Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  She waits, then walks back to him, sits down in the kitchen chair opposite him, and takes one of his hands. He doesn’t object, but he doesn’t look at her. The skin is papery and thin, bruised-looking, but it is Daniel’s hand, large and warm.

  “But not today, Daniel,” Isabelle says softly. “Today I’m here.”

  “Go home, Isabelle.”

  —

  “WE HAD TEA,” ISABELLE TELLS ALINA AND BEV when she gets back to the barn, just as twilight descends. The women are sitting on Alina’s white sofa, a bottle of wine and two glasses on the table in front of them. The light from a table lamp is pooling amber, providing just enough illumination for Bev to embroider a riot of flowers onto a plump pillow—reds, yellows, purple, the colors startling in the severe whiteness that is Alina’s house.

  It is Bev who gets up, finds another wineglass, and pours Isabelle a glass. Alina seems incapable of that simple act of hospitality. “Come sit with us,” Bev says, and Isabelle finds herself suddenly exhausted, all but collapsing into a white slip-covered armchair positioned next to the couch.

  “He told me to go home.”

  “But you’re not, are you?” This from Alina, an edge of panic in her voice.

  “He wants to finish his book. He didn’t say so—in fact he said the opposite—but I know him well enough to know that.”

  “Yes, of course,” is almost a murmur from Bev.

  “Then what are you going to do?” Alina needs to know there’s a plan—something, anything that might work.

  “I don’t know. Come back tomorrow and the day after and the day after that.”

  And at that reassurance, Alina relaxes a bit. She allows her back to sink into the soft cushions of the sofa, reaches for her wine. “He’s being impossible,” she says. “Stubborn and contrary.”

  Runs in the family, almost pops out of Isabelle’s mouth, but she restrains herself.

  “He pushes people away,” is Alina’s final judgment.

  “Let’s see,” says Isabelle. “We’ll take it a day at a time.”

  —

  AND THAT’S WHAT THEY DO. Each morning Bev drives the two miles from town and deposits Isabelle on the gravel driveway before she races back to open the bakery, later than she’d like, but everyone in town knows that Daniel is sick and Bev is taking care of him and so there is a patient line of customers snaking along the sidewalk, waiting for the OPEN sign to appear in the front window.

  Some mornings Isabelle will have a cup of coffee with Alina before she makes her way to Daniel’s cabin. In those early-morning conversations she hears about the resentments Alina can’t free herself from, the legacy of Daniel’s transgressions as a father, which his daughter still needs to air.

  “Did your mother make it hard for him to see you?” Isabelle suggests as a counterpoint to all the accusations.

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “No, but maybe an explanation.”

  “Not enough of one.”

  And the topic is closed for that day, and Isabelle makes her way across the meadow to do battle with an even more worthy adversary.

  Daniel makes sure he’s up and shaved and dressed by the time Isabelle gets there. Now he has a reason to get out of bed, not that he tells her that. Instead he starts each morning’s conversation with, “Let’s make this your last day here.”

  “Mmmm,” Isabelle will usually say, then busy herself making tea for them both. Even though she’d like another cup of coffee, she drinks tea with Daniel.

  “Doesn’t your husband want you home?” Daniel says this morning, a week into Isabelle’s visit, when they’ve had time to develop a routine.

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t marry that global do-gooder.”

  And Isabelle laughs: such a reductionist labeling of Casey. But not inaccurate.

  “Me, too, but that was never an option.” Then: “I married the right man.”

  And Daniel nods but doesn’t say anything. From what she’s told him about Michael, he agrees with her.

  This morning he’s feeling strong enough to go outside with her. They switch his oxygen to a portable canister with wheels and take it with them. Daniel manages to walk to a bench Bev has set up for him at the edge of Foyle’s Pond, overlooking the meadow. By the time he settles himself down on the bench, his chest is heaving with the effort of walking and breathing at the same time. And he is coughing, a hacking sound that’s hard to hear. Isabelle waits for it to quiet, for Daniel to return to himself.

