Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  Through the woods they retrace their steps from Isabelle’s last visit, laughing about how angry she had been then.

  “Angry at myself,” Isabelle says now.

  Daniel takes her gloved hand in his and doesn’t disagree.

  The trees are bare now, all the gorgeous leaves underfoot fading into the forest floor. It’s more desolate than the last time Isabelle was there, with winter around the corner and the blaze of autumn behind them. But they are content, and Isabelle feels the need to amend her thought.

  “But not now.”

  He nods but doesn’t look at her. They stride ahead, hand in hand. A bright red cardinal in the muted landscape hops from one barren tree limb to another, always a few yards ahead of them, leading the way, and Daniel tells her softly what has been so hard for him to tell others. “I’m proud of you.”

  And she rests her head on his shoulder for a moment as they walk. The comfort they give each other.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This time when Isabelle arrives at Boston’s Logan Airport, Bev is waiting for her. She will drive her to Winnock and Daniel.

  It was almost eleven years ago that Isabelle first met Bev, when Daniel took her into the bakery for coffee and a sweet roll on the morning she was leaving. They were celebrating, it felt like, because Daniel had given her what she needed to go home and continue to work: his belief that what she was writing was worthy. That’s what she had come for, even if she hadn’t been able to articulate it beforehand.

  They walked into Bev’s hand in hand, Isabelle’s cheeks reddened from the cold, a little out of breath from keeping up with Daniel’s pace on the long walk, and Bev knew immediately that here was Isabelle—tall, graceful, young, oh, so young, although Isabelle was thirty-one at the time. To Bev, who was almost twice her age, Isabelle was blissfully young.

  They sat at Daniel’s table in the front window and Bev brought them both ceramic mugs of steaming coffee, and Daniel introduced them.

  Almost in unison, they said essentially the same thing: “Oh, I’ve wanted to meet you,” from Isabelle, and “Finally, we meet!” from Bev. And then the women smiled at each other and knew instantly that they would be allies, that they both cared about Daniel and that such a feeling would unite them, not divide them.

  Daniel asked for his cinnamon bun and Isabelle ordered a cranberry scone, and Bev rested her hand lightly on Daniel’s shoulder as she left, a silent signal of approval that Isabelle noticed.

  “You’d better pay attention to her,” Isabelle said once Bev was back behind the counter.

  “I always pay attention to smart women.”

  “This one in particular, I think.”

  “Isabelle,” he said, sitting back in his seat, grinning at her across the table, happy to be able to tease her a little, “are you taking care of me?”

  “Yes, I’m pointing you in the right direction. You think you have a monopoly on that skill?”

  And Isabelle was right. In the following year Bev and Daniel found their way to each other, slowly, with hesitation, because they carried with them two lifetimes of experience that might have been impediments but in the end weren’t. They turned toward each other at just the right time. Daniel was sixty-two and deep into the pleasure of writing his Winnock stories. Bev was fifty-nine; her husband had been dead for more than a decade, and she had all but given up on the possibility of loving someone again. Daniel stepped through the very small and rapidly closing window of hope.

  Isabelle’s first thought when she sees Bev now, waiting for her at the baggage claim, is how much she has aged, her lovely chestnut hair overtaken by gray, the lines on her face deepened into wrinkles. Time has honed her strong face into angles that weren’t nearly so prominent a decade ago, but Bev must be close to seventy, Isabelle reminds herself. Daniel is seventy-two.

  And of course Isabelle is no longer the young girl who came to Daniel repeatedly for directions to a life she wasn’t even sure she could manage to live. She is almost forty-two, and her child is all but grown. She chose wisely and married well. She has helped her brother Aaron through many rough years marked by estrangement from their parents and alcohol abuse. She has run a business by herself and successfully. And she is now a bona fide author. A small press in Berkeley, Indian Rock Books, published her novel, My Side of the Story—a title that made Daniel laugh outright. And although it reached a very small audience, she is working on a second. She is a woman in the middle of her life, with skills and accomplishments she would never have predicted when she first walked into Daniel’s office.

