Surprise Me (12 page)

Casey was a revelation to her. The men she was used to talked and talked. They complained and needled and pugnaciously pursued arguments. Nate would never stop his relentless words until she had agreed that, yes, he had a point, yes, he had figured it all out. And her father, who had spent the summer constructing one long monologue, was always talking, always making his case, always needing her to listen. Even her brothers, whom she adored, created constant noise, shouting over each other, the twins in some kind of inexhaustible contest of one-upmanship since the day they could talk until Aaron, patient Aaron, would shout at them, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

Words all around her—male sounds, arguments, and grievances. The static of her life. But Casey could be quiet. He could use two words where others would need a paragraph. He would rather touch than talk. Suddenly life was quieter. Peace crept in and took up residence inside her, a tiny corner of stillness, and she was grateful.

What she didn’t realize until it was too late was that there was a price to pay for all this tranquillity. There was a list of things Casey had neglected to mention—that he had no home, that they soon had to vacate this hilltop cottage they were living in, that he had no clue where he was going next. But more important, what he didn’t tell her was that he could be whisked away in a heartbeat, out of the country, across the world for months at a time. He didn’t talk about that possibility until the call came on November 15.

Of course Isabelle had asked Casey about his work. He was proud to tell her about Global Hope, about how they were among the first responders when any disaster struck—when earthquakes devastated villages or hurricanes swept away houses or floods wiped out farmland or famine threatened children. The nonprofit was homegrown, started in Berkeley in the 1960s, when everyone believed they could make the world a better place. Casey believed it still, he told Isabelle. He believed in his obligation to do so.

“I was raised that way,” he says simply one Sunday morning as they are making their way from their tree house down the hill, crossing College Avenue to Bancroft and then down to Goldman Field for one of Casey’s soccer games.

As they walk, Casey has his duffel bag slung over his left shoulder and holds Isabelle’s hand in his right. He doesn’t continue. “I was raised that way” seems enough of an explanation for him.

But Isabelle wants to know more. “Your parents?” she prompts.

“My parents walk the walk,” he says with a shrug. “My dad runs an alternative school in Oakland. Very progressive, sort of Montessoriesque without the dogma.”

“And your mom?” Isabelle thinks quickly of her own mother, who had never been “well enough” to hold a job, the threat of a migraine always hovering somewhere behind her disillusioned eyes.

“She teaches English as a second language at a night school for migrant workers. During the day she lobbies for immigrants’ rights.”

“Wow,” Isabelle says quietly, frankly intimidated. These people all do such good in the world. What has she or anyone in her large, extended, rowdy, raucous Rothman family done that approaches the good Casey’s family does?

“On the other hand…” Casey adds with a grin, to let her know his next comments are meant benevolently, although Isabelle would have taken them that way. She hasn’t experienced a moment yet of meanness or pettiness from Casey.

“You walk into their house and it’s like you’re having a flashback. I mean, you will see actual tie-dye and a framed Woodstock poster and a lava lamp in the bedroom. The sixties have never ended as far as my parents are concerned.”

“But that’s not a bad thing, is it, if they do such good in the world?”

“My sister, Mimi, thinks all three of us are embarrassing.”

“She does?”

“Yep.”

And Isabelle has to ask, “Because of the tie-dye?”

“She thinks we’ve drunk the Kool-Aid or something. That we’re mouthing platitudes. Like we’re as cringe-worthy as recycled clothes or something.” He stops talking, and then the sly grin starts again and Isabelle has no idea what he’s going to say next. “She married an investment banker. They live in Connecticut, and she voted for George H. W. Bush in the last election. My parents had apoplexy. I think that was the point.”

When they reach the soccer stadium, Isabelle spots Deepti immediately. Although she sits demurely in the bleachers, hands folded in her lap, waiting for Isabelle and the game to begin, her aqua sari, the only pop of color amid the steel-gray slats, screams “Here I am!”

Casey seems to stand taller as they cross the grass field, to smile more broadly, to fill up with expectation. Isabelle can tell how eager he is for the game to start.

