Surprise Me

by Deena Goldstone

  “You wanted to write about regrets.”

  “Yes,” Daniel said, “because even if a man is following an inner imperative, even if he feels he has no choice in the matter, there are losses along the way. That was the question I was exploring in the book.”

  “What were Jack’s primary losses?”

  “One of his daughters, the oldest one. She blames him for her mess of a life. Those years of hiding and fear—she believes all that furtiveness ruined her and that it’s his fault.”

  “Ahhh,” Isabelle says, and then keeps quiet. She waits for Daniel, and he finally says, “Echoes of my own life. You can say it, Isabelle, I’m not an idiot.”

  “Do they reconcile? In your book, do the father and daughter reconcile?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t finish writing it.”

  “I’d like to know,” she says, and leaves it at that.

  —

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AFTER ISABELLE has made them lunch and cleaned up and Daniel has made his way to the couch and quieted the round of coughing the exertion has cost him, each of them settles in. Daniel wraps the afghan around his legs. Isabelle pulls an easy chair up alongside and continues their conversation of the day before.

  “What would this Jack Dyson have to do to win his daughter’s forgiveness?”

  “I don’t know that he could. His daughter is angry beyond all measure. And a mess. Did I mention she’s a complete mess?”

  “Several times.”

  “Well, that’s the problem.”

  “How much of this have you written? How many pages do you have?”

  Daniel waves his hand in the general direction of the wooden table where he works. Isabelle has no idea what he’s doing.

  “What?”

  “It’s in the cupboard there—the pages. Two hundred and some.”

  “And?”

  “Oh, Isabelle, don’t be dense. Go get them and read them and then we can have an intelligent conversation.”

  She leans over and kisses him. “You are a dear and infuriating man.”

  “Right, right,” he says, but he’s smiling.

  —

  ISABELLE TAKES THE PAGES HOME with her to Bev’s, where she’s staying, and settles down to read in one of the two small love seats framing the fireplace. It’s quiet in the old Victorian house because Bev spends the evenings with Daniel, cooking him dinner, which he barely eats, putting him to bed, and staying with him until Daniel insists that she go home.

  While she’s gone, Isabelle plans to get a good look at Daniel’s novel in progress. The manuscript rests on her lap, but instead of picking up the first page, her hands lie idle. She looks around the overstuffed living room, decorated with all the handicrafts Bev is constantly making—knitted throws of mohair and wool, patchwork pillows, a beautiful circle quilt hung on one wall like a tapestry.

  Daniel would feel claustrophobic in here, was Isabelle’s first thought when she walked in almost two weeks ago. It’s such a feminine space, the room narrow, as these late-nineteenth-century houses tend to be, and overcrowded. Daniel is such a large man. There would be no breathing space in these little rooms for him.

  Okay, Isabelle tells herself, focus, but she can’t make herself pick up the first page and begin reading. She’s afraid, she knows. What if it is as Daniel said—awful? It’s not as if he has an unblemished record as a writer. There were those two books in the middle of his career that never worked, that were universally labeled failures. What if there’s no hope for this work in progress? Could she lie convincingly enough to give him some measure of happiness at the end of his life? Should she? Wouldn’t he know she was lying? Wouldn’t he be devastated if he truly believed this work was irredeemable? Why did she even start this? Why couldn’t she have just come and spent time with him and left him in the good hands of Bev?

  Of course she knows the answer. She owes him this. The read. The honesty. The attention to a work that might not be all that it could be. He did that for her when she was a student with dreams of writing and no confidence who walked into his campus office and all but prostrated herself in front of him. And when she was struggling with her book and sent him chapters to read, and he sent her back pages and pages of thoughts and suggestions and encouragement in just the form she needed to continue. So now she must read these pages and be honest in her response and find a way to tell him, no matter what she thinks, so that he feels compelled to finish the book. Wow, she tells herself, talk about a tall order.

