Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

“Don’t you say anything,” his son spits at him. “You don’t know. You have no idea.”

  “Stefan,” Daniel says again, quietly, “I’ve been in love.”

  “That has nothing to do with it!” And Stefan’s voice mounts into hysteria. “I was helping her! I was making sure she got into the Olympics!”

  Daniel is completely nonplussed. Is his son crazy? At the very least he’s delusional. How has he missed all this in his child?

  “The notebook,” Stefan says as he scrubs his knuckles across his face. Again and again. “The notebook…the notebook…” It’s a kind of keening.

  Daniel doesn’t respond. He looks away. He has no idea what Stefan is talking about, and he’s not about to ask.

  While the men sit in the airless room and wait, both hopeless for different reasons, the green-covered notebook at the center of this debacle is finally in Mitsuko’s hands. As Stefan laments its loss, the skater is carrying it into the police station, her sister on one side of her, Hideo Suzuki on the other. It was Mitsuko who picked the fluttering pages off the parking lot surface after the police took Stefan away. Even though she couldn’t read a word of it, she understood enough to know that Stefan valued what was in the book. She’s in the police station to return it to him.

  Her sister wouldn’t let her go without her coach, and Suzuki agreed to take her only so he could talk to the policemen himself. The boy is a distraction. His presence, his antics, have pulled his student’s focus away from her skating, and he can’t have that. Stefan must be gone. Gone from the Ice Hall, gone from the streets of Colorado Springs. Gone from the planet, if that were possible.

  Hideo speaks enough English to say “the tall boy,” and he points to Mitsuko. The station is small, and the day has been slow enough for the desk sergeant to know that this is Ron Sessions’s case, so he calls him to the lobby.

  As the substantial officer enters the room, Mitsuko steps forward with the notebook held out in front of her, an offering. She’s as tiny as a bird, Sessions sees, a hummingbird. Not even five feet tall. No wonder the looming presence of the boy, who is well over six feet tall, frightened her. And she is shy, tentative, as she stands in front of him, but, he can also see, determined. She says something in Japanese to her coach and he translates it roughly: “For the boy. It is his.”

  Mitsuko nods and places the notebook in Sessions’s hand. “Please,” she says in English.

  “Are you here to file a complaint?”

  No one answers. None of the three of them understand enough English to translate complaint.

  Sessions tries again. “The boy—he committed a crime. You are here to tell us that?”

  There is a rapid discussion in Japanese, with Mitsuko’s face coloring with emotion as she says something over and over again to her coach. He keeps shaking his head and arguing with her. At least that’s how it seems to Sessions.

  Finally the coach turns to him. “No crime,” the Japanese man says, shaking his head as if he doesn’t agree with the words coming out of his mouth. “No crime,” he says again, and looks directly at Mitsuko, who nods and then says something very quickly in Japanese.

  “She didn’t understand,” Suzuki tells Sessions.

  “What?”

  “The boy.”

  Sessions heaves a sigh. They aren’t getting much of anywhere. The language barrier. The girl is so young.

  Again Mitsuko tells her coach something and he translates. “He did not do anything.”

  Now Sessions gets it—they’re not going to press charges, although he suspects that the coach would like to. But the man wasn’t there. It’s the word of the two girls, and they’ve decided it was a misunderstanding. Their position doesn’t give him much room to maneuver with the father and son waiting in the interrogation room.

  “He go away,” Suzuki says, “right now.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Sessions tells them all.

  “Thank you,” Mitsuko says, and lowers her eyes. “Thank you,” she says again.

  Sessions brings the notebook with him when he opens the door of the interrogation room to find Daniel and Stefan sitting motionless, staring at nothing. He tosses it onto the table and Stefan sits up straighter.

  “How did you—?”

  “She brought it in. The girl.”

  “But it’s for her!” And now Stefan puts his head in his hands and moans. He’s fucked this up, like he has fucked up everything in his life.

  Sessions and Daniel look at each other. The moaning from Stefan fills the small room, and each man, a father, is moved by the hopelessness in it.

  “Look, son,” Sessions says as he pulls out a chair and sits down next to Stefan, “you’re in trouble.”

