Surprise Me (20 page)

There’s a closed door to the left of the front door.

“The one bedroom?”

“Where I work.”

“I thought you were teaching.”

“I was. Not anymore.”

“And now what do you do?”

She opens the door so he can see what lies beyond. The space is large and open. It is easy to see the barn that this structure used to be—a tall, pitched roof with heavy wood struts crisscrossing beneath the roof, a concrete floor, windows high up in what must have once been the hayloft.

One wall is lined with crude shelves made of bricks and wood planks. They are crowded with salmon-colored bowls and dishes, vases, goblets, whatever can be made of clay. There’s a large structure of stacked cement blocks, looking like a small fortress, which Daniel understands is a firing kiln, and there’s a potter’s wheel under a window.

“These are yours?” Daniel asks. The bowls are delicate and willowy, with rims that undulate. The vases pour upward at their edge like outstretched arms. Everything is delicate and beautiful even in this primitive, unfired state.

“That’s what I do now,” Alina says. “I take care of the O’Malleys’ land and they let me stay here and work.” She turns, looks at Daniel, appraising him. “And now you’re here.” The last thing she wants is this problem that Stefan has dumped in her lap.

“You don’t have to—” Daniel starts, without really knowing what the end of that sentence is going to be, but his daughter interrupts him.

“The cottage is only one room.”

“Okay.” Daniel is determined to be agreeable. What choice does he have?

She shrugs and grabs a key from a nail by the door. “Come on, then,” she says, and tromps out in her heavy boots, Daniel following.

His daughter is formidable, Daniel sees. She wears jeans caked with dried clay, a torn T-shirt with
The Vagina Monologues
in faded script across her breasts, and those hiking boots that lace all the way up her shins. Her honey-colored hair is pulled back into a low ponytail and tied with a length of twine. Her hands are callused and look supremely capable. She seems so strong and self-reliant. And Daniel is immediately jealous. To be as at home in the world as she is, marching quickly ahead of him now across a meadow bursting on this June day with wild lupines and woolly-headed lavender bergamot and milkweed plants crowned with vivid yellow-and-black Monarch butterflies.

Alina’s destination is a small stone building with a low door and a roof of charcoal slate, situated on the edge of a pond.

“Foyle’s Pond,” she tells him, keeping her sentences short and factual. “And this was once the springhouse for the farm.”

With a copse of birch trees creeping up behind the building and large granite blocks in shades of gray and amber making up the walls, Daniel can see that it must have been an ideal spot for keeping perishables cool.

Alina hands him the key. “The O’Malleys remodeled it some, but it isn’t much.”

Daniel shrugs. He doesn’t need much. Four walls. A door he can close to keep the rest of the world at bay.

“Two miles farther down the road you came in on is the town. Winnock.” She points him in the right direction. “I work during the day. Every day. You’ll have to fend for yourself.” And with that, she turns and walks back across the meadow, the way they came.

Daniel watches her strong strides quickly put distance between them, and then a high-pitched tone, a whistle, cuts through the quiet air. And immediately an image flashes across his mind of a five-year-old Alina, lips pursed into an
O,
the tip of her tongue lodged against her lower teeth as he taught her, struggling to push just the right amount of breath out to make that whistle. Nothing, for days and days, but she didn’t give up. They practiced together for weeks, in the car when he drove her to school, on the sofa after dinner, her determined little face bunched with concentration, fierce even then, until she finally got it. Surprised at herself, but oh, so proud. And then, less than a month later, he was gone. Left: he should be clear. Less than a month later, he left.

Now she whistles a second time, and a medium-sized mutt, a blur of white and brown, shoots out of the trees, bounding toward her and circling his daughter with leaps of happiness as she walks back to her barn. To Daniel, it feels as if Alina has forgotten him as soon as her back is turned.