  They sit in the sun, the lush panorama of wildflowers in front of them—the mountain lupines, which come back every year, the sunny black-eyed Susans, and the delicate white lace of the tall yarrow heads that sway with every whisper of a breeze.

  A portion of the meadow closest to the barn has been converted into a vegetable garden in the years since Isabelle has been here, with a handsome wood-and-wire fence enclosing it to deter the deer and other woodland creatures—Jesse’s work, she’s sure. And inside the fence Isabelle can see obsessively straight rows of seedlings, a bamboo teepee for pole beans, a trellis for cucumbers and one for peas, mounds of zucchini and yellow squash plants just starting to sprawl, squares measured out for basil and peppers of all kinds. Everything as neatly composed as Alina’s living quarters.

  And she is there, on her knees in the garden, weeding carefully around the fledgling plants. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t acknowledge them, as consumed in this task as she is when sitting at her potter’s wheel.

  Daniel watches his daughter while his breathing slows and stabilizes. He manages to get out the one word that defines his daughter, he feels—fierce—and Isabelle nods in agreement and sits quietly beside him, waiting for his heaving chest to quiet before she starts the conversation she wants to have.

  “Talk to me about the book.”

  “Don’t you ever give up?”

  “You taught me not to.”

  “Totally unfair answer.” His voice is gruff, and he turns away from her.

  “Fairness has nothing to do with what we’re doing here. Tell me.”

  “No.”

  And then there’s a hard-edged silence between them. Daniel’s No is unequivocal, and Isabelle sits there scurrying around in her mind, trying to find a lateral strategy, a way to sneak up on the answer she needs.

  “Does Bev know what it’s about?”

  “Not this one. If she had known, she wouldn’t have called you.”

  “Alina called me, not Bev.”

  And that piece of information startles him. She can see it. He watches his daughter move from plant to plant, lovingly clearing the soil around each one, before he says, “I wouldn’t have thought she cared enough.”

  “Oh, Daniel, sometimes you can be so dense.”

  —

  ISABELLE MAKES LUNCH FOR THE TWO of them. Daniel eats very little, and unlike Bev, she doesn’t push him to eat more. She just wraps up the untouched food and puts it back in the refrigerator. Then he settles down on the sofa. Isabelle covers him with Bev’s afghan and settles herself into one of the old armchairs. She reads to him until he falls asleep—today it’s from Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, a novel she’s recently read and thinks he’ll respond to. It’s a plain-speaking work and very moving—both attributes Daniel admires.

  This is his favorite time of the day. Isabelle is here. She’s asking nothing from him. He can listen to her voice and drift. He knows she will be there when he wakes.

  While Daniel sleeps, Isabelle walks. At first she varied her route, exploring the land around the O’Malleys’ complex, but once she found the beaver dam, she felt compelled to return to it every day. Now she makes her way through the shade of the dense forest growth, across the bright sunlight of open fields, often scattering flocks of wild turkeys, which cackle in protest as she passes, then down the two-lane road and up to a much larger pond than Foyle’s whose name she doesn’t know.

  The beavers are always there—a family, she’s decide
d, and everyone pitches in. The parents take on the trees surrounding the pond, chipping out a wedge of wood from the trunks with their large orange front teeth, gnawing over and over again until it looks like a woodsman has been hacking away with an ax. When a tree topples of its own weight, right into the water with a resounding and satisfying splash, Isabelle feels like cheering.

  The younger beavers’ job seems to be bringing up stones from the bottom of the pond and fitting them under the fallen trunks, solidifying the base of the dam. The entire family of four is responsible for diving to the bottom and scooping up sediment. Their tiny paws look amazingly like human hands as they push and pat the mud into place, cementing the branches, twigs, and larger tree trunks together. More twigs and limbs are brought into the water and positioned just so. More mud is brought up. The barrier grows. Each day Isabelle can see how much progress has been made in the intervening twenty-four hours. It’s astonishing to her how hard the beavers work and how ceaseless they are in their activity, and especially how they know exactly what to do, with no hesitation.

