Surprise Me (15 page)

He hits Reply and begins his e-mail. His breathing slows, his panic recedes.

Isabelle,

I’m in Colorado Springs, Colorado, teaching a bunch of dolts. There isn’t one student who can hold a candle to you. My son, Stefan, is with me and he can’t find a job in Colorado either, although to be fair, taking charge of his old man, as he seems to be doing, could be described as a full-time job.

What happened to that guy you met? The one you wrote me about the last time, who convinced you to stay in Berkeley?

Daniel thinks about that last paragraph. Is that overstepping some invisible line? Does he have the right, the standing even, to ask her that? He stares out his bedroom window as he ponders. There’s another brick building right next door. Nothing to look at. Nothing to help him decide. Oh, what the hell—he wants to know the answer to his question, so he’s going to leave it right there. She can answer it or not. It’s up to her.

I hope the Bay Area has turned out to be the place that encourages you to write. Don’t let your gift slip through your fingers.

Merry Christmas,

Daniel

And he hits Send before he can reread it and delete the question he’s dying to have answered.

Almost immediately he gets Isabelle’s response.

Daniel,

There’s been a 7.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tsunami in the Philippines and Casey is there saving lives.

Isabelle

Well, that doesn’t tell him what he wants to know, but Daniel leaves it there, already a little embarrassed he asked the question in the first place. Too revealing. Her life has moved on. She’s involved with a guy who sees himself as a hero. Why does Daniel think she’d want anything to do with an old, broken-down writer who can’t even save one life—his own?

CHAPTER NINE

I
sabelle rented half a bungalow in the flats of Oakland with the last of her summer salary, eking out just enough to cover first and last month’s rent and the security deposit. She found an old wooden house on Marston Street, built in the 1920s and reconfigured into two side-by-side apartments sometime after that. With its requisite low-pitched, gabled roof and horizontal wood siding, it is a perfect example of the California Craftsman Style which peppers the state. Each unit has its own small front porch held up by stone pedestals. That was the selling point for Isabelle, that quaint front porch with its white wooden railing, sitting four wide steps up from the street.

The living room overlooks the porch and has a large fixed window bordered by two smaller double-hung windows that open from the top and bottom. There is an eat-in kitchen with a window along the driveway, two small bedrooms, and a pink-and-black–tiled bathroom on the other side of the house. Isabelle and the tenant in the other unit, Mrs. Hershfeld, share the backyard, but so far Isabelle has seen her neighbor only when she hobbled out to hang a few pieces of hand-washed underwear on the ancient clothesline positioned behind the garage.

“It’s for you, too,” the older woman called as she struggled up the back stairs, her shockingly bright orange hair set in curlers, a cigarette packed into a lip so she can use both hands to haul herself onto the back stoop. Isabelle waved from her bedroom window, the one that overlooks the backyard, and smiled. They hadn’t yet formally introduced themselves, but Mrs. Hershfeld wasn’t standing on any ceremony. She wanted Isabelle to know she was welcome to hang her dripping intimates on the two skinny, sagging lines.

It took Isabelle about a week at the Hotel Durant without any sort of communication from Casey to realize she’d better make some decisions on her own.

I have to find us somewhere to live
—that’s how she thought about it, without ever discussing it with Casey.
Where can the two of us live?
The classic bungalow on Marston, much rented but still adorable as far as Isabelle was concerned, would do perfectly.

Once her telephone service has been activated, Isabelle makes her way back up the hill to Orson Pratt’s house to give him the new, and now permanent, number. She knows she could simply call and deliver the information, but there’s a pull toward that house. She was so happy there. Bits and pieces of her life with Casey still reside there. She decides to walk up the hill. Seeing it all again, being there, will reinforce the necessary belief that it was all real.

Isabelle is immediately struck with the sense that climbing the steep stairway of railroad ties up to Orson Pratt’s house takes much more energy than she remembered. With Casey by her side, she would float upward to the front door, but today it’s hard work. Everything seems harder without Casey. She admits this to herself, but she won’t be undone by it. She’ll just tackle each thing as it comes along, she tells herself. And then he’ll be home and everything will ease into effortlessness again.