From across the meadow he watches Stefan open the trunk of the car, take out his three boxes of books and two suitcases, put them on the gravel, get into the car, back it up, and head down the driveway toward the main road. On the drive from Iowa to New Hampshire, Stefan made the case, relentlessly, that he needed the car more than Daniel did. Daniel is afraid to drive, Stefan reminded him, and, besides, where was there to go? The car would just sit there rusting out and being wasted, while he, Stefan, already had plans for it. Daniel, exhausted from all the years of arguing and opposing his son, agreed to let Stefan take the car. Which he is now doing. Down the driveway, almost to the end, and then the car stops abruptly and Stefan gets out and lopes across the meadow to Daniel.

“This is for the best,” is his parting statement.

Daniel shrugs. “I don’t see much alternative.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. We wore out our welcome.”

With each other?
Daniel wants to ask but doesn’t. No need to start all that up again. He simply nods, raises a hand to rest across Stefan’s shoulder in parting. “Son—” But Stefan has already turned and is now sprinting through the wildflowers, desperate, it seems, to get in the car and be on his way.

And then Daniel really is on his own, the next chapter of his life in front of him, inside the stone cottage. He stoops a bit as he opens the heavy wood door to see a small room with thick granite walls—the kind of walls that weep with moisture in the winter. A basic, unfinished wood floor. Through a door to his left he can see a serviceable bathroom. There’s a small fireplace in the rear wall, its stone blackened from use and never cleaned, a simple wrought-iron bed to its left, and an old stove, an older refrigerator, and an enameled sink along the right, open shelves with a few mismatched dishes above it. Two easy chairs, looking like garage-sale rejects, upholstered in a faded stripe, are positioned to face the fireplace; a braided rag rug in autumn colors spans the floor between the chairs and the hearth. A simple wooden table, maybe four feet long, and two straight-backed chairs are angled next to the stove. Four long, narrow windows, two on either side wall, reach almost to the floor and are curtainless.

So this is where he has landed. Fifty-four years old. Homeless, disdained by his children, unemployable. Besieged by panic attacks. Without any skills. And feeling sorry for himself, he has to admit, which brings a grin at his own predicament, there in this barren room which is to be his home for the foreseeable future. Life does a number, doesn’t it? There’s nothing to do but grin at that. He’s living out an appropriate retribution for his acts of selfishness in his thirties—leaving Stephanie and his kids—and his self-centeredness in his forties—drinking too much, enjoying the literary acclaim too much, marrying Cheryl when he shouldn’t have.

He puts his laptop down on the wooden table; somehow he hasn’t let go of it since stepping out of his car. Does that tell him something? That he’s pathetic? That he still clings to the illusion he’s a writer?

He sits down at the table and surveys the room again. It will do. Maybe it’s all he deserves right now. Maybe he’d better unpack. He goes out to Alina’s driveway and begins carrying in his boxes and suitcases. His daughter is nowhere to be seen.

It’s while he’s unpacking his books that he finds the crumpled eight pages that Isabelle gave him that day two years ago when it was so hot and she took off her graduation robe to reveal that gossamer sundress, almost like wearing nothing. And then she took the strap off her shoulder and then he…And he stops himself. He shouldn’t be going there.

He smoothes the pages flat and reads her words again. About Melanie. And needing to be an outlaw. About sass and meeting life head-on. He’s missing Isabelle’s spirit in his life. That’s the deepest sadness of all.

He opens his laptop and begins an e-mail to her that he knows he will never send. It contains too much longing. And besides, he hasn’t heard from her since she was having great sex with some guy who was saving the world. She had found Daniel’s disgraced third novel in a secondhand shop, and he had made her promise not to read it. By now she probably doesn’t even remember him. But still he writes.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
sabelle’s son has night terrors. When they happen, Avi bolts upright in bed, eyes open but still deeply asleep, and screams. On particularly bad nights, he darts through the house as if being chased by demons.

“Three is a common age for night terrors to begin,” Deepti tells Isabelle calmly one mild September evening, “and there is no reason to be overly concerned.”

