Surprise Me (8 page)

There’s no way out for him. Not now, not for another year, until he goes away to college and never comes back. “Okay,” he says finally, and Isabelle is gone, swallowed up by the crowd.

She pushes the guilt down, away, away from her just for today as she weaves through the milling families, recognizing somewhere inside her that she made the decision to leave without any of her habitual agonizing. Should she have stayed and mediated her parents’ argument? Should she have tried harder to head it off? Should she have stayed to protect Aaron, as she has countless times before? Should she have been a better daughter? Those questions would have trapped her into indecision if not for Daniel, who is waiting for her.

And then her eye is caught by a swirl of primary colors shimmering in the heat: Deepti’s extended family—her mother in a rose-colored sari shot through with gold thread, her older sister in shades of green and blue, Aunt Priya, the doctor, dressed in bright yellow silk. And in the middle, startling in contrast, is Deepti in her long black gown and tasseled cap. Her father, Ajay, stands proudly on the periphery of all these colorful women in his woven sandals and starched ocher shirt, content to watch them flutter around his beaming daughter.

“Isabelle!” Deepti calls to her, and the two roommates embrace. “We did it!”

“We did!” And suddenly, in that split second, Isabelle is overcome with a sense of loss. “I’m going to miss you so much!”

“I know. I know!”

“I won’t see you every day. How can that be?”

“You’ll visit me in the Bay Area. Promise me?”

“Of course I promise,” Isabelle says, because she wants it to be true—that she will take a trip to San Francisco sometime soon, even though the days and weeks past graduation are a fuzzy blur to her now.

And then she spots Nate and his parents and grandparents, Rose and Bernie, and a couple of aunts and uncles and their children, all of whom Isabelle knows. So many Litvaks have come out from Long Island for this. Isabelle waves to them over the heads of the people.

“I’ve got to go.” Isabelle gives Deepti one last hug, her eyes on the fast-approaching Nate as she takes off in the opposite direction. “I will come!” are the last words Deepti hears.

“Isabelle, wait!” Nate calls out.

“See you at dinner,” she shouts to him as she slips through the crowd and is lost from view. The last thing she wants to do now is acknowledge her connection to the whole Litvak clan.

—

THE WALK FROM THE AMPHITHEATER
to Daniel’s house is quick and smooth. As soon as Isabelle is down the hill, the campus empties out, the way it does on any Saturday. And walking through the shaded groves of ancient oaks and eucalyptus feels good after all the hours of sitting in the sun. It’s only when the buzz of voices recedes and the quiet beauty of the Chandler campus reinstates itself that Isabelle can allow herself to realize that this is the last day she will walk these paths, see these buildings, live here…see Daniel.

She stops in front of Lathrop Hall and fixes it in her mind’s eye.
Remember the twenty-seven steps you took every Tuesday. Remember the red tile roof and the elegant arch over the front door. Here is where your life changed, on the second floor, in that derelict office Daniel keeps for himself.

Something extraordinary happened, she knows it. Somehow Daniel guided her toward a vision of herself that is singular, unique, divorced from everyone else’s expectations—a writer. She has to let him know how grateful she is.

—

DANIEL HAS BEEN WAITING ALL WEEK.
He really didn’t expect her on Wednesday, or even Thursday. He knew it would take longer than a day or two to rewrite the pages. But Friday he was at the living room window every few hours, and when she didn’t show up, he knew it had to be Saturday, even though Saturday was graduation. Sunday she was leaving with her parents, back to Long Island for a summer job in her father’s law firm, she’d told him. And then? She doesn’t know.

All morning he waited for her. Maybe she’d come with her pages before the ceremony. But she didn’t. So he knew that somehow she’d come after. And it is late afternoon and he is pacing in his living room and then he sees her, flying down his front path. She’s still wearing her long black robe, and it’s flapping open to reveal bare legs and sandals. She isn’t just coming to him, she is rushing toward him.

He opens the door and she sails through. “Daniel…Oh, Daniel…How can I go back to Long Island with
them
? They’re already driving me crazy! My mother’s sure she has heatstroke and my father is yelling at her and the twins are mortified and Aaron, poor sweet Aaron, is beside himself and I left! Can you believe that? I ran off and left them all there to sort it out!”

“Good.” Daniel says this unequivocally, and it immediately calms her down.

She tosses her body into a living room chair and a small smile starts. “It is good, isn’t it?”

He nods. He knows something about dealing with selfish parents.

“If it had been any other day, I would have pleaded with them to stop arguing, begged my mother not to misunderstand, pushed my father to apologize…”

“Sounds exhausting,” Daniel says, his tone mild, neutral. He doesn’t want to encourage a conversation about her parents.

“Don’t you think they could have held it together for one day?”

“Apparently they didn’t want to.”

Apparently not. A sobering thought. She reaches into the pocket of her gown and takes out the much-folded eight rewritten pages and hands them to him.

“Come into the kitchen,” he says. “I have lemonade.”

“You do? You bought lemonade for me?”

“Yes. Well, Stefan did. I don’t go to the market.”

“Oh, right,” she says, and now she’s openly grinning, simply entirely happy to be here. “Did he get a job?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Wasn’t that part of the bargain?”

“It was.”

“Are you going to send him back?”

Daniel looks stunned. “No, of course not. He’s my son.”

In the kitchen he pours her a glass of cold lemonade and sits down at the kitchen table to read the pages. All the windows in the room are open to catch whatever breeze might be brave enough to come, and the door to the backyard stands open, as well. Isabelle walks to it as Daniel reads.

What she sees is a large and overgrown space, but there are old fruit trees struggling along at the back of the lot and a flagstone patio that would be welcoming when the weather was cooler.