  “Isabelle!” Bev cries out when she sees her, in relief, in pleasure. The two women hug, then Bev pulls back and they look at each other, taking a measure of the other. Are you ready for this?

  “How is he?”

  “Angry,” Bev says. And Isabelle nods. Of course.

  Quickly they move toward the exit doors, through them, and out to the parking lot.

  “Every e-mail I get is about how impossible it is to finish this latest book, how stupid it was for him to begin it, how incompetent he is to write what he wants to write.”

  “And nothing about the cancer, or what the doctors have said?”

  “No. Not after the first news.”

  Isabelle watches Bev as they reach her minivan. She takes Isabelle’s suitcase and puts it in the car, lowers the hatchback, avoids Isabelle’s eyes.

  “Tell me, Bev.”

  And Bev does, with tears spilling down her face. “We’re talking about a short time left. He has a particularly aggressive kind of lung cancer—that’s what the doctors have told him.”

  Isabelle puts a hand on Bev’s arm, in sympathy, in support, so she can continue.

  “He’s on oxygen now, and it’s hard for him to leave his cabin, which of course, knowing Daniel, he wouldn’t do anyway. I wanted him to move into town with me when he first got sick so he wouldn’t be so isolated out there, but would he?”

  Isabelle shakes her head; the answer is obvious. “Of course not.”

  “He has to finish his book, he told me. He can only write out there.”

  “That sounds like Daniel.”

  “But something’s shifted in the last weeks.” Bev shakes her head slightly, almost as if she’s talking to herself. “I’m afraid he’s defeated.” And then Bev looks directly at Isabelle. “I can’t abide the thought he’ll die without finishing that damned book.”

  As they drive north out of Massachusetts and into southern New Hampshire, Isabelle marvels at how vividly green everything is. It’s early summer and there is lush, verdant foliage everywhere—towering pine trees, green-leafed maples and oaks, mountainous shrubs with emerald leaves and white flowers (maybe a kind of rhododendron; she isn’t sure), and eight-foot-tall blueberry bushes.

  “I’m not used to all the green,” she tells Bev. “We’re in a drought in California, and the whole state is this gray-green color, as if some alien being has sucked the chlorophyll out of every living thing. And look at that.” Isabelle points out the window as they pass a large area of wetlands with an old covered bridge spanning part of it and a great blue heron picking its way along the grassy flats, high-stepping on spindly legs. “We’re rationing water out west, and here you have ponds and rivers. Water everywhere.” She knows she’s chattering about nothing because she’s afraid to ask the questions she needs to ask: How much pain is he in? What will I find when I see him? How have you managed, Bev? How can Daniel be dying? How can that be? And so she stops talking.

  In the charged silence, with so much left unsaid, Bev steers them toward more benign territory. “Tell me about your son.”

  And Isabelle smiles at her. Yes, I can talk about Avi and feel a little better. And so she tells Bev about his summer work in Alaska, about how incongruous it is that she raised a child who only wants to be outside doing something dangerous when Isabelle pretty much considers freeway driving to be as dangerous an activity as there is in her world.

  “He’s confident
and thoughtful,” Isabelle says in summary. “What I would have given to have those qualities at his age.”

  “Wouldn’t we all,” Bev agrees. Then: “Now tell me about Michael. I know even less about him.”

  And so Isabelle describes Michael to her—his goodness, what her father would call his steadfastness. How he’s almost courtly in the way he takes care of her, opening doors, bringing her a sweater when she’s sitting outside and the evening turns cool, taking her feet in his hands at the end of a day as they sit on the living room sofa telling each other their stories of their day and rubbing the tiredness away as they talk, attending to her without making a big deal of it. Small gestures that speak of a great kindness.

  She tells Bev that they talked about having a child together, but they married when Isabelle had finally committed to her writing again, after she had been back to visit Daniel, when she had met Bev.

  “Of course, I remember,” Bev tells her.

