Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew there wasn’t time to waste, that she couldn’t go through the motions, steps, build. That the linear trajectory would bring her only to the middle.
“You’re not,” I say. “You’re here. You’re right here.”
Aaron sleeps next to her at night. Together with Svedka, we move around the apartment, choreographing our own silent dance of support.
I come home from work the following week to find that the boxes in my room are gone. My clothes, my bathrobe, everything.
Bella is sleeping, as she has been for most of the day. Svedka comes in and out of her room, carrying nothing.
I call Aaron.
“Hey,” he says. “Where are you?”
“Home. But my stuff isn’t here. Did you move the boxes down to storage?”
Aaron pauses. I can hear his breath on the other end of the phone. “Can you meet me somewhere?” he asks me.
“Where?”
“Thirty-Seven Bridge Street.”
“The apartment,” I say. I feel a pull from deep down inside of me, far behind my sternum, the place where my gut might be, if I believed in its existence.
“Yeah.”
“No,” I say. “I can’t. Something happened to my stuff and I have to—”
“Dannie, please,” Aaron says. He sounds, all at once, a very long way away. A foreign country, the other side of a decade. “This is a directive from Bella.”
How can I say no?
Aaron is downstairs, outside the apartment when I get there, smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.
He looks at the cigarette between his fingers as if considering it for the first time. “Me neither.”
The last time we were here it was summer, everything was blooming. The river was wild in green and growth. Now—the metaphor is too much to bear.
“Thanks for coming,” he says. He’s wearing a jacket, open despite the cold. I can barely see out of my hood and scarf.
“What do you need?” I ask.
He tosses the end of the cigarette down, snuffs it out with his foot. “I’ll show you.”
I follow him back through the familiar door, into the building and up the rickety, wobbly elevator.
At the apartment door, he takes out the keys. I have the desire to put my hand over his, yank it away. Stop him from doing what he does next. But I’m frozen. I feel like I cannot move my arms. And when the door swings open I see it all, splayed out before me like the inside of my heart.
The renovation, exactly as it was. The kitchen. The stools. The bed over there, by the windows. The blue velvet chairs.
“Welcome home,” he whispers.
I look up at him. He’s smiling. It’s the happiest I’ve seen anyone in months.
“What?” I ask him.
“It’s your new home,” he says. “Bella and I have been working on it for months. She wanted to renovate it for you.”