  She could watch them for hours, but she always makes sure to wear a watch and to be back in the cottage before Daniel wakes up, so that when he opens his eyes, he will see her sitting there.

  She’ll make him tea then and they’ll talk about some safe subject—the coming fall elections or the Boston Red Sox’s season now that Daniel has become a fan. They’re the kind of team he likes—tough, aggressive players—but despite winning the World Series in 2013, the team seems to be off to a bad start this year, and Daniel has concerns.

  Isabelle knows a little about baseball; Michael is a San Francisco Giants fan, and she’s picked up some rudimentary knowledge from half listening to the broadcast games he seems to keep on all spring and summer. She knows enough to listen to Daniel’s indignation with the way the Sox are going and sympathize.

  One day he asks her to describe the bookstore. He wants to be able to “picture it in my mind.” He wants to be able to place Isabelle there when she’s back in Oakland. And so she describes the corner it’s on—College and Crescent, within walking distance of the Berkeley campus but not too close. How the front door is glass and she’s left the old-fashioned bell Meir had attached to it to announce a customer. How the front counter is tall and she sits on a high stool behind it.

  “Is that where you e-mail me?” Daniel asks.

  “Mostly, on my laptop.”

  And Daniel nods; he can see her there now, doing it.

  She tells him the story of how she convinced Meir, years ago, to carry some new books and display them at the very first table you see when you walk in. She describes the small, cozy sofa to the right of the front door, slipcovered now in a deep burgundy twill, and the steamer trunk they use as a coffee table and how people can sit there and browse through a book, even put their feet up on the trunk, since it’s well worn, and relax into the reading experience.

  She tells him about the changes she made after Meir died eight years ago. How she painted the walls of the shop, which probably hadn’t been touched since Meir first bought the store, a warm cream color and replaced the rickety old metal shelves with custom-built wooden ones. How she hired an old-fashioned sign painter to etch onto the large front window of the store, the one that fronts on College, NOAH’S ARK, BOOKS in shiny black letters shadowed with a sliver of gold, and underneath the store’s name, MEIR SCHAPIRO, FOUNDER.

  She tells Daniel how she’s kept all the books she inherited. She couldn’t throw out a single one, even though many of them were so esoteric she knew no one would ever buy them. But she just dusted them off and reshelved them. They were Meir’s children, it felt like, and there was no abandoning them. So the shelves at the back of the store remain a shrine to Meir’s belief in the unpopular, the obscure, the arcane, the unloved. Once in a while she’ll sell one of those books. In fact, that’s how she met Michael. And Isabelle tells Daniel that story, which she can tell he appreciates.

  In those free-ranging afternoon conversations, Isabelle and Daniel move back into the easy intimacy that they once took for granted. The talk flows without pause. They interrupt each other without hesitation, tease each other occasionally, know exactly what the other means even when the other is searching for the right words. It’s so easy to talk, so easy to amuse, so easy to understand exactly the point.

  But today when Daniel wakes, he’s furious. He’s pulled himself from a dream he immediately wants to forget. Images linger—a stark and empty hillside, merciless wind, and the sky dark with heavy clouds—a goddamn Victorian novel! He’s dreaming a scene that belongs in Wuthering Heights. He’s had the dream before, various versions of it. There’s always a gaping hole in the earth, bottomless, a closed coffin which somehow he knows is his, and cries of grief coming from a source he can’t locate in the dream. Not very subtle. Even his dreams have gotten mundane and predictable, and he’s disgusted with it all—himself, his situation.

  He tries to sit up, impatient with the beautiful afghan that gets tangled in his feet, impatient with the oxygen line, which wound itself around an arm as he slept, impatient with Isabelle, who tries to help.

  “This is all taking too long!”

  She knows he means this long, slow march to the end, but she asks him anyway. She wants him to start talking to her about it all. “What is, Daniel?”

  “This dying business. It’s taking too long!”

