In Five Years

“Bella is spoiled, mercurial, and more than a little bit magical. It’s not just me. Everywhere she goes people fall at her feet. She is the easiest to love, and gives love freely. But she’s fragile, too. A membrane of skin stretches so thinly over her emotions it’s always threatening to burst.” 

Dannie’s early introduction of Bella stands in stark contrast to her own self-description. The description establishes Bella as somehow other than Dannie, suggesting that Bella has a whimsical quality that is accompanied by a general weakness and fragility. The reader will come to understand that Dannie views emotion-driven decision making as weakness.

“I tell him that when I stepped off the elevator and saw all the endless movement, all the frenzied bustle, I felt as if I were at home. It’s not hyperbole, he can tell.”

Dannie’s job at Wachtell is one of the few things in her life that stays stable and positive as the novel develops. Though her experience elsewhere is very often marked by a feeling of not-belonging, the busy, high-pressure environment of the firm is one that genuinely thrills her and one in which she feels sure and confident in herself.

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice to achieve your dreams.”

This is not an uncommon sentiment, but there’s a subversion to the idea in Dannie’s use of it. She prioritizes the “dream” that supports the kind of financial and personal stability that she values while seeing Bella’s art as acceptable sacrifices rather than as parts of her dream.

“Was I different as a child? Before my brother died? Was I spontaneous, carefree? Did I begin to plan my life so that no one would ever show up at my door and throw the whole thing off a cliff? Probably. But there isn’t much to be done about it now. I am who I am.” 

Dannie struggles to articulate the trauma and impact of her brother’s death, though it has profoundly influenced her decision making and lifestyle. Here, she touches on the event’s contribution to her need to be in control of everything in her life but quickly waves it off as something that’s not worthy of further attention. Despite Dannie’s belief that she is the one who can help Bella live a better life, Bella gently tries to steer Dannie towards healing and happiness.

“Bella lives in a world I do not understand, populated by phrases and philosophies that apply only to people like her. People, maybe, who do not yet know tragedy. No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.” 

The phrase “people like her” reinforces the otherness of Bella in Dannie’s view of the world. Further, this assessment fails to recognize the pain and trauma Bella has faced in her own life, instead assessing Bella as blessed and sheltered from the types of problems that other people must cope with.

“Her proximity is my gift; my silence is hers. I make her life smooth and solid. She makes mine bright and dazzling. This seems fair. A good trade.” 

This is a rather transactional view of their relationship. Throughout the novel we see that Bella and Dannie truly love each other as family, and yet, it’s clear that Dannie perceives there to be some distance between the two. Additionally, what she perceives as her offerings in the transaction have little to do with adding to Bella’s life; instead, she sees herself as providing a steady surface atop which Bella can be safely special. This is one of the moments in the novel where the reader can recognize some of the unaddressed tensions in Dannie and Bella’s relationship: Dannie’s frustration with Bella’s choices and Bella’s frustration with Dannie’s need to control and tendency to repress strong emotional responses.

“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.” 

It is in this kitchen scene that Bella’s body becomes as (or more) important than her personality. She tells Dannie about her suspected pregnancy, which shifts the focus onto her womb as a life-giving and life-holding space. This focus intensifies after she is diagnosed with cancer; the body becomes an enemy, and it is closely surveilled both inside and out.

“I wasn’t sure Bella had insurance or kept a card on her. I’m impressed at the number of steps she’d needed to go through to get there. Does she buy it through the gallery? Who set that up for her?”

This is an example of the kind of biased, flattening views Dannie has of the world and the people in it. Bella owns a gallery, has employees, and successfully runs a business. Despite these accomplishments, Dannie has conditioned herself to believe that she is the one responsible for the logistical details of Bella’s life.

“I take precise notes, but it is hard—it is impossible—for even me to follow everything. It sounds as if Dr. Shaw is speaking in a different language—something harsh. Russian, maybe Czech. I have the feeling that I do not want to understand; I just want him to cease speaking. If he stops speaking, none of it is true.” 

This scene parallels Dannie’s memory of standing in the hallway while the police tried to explain the circumstances of her brother’s fatal car accident. She recalls that her father asked the police officers who was driving and whether they had been going the speed limit. This moment echoes that memory, except that this time it’s Dannie whose grief and fear render her incapable of focused thinking and processing.

“I didn’t tell anyone about Bella’s illness, but even if I did, they would be supportive as long as it didn’t get in the way of my work. Wachtell isn’t a charity.” 

When Dannie ultimately does tell Aldridge about Bella’s sickness, he is sympathetic and encourages her to find balance so that she does not have to sacrifice her personal life to her ambition. She may be right that the firm’s expectations of her would not lessen in these circumstances, but the certainty she shows here is indicative of her tendency to compartmentalize her life.

“And she’s spontaneous in the way people aren’t anymore. She lives for now.” 

Even new to their lives, Aaron is able to pinpoint one of Bella’s most defining characteristics. The concept of time is very important in this novel—its passing on a measurable level but also its division into the past, the present, and the future. Dannie often defers the experience of life to a future she has designed and believes will bring happiness when it is achieved. The novel suggests that Dannie sees “now” as a transitional period rather than something valuable in and of itself.

“We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance. It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that’s what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.” 

Though Dannie is speaking of David in this passage, her thoughts apply to Bella as well. It is an early step towards seeing value in difference, in recognizing her own weaknesses and better recognizing Bella’s. David is an important person in Dannie’s life, but she assesses him far less for what he can add to her life now and far more for a future she thinks they could share together.