The two women are sitting on the front porch of the Craftsman duplex, Isabelle in an ancient rocker found at the Berkeley Flea Market whose contours fit her lanky frame perfectly, and Deepti in a wicker chair. They’re sipping chai tea that Deepti made for them, sweet and aromatic. Fanny Hershfeld’s side of the house is quiet, with only the blue light from the television screen flickering in the living room darkness. Isabelle knows that in all likelihood her neighbor is fast asleep in her BarcaLounger and that the television will be droning on till the early-morning hours. Usually Fanny manages to rouse herself, turn off the TV, and hobble to bed before the sun rises, but not always. How much you know about someone living in such close proximity, Isabelle has discovered—things you would never know about friends, who feel much closer to your heart.

“In the transition from REM sleep to the deeper non-REM sleep, the central nervous system of a child can become overly aroused, and it responds with a sudden reaction of fear.” Deepti is patient and careful in her explanation. It is easy to see the excellent physician she is preparing to be.

“But he looks terrified,” Isabelle whispers into the soft night air, as if it were a shameful secret.

“Yes, children do, but he’s fast asleep. He doesn’t know, Isabelle. It’s only you who sees the terror.”

Isabelle nods, is quiet for a moment, then adds in a rush, “I was afraid it was something I’ve done. Something emotionally damaging.” Her greatest fear, spoken to Deepti, whom she trusts completely.

“No, it’s a neurological phenomenon.”

“Meaning it’s physical, not psychological?”

“Yes, so simply hold him so he doesn’t hurt himself and wait. That’s all. There is no comfort you can give. Just wait.”

Wait while her child is inconsolable? Wait and do nothing?

“That’s torture in itself.”

“It passes, Isabelle.”

“Yes,” Isabelle agrees finally and sighs. “It does.”

With her foot Isabelle pushes the ancient rocker lightly back and forth against the weathered stone porch and watches the flickering light coming through Fanny’s front window. There’s a pool of quiet between the two women, comfortable, familiar.

“I wish…” Deepti starts, and then pauses.

“What? I love any sentence from you that starts ‘I wish.’ So rare, Deepti.”

Deepti blushes in the dim light, but Isabelle can’t see it. “I wish…” Deepti says slowly, trying to find exactly the right words, “I wish you didn’t have to deal with this problem by yourself.”

“Yes,” Isabelle agrees. Just that one word, afraid if she doesn’t stop there, she will say too much.

“That is the unfortunate part.”

And I am furious about it,
Isabelle wants to say.
Where is Casey? Why is some child in Indonesia or Senegal more worthy of his attention than his own? And why do I feel like such a horrible, uncaring, selfish person whenever I even entertain these thoughts?

“As long as Avi is all right,” is what she says instead.

“Avi is fine,” Deepti reassures her again.

What Isabelle doesn’t tell Deepti that evening, or anyone else, is that she is afraid to fall asleep, afraid her sleep will be shattered by Avi’s screams. Better to stay awake, be alert. Better to hold his tiny body and lull him calmly back to sleep with all her wits about her.

So she’s become a night troller, surfing the Internet for clues, corresponding with other wide-awake mothers across the country whose children cry out in the night. Modifying the loneliness as she can.

There’s something about the early-morning hours, about the tension of waiting for the screams to pierce her heavy quiet, about the harshness of her solitude, that feeds her need to feel connected to somebody. One night she finds herself writing to Daniel.

Where is he now? Still in Colorado? Does he even have the same e-mail address? Will he even remember her? Will he answer?

Daniel,

I think it’s been over three years since we’ve been in touch. I have no idea if this will reach you or whether you’ll even want to respond.

You must think I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, if you’ve thought about me at all.

It’s been a pretty life-changing three years. I had a son in July of 1995. An amazing, wonderful, funny child named Avi. We live in Oakland and I work at a bookstore that reminds me of Seaman’s. Do you remember Seaman’s, near the Chandler campus?

Avi’s father works for a nonprofit called Global Hope and he spends most of his time saving people’s lives. We’re not married but we’re a couple, sort of. It’s complicated. Actually, life these days is complicated.

I think about you often, but I’m afraid that you will be disappointed in how my life has turned out.

Isabelle

She clicks the Send icon and closes her laptop, dispatching the bedroom into complete darkness. Now the whole house is dark and quiet. Peace…there should be peace now, but Isabelle doesn’t feel it. She gathers the quilt from her bed and drags it into Avi’s room.