Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

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.

That 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.

It is a stifling summer in New York, each day blooming hotter than the last, and every morning as Isabelle takes the train into the city with her father and returns home at the end of the workday, she feels Daniel’s Isabelle disappear a tiny bit more into the humid, noxious air.

At the beginning she held on. That first week, as she and her father settled into seats on the Long Island Railroad, lucky if their car had some degree of air conditioning, Isabelle would take out her laptop and enter Melanie’s world. She would make notes, try out bits of dialogue, talk to her characters. Eli, sitting next to her reading The Wall Street Journal, would glance over from time to time but not intrude.

Or she would write postcards to Daniel, quick notes as the train sped toward Manhattan, telling him she was working, planning her next chapter. Once in a while she’d get a cryptic card back with no salutation or signature— What if Melanie used a horse for her getaway instead of a car? A horse so black he couldn’t be seen in the night? Isabelle laughed out loud as she read that one — a horse in the middle of the city?