“She climbs back into the car, but there’s a change in her. She knows now that what’s to come is hers to face alone. I can’t take this part from her, I can’t even share it. I have the instinct to reach out, to try and keep the jaws open, but they have clamped shut too quickly.” 

This is another moment at which Bella’s growing embodiment is emphasized. Whereas before the cancer could be treated as something they’d tackle collaboratively, Bella’s physical symptoms remind them that it is her body alone that will experience and suffer it.

“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.” 

Aaron’s insistence on this point articulates Dannie’s character arc in the novel. She tends to see things as investments in the future, their value held in what they can offer in five years, or 10, or 20. Things that exist only in the moment are difficult for her to appreciate. Bella’s sickness and likely death shift Dannie’s focus from the distant future to the immediate present. Aaron is able to invest the present moment with a worth all of its own with these words.

“I used to think I could never live in Los Angeles. It was for people who couldn’t make it in New York. The easy way out. Moving would mean admitting that you had been wrong. That everything you’d said about New York: that there was nowhere else in the world to live, that the winters didn’t bother you, that carrying four grocery bags home in the pouring rain or hailing snow wasn’t an inconvenience. That having your own car was, in fact, your dream. That life wasn’t, isn’t, hard.” 

Dannie’s trip to California with Aldridge is another of the novel’s revealing relocations. The way Dannie describes Los Angeles and New York makes it clear that she sees the “easy” life (Los Angeles) as something for people who can’t handle the struggle of the “hard” life (New York). This thinking valorizes suffering in the same way that Dannie’s insistence on prioritizing financial and career ambition over feeling and joy does.

“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 there, see exactly what she needed. Now, I cannot.” 

In this moments Bella is arguably behaving in the way Dannie does and has long wanted Bella to. That Dannie finds it unsettling exposes some of the cracks in her worldview.

“I have 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.”

Dannie is able to clearly articulate the underlying reasons for her approach to life in this moment. The idea that she has been “waiting” and trying to “ward off” another tragedy does a lot to acknowledge the reasons she has organized her life so firmly and unyieldingly.

“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… […] I think you’re capable of this kind of love, too. And I don’t think you have it.” 

Many times, we’ve seen Dannie wish that Bella would feel less than she does; here, we see Bella wishing that Dannie would feel more and being much more direct about it than she has in the past. This new approach reflects their sense that there is no time left to delay the important things.

“We’ve been on these parallel tracks, David and I. Moving constantly forward in space but never actually touching, for fear of throwing each other off course. Like if we were aligned in the same direction, we’d never have to compromise. But the think about parallel tracks is that you can be inches apart, or miles. And lately it feels like the width between David and me is extraordinary. We just didn’t notice because we were still looking at the same horizon. But it dawns on me that I want someone in my way. I want us to collide.” 

Dannie’s growing recognition of her alienation from her own feelings leads to this important confession to herself. As she faces the loss of the woman who had kept her “colliding” with life, Dannie is forced to admit that she wants more than she has allowed herself in other relationships.

“I have held her so many times. After so many breakups and parental disappointments, but here, now, I feel like I’ve had it backward. I thought I was her protector. That she was flighty and irresponsible and frivolous. That it was my job to protect her. That I was the strong one, counterbalancing her weakness, her whimsy. But I was wrong. I wasn’t the strong one, she was. Because this is what it feels like—to take a risk, to step out of line, to make decisions not based on fact but on feeling. And it hurts. It feels like a tornado raging inside my soul. It feels like I may not survive it.” 

This is a moment of powerful realization for Dannie. Instead of seeing intense feeling as a weakness or a liability, she is able to recognize the strength it takes to endure it. This is a radical inversion of the way she has viewed herself and Bella.

“I think about Bella. Her life. Dropping out of college. Flying to Europe on a whim. Falling in love, falling onward. Beginning projects and abandoning them. 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.” 

The concept of time as a resource reappears here as Dannie experiences a type of gratitude for what she formerly saw as Bella’s frivolous lifestyle. There is no way that Bella could have known that she would die young, but the reader may widen this to refer to the passage of life in general. Everyone’s time is limited, and death can come unexpectedly. Dannie’s beliefs about how that time should be spent shift as she realizes how many things Bella was able to do in her short life.

“I have been asked if I’ve needed help so many times that I have been allowed to forget the question, the significance of it. I see, now, the way the love in my life has woven into a tapestry that I’ve been blessed enough to get to ignore. But not now, not anymore.” 

Dannie suggests that it is the things we take most for granted that we should be the most grateful for. This moment also encourages a stepping back from life and appreciation of the small ways people care for each other. These are things that Dannie is newly learning to value.

“Frederick will keep the gallery open. They’ll find someone to run it. It will still bear her name. The apartment isn’t the only thing you finished, I want to tell her. Why didn’t I see it? The way she ran that place. Why didn’t I tell her? I want to tell her now, taking inventory of her life, that I see all of it—all of her completion.”

Dannie has often thought or spoken with exasperation about Bella’s inability to finish things but realizes now that she overlooked many things of value because of the rigidity of her own priorities. It is too late now, as Bella is already gone. This type of realization marks one of the many profound changes Dannie has undergone throughout the novel, developing a flexibility and open-mindedness that allow her to see the world with more complexity.