“I’ll see you afterward,” she tells him, preparing to slip away, to join Deepti and the scattering of spectators in the bleachers, but Casey grabs her wrist and brings her to him. They stand face-to-face, their bodies touching in all the right places, and Isabelle feels a surge of heat.

“Wish me luck?”

“Do you even need it?”

Casey puts his arms around her and kisses her with real hunger. And she kisses him back, her arms around his neck, her hands in his long blond hair, matching his eagerness. She doesn’t care who sees. And then they smile at each other, because they share the only secret worth having in the whole world—that love is wonderful!

“Now we’ll win,” he tells her.

Isabelle, with Deepti beside her, settles in to watch the teams play. Paying attention is serious business for both women, and their eyes never leave the field. They might miss something otherwise—a play, a clue about their men, a secret revealed only through the immediacy of the game.

“How constant he is,” Deepti murmurs as Sadhil blocks his second goal attempt.

“Yes,” Isabelle agrees. “Sadhil was made to be a goalie.” To stand and protect.

“And how fast Casey is,” Deepti adds, to be evenhanded.

“Exactly!” That’s what Isabelle wants—the thrill in her blood as she watches Casey fly down the field as if his life depended on his team’s next goal.

After the game, which the Berkeley Breakers win by a score of 1–0, Sadhil as proud of his stops as Casey is of passing for their one goal, the two couples walk to the Indian Oven Café, a few blocks away on Shattuck, for an early dinner.

It is only on these Sunday nights that Isabelle feels the least bit in touch with the rest of the world. As they walk, she’s reminded that there are other people talking, laughing, pushing their children in strollers, going about their lives—the rest of humanity she hasn’t given even a fleeting thought to in the intervening week. They pass a copy store, a Laundromat, a small grocery with pears and apples mounded in symmetrical piles out front, an Italian bakery closing for the night. Making a left turn at the corner newsstand, Isabelle catches glimpses in the Sunday papers of the fallout from the congressional elections. Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” had swept Republicans into the majority in both houses. Bill Clinton’s policies had been repudiated, but right now, in this bubble she’s living in, Isabelle isn’t interested. Casey has his arm around her shoulders. She’s watching his animated face as he and Sadhil recap the game they just won. There’s a whole world in that lovely sunburned face.

Deepti and Sadhil, Hindu and vegetarian, order eggplant bharta, dal makhani, naan, and aloo gobi. Isabelle orders tandoori chicken for Casey and herself. She’s learned that Casey will eat anything, or rather, that he doesn’t care what he eats. Many days, she now knows, he would forget to eat if she didn’t remind him, or he’d have cereal for dinner, standing up in the kitchen, shoveling it into his mouth quickly so he can get on to something much more interesting—a movie they want to see, or a friend who’s playing at a coffeehouse in Oakland, or the 49ers game on TV. Anything to do with sports takes precedence over eating.

So Isabelle has begun to cook for him, something she did for Nate but only with a secret resentment. With Casey it feels as natural as waking up next to him each morning and curling into his body to fall asleep at night. The two of them in an effortless rhythm, Isabelle has come to feel, of give-and-take that forms a perfect circle, smooth and continual and impenetrable.

At dinner, Casey and Sadhil talk about their Global Hope trips. It’s the only time Casey builds paragraphs of long sentences leading to the next paragraph, as though the ardor he feels for his work fuels his tongue.

Isabelle listens as Casey explains how he and Sadhil met—on a mission to Erzincan, Turkey, in 1992 after a 6.9-magnitude earthquake had killed hundreds and injured thousands and created 50,000 homeless people.

“All across the city there was nothing but concrete rubble, some pieces as big as this table, piled up on top of each other. Apartment houses, office buildings, so we knew there were people underneath all that, but we didn’t have much equipment. This was less than forty-eight hours after the quake.”

“Everywhere you looked, men were pulling at the boulders with their bare hands,” Sadhil adds.

“I was working at this four-story apartment building that had been totally destroyed. You couldn’t even see what the building had once been.”

“There was snow on the ground. It was so cold,” Sadhil interjects, “and these men didn’t have gloves or shovels or any kind of equipment. Just their bare hands. And they were bloodied and raw and nobody cared, they just kept digging. Casey was right beside them.”