  She picks up the first page. When you’re dying, she reads, it’s pretty late for regrets. Jack Dyson would be the first to tell anybody who needed to know that here he was, dying, and he had jettisoned all his regrets. But he would be lying. He had one last, great regret, and he feared he was going to die with it wedged in his heart.

  “Oh…” Isabelle murmurs to herself in the silent room. And she stretches out, her back against one arm of the love seat and her feet hanging over the other. She gets as comfortable as she can on the small structure and reads on.

  A little after nine o’clock Bev opens the front door and Isabelle looks up. She hasn’t moved in hours.

  “How is it?” Bev asks without any preamble, almost as anxious about Isabelle’s reaction as Daniel.

  “How is he?”

  “Already cursing himself for giving you the pages.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well?”

  “I’m only about a third of the way in…”

  Bev sits down on the opposite love seat, trying to read Isabelle’s face. “And?”

  “This is vintage Daniel.”

  “Meaning it’s good?”

  “Meaning it’s very good.”

  And Bev collapses back into the overstuffed pillows. “Oh, thank the Lord.”

  “Yes,” says Isabelle softly, “on this one, even I would thank the Lord.”

  Isabelle reads well into the night and sleeps very little. The more she reads, the more convinced she becomes that Daniel must finish this book. Not only because it’s quintessential Daniel—beautiful and tough—and deserves to be finished, but because it has a certain energy within it, a pulse, a life force even, that she knows will carry Daniel with it if she can get him to engage.

  The next day he’s sitting outside on the bench overlooking the meadow, portable oxygen canister parked by his side. She can see him waiting for her as she strides past Alina’s garden and through the wildflowers.

  “How did you get here?” she asks him when she’s within shouting range.

  “I fucking walked—what do you think?”

  “By yourself?”

  “Please, Isabelle, I’m not at death’s door yet.”

  And she grins as she sits down next to him on the bench. “Apparently not. Apparently you still have the ability to write great pages.”

  And he’s more pleased than he even imagined he’d be by her validation. “It’s worth something, the book?” And he shrugs, as if to say it all doesn’t matter much in the scheme of things, but she’s not in the least bit fooled.

  “It’s worth finishing. You have to, Daniel.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know. It’s wonderful.”

  —

  THEY FIND A RHYTHM THAT WORKS for them. At the beginning Daniel sits on the couch, or lies down if it’s later in the day, and talks. His thoughts are randomly arranged, jumping from scenes he wrote early in the book to pivotal arguments between Jack and his teenage daughter much later. Sometimes he’ll ask Isabelle to read from the manuscript pages; he needs to remember exactly what he wrote or to hear it out loud to see if it holds.

  When he’s ready to write, Isabelle opens Daniel’s laptop and types. She makes sure to get down exactly what he says. The next day, after she’s printed out two copies of what he’s dictated, they read it together and hash it out—what works, what doesn’t, what’s unclear, what’s redundant, what slips easily into the novel as written and what doesn’t. Daniel takes a pen and edits th
e hard copy. Isabelle makes tea. They take a break and talk about other things, then they begin again.

  One day, as Daniel is describing a memory Jack Dyson has of his daughter when she was only five, when there was still love and trust and silliness between them, he stops in midsentence and simply looks at Isabelle until she lifts her head from the computer and meets his gaze.

  “What?” she asks.

  “We began in a room. We end in a room.”

  And Isabelle doesn’t disagree. She simply nods. “Yes.” Then, with a grin: “We’re room people, you and I.”

  “Womb to room.”

  And Isabelle laughs out loud.

  —

  DANIEL HAD LEFT OFF WRITING in despair when Jack’s daughter slipped into the underworld of the homeless. Rachel’s disappearance from the book, Jack’s impotent agony about it, seemed to be too much for Daniel to unravel.

  Eventually, after they have discussed all manner of things and Daniel has rewritten the earlier pages, they reach that section and Isabelle asks questions meant to lead him gently to the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page of text: How long does he search for her? Is she living with a group of people or on her own? Does she stay in Portland or move to another city in Oregon?