  And Isabelle was afraid that another child would displace her writing once again, as Avi had, and Michael understood. And never blamed her when they put away the question of having a child.

  “You can see how lucky I am.”

  “He sounds like perfection.”

  “He worries. A lot. It drives me crazy. And he doesn’t like people much, at least not in a group. One-on-one isn’t so hard for him. He’d rather read in his study than take a walk. He refuses to buy himself new clothes. His initial reaction to anything new is no, but he thinks about it again, I’ll give him that. He eats a limited number of foods, and to get him to a new restaurant is a major campaign. He doesn’t understand the concept of risk. He—”

  And here Bev stops her, laughing. “Okay, okay—he’s a human being.”

  “A mixed bag like all of us, but I make him happy, Bev, I can see that. Really all he wants is for us to be together. And I feel the same way.”

  And Isabelle tells her how, over the years they’ve been married, she has come to rely on Michael more and Daniel less. That there’s been a sort of easing between Daniel and her—not a lessening of affection but an appropriate burrowing into their own lives.

  “I’ve seen that,” Bev says.

  “And of course he’s had you.”

  “But when you finished your book and then got it published”—a grin crosses Bev’s face when she thinks about it—“he’d stop people in the street, perfect strangers, wherever we were—Daniel talking to people he didn’t know and didn’t have to talk to!—and tell them to go buy the book. Immediately! He wouldn’t stop talking about it until they promised. He was so proud of you.”

  “I know that.”

  “They’ve been good years,” Bev says, summing up the last decade for both of them.

  “Yes,” Isabelle agrees, “they’ve been very good.”

  The women ride in silence, memories of the past decade giving them some solace. Then Bev tries to explain, certain that if anyone can understand, it will be Isabelle, “All those difficult years Daniel spent before he came here, they helped create a…” And she hesitates, trying to find exactly the right word. “A grateful man.”

  “I saw that man the last time I was here. He was so genuinely happy to be here, to have his panic in retreat, to have his class to teach.”

  “Oh, the women loved him.”

  “I’ll bet.” They grin at each other, and then Isabelle adds quietly, “To be able to write again.”

  Bev nods and then pulls them back to the mission at hand, “But not now.” The three words are clipped, like the top of a hinged box snapping shut.

  And then Daniel is between them again, in the car with them, the Daniel of today, who is dying and angry and desperate to work but unable to.

  “Can you work a miracle, Isabelle?”

  Isabelle doesn’t answer; there is no answer. The two women turn away from each other, look out their separate windows, take in the fading of this radiant summer’s day as they drive toward the difficulty ahead of them.

  Alina is waiting for them as they pull up outside the barn late in the afternoon, shadows cutting the gravel driveway in half. She’s there to stop Isabelle from marching into Daniel’s cottage without speaking with her first.

  She looks undone—that’s the only word Isabelle can come up with as she gets out of Bev’s car and takes a good look at the woman waiting for her. Undone, desperate, the impending loss of the father she has never reconciled with eviscerating her.

  But there is, of course, no acknowledgment from Alina of what she’s feeling or the difficulty of this trip for Isabelle, and there’s no small talk. Not even a How was your flight? or Was there a lot of traffic? or the common courtesy of How are you?

  “He doesn’t know you’re coming,” Alina says by way of greeting as Isabelle approaches.

  “And why is that?” Isabelle asks.

  “Because he would have told me not to call you, not to have you bother to fly across the country to see a sick old man die.”

  Isabelle looks at Bev. Is that true?

  “Sounds about right,” Bev says.

  “What are you going to say to him?”

  “I don’t know, Alina. What do you think?”

  Daniel’s daughter shakes her head. “I’ve never known what to say to him.”

  Bev and Isabelle share a quick look: something to be discussed later.

  “You need to do it, Isabelle. You need to figure out why he put the book away and you need to get him to finish it.”

  “I don’t know if I can accomplish—”

  “It’s the only thing that matters to him!”