  Stefan doesn’t raise his head, doesn’t remove his hands.

  “Look at me!” And all traces of compassion are now gone from Sessions’s voice. If he’s going to get anywhere with this kid, he’s going to have to scare some sense into him. “Sit up straight and look at me when I talk to you!”

  Stefan does, reluctantly.

  “What did we agree to the last time you were here? You tell me. I want to hear it.”

  Stefan mumbles something that Sessions finds unacceptable. “What? You need to tell me what our bargain was, son. What you were going to do so that there wouldn’t be any more trouble. Say it. Tell me.”

  Stefan mumbles a few words. “Stay away” is what it sounds like.

  “What? I can’t understand a fucking word you’re saying! What was our agreement?”

  “Not bother…”

  “Speak in goddamn sentences!”

  And as the duet of mumbles and shouts plays out across the table from him, Daniel picks up the notebook and opens it. There it all is, the whole story of his son’s futile, clueless life. Endless pages in Stefan’s meticulous, tiny script. In black ink he has carefully created charts with a place for the date, then the skating move, and then a number grade based on a 1–5 scale: double axel, triple toe loop—4.75; triple flip…great speed coming out—5; triple lutz…you nailed it—5! Every turn, every spin and leap and dip, has been noted and graded. Pages and pages and pages of observations. And in red pen Daniel sees Stefan’s notation of mistakes: under-rotated triple axel…insufficient speed on triple lutz to permit triple toe loop…head angle tucked down. But it’s the lines of purple ink that crack Daniel’s heart open, because they contain so much longing: lovely, gentle quality…soaring jumps…I saw 4 minutes of joy.

  Only from a distance, hidden behind these supposedly objective comments, can Stefan allow himself to love this girl. When Daniel reads, You skate like an angel from heaven, he closes the book. He can’t read any more, because it’s too revealing. Here is a boy who sees himself as the damaged goods Daniel feels him to be. And Daniel is ashamed of himself for communicating all this to his child.

  “And what did you do?” Sessions is now shouting. “Did you leave her alone?”

  “For a while,” Stefan manages.

  “Not good enough, Stefan. I said permanently. Leave her alone permanently! You remember that discussion? Do you? Answer me, son!”

  But Stefan is gone. His eyes on his lap, he shakes his head, doesn’t speak, doesn’t look up. Everything is lost. What difference does it make where he ends up—jail, his father’s apartment, which feels like jail?

  And Daniel can’t bear it anymore, the cop browbeating his son, the hopelessness weighting Stefan’s shoulders. “We’re leaving,” he says as he stands up.

  “That’s up to me,” Sessions says. “Sit down.”

  Daniel doesn’t. “No, we’re leaving Colorado.”

  At that Stefan raises his head.

  “If I guarantee that we will move to another state? In another time zone, somewhere back east, say. If I’m responsible for him, if I tell you that he won’t leave my side, will that do it? Will that solve the problem?”

  “But Dad, where would we go?” Stefan is panicked. He can’t be that far away from her. From Mitsuko.


  “If you tell the girl that? If you reassure her? Would that solve the problem?”

  Sessions shrugs.

  “He fell in love and lost all judgment.” Daniel is speaking to the father inside Ron Sessions, to the man who gave him his card and told him he understands about raising sons. Very softly Daniel says, “Haven’t you and I done pretty much the same at one time or another?” He shows the cop the open notebook. “He meant well. Look. He wanted to help. It’s all here.”

  And Stefan presses the heels of his hands over his face. His father understands. He never thought he would. But he does.

  Daniel watches the cop scan Stefan’s pages, and when Sessions’s face settles into surrender, Daniel knows that their flight from Colorado is what he can do for his son. Perhaps the only thing.

  It is the action that keeps Stefan out of jail, Daniel believes. And so, in early May, father and son are on the move again, across the high plains of Colorado on I-76, through the entire state of Nebraska on I-80, and then into Iowa, past Des Moines to Grinnell College in the center of the state, halfway between the capital and Iowa City. It isn’t the East Coast, but it is where Daniel can find a job. And it is far enough.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the end of the academic year Daniel is in New Hampshire, the southwestern part, just over the Massachusetts state line, in a tiny town called Winnock, population 394. His stay in Iowa, at Grinnell College, lasted two semesters. He experienced it as a year of polite, well-mannered students overshadowed by Stefan’s constant, unrelieved anger, all of it directed toward him.

