Surprise Me (26 page)

She’s not making any sense to Meir, but it is very clear that she is consumed by rage. Angry women are not in his wheelhouse—it’s one of the reasons he refuses to see his sister, Fanny. He’ll just wait until the Isabelle he knows and loves resurfaces. He’ll just move away from her, behind the counter, and busy himself with whatever papers he can find there to shuffle. But Isabelle isn’t finished.

She stands on the customer side of the front counter and continues with the same intensity. “He never told me a thing! Never! He’d write me these concerned e-mails and pretend nothing was going on, and all the while this!”

She grabs the book from Meir’s hands and bangs it flat against the wood counter. “This! This! This! This!”

Meir wishes there was a hole he could sink into until she calms down.

But she doesn’t. The rage Isabelle feels, the sense of betrayal, really, doesn’t dissipate in the coming days. In fact, as she seethes, her anger grows. So many things she would shout at Daniel if he were standing in front of her: “You used everything from my heart, everything I am, for your own purposes!” “Didn’t we have this implicit pact of trust?” “How could you, Daniel? How could you?”

And then she does something so uncharacteristic that it scares her a little. She packs up Avi’s clothes and deposits him at Art and Louisa’s with Casey and she gets on a plane to Boston and rents a car and drives to Winnock, New Hampshire, without telling anyone where she is going.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

N
ow, four years into his New Hampshire life, Daniel takes the dog, Alina’s dog, with him when he walks into town in the mornings. She named him Orphan when he showed up at her studio door one winter morning, motherless, a tiny puppy shivering with cold. Daniel suspects that the name has more to do with Alina than with the state of the dog, but he’s never said that to his daughter.

Father and daughter have worked out an arrangement to share the dog, if little else. Orphan ranges freely from Alina’s barn to Daniel’s small cottage, sometimes sleeping with her, sometimes with him, probably getting fed in both places and yet managing to look perpetually skinny and undernourished.

When Orphan’s not with either of them, he roams the woods in search of intoxicating smells to roll in and small game—squirrels, mice, chipmunks, cottontail rabbits—to hunt. And thankfully, he provides the one safe conversational harbor for Daniel and Alina. “I’m taking Orphan into town with me,” Daniel might say as he begins his morning walk to Bev’s Bakery. Or Alina might knock on Daniel’s door after dark, worried because Orphan is MIA. “Is he with you?” she’ll ask.

Sometimes they’ll tromp through the woods behind Daniel’s cottage with twin flashlights, calling the dog’s name until they see him burst through the trees, tail whirling with pleasure, a ball of ecstatic energy that somehow manages to melt the deep freeze between the two humans, at least for that moment.

This October morning, as Daniel and Orphan begin their two-mile walk into town, Daniel can’t help but notice Jesse Eames’s faded red pickup truck parked at a slant, again, in front of Alina’s barn. None of his business, he tells himself, not now, nor when the man and truck started showing up over a year ago. Besides, he likes Jesse, a quiet guy who does what he can to get by—finish carpenter, fine furniture maker, hired hand in the spring and summer when there’s outside work to do. Daniel’s glad, he tells himself, glad that his daughter’s got herself a decent man. And the slightly bitter taste of regret? Only that Alina has never felt the need to mention Jesse to him.

But this is a morning to put all that away. The world is ablaze with reds and oranges and the purest of yellows. The maple and oak trees are burning up with scalding color, the last of their leaves clinging stubbornly to outstretched branches and the rest flooding the road and the forest floor with missives the size of dinner plates.

Of course Daniel knows the leaves are dying, that the trees are going dormant for the winter, that autumn is the ending of things, not the beginning, but the foliage show is so gaudy, so aggressively
there,
that it is hard for him to believe the deadness of winter is just around the corner.

And Daniel suspects it’s especially hard to believe this year because he feels so much more alive than at any time he can remember. And proud of himself—an emotion he can barely remember ever feeling. For finishing the book. For writing a novel. For honoring Isabelle, as he sees it. For writing something hopeful. Of course he knows that this feeling may well be transitory; the book could be badly reviewed or not at all, it might fail to sell, he may never be able to repeat the experience he had writing it, when the act of creation brought him so much…well, joy. But right now, on this glorious morning with the dog at his side and the world around him exploding with one last burst of showmanship, Daniel is hopeful.