  “Maybe there’s a reason.”

  “Yes, the universe has a sick sense of humor.”

  “Maybe you’re not done yet. Maybe you have things to do.”

  “Oh, spare me, Isabelle, you sound like some New Age blissed-out airhead! ‘Things to do’? Yes, I have things to do, but they all involve living, and all that’s fucking ahead of me is dying! So stop serving up nonsensical pabulum like I have ‘things to do.’ ”

  The vehemence of his words, the blatant attack on her, backs her away. She’d like to walk right out on him, but she feels she can’t. The best she can do is move across the small room and sit at the kitchen table. Turned away from him, she watches the rustle of the birch leaves, bright green against the paper white of the trunks. She’s disappointed in him—wounded, if she’s honest. Daniel, of all people, knows how often she calls into question her own intelligence, feeling in her darkest moments that she doesn’t have the uniqueness, the smarts, she would like to, and that is exactly the soft spot he went for. Unfair, uncalled for, even if he’s sick.

  And he knows it. He sits on the couch silently cursing himself and fumbles to apologize, something he’s rarely moved to do in this life.

  “You need to stop pushing me,” is what he comes up with.

  She shakes her head, not looking at him. There are tears there for the first time since she’s come—this is all so hard, he’s in so much despair—and she doesn’t want him to see them.

  “Will you make us some tea?”

  And she gets up and busies herself with the kettle and the stove. She takes some deep breaths.

  He watches her, silent. There’s an emptiness between them, and she lets it fill the room. She has no idea what to say.

  Finally he starts talking. “I started the book way before I knew I was sick.”

  “I know that.”

  “But maybe some part of me knew it.”

  “Maybe.” And then she turns to face him and asks carefully, “What were you writing about?”

  “Old age. Dying. Even though I felt completely fine. Explain that.”

  It’s a genuine question, and she thinks about it a moment before she answers. “You’d just turned seventy. You knew what was ahead of you, and you wanted to work it out in your writing before you got there. That’s what you do, Daniel—you figure it out as you write.”

  And she brings the two mugs of tea over, sits on the sofa with him, hands him his. They take a sip, and then Isabelle thinks of what she’s going to say next and a small smile plays at the corners of her mouth.

  “That’s wha
t we writers do,” she tells him, amending her earlier statement.

  And he grins back at her, giving in, she feels, agreeing.

  “Yes,” he says, “that’s what we writers do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Now, in the afternoons, instead of listening to Isabelle read to him from someone else’s work, Daniel lies on the sofa and talks to her about his unfinished novel. About how his character, whom he has named Jack Dyson, came to him.

  There had been an op-ed in the Sunday New York Times about the approaching fifty-year anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, that moment in history when for the first time college students took over a campus and demanded their right to a voice. The point of the piece was to contrast the activist students of the sixties with the self-involved students of today, their concerns narrowed to their own personal dramas, brought to them on tiny cell-phone screens. But Daniel’s attention had been caught by a brief mention of a former activist who had been one of the acknowledged student leaders and had then spent the rest of his life in the margins.

  It was easy to Google Bob Gelfant and learn that here was a man who had led students into Sproul Hall in 1964 to begin the Berkeley sit-in, who had quit college to travel to Columbia University when that campus exploded, then to Kent State in 1970, where four students had been killed by the police. After that he had gone underground and continued to organize and protest and defy the laws he felt were unconstitutional. He was rumored to be part of the Weathermen, but whether or not that was true, he had slipped out of sight.

  Daniel wondered what this man, who would now be in his seventies, thought of the sacrifices he had made for his ideals, whether his youthful choices and their consequences haunted him.

  “I decided that my guy, Jack, had been on the run for at least twenty years,” Daniel tells Isabelle now. “Along the way he had acquired a wife and two children, and they all assumed new identities every time they moved, and that was often because they could never stay in one town too long. He managed to evade arrest for decades. The question for me was, what would such a man think of his life at the end of it? When he was facing his own death.”