“This is the last time I’ll bother you,” Isabelle says as Orson opens the front door. His expression is hard to read. Is he annoyed with her still?

She hands him a small slip of paper with her new information carefully printed on it. “Here’s my new address—I’ve rented a duplex—and my phone number.”

“No more Hotel Durant?”

“God, no.” And then Isabelle adds, as if she’s made an unprecedented discovery, “Hotels are expensive.”

“No kidding?” And he’s smiling.

“Obvious, I know,” and she smiles back. A small détente.

“Oakland?” he asks her, looking at the address.

“Yes, but it’s just off College, not too far away. In Rockridge.”

“Did you walk?”

“Yes.”

And then Orson has an idea. “Wait a minute,” he says, and disappears into the house. He’s back immediately, a set of keys in his hand. “Take Casey’s Jeep. It’s just sitting in the garage taking up space. Along with all his other things,” Orson adds tartly and unnecessarily, despite his best intentions of holding his tongue.

“I don’t know.”

“Couldn’t you use a car, now that you’ve moved?” He watches her eyes fill with tears. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s just so kind of you to think of it.” Why is she crying? She has no idea. All she knows is that she’s embarrassed in front of this man she hardly knows.

“Are you all right?”

And now the tears won’t stop. She’s not sobbing or hysterical, she’s just awfully tired and worn-out and feeling alone and she can’t find the off valve for the tears.

“Come in,” Orson says.

“No, I couldn’t…”

“Just until you stop crying.” What else can he do? Send a crying woman away to weep alone?

He opens the door wider and Isabelle steps into the familiar living room, only now it looks like a photo from a home improvement magazine, everything dusted and cleaned and in its place. Perfect Iceland poppies, tissue-thin orange petals crinkled and curved into cups of color, sit in a crystal vase on the coffee table. All the throw pillows are plumped and arranged by contrasting colors on the neutral couch.

Isabelle sinks into a corner of the soft sofa and Orson sits at the opposite end, back straight, hands on his knees, watching Isabelle try to get a handle on her tears.

“I’m so sorry,” Isabelle says as she rummages in her large, satchel-like purse for a Kleenex. “I never do this. Really, I can’t remember the last time I cried. It’s just that…oh, I don’t know, maybe because I haven’t heard from Casey yet…”

“Uh-huh.” Orson is biting his tongue so he doesn’t say, “I tried to warn you” or some other harshness.

“It’s been over three weeks. And CNN isn’t interested anymore and so I really can’t get any information about what’s happening over there…” Isabelle trails off, heaving a big sigh. And then she squares her shoulders. “This is all so pathetic. Every time I see you, I’m one big pathetic mess, which is really weird because in my family, I’m the one who always keeps everyone else going. My mother is usually the mess, although she’d die before she accepted that label, and I’m the one who gets her through whatever crisis is causing the uproar, and here I am dissolving into tears for no reason whatsoever. I am so sorry.”

And then there’s silence—Isabelle has run out of apology, and Orson has no idea what would be an appropriate response to her confession.

“Well,” he says finally, in order to move her up and out of the house, “here are the keys to the Jeep. I’m sure Casey would want you to have it.” And he stands, places the keys in her hand to indicate that now that she’s no longer dripping tears his intervention is over, but Isabelle isn’t getting up.

“How do you know Casey?”

And Orson sits back down. “Casey and my son went to school together, from preschool through high school.”

“You have a son?” Isabelle is stunned. Orson seems such a singular presence, it never occurred to her he had children, a wife. There’s no trace of either in his house.

“All grown now, same age as Casey. Luke lives in Detroit, where he is attempting to resurrect the downtown—a hopeless mission if there ever was one.” And then Orson adds, proud despite himself, “But that’s my son.”

“What was he like as a child?”

“Luke?”

“No, Casey.”

“Pretty much the way he is now, only smaller.”

And Isabelle laughs. “I can see that. I can definitely see a tinier Casey”—and she takes both hands and holds them about two feet apart—“behaving exactly as he behaves now.”