Orphan bounds ahead of him, into the trees and out again, barking at something loudly, probably a fox, then circling back and ambling contentedly alongside Daniel, tail in the air, his gait a steady patter. The sky overhead is the brightest of blues. The air is still chilly this early in the morning, and the pumpkins Daniel passes in Steve Wethering’s pasture have a dusting of frost along their shoulders. Within a week they’ll all be gone, turned into toothy jack-o’-lanterns for Halloween.

When they get to the bakery, Orphan takes his customary place on the sidewalk, directly beneath the large front window, and watches as Daniel goes inside and claims the round table so that man and dog have clear sightlines to each other. That proximity makes each of them feel better.

Daniel plugs in his laptop. Bev brings him a thick white mug of coffee and his customary cinnamon bun. He smiles his thanks as she moves back to the counter and the line of customers waiting patiently for her.

As Daniel opens his e-mail, he vows to himself that today is the day he’ll tell Isabelle about the book. He’s put it off far too long, he knows, but only because he hasn’t figured out exactly how to say what he wants to say. The dedication thanks her, although not by name. He struggled for a long time with what to write, how to acknowledge her, and finally came up with
To I.—who inspires and delights,
because it’s naked and true. But he fears that one simple sentence is not nearly enough. He wants her to understand that she brought him alive. He hopes that the book will convey that message, but he wants to prepare her for it.

That first day here in Winnock, when he was unpacking his books and found those eight pages of her never-finished novel, they took him back to a time when he felt the first stirrings of hope. The pages were irrefutable evidence that at least then he had had something to offer. Over the course of the semester they’d worked together, Isabelle had found her gift. He has no doubt of that, and he also can admit in the privacy of his own musings that he had something to do with it.

And of course finding Isabelle’s pages couldn’t help but take him back to that stifling hot afternoon in May, in his large and messy L.A. kitchen, when he looked up from reading to see her young body silhouetted in the doorway, practically naked in that wisp of a dress. There were so many things he could have said to her that day but never did. And remembering all that prompted him to start writing, endless e-mails of things he wished he had said or wanted to say to her now, e-mails he knew he would never send because they were inappropriate—too needy, too intrusive, feelings he could barely acknowledge to himself, let alone send to her. But somehow they became the foundation for more writing. And then, later, when Isabelle did contact him and they began to e-mail regularly and far more benignly, it felt as though they were building some sort of web of support, a safety net of writing from which the novel came. So without Isabelle, there would be no book. He’s sure of that, and he wants her to understand how grateful he is.

But how to do that? Such an unfamiliar feeling for Daniel: gratitude, with its implication that life is good or that something in his life is to be applauded. And so he has put off the e-mail, and now the book is out and he has to alert her, has to share with her how they did this together. That’s how he feels: that the book is a joint project, even though Isabelle never knew she was contributing.

What will she think of the nature of the book—the fact that he’s written a fully romantic love story? He can’t predict. And all the intimate scenes between the characters? Okay, all the sex, which of course he has imagined and written in great detail. He has only the memory of his lips on her perfect young breast. And from that memory he has created the rest. He hopes she feels adored, because he sees the book as a celebration of her.

All these thoughts render his fingers motionless. The weight of the proposed e-mail sinks it before he even starts. And so he stares out the window and locks eyes with Orphan, who waits patiently, head on his front paws, but can’t help him out at all.

The morning crush of customers over, Bev comes with her coffeepot and refills his cup, then pulls out a chair and sits down opposite him. Over the years of morning coffee and evening classes, they’ve become easy with each other, comfortable.

“Something wrong with the cinnamon bun today? You haven’t touched it.”

“No, Bev, of course not.” And Daniel takes a big bite. “I’m too busy being stuck is all, trying to figure out how to tell Isabelle that the book is coming out.”