  Stefan blamed Daniel for their flight from Colorado, convinced somehow that his father could have negotiated a better outcome than the one he did, that there was a way to keep Stefan out of jail and remain in Colorado Springs, close enough to Mitsuko Kita that he could have found a way to see her again.

  During one of their endless arguments, Daniel finds the legal definition of stalking in one of the criminal law books he had Stefan bring home from Grinnell’s library for just that purpose—to scare some sense into his son: “ ‘Stalking involves severe intrusions on the victim’s personal privacy and autonomy, with an immediate and long-lasting impact on quality of life as well as risks to security and safety of the victim even in the absence of express threats of physical harm.’ ” Daniel reads that last part out again, but Stefan is pacing through the apartment—long, irate strides, head down, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets—and appears not to be listening.

  “If someone ‘repeatedly follows, approaches, contacts, places under surveillance, or makes any form of communication with another person,’ then they’re stalking.” Daniel is shouting now. “And it’s a class five felony! A felony means jail time, Stefan! That’s what was waiting for you in Colorado if we had stayed!”

  His son yells right back—“You’re crazy!”—and slams out of their apartment. Every fight is some variation on the same theme, until twelve months of unrelenting battle culminate in Stefan’s driving Daniel to Winnock to deposit his father with his sister, Alina.

  In counterpoint to his son’s relentless demands—Stefan’s caretaking and anger two sides of the same filial imperative: that his father pay attention to him—Daniel’s daughter seems to need nothing from him. Or from the world around her, either.

  When asked, Alina always maintains that she chose this remote town in New Hampshire, almost an hour northwest of Boston, for its beauty. But Daniel suspects that Winnock’s isolation is a key factor. Here Alina can go for weeks without seeing or speaking to anyone. And she is content, or at least she insists that she’s content. The arrival of her father is not welcome, that much is clear. She has no interest in him. She has no need to mend what was irrevocably broken back when she was five.

  She takes him in because Stefan delivers him and she loves her brother and can see that he is at the end of his rope.

  “Your turn,” is what Stefan says as he deposits Daniel on the gravel driveway of what looks like a small barn. “We’re going to kill each other if you don’t take him.” And Daniel didn’t dispute those words. In fact, he says little. By this point he has come to see himself as a piece of unwanted luggage handed over from one child, who is done with him, to another, who has no need for him.

  The barn Alina stands in front of has been rehabilitated—a coat of deep red paint, new windows, and a black shingled roof. And the main house, which is just visible on a slight rise to the left, is a sprawling, stately white clapboard structure with a deep front porch.

  Daniel faces his two adult children and waits for his fate to be decided.

  “You can’t stay here,” Alina tells him, gesturing vaguely to the structure behind her. “There’s only one bedroom.”

  “All right.” Daniel looks at Stefan. What next?

  “Not all right,” Stefan says. “What about the cottage? Where I stayed that time. That’s what I thought—the cottage.”

  Alina shrugs. “If he wants to.”

  “He has no choice,” Stefan insists.

  “All right, then, let me get the key.”

  And although uninvited, Daniel follows his daughter through her open front door. He’s curious to see how she lives.

  In front of him is a spare and pristine living room, everything in it white—the walls, the planked ceiling, the intricate lace curtains at the windows, the slipcovered sofa. That is why his eye is drawn to the large blue-and-gray fieldstone fireplace, which bisects the right wall, and its white-painted mantel, where found objects are grouped in threes and fours. Seedpods. Twigs. Stones. The skeletons of several small animals, white and brittle. A bird’s nest. The display is simple and beautiful, composed by a sure hand. Through an open doorway Daniel can glimpse a tiny jewel box of a kitchen. More white—cabinets, sink, refrigerator. The entire effect is both restful and austere.

  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 immediat
ely 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.