She doesn’t turn around. She knows that behind her Daniel is reading her work, but the two of them are very far from those beginning days when she needed to monitor his reactions.

Daniel reads quickly. He’s mainly interested in the scene between Melanie and the motorcycle cop who stops her just minutes after her last robbery. Isabelle hadn’t paid enough attention to that scene. It was an opportunity to see Melanie scared and then rising above it, using all her moxie to take control of the situation. And this time, in these pages, Isabelle has done it.

Melanie’s car is pulled over. The cop approaches. Her heart is thumping through her chest. This is it, she thinks, this is where it all ends, but no, the cop is talking to her about a nonfunctioning rear taillight. He tells her he has to write her a “fix-it ticket.” And that would be the end of it, she would be off the hook, but Melanie can’t leave it be. She provokes.
Ah, good,
Daniel thinks as he reads. This is what he had been hoping she’d do.

Isabelle stands in the doorway and sheds her heavy robe. She’s supposed to turn it in, she knows, along with her cap, which she thinks one of the twins took from her, but in her hurry to get to Daniel, she didn’t do it. Under her robe she wears the thinnest of sundresses and a pair of bikini underpants and that’s all. She knew it was going to be blisteringly hot. The hem of the dress barely covers her thighs, and the top looks more like a chemise with ribbons for straps.

Daniel focuses on the expanded final scene Isabelle has written. Melanie gets out of her car and asks to see what the cop is talking about. They walk around to the rear and he points to the left taillight. The red plastic is cracked. The light doesn’t work. Does she see? The trunk, just inches away, is filled with objects stolen less than ten minutes before, objects taken at random—a set of steak knives, a quilt off one of the beds, a crystal pitcher, two dresses. Small and useless things.

The adrenaline rush, perversity, heedlessness, push Melanie on. She brings up the robberies with the cop. Everyone in the neighborhood is talking about them. Who could be doing this, robbing all these houses?

“Professionals,” he tells her, head down, writing out the ticket, paying little attention. “The jobs are too clean for amateurs.”

“Maybe it’s just a really smart amateur,” Melanie finds herself saying for the thrill of it, to see if she can teeter on the edge and not fall off. “Maybe it’s somebody with a point to make. Or maybe it’s an act of desperation from someone who feels like he has no other avenue. Maybe these robberies are saving someone’s life.”

The cop looks up at her quickly. Has she said too much? Crossed the safety line? His eyes don’t leave hers, and she makes herself stare right back at him as if the secret she owns wasn’t pushing against the back of her throat, desperate to leap out.

“You’ve been watching too many cop shows,” he tells her finally, and smiles.

She smiles back. “I guess so.”

Yes! Daniel is pleased: so much better. He looks up from the pages to see Isabelle standing there, her back to him, her body outlined against the flimsy cotton of her dress, which has all but disappeared in the light and the breeze from the back door. His breath catches and he has to wait a minute before he can say, “Isabelle…” And she turns around and looks at him. “The pages—they’re very good.”

She nods, taking it in. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted,” she says softly, “for you to say that. For you to believe I could be a writer.”

“You have to believe it.”

“I do now. You gave me that.”

She walks back into the room, closer to him. “Daniel, I don’t know how to tell you how much this has—”

He stands up. He can’t tolerate a long speech of thankfulness. He doesn’t deserve it. “You did the work.”

“But without you…” She shakes her head at the thought, understanding somehow that she must be quiet, that he can’t accept what she wants to give—her enormous gratitude. But he must.

She moves closer to him, and they stand less than a foot apart. Silent. Anything might happen now. They both know it. She reaches up and puts her arms around his neck and moves her body to his and lays her head in the curve of his shoulder.

He’s conscious of the girth of his stomach in contrast to the slender young arms she wraps around him and the lean, eager body he feels along the length of his. He holds her and finds himself doing something he hasn’t thought to do in thirty years: he prays. Then he puts his lips on her bare shoulder and tastes salt from her perspiration and smells something young and floral and utterly mesmerizing—Isabelle.

She slips the strap of her dress from her left shoulder, her head pressed against his chest as she does, her eyes closed, and he gently, tenderly, carefully allows his lips to travel across the perfect flesh of her collarbone, down to her breast and then her nipple. Her hand goes to the back of his head and time stops, and then he straightens up and so does she.

He steps back first and they look at each other. He lifts the strap back onto her shoulder. It may be the most selfless gesture he’s made in a decade.

Carefully, she says what she came to say. “Without you, Daniel, I would have been lost my whole life.”

And he nods, acknowledging, accepting finally what he has meant to her. Only then can she turn and go.

Part Two

JUNE
1994
–
OCTOBER
2000

CHAPTER FIVE

T
hat summer back in Merrick, Long Island, after graduation felt like a creeping suffocation to Isabelle, a slow slide into death. And the person who was dying was the Isabelle Daniel had nurtured in his own idiosyncratic way from January to May.

Having made no plans beyond receiving her diploma, Isabelle told herself she would spend the summer, and only the summer, working in her father’s law firm. It would give her some breathing space to figure out her next move.

But that’s not what happened. As soon as she read the expressions of expectation on her parents’ faces, she turned back into the dutiful daughter she had always been astonishingly quickly. And Daniel’s vision of her as an unique person, ripe with possibility, faded into insubstantiality.

Maybe they hadn’t had enough time together. Or maybe it had only been the alchemy between them that had allowed her to write freely and, finally, well. In her most fragile moments, Isabelle believed that Daniel may well have conjured that eventually confident girl, who strode into his dingy office in Lathrop Hall eager to get to work, from his own wishing.