“Lots of energy,” Orson says, nodding.

“Happy if the sun was shining.”

“Yes. Whatever was in front of him was pretty much it.”

And Isabelle is silent. Then: “Not much good at long-term planning.”

“No. Not his strong suit.”

“Well,” she says as she stands and he does, as well, “that’s what I can help him with.” And she finds that she’s light-headed, dizzy, and she sits back down again.

“I’m sorry.” God, she must have said that ten times already to this nice man. “I’m a little light-headed. In fact, I haven’t felt well since Casey…” And then she stops herself, because she knows instantly what’s wrong. How could she have been so clueless? Of course it’s been crazy since Casey left, and she’s been worried about him and worried about where she was going to live and how she was going to pay for it all, but to completely skip over the missed period, even though she’s never been exactly regular so it wasn’t such a big deal, but still, the queasiness alone should have told her. Oh my God.

“I’m pregnant,” simply springs from her mouth before she can censor herself. Then, more slowly, with real wonder: “I just realized I must be pregnant.”

Orson sits back down for a second time. Obviously this girl isn’t leaving anytime soon.

“What a mess,” she says, and he would concur if it weren’t cruel to do so.

They look at each other, neither knowing exactly what to say now, Isabelle gradually coming into complete embarrassment. And with her face flushing red, she stands up again, car keys in hand, and makes for the door.

“Thank you,” she says as she crosses the living room. “I can’t thank you enough,” is lobbed over her shoulder as she reaches the front door, opens it, and is gone.

—

ISABELLE SITS ON HER TINY
front porch and stares out at the stillness of Marston Street. Up and down the block are small two- and three-bedroom wooden houses similar to her own. The old maple trees planted at the curbs, probably when the houses were built seventy years ago, are huge and leafless in the December air. Christmas is less than two weeks away.

It’s the middle of the day. The kids who live on the street are in school, and it’s so quiet Isabelle can hear the occasional squeal of car brakes on College Avenue several blocks to the east and the faint music of a guitar trio that often positions itself outside the Rockridge Café, playing for change.

Stupid. Could you have done anything more stupid?
The words run through her head in an endless loop. She knows it’s her mother’s voice accusing her—she hears the harsh tone and staccato cadence, exactly as if her mother were sitting beside her—but she has no defense. She agrees. She can’t think of anything more stupid.

And then comes her father’s sorrowful voice from one of their morning discussions on the Long Island Railroad, when he fervently admonished her not to “live a life of regret.” “How do you avoid that?” she remembers asking him, and he responded, “Be careful.”

Well, she wasn’t. And now what?
You can have this baby,
she tells herself,
or not.
That’s the first choice she has to address, and she prepares herself for endless agonizing bouts of indecision which will tie her up in knots. But to her amazement, the “or not” of her choice seems like an impossibility. It is crystal clear to Isabelle that she will have this baby. No, she tells herself, she and Casey will have this baby.

That rock-solid belief is a revelation to her. Where did that certainty come from? She has no idea. Maybe pregnancy carries with it this gift of clarity. Maybe she’s gone slightly crazy. All she knows for sure is that it feels amazing to be so unequivocal.

“Well!” And she says this out loud to the quiet street, frankly astonished at herself.

Mrs. Hershfeld, dragging a wire shopping cart loaded with groceries behind her and smoking, as she always seems to be, hears the loud and self-satisfied “Well!” as she nears the bungalow and takes it as a greeting.

“Fanny Hershfeld,” she says from the bottom of the steps. She could climb them to be more neighborly, but it would kill her knees.

“Isabelle Rothman,” Isabelle says as she gets up and walks down the steps to shake Mrs. Hershfeld’s hand.

“Rothman,” the older woman says with a knowing nod. “Good. Things will be fine between us.”

Isabelle has no idea what she means and it shows on her face.

“The Jews—we know.” And with that Fanny turns, grabs her shopping cart, and slowly begins to maneuver the four stone steps to her front door.

“Here, let me help you.” And Isabelle easily carries the cart onto the porch. And then, she can’t resist: “What do we know, Mrs. Hershfeld?”