when they’re usually some mix of paisley.

  David leans down and brushes his lips to my forehead. “I’m gonna jet. You need anything?”

  I shake my head. “I’ll unpack for us.”

  He stretches, bending over and grabbing onto opposite elbows with his hands. I stand up and rub the spot on his lower back that I know pinches. He winces.

  “Do you want me to drive?” I ask. “I can go. You just drove for five hours.”

  “No,” David says, still folded in half. “I forgot to put you on the rental agreement.”

  He lifts himself, and I hear his vertebrae crack on the way up.

  “Bye.” He kisses me and leaves, grabbing the keys out of his pocket.

  I open the closet to find a hanging rod, but no hangers—as usual, Bella has stolen them all and taken them upstairs.

  I plod into the hallway in search of the coat closet and find Aaron in the kitchen.

  “Hey,” he says. “You guys made it. Sorry, I went for a swim.”

  He’s dressed in board shorts with a towel draped over his shoulders like a cape.

  “David went to town to get Ariel,” I say.

  Aaron nods. “That was really nice of him. I would have been happy to go.”

  “David loves the car, it’s no problem,” I say.

  He smiles.

  “Morgan is upstairs with Bella.” I point toward the ceiling with my index finger. I hear their feet moving on the floorboards above us.

  “You hungry?” he asks me.

  He goes to the refrigerator and takes out three avocados. I’m struck by his ease, his belonging here.

  “Right, you cook,” I say.

  He cocks his head at me.

  “I just mean, Bella said.”

  He nods in response.

  What Bella actually said was that he made butternut squash and sage risotto, but before she could have one little bite they’d had sex on the counter, right there in the kitchen. I blink away the image and run my hands down my face, shaking my head.

  “So is that a no on guacamole?”

  “What? No, yes, definitely. I’m starving,” I say.

  “You have interesting ways, Ms. Kohan.”

  He starts piling ingredients onto the counter: onions, cilantro, jalapeños, and a variety of vegetables.

  “Can I help?” I ask.

  “You can open that tequila,” he says.

  He gestures with his head to the countertop, where our booze for the weekend is artfully displayed. I find the tequila.

  “Ice?” I ask. “I’ll pour.”

  “Thanks.”

  I take two small tumbler glasses down from the cabinet and pour a finger of tequila in each one. I pull out the ice tray, careful to hold the bottom drawer of the freezer when I do—another quirk of the house.

  “Heads-up.” Aaron tosses me a lime. I miss, and it rolls out of the room. I’m chasing it on my hands and knees when Bella comes floating down the stairs, still in her blue tunic, hair now up.

  “Rogue lime,” I say, snatching it before it scurries under the sofa.

  “I’m starving,” she says. “What do we have?”

  “Aaron is making guacamole.”

  “Who?”

  I shake my head. “Greg. Sorry.”

  “What do you guys want to do for dinner?” Bella asks us. I follow her into the kitchen and she snakes her arms around Aaron’s waist, kissing him on the back of the neck. He offers her up his tequila. She shakes her head.

  I know, of course, that they’ve gotten closer. That while I’ve been at work all summer, Bella has been falling for this man. That they’ve been to museums and outdoor concerts and cool, tiny wine bars. That they’ve walked the West Side Highway at dusk and the Highline at sunrise and had sex on every single piece of furniture in her brownstone. Almost. She’s told me all of it. But seeing them now, I’m met with a prick in my chest that I’m not entirely sure how to identify.

  I take a seat at the counter and pick a tortilla chip out of the bag that Aaron has set out. He scoops some diced onions onto the back of a knife and dusts them into the guacamole bowl.

  “Where did you learn to cook?” I ask. Anyone with knife skills impresses me. I like to believe it’s the one thing that prevents me from being a good cook.

  “I’m kind of self-taught,” he says. He nudges Bella to the side and opens the oven. In goes an array of sliced peppers, onions, and potatoes. “But I grew up around food. My mom was a cook.”

  I know what that means. It’s not the words themselves, although they are markers, but the way he says it—with a slight bewildered edge. Like he can’t quite believe it, either.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He looks back at me. “Thank you. It was a long time ago.”

  “Dinner?” Bella asks. Her hands are on her hips, and Aaron loops his arms through hers, pulling her in and kissing her on the side of her face. “Whatever you want,” he says. “I’ve got snacks covered.”

  “Tonight we have reservations at the Grill, or we can walk to Hampton Chutney if we’re not in the mood for something serious,” I say.

  I’m always in charge of dinner reservations. Bella is always in charge of choosing which ones we use.

  “I thought the Grill was tomorrow night.”

  I grab my phone and pull up our reservations document. Huh. “You’re right,” I say. “It is tomorrow night.”

  “Good,” Bella says. “I wanted to stay in anyway.” She snuggles closer to Aaron, who loops an arm around her.

  “We can call David, ask him to stop at the store?”

  “No need,” Aaron says. “We came loaded. I have plenty to cook.” He goes to the fridge and yanks it open. I peer over the counter. I see rainbows of vegetables and fruits, paper-wrapped cheeses, fresh parsley and mint, containers of oily olives, some rolling lemons and limes, and a larg
e wedge of Parmesan. We are supremely stocked.

  “You got all of this?” I ask.

  In prior years, I’d be lucky to show up to a stick of butter. There is never anything in Bella’s fridge but mossy lemons and vodka.

  “What do you think?” she asks me.

  “That I can’t believe you went grocery shopping.”

  She beams.

  I head out onto the back patio, which overlooks the ocean. It’s cloudy today, and I shiver a little in my T-shirt and shorts. I need to grab a sweatshirt. I breathe in the fresh air, salty and tangy, and I exhale out the drive, the week, Aaron in the kitchen.

  I open my eyes to the slow, melodic stylings of Frank Sinatra. “All the Way” wafts outside. I’m instantly reminded of the Rainbow Room, of twirling slowly under that rotating ceiling.

  I turn around. Through the window I can see Aaron, his arms around Bella, moving her to the beat. Her head is on his shoulder and there is a slight smile on her face. I wish I could take a picture. I’ve known her for twenty-five years and I’ve never seen her this relaxed with anyone, this herself. And I’ve never seen her close her eyes against a man.

  I wait to go back inside until I hear the crunch of David’s car returning on the gravel. By that time, the sun has already almost entirely set. There is just the fading of light, a slight blue on the disappearing horizon.

  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 anthills, 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 the 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 like a log 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.