  Another quick look between Bev and Isabelle: the only thing? What about the three women who have come together to tend to him? How can Alina really believe that none of them matter to him?

  “Let me see how things go,” Isabelle says, and Alina nods, satisfied.

  —

  AS SHE WALKS ACROSS THE GORGEOUSLY blooming meadow separating the barn and Daniel’s cottage, Isabelle searches frantically for something to say, for the right something to say, but comes up completely empty. There’s no way to make this better, and there’s no way that the Daniel she’s known and loved for twenty years would stand for one false sentiment from her. Words fail her. Her heart is pounding. She’s afraid of what she will find. She’s afraid she’ll be inadequate in the face of it.

  She doesn’t knock but opens the wooden door softly, stooping a little as she crosses into the cabin. She sees him immediately. He’s asleep on the blue sofa, covered with a blue-and-white afghan that Bev probably knitted. An oxygen cannula rests in his nostrils, and the clear plastic tubing is looped around his ears to hold it in place. The line travels to a large green canister positioned by the fireplace.

  He’s gaunt, having lost so much weight that the bones of his shoulders seem to push through his skin, and there’s a shadow over his face, a caul, which tells her he’s dying. She moves soundlessly and takes a straight-backed kitchen chair and positions it alongside the sofa, so that when Daniel wakes, he will see her sitting there. And then she waits.

  The light from the long windows begins to turn purple as the day moves into evening and the sounds of the country, which are so unfamiliar to her, fill up the air—the ruffle of the water against the banks of Foyle’s Pond, the harsh call of a bird of prey, maybe a hawk. And then, in the distance, the howling of what must be a coyote and the answering call from another farther away. Mournful and unnerving.

  Isabelle sits without moving and watches Daniel sleep. His breaths take effort, but they are consistent and rhythmic. She’s grateful to find her panic subsiding in the quiet room, pushing ahead of it the worst of her fear. He’s still Daniel. She still loves him. If she can hold on to those facts, she might be able to do this. And then he opens his eyes, when she is as ready as she’s ever going to be.

  “Isabelle,” he says, but not with affection. “What are you doing here?” An accusation. He’s not smiling. In fact, she can see he’s angry, but she won’t
be intimidated.

  “I couldn’t take one more e-mail telling me how impossible it is for you to finish your book. On and on, e-mail after e-mail. I’m here to do something about it.”

  He pushes himself up onto an elbow, moves his legs over the edge of the couch slowly, with difficulty, so he’s sitting up and facing her. “A wasted trip, then.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little too soon for that judgment?”

  He shakes his head. He’s not engaging with her. He struggles to stand up.

  “What do you want? I’ll get it for you.”

  “I was going to make a cup of tea.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  And Isabelle takes the kettle from the small stove, fills it with water. “Since when did you start drinking tea?”

  “Since I got sick.”

  And the fact lies there between them. Daniel watches her set the kettle on the burner and turn the flame up to high, her back to him. She’s buying time. She doesn’t know what to say, how to approach him. He can see that, but he’s not helping her. He can’t bear it that she’s come all this way to watch him die. He wants to do it in private, alone, unobserved, and now Isabelle is here. Why should she have to experience all this with him when she has decades of life ahead of her? Years and years before all this sickness and dying and regrets and sorrow have to infiltrate her life.

  “Talk to me about the book,” she says now as she turns to face him, leaning her back against the kitchen countertop.

  “No,” Daniel says firmly. “I’ve put it away.”

  “Well, can I read the pages you’ve done?”

  “No.”

  “Because they’re terrible?”

  “Awful.”

  “Okay, I’ve read awful before, years and years of awful. You forget how long it took me to finish my first book. I’m a pro.”

  “No, Isabelle. I’ve stopped writing.”

  “That’s what I’m here to fix.”

  “It’s unfixable.”

  Isabelle shrugs. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  “I’m dying, Isabelle!” It’s a cry, and the words hang in the air, suspended between them. Isabelle can almost see the letters written across the dimming afternoon light: I’m dying…