Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  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.

  —

  AS DANIEL IS STRUGGLING WITH FINDING just the right words for his e-mail to Isabelle, she is struggling to find her way from Boston to Winnock. They gave her a map at the airport Budget Rentals with the route highlighted in yellow marker, but she’s useless when it comes to maps and directions. Taking 93 north out of Boston was fairly easy, and she made the transition to 495, but once she hit 3 and got past Nashua, New Hampshire, she had trouble on 101A after Ponemah trying to navigate the East Milford interchange to get to 101 proper. And then she missed the turn at 123, which was where she had to be, and once she doubled back and found it, she had to stop twice and ask if she was on the right road. It seems to be impossible to find the practically nonexistent town Daniel has decided to settle in, and her anger grows with each mile she travels. Almost nobody has heard of Winnock, and she’s beginning to think Daniel may have made it up.

  Now that she’s on a smaller, more rural road, purportedly the road that will take her to Daniel, her concentration is maniacally focused. She’s even too angry to rehearse what she will say once she’s in front of him. She feels possessed. It doesn’t help that she took the red-eye to Boston, didn’t sleep on the plane, got into her Dodge Neon without stopping for rest, and drove straight through with only the awful coffee from Speedy Mart Gas propelling her forward.

  She almost misses the turnoff to the O’Malleys’ farmhouse. The teenager at the gas station told her to look for a small hand-painted sign stuck into the ground right at the turnoff that reads CERAMICS FOR SALE. What he didn’t say was that the wooden shingle was practically covered up by ropes of ivy gone wild.

  Isabelle sees it just at the last second and manages the right turn with a slight skid. Quickly she slows the car, because the road ahead is unpaved dirt and narrow, and tries to slow her breathing, as well. To calm down, now that she is here. To figure out what she is going to say. Suddenly the reality of confronting Daniel seems overwhelming.

  She drives up to the large white house on the slight rise. There are no cars parked there because the O’Malleys are in Boston, but she gets out of her rental, grabs her copy of Out of the Blue, which for some reason she has kept on her lap through the whole circuitous route to Daniel’s home, and knocks on the front door. And then knocks again more loudly and calls out, “Hello!” but no one comes. She hadn’t thought of this possibility—that no one would be home. That she could have traveled all the way across the country to encounter empty space, devoid of people.

  She steps back, off the front porch, and surveys where she’s landed. The white clapboard house in front of her, with its wide wraparound porch, is imposing and inviting at the same time. A line of wooden rocking chairs immediately springs to mind, even though the porch is now empty. Probably not where Daniel lives, Isabelle concedes to herself.

  She backs up onto the gravel driveway to see a red barnlike structure to her right, then a meadow; then the forest seems to start. Daniel’s small cottage, sheltered by the birch trees, isn’t visible from the main driveway.

  “Daniel!” she yells. Then, louder: “Daniel, where are you? Daniel! Daniel!” She’s screaming in frustration now, in hopelessness. Could she have come all this way for nothing?

  And suddenly the door of the barn opens and a tall, scowling woman about her age is standing there, clearly unhappy to have been interrupted. Her hands and the front of her jeans are caked with wet clay and she has a dirty towel slung across her shoulder.

  Alina takes in this obviously distraught young woman who clutches her father’s latest book to her chest and knows she’s facing trouble. Here is a melodrama waiting to happen, and she distinctly wants no part of it.

  “He’s not here.”

  “But he will be? Tell me he will be.”

  “I don’t keep track of his comings and goings.” And Isabelle immediately knows who she is.

  “You’re Alina, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Isabelle.”

  Alina shrugs; the name means nothing to her. She and Daniel don’t share personal information.

  “I came all the way from California.”

  And then they’re at a stalemate. Isabelle seems to have run out of things to say and to be deflating by the second—her shoulders slump, her arms fall to her sides. Then she bends over and rests her hands on her thighs, as if she’s too weary to stand upright, and Alina yields a bit. The same instinct that allowed her to take in Orphan as a tiny puppy kicks in. Isabelle seems so lost.

  “He usually walks back from town.” And she points. “That road there.”

  Relief floods Isabelle—he’s here, somewhere here. Her trip wasn’t an act of complete insanity.

  “Thank you. You see this book…the novel he wrote…what he wrote about me…”

  Alina waves her hand in dismissal—the last thing she wants is to become entangled with her father’s affairs—and turns back to her barn. “You’ll have to take all that up with him.” And she’s gone, back to her work.

  Town—so that’s where the town of Winnock is. And from the years of e-mails Isabelle knows that Daniel goes there in the mornings for his coffee and Internet and then comes home to work. He’s told her all this. What he neglected to tell her was what he was working on! Her! Some fantasy of a love affair! As if he had a right to everything she is and every thought and fear that she so completely trusted him with. How could he?!