  Sometimes Daniel will answer quickly, spontaneously, and then they’ll have a direction, a path to explore. Sometimes he’ll just shake his head and moan, “I don’t know. I should know, but I don’t!”

  But they continue to talk, and gradually Daniel finds his way forward. One afternoon he sees Jack encounter Rachel as she pushes a shopping cart across Burnside Bridge in Portland. The scene comes to him fully formed—he sees it in his mind’s eye. And that day’s writing goes easily. He talks quickly; Isabelle types as fast as she can. Both of them are drained but elated at the end of the day.

  But more often the days move slowly. The talk between them is desultory, with lots of expanding silences. But they continue. That’s what has been established: that they will continue as long as Daniel can. No one is backing out now, and so the pages accumulate slowly.

  As the book edges toward its finish, Daniel becomes more convinced that Jack and Rachel never reconcile. “Too neat,” he tells Isabelle. “I’d rather end with an acknowledgment of the calamity that life is.”

  “Okay,” she says, in as neutral a tone as she can manage, but Daniel hears something in her tone. Of course. Their intimacy has always been grounded in their work, and they are so finely attuned to each other.

  “Meaning you don’t agree.”

  Isabelle shakes her head. “That ending will work, but…”

  “Spit it out, Isabelle.”

  “My heart is aching for them to find each other again.”

  “That’s the difference between us. I’ve lived thirty years longer and I know that what the heart wants isn’t always possible.”

  Isabelle nods and says no more.

  —

  BEV ARRIVES AT THE CABIN in the late afternoon, after all her baking for the next morning is done. Sometimes she gets there when Daniel is still sleeping, and then the two women have a chance to catch up, sitting on the bench outside the cottage, at the edge of the pond. From there they can see the barn and sometimes Alina if she makes her way outside to the garden.

  “Does she ever come to visit Daniel while you’re with him?” Isabelle asks as the two women watch Alina harvest pole beans for dinner, snapping them off the tall vines, which now cover the teepee with a blanket of green.

  “No.”

  “And she’s never once come in while we’re working.”

  “Alina leaves him be. Nothing’s changed since his diagnosis.”

  “But now, Bev? How can she do that now?”

  “I don’t think she knows how to do anything else. Neither one of them is big on interpersonal skills.”

  —

  SOMETIMES BEV WILL DRIVE ISABELLE back to town if there’s time, but often, as the days of summer lengthen, Isabelle will choose to walk the two miles. It’s a time to decompress from the intensity of Daniel and their work together and the urgency of the ticking clock.

  Lately, as she walks, Alina and her newest rescue dog join her for part of the way. Alina uses the excuse that the puppy, a Lab-spaniel mix named Trixie, needs the exercise. But it is very clear to Isabelle that the daughter wants information about her father, and so she starts off these walking conversations with a progress report.

  “He was in a better mood today,” she might say, or “He had more trouble walking later in the day,” or “We’re getting close to a solid draft.”

  Alina doesn’t ask questions. She simply listens. She both wants and is afraid to hear how Daniel is doing. At first Isabelle respected the distance Alina keeps, but after several weeks of largely one-sided conversations, she’s had enough.

  “Ask me questions,” she demands one day. “There must be so much more you’d like to know.”

  Alina shrugs but says nothing, so like Daniel in her gesture that Isabelle almost comments on it.

  “You’d be interested in what he’s writing about.” Isabelle knows she’s being provocative, but she can’t help herself. She’s angry at this grown woman who acts like she’s still that five-year-old whom Daniel left. “Would you like to know?”

  “Hmmm.”

  “The book is about a father who’s tormented by his daughter’s rejection of him.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “He thinks I’m rejecting him when he’s the one who abandoned us?”

  “Alina, that was decades ago. Don’t you think your reaction today, as a woman well past forty, might be a little more…nuanced?”

  “What does he want from me?”

  “Forgiveness.”

  “Because he’s dying?”

