Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“Now we’ll win,” he tells her.

Isabelle, with Deepti beside her, settles in to watch the teams play. Paying attention is serious business for both women, and their eyes never leave the field. They might miss something otherwise — a play, a clue about their men, a secret revealed only through the immediacy of the game.

“How constant he is,” Deepti murmurs as Sadhil blocks his second goal attempt.

“Yes,” Isabelle agrees. “Sadhil was made to be a goalie.” To stand and protect.

“And how fast Casey is,” Deepti adds, to be evenhanded.

“Exactly!” That’s what Isabelle wants — the thrill in her blood as she watches Casey fly down the field as if his life depended on his team’s next goal.

After the game, which the Berkeley Breakers win by a score of 1–0, Sadhil as proud of his stops as Casey is of passing for their one goal, the two couples walk to the Indian Oven Café, a few blocks away on Shattuck, for an early dinner.

It is only on these Sunday nights that Isabelle feels the least bit in touch with the rest of the world. As they walk, she’s reminded that there are other people talking, laughing, pushing their children in strollers, going about their lives — the rest of humanity she hasn’t given even a fleeting thought to in the intervening week. They pass a copy store, a Laundromat, a small grocery with pears and apples mounded in symmetrical piles out front, an Italian bakery closing for the night. Making a left turn at the corner newsstand, Isabelle catches glimpses in the Sunday papers of the fallout from the congressional elections. Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” had swept Republicans into the majority in both houses. Bill Clinton’s policies had been repudiated, but right now, in this bubble she’s living in, Isabelle isn’t interested. Casey has his arm around her shoulders. She’s watching his animated face as he and Sadhil recap the game they just won. There’s a whole world in that lovely sunburned face.

Deepti and Sadhil, Hindu and vegetarian, order eggplant bharta, dal makhani, naan, and aloo gobi. Isabelle orders tandoori chicken for Casey and herself. She’s learned that Casey will eat anything, or rather, that he doesn’t care what he eats. Many days, she now knows, he would forget to eat if she didn’t remind him, or he’d have cereal for dinner, standing up in the kitchen, shoveling it into his mouth quickly so he can get on to something much more interesting — a movie they want to see, or a friend who’s playing at a coffeehouse in Oakland, or the 49ers game on TV. Anything to do with sports takes precedence over eating.

So Isabelle has begun to cook for him, something she did for Nate but only with a secret resentment. With Casey it feels as natural as waking up next to him each morning and curling into his body to fall asleep at night. The two of them in an effortless rhythm, Isabelle has come to feel, of give-and-take that forms a perfect circle, smooth and continual and impenetrable.

At dinner, Casey and Sadhil talk about their Global Hope trips. It’s the only time Casey builds paragraphs of long sentences leading to the next paragraph, as though the ardor he feels for his work fuels his tongue.

Isabelle listens as Casey explains how he and Sadhil met — on a mission to Erzincan, Turkey, in 1992 after a 6.9-magnitude earthquake had killed hundreds and injured thousands and created 50,000 homeless people.

“All across the city there was nothing but concrete rubble, some pieces as big as this table, piled up on top of each other. Apartment houses, office buildings, so we knew there were people underneath all that, but we didn’t have much equipment. This was less than forty-eight hours after the quake.”

“Everywhere you looked, men were pulling at the boulders with their bare hands,” Sadhil adds.

“I was working at this four-story apartment building that had been totally destroyed. You couldn’t even see what the building had once been.”

“There was snow on the ground. It was so cold,” Sadhil interjects, “and these men didn’t have gloves or shovels or any kind of equipment. Just their bare hands. And they were bloodied and raw and nobody cared, they just kept digging. Casey was right beside them.”

“And then I heard it, or I thought I heard it.” Casey takes over the telling. “A faint sort of moaning coming from somewhere underneath all that debris.”

“A child,” Sadhil says.

Deepti looks at Isabelle, her expression suddenly troubled — a child buried alive in stone.

“We started to open up a small hole where we thought we had heard the sounds. It seemed to take forever, but we had to be careful. We didn’t want to start a slide.” Casey shakes his head as he remembers, not liking what he’s about to say.

Isabelle’s breath catches — she doesn’t want the child to be dead, but Casey’s face, as he remembers, is somber.

“We unearthed a hand. A tiny hand, the whole thing smaller than half my palm.” He shows them his palm so they can envision just how tiny the hand was. Then he continues the telling. “It didn’t move. The men were talking to the child in Turkish, but we heard nothing back, and the hand didn’t reach for us or grab on. And my heart dropped. We had taken too long. We had been too careful. A minute sooner, maybe thirty seconds. When did the child stop moaning? It was impossible to know.”

Both men are silent. In their memory, they are back in that rubble as Casey reached into the hole and brought out the limp body of a three-year-old boy. Impossibly dirty, dried blood covering half his face. Absolutely still.

“He was dead?” Isabelle whispers, terrified of the answer.

“We pulled him out dead,” Casey confirms.

“No…” from Deepti, a soft moan.

“And then this guy here”—and Casey grins at Sadhil—“comes from I don’t know where…”

“From the other side of that pile of rubble,” Sadhil adds.

“And he checks the kid’s pulse, puts two fingers on his carotid artery, and starts breathing air into the kid’s body. He’s calm — you should have seen him, so calm — and he forces life back into that boy. Really, he brings him back from the dead.”

And Casey sits back in his seat, pleased with the story, pleased to be able to present Sadhil to the women as the hero Casey believes him to be.

“That’s how we met,” Sadhil says, modest, matter-of-fact.

When they’re alone, Isabelle asks more questions about Casey’s missions. She wants to understand this part of his life. And he tells her, but they seem like stories of people and places so far away, so peripheral to the immediacy of their lives, because here Casey is, naked beside her in bed, stroking her skin, or beside her in his Jeep, driving with his hand on her thigh as they travel north to Mount Tamalpais State Park, or here is Casey with her in their secluded tree house as they build a fire in the living room fireplace and stretch out on the rug and undress each other and move into that unreal space where everything they do to and for each other is right. So she can delay comprehension, refuse to understand what his commitment to Global Hope means for her.

And then there is a 7.1-magnitude earthquake which creates a tsunami which devastates Mindoro Island, part of the Philippines, and Casey has to go.

It’s as if he’s vanished off the face of the earth. That’s how Isabelle feels. There is no way to get in touch with him once he’s on Mindoro. Seven hundred and ninety-seven houses have been totally destroyed, 3,288 have been damaged, 19 bridges have been washed out. The power supply throughout the province has been cut off, and the power barge of the National Power Corporation was washed away by the oversized waves.

Isabelle knows all this because she has been watching CNN obsessively in the hope of catching a glimpse of Casey amid the raging floodwater, the rivers of cars and trees and parts of houses that pour over the land. The network runs the same loop of grainy footage over and over and repeats the same disaster scorecard, because that’s all it has.