  Furious again, Isabelle sets out on the road Alina pointed out, her feet crunching the brittle carpet of fallen leaves, marching along in the very caramel-colored boots that featured so prominently in the first sentence of Daniel’s novel, boots she deliberately chose to wear today. Wrapped in a thick green wool cape knitted by Fanny as a Christmas present last year and valued despite its many flaws and dropped stitches, Isabelle could be mistaken for a warrior of sorts.

  Now she’s murmuring to herself, head down, rehearsing what she has to say, needs to tell him: How dare you? What is your definition of trust? What gave you the right?

  Walking in the opposite direction, home from Winnock to his cabin, Daniel is feeling even better than he did earlier that morning, because he finally managed to e-mail Isabelle. He found the right words, he feels, to present the novel as a celebration of her. Finally!

  Unaccustomed as he is to the condition others label “happiness,” he can’t deny that he feels, at this minute, on this path, with Orphan running ahead of
him and the natural world conspiring to flaunt all its beauty at him, that life is good.

  He hears in the distance Orphan’s frenzied barking, and even that racket is somehow comforting—Orphan ferreting out an animal, Orphan being the adventurous dog that he is. But the barking doesn’t stop. Doesn’t change pitch or taper off. He’s got something.

  There have been times over the years when Daniel has had to pull Orphan back from a seriously annoyed black bear he’s managed to drive up a tree, and once from a standoff with a snarling bobcat. That one was scary, the large cat cornered and ready to spring. Orphan wouldn’t have gotten the better of that confrontation if Daniel hadn’t intervened in time, so now he picks up his pace.

  As he runs down the road toward home, the barking gets louder, and then there he is: Orphan, hunkered down, his hindquarters in the air and brutish, manic barks cascading rat-a-tat, one after another, filling up the woods with insistent noise.

  What he has cornered is a woman, a young woman, whose back is pressed up against the long, irregular furrows of a sugar maple trunk, and who looks to be flapping long green wings at the frenzied dog. A young woman who is…Isabelle? Isabelle here? For a crucial second, two, Daniel’s brain can’t quite compute what his eyes see. He stands frozen.

  “Daniel! Get this crazy dog away from me!”

  “Isabelle?” And he doesn’t move, simply stares at her as if he’s hallucinating, as if she might vaporize into a whirl of dust at any moment. He’s conjured her—he must have—from all the thought and love he put into her e-mail.

  “Daniel—the dog! Get the dog!”

  And Daniel grabs Orphan’s collar. “It’s okay…Easy, Orphan, back off.” And the dog does. He presses himself against Daniel’s leg, not quite sure yet that he shouldn’t be protecting him from the tall, winged interloper. But the barking grinds down to a low-pitched growl.

  “This is your dog?”

  “Well, Alina’s, but we tend to share him.”

  And then again, with more indignation, “This is your dog who terrorized me? Perfect! Just perfect!”

  “Isabelle—”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Amazing.” And then he sees his novel in her hand. “Did you read it?”

  “Of course I read it. Why do you think I’m here?”

  “To tell me how much you liked it?” And Daniel is grinning, delighted, but Isabelle is not.

  “Daniel, you took what is mine and hijacked it for your own use!” Isabelle’s voice shakes with emotion.

  Daniel shakes his head. What can he say? Very quietly he tells her, “Isabelle, listen to me. I’ve taken what you meant to me, what you mean to me, what you did for me, and written about it. That’s entirely different.”

  “Bullshit! What’s your main character called? Lanie. Sound anything like Melanie? Remember her? Remember the novel I was writing with Melanie as my main character?”

  “Yes, Isabelle, I do.”

  “And your title! You couldn’t even find your own title? Do you remember “Outlaw”? Outlaw? So you name your book Out of the Blue?”

  Daniel can’t help it; he starts to chuckle.

  “This is funny to you?”

  “No, Isabelle, I just think that last accusation is a bit far-fetched.”

  “You appropriated every feeling I’ve ever shared with you, every thought in my head, everything I’ve ever told you, and you used it. You used it! You stole my life!” Such a horrible accusation.

  And Isabelle starts to weep. Oh, no, how can she be doing this? She stuffs the back of her hands against her cheeks to stop the tears, but they run across her fingers and down her face nonetheless. Oh, she’s exhausted. And mortified. And lost. She knows she’s completely lost.

  Daniel just watches her. It’s heart-wrenching, but he knows he mustn’t touch her. Not yet. She has to hear him, and so he waits till the weeping slows.

  “The book is a love letter, Isabelle. To the woman who saved me. To the woman who came into my life when I was on the edge of self-destructing and gave me hope. You, Isabelle. You did that for me.”