  “Because we all have regrets.”

  Alina shakes her head. “That’s not a good reason.”

  “Because Daniel is a wiser, better man than the one who left you.”

  Alina shakes her head again, not looking at Isabelle as they walk, not buying a word of what Isabelle is selling.

  Finally Isabelle says softly, “Because he loves you.”

  And Alina looks stricken, as if Isabelle has just given her news that the world is ending. She has no idea what to do with the information.

  “Go in to see him,” Isabelle says gently as they walk. “Sit with him. It doesn’t matter what you say or even if you say a word.” There’s no response from Alina, but Isabelle continues on, breaking down the task as if she’s talking to that grieving five-year-old. “Open the door to his cottage, take a kitchen chair, bring it close to his bed. Be with him. That’s all he wants.”

  Alina whistles for the dog, snaps the leash on the puppy, shakes her head finally—I can’t, I won’t—and starts back toward her barn.

  —

  AS ISABELLE HAD HOPED, at first the energy within the book, the enthusiasm she brings to the collaboration, carries Daniel along and he feels better. And she is cheered and hopeful that they will be able to finish, and even he is optimistic. But as the weeks accrue, it becomes clear that Daniel is failing. Breathing has become more of a labored activity. The pain medication he was given no longer works. He needs help walking from the couch to the kitchen table. When he coughs now, it seems as though he will never be able to stop.

  Bev takes him into Nashua to see his oncologist. They return grim-faced. As soon as Isabelle sees them get out of Bev’s car, she knows the news is not good and there will be no working today.

  She waits while Bev brings Daniel into his cabin, her arm around his waist as he leans heavily on her shoulder. Isabelle has to turn away from the image of Daniel as an invalid, so thin he appears skeletal, clutching Bev in order to remain upright. Perhaps he was all these things yesterday when she was with him, but being separated by many yards, watching Bev tending to him instead of doing it herself—all that conspires to show her Daniel as he now is.

  And then she rem
embers—an image flashes across her mind—Daniel as she first saw him that January day at Chandler. It was his physical presence that stunned her, she remembers so well. So tall and imposing—he took up so much space in the small office. Without exerting any energy, he was intimidating, at least to her, a sheltered, unsure college student who was lost in the world. Daniel felt like a boulder, anchored to the earth in a way she had never before encountered.

  Isabelle walks away from the cabin, stands behind the bench, and holds on to its back. She takes a number of deep breaths to slow the rush of panic that assaults her—the comparison of who Daniel was and who he is now.

  Finally Bev comes out, having gotten Daniel settled on the couch, and finds Isabelle staring out across the meadow.

  “He’ll sleep for a while now, I think,” Bev says, her face white with fatigue and worry.

  “Do you want me to stay?”

  “No, I already closed the bakery for the day. I’ll stay.”

  “How do you do this, Bev? Day after day?”

  Bev shakes her head and sits down. Isabelle joins her then on the bench. She’s searching the older woman’s face for an answer, even a clue to her grace and strength.

  “It’s been so many months for you.”

  “It doesn’t feel that long.” And Bev sighs, leans back, and begins to talk. “I married a man I loved with a sort of total fervor. It was a crazy love, I see now, but then I thought that was how you were supposed to feel. We met in college and he was this big, handsome, outgoing guy who made everyone around him feel more alive. I felt like the luckiest girl in the world.”

  Isabelle doesn’t say a word. She’s never heard Bev talk about any of the details of her life before Daniel, and she’s hungry for whatever Bev will tell her.

  “Right after our first son was born, Ned fell into a depression that completely incapacitated him. He couldn’t get out of bed. He wouldn’t eat or shower or get dressed. I had a newborn to take care of. Now, I don’t feel like that’s enough of an excuse for what I did, but then I didn’t see any alternative. The doctors all told me…and so I hospitalized him for several months, and then he came home. And then it happened again. And then we had some good years, and then the medications stopped working and he was back in the hospital again.”