Bev laughs. “About time. She figures fairly prominently in it, wouldn’t you say?” She’d read the book as soon as she had been able to coerce Daniel into giving up a copy of the galleys, blushing in the solitude of her small living room at the sex scenes and marveling at Daniel’s ability to bring this girl to life. She knew he’d be a wonderful writer, and he is. She told him so, but he deflected the compliment, always uncomfortable with any kind of praise, the hallmark of a man who hasn’t welcomed a lot of goodness into his life.

“It’s my memory of Isabelle,” Daniel corrects her now. “She’s the
inspiration
for the character.”

“Hmmm,” Bev says as she gets up, not buying Daniel’s explanation for a second. “Well, good luck with that.”

“Maybe she won’t see the book,” Daniel calls to Bev’s retreating back.

“She works in a bookstore!” is thrown over her shoulder.

Right. There’s that. He’d better get busy with the e-mail.

Daniel told Bev quite a bit about Isabelle over the years he was writing
Out of the Blue
. He’d come in each morning with his brain full of what he had been working on the day before or what he was hoping to tackle that day when he got home, and Bev was always a willing audience. To his surprise, Daniel found himself talking about the progress of his writing as he was doing it. In the past he had always felt that it all was so fragile, so mystical almost—this writing business—that talking about the work might shatter all that delicacy into a million irreparable pieces. But somehow, in Winnock, with Bev, he found himself wanting to talk. She knows more about this book than anyone else.

Women—he could always talk more easily to women. His mother first and foremost. Daniel doesn’t know where she got the strength to be constantly available to the three needy men in her life: his father, his brother, Roman, who acted out when things got bad at home, and especially to him, who would flee when the latest alcohol-fueled storm of his father’s escalated. Gone…gone for as long as he could manage. And then later, when he would creep back into the house, he would sniff the quality of tension in the air to figure out whether it was safe to return, or relatively safe.

And he would seek out his mother, praying she would be alone. If he was lucky, he would find her by herself, usually in the kitchen, or sometimes outside reading on the back porch when the weather was nice. Those were the times he would be able to see the toll his father’s injury and drinking had taken on her. In repose, while she read, her face would relax into a vision of sadness—slack and lined and careworn. And he couldn’t bear it, to see the suffering that she made sure to hide from him most times behind her steady gentleness. And so he would go to her, sit with her, and tell her stories. It was an instinct of his, to fabricate long, elaborate tales which took them both away from the loud suffering that was their life with Gus Jablonski. All Daniel wanted to hear was his mother’s astonished reaction of “No!” when he made up something very far-fetched, and then her laugh—that was the grand prize—at the preposterous nature of whatever he said was “true, Mom, completely true.” Somehow those stolen moments with his mother would make things instantly better.

Daniel understands now that he has always gone to women. Despite all her shortcomings, Stephanie was a listener, too. She would sit, uncomplaining, for hours in a high-backed wooden booth at the Lakeside Diner in Erie, nursing cup after cup of coffee, and listen to Daniel, barely past his twenty-first birthday, spin the real stories that would one day become his first book, about his father. The irony, never lost on him, was that it was only after he had left Stephanie that he could write them down.

And now in his new life in New Hampshire, Bev’s steady presence gives him much the same gift. She listens. She’s thoughtful. Well, to be fair, she pretty much dispenses that same thoughtfulness to everyone. She takes in her customers’ stories as they buy her sourdough bread and carrot cake and hot cross buns, nodding as she bags maple scones for David Leighton, who opened the bookstore a few years back and is now showcasing Daniel’s new novel prominently in the window, or making sympathetic sounds when Marie Tibbett worries about a grandson whose asthma has gotten worse.

Who listens to Bev? Daniel wonders. Maybe Sarah, whose husband has finally died and who seems liberated now, reborn into life after a decade of caretaking. Bev must talk to Sarah. They drive together to the Monday and Thursday class. He supposes there are other times when they see each other, but he doesn’t know for sure. He’s curious about Bev’s life away from the bakery and those two nights a week he sees her in class, but she reveals little, preferring to listen. As it is, he’s content with the package deal he does have—Bev, the Internet connection, and the best cinnamon buns in 100 miles—all in one place.