“And then I heard it, or I thought I heard it.” Casey takes over the telling. “A faint sort of moaning coming from somewhere underneath all that debris.”

“A child,” Sadhil says.

Deepti looks at Isabelle, her expression suddenly troubled—a child buried alive in stone.

“We started to open up a small hole where we thought we had heard the sounds. It seemed to take forever, but we had to be careful. We didn’t want to start a slide.” Casey shakes his head as he remembers, not liking what he’s about to say.

Isabelle’s breath catches—she doesn’t want the child to be dead, but Casey’s face, as he remembers, is somber.

“We unearthed a hand. A tiny hand, the whole thing smaller than half my palm.” He shows them his palm so they can envision just how tiny the hand was. Then he continues the telling. “It didn’t move. The men were talking to the child in Turkish, but we heard nothing back, and the hand didn’t reach for us or grab on. And my heart dropped. We had taken too long. We had been too careful. A minute sooner, maybe thirty seconds. When did the child stop moaning? It was impossible to know.”

Both men are silent. In their memory, they are back in that rubble as Casey reached into the hole and brought out the limp body of a three-year-old boy. Impossibly dirty, dried blood covering half his face. Absolutely still.

“He was dead?” Isabelle whispers, terrified of the answer.

“We pulled him out dead,” Casey confirms.

“No…” from Deepti, a soft moan.

“And then this guy here”—and Casey grins at Sadhil—“comes from I don’t know where…”

“From the other side of that pile of rubble,” Sadhil adds.

“And he checks the kid’s pulse, puts two fingers on his carotid artery, and starts breathing air into the kid’s body. He’s calm—you should have seen him, so calm—and he forces life back into that boy. Really, he brings him back from the dead.”

And Casey sits back in his seat, pleased with the story, pleased to be able to present Sadhil to the women as the hero Casey believes him to be.

“That’s how we met,” Sadhil says, modest, matter-of-fact.

When they’re alone, Isabelle asks more questions about Casey’s missions. She wants to understand this part of his life. And he tells her, but they seem like stories of people and places so far away, so peripheral to the immediacy of their lives, because here Casey is, naked beside her in bed, stroking her skin, or beside her in his Jeep, driving with his hand on her thigh as they travel north to Mount Tamalpais State Park, or here is Casey with her in their secluded tree house as they build a fire in the living room fireplace and stretch out on the rug and undress each other and move into that unreal space where everything they do to and for each other is right. So she can delay comprehension, refuse to understand what his commitment to Global Hope means for her.

And then there is a 7.1-magnitude earthquake which creates a tsunami which devastates Mindoro Island, part of the Philippines, and Casey has to go.

It’s as if he’s vanished off the face of the earth. That’s how Isabelle feels. There is no way to get in touch with him once he’s on Mindoro. Seven hundred and ninety-seven houses have been totally destroyed, 3,288 have been damaged, 19 bridges have been washed out. The power supply throughout the province has been cut off, and the power barge of the National Power Corporation was washed away by the oversized waves.

Isabelle knows all this because she has been watching CNN obsessively in the hope of catching a glimpse of Casey amid the raging floodwater, the rivers of cars and trees and parts of houses that pour over the land. The network runs the same loop of grainy footage over and over and repeats the same disaster scorecard, because that’s all it has.

Isabelle has even less. Casey left so quickly they barely said good-bye. Once he got the call from Lester Hoffman, the head of Global Hope, Casey was a laser beam focused on stuffing his backpack with underwear and making the 5:47 plane out of San Francisco airport. She watched and stayed out of his way. She’d never seen him so single-minded and so closed off.

He kissed her good-bye as they pulled up at the airport curb and told her he loved her and then was out of the Jeep and gone before she could say, “I love you, too.”

She went home to their tree house, which felt startlingly empty, and turned on the TV and never turned it off until she heard a key in the front door five days later.

She is in her pajamas, wrapped in a blanket she took from their bed, huddled on the living room sofa even though it is the middle of the morning, watching CNN in the faint hope that it will report something new. Since Casey left she hasn’t felt well, as if she is coming down with the flu, but she reasons that it is only loss—the absence of the body and spirit of the person who had sheltered her and nourished her and led her into the light.