  She shakes her head, either because she doesn’t believe him or because she can’t take it in or…? Daniel doesn’t know, but somehow he does know that he can move to her now. He can take her into his arms and let her cry against his shoulder, and so he does, and he holds her as tightly to him as he has longed to do from the day she first stepped into his office.

  They stand together in the glorious woods, with the surrounding world shouting at them to have one more go at living before the winter. And so Daniel takes Isabelle’s hand and leads her back to his spartan cottage and lays her on his narrow bed and covers her with a blanket and lets her sleep. He sits by the fireplace and watches her.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Isabelle wakes to find elongated shadows stretching out across the raw wooden floor. And Daniel asleep in his easy chair, a book open on his lap, his feet crossed at the ankle and propped on the stone hearth of the fireplace. It’s so quiet she can hear the last leaves rustling on the birch trees and her own beating heart.

  It must be late afternoon. She’s slept for hours. Quietly, so that she doesn’t wake him, Isabelle turns onto her left side so she can take in the entire room—the two sets of long, uncurtained windows on opposite walls, which look out onto the trees, the plain wooden table where Daniel must work. She can see stacks of paper and his laptop, an orderly pile of books, a ceramic mug—Alina’s?—stuffed with pens. The fireplace, built into the back wall, is beautiful with its large blocks of stone in shades of yellow and rust. Everything neat and swept clean of clutter, so unlike the unsupervised mess of his L.A. house.

  It’s peaceful. Could it be this serenity that has worn away Daniel’s sharper edges? He seems less afraid, calmer, as if he’s expanded more fully into himself, she suddenly understands. And oh, how she’s missed him! The physical presence of him, large and solid and awkward all at the same time. And how she’s longed for what he implicitly gives her: his belief in her possibility, his trust in her uniqueness.

  “Daniel…” she whispers across the silent room, too softly for him to hear, she’s certain, but he opens his eyes anyway, stretches his arms above his head, and arches his back. He’s too old to sleep in a chair. And then he turns to her and smiles.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She nods. She’s famished. She can’t remember the last time she ate. Yesterday morning, maybe?

  “Will you drive?”

  “Oh, Daniel…still?”

  He grins. “You can’t expect miracles.”

  “I’ll drive.”

  —

  ISABELLE PARKS HER RENTAL CAR in front of Leighton’s Books and Daniel takes her up to the front window so she can see the display announcing Out of the Blue—copies of the book artfully arranged alongside a small poster identifying him as a local author, irrefutable evidence to Daniel of his resurrection. Here it is—the book, for all the world to see. He waits for Isabelle’s reaction. Did she hear him earlier? Can she see the book as a tribute to her?

  “It’s a beautiful cover,” she finally says, and Daniel nods. He doesn’t push for more.

  “Let’s cross the street.”

  They head for the Granite State Diner, the only game in town. Bev’s shuts down midafternoon. She offers only breakfast pastries and a few simple sandwiches for lunch. By three o’clock the CLOSED sign is hung on the door.

  And as they walk past Le Breton’s Gourmet Foods, the realty company, and Sewall’s Pharmacy, Isabelle slips her arm easily through Daniel’s and he smiles at her. He’ll take it. She’s on her way to forgiving him.

  At the end of the block, the diner’s neon sign beckons. The whole long name, THE GRANITE STATE DINER, is spelled out in heavy red cursive above the front door, and they walk toward it, arm in arm, two tall people matching strides easily.

  “Good thing I wore my boots,” Isabelle says with a sly smile. “I can keep up with you.”

  Aldo, who boug
ht the diner from the Olmsteads when Mac Olmstead retired, is standing behind the counter as they walk in, wearing his signature outfit, a short-sleeved white T-shirt, whatever the weather, stretched tight over his ever-expanding girth and an even larger red-and-white–striped apron tied around his middle. Years ago, when Aldo migrated up to Winnock from Bayonne, New Jersey, it was easier to see the firefighter he used to be. He was trim and fit and had a lot more hair. Now countless meals of his own cooking have filled out his form—an advertisement for the tastiness of his food, Aldo tells everyone who will listen.

  “Professor. Take a booth.”

  “Professor,” Isabelle teases lightly as they slip into the second of a line of red vinyl booths hugging the windowed outer wall. “Wow,” she says as she scans the small space, “you’ve taken me to the quintessential diner.”

  “Right out of Norman Rockwell,” Daniel agrees.

  With its black-and-white checkerboard floor, long straight counter with red vinyl stools, open kitchen where anyone can watch Aldo and his son, Luca, cook—a competitive show in and of itself—and the requisite wall of windows and booths underneath which look out on the street, the Granite State Diner is a classic.

  “Yankee pot roast…fish and chips…meat loaf with mashed potatoes…” Isabelle reads out loud from the menu. “We’re in a fifties time warp.”