Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

Isabelle has even less. Casey left so quickly they barely said good-bye. Once he got the call from Lester Hoffman, the head of Global Hope, Casey was a laser beam focused on stuffing his backpack with underwear and making the 5:47 plane out of San Francisco airport. She watched and stayed out of his way. She’d never seen him so single-minded and so closed off.

He kissed her good-bye as they pulled up at the airport curb and told her he loved her and then was out of the Jeep and gone before she could say, “I love you, too.”

She went home to their tree house, which felt startlingly empty, and turned on the TV and never turned it off until she heard a key in the front door five days later.

She is in her pajamas, wrapped in a blanket she took from their bed, huddled on the living room sofa even though it is the middle of the morning, watching CNN in the faint hope that it will report something new. Since Casey left she hasn’t felt well, as if she is coming down with the flu, but she reasons that it is only loss — the absence of the body and spirit of the person who had sheltered her and nourished her and led her into the light.

And suddenly a small, tidy man is standing in the doorway. He is maybe five feet five or so, impeccably dressed: expensive wool slacks, a cashmere sweater, a beautifully tailored black trench coat draped with an alpaca scarf in subtle shades of plum. His salt-and-pepper hair is cut close to his head, and his face, with its small, regular features, is distinguished only by deep bruises of exhaustion under his eyes. He has two large suitcases with him and looks astonished to see Isabelle there, as astonished as Isabelle is to see him.

After surveying the rest of the room, the man sighs, as if he has figured it out. “Casey?” he asks.

Isabelle points to the screen, to the footage of toppled buildings and flooded streets. “There’s been an earthquake and tsunami in the Philippines.”

The man sits down on the nearest chair. “I heard.”

“That’s where he is.”

“And he didn’t tell you I was coming home today.” It’s not a question.

“He left so suddenly, you know. The phone call came and he was gone. I’m sure he would have if—”

“Right,” the man says, without much conviction. And then he looks at Isabelle, really looks at her, and she grabs the blanket around herself more closely.

“Orson Pratt,” he tells her.

“Isabelle Rothman. I’m a friend of Casey’s.”

“I figured.” Then: “Well, this is awkward.”

“No, no.” Isabelle gets up from the couch, clicks off the TV, trails the blanket as she quickly moves out of the room. Orson winces as she drags it, bites his tongue so he doesn’t bark at her to pick up the end, for God’s sake. “I’ll be out of here in five minutes,” she says as she makes her way into the bedroom and closes the door.

Orson sighs again. With Casey there’s always one surprise or another.

Isabelle surveys the bedroom and is overcome with embarrassment. It’s a wreck — the bed unmade, clothes everywhere, plates of half-eaten food. She’s lived here and in the living room since Casey left, trailing morosely between the two rooms. Now she sees it with Orson’s eyes and she’s frankly horrified. If she were the owner of this house and in her right mind, as Orson seems to be, she’d be furious.

The owner of the house walks into the kitchen and averts his eyes; nobody’s cleaned up for days. It must be the girl. The last time Casey house-sat for him, he had the decency to clean and spruce and leave the house spotless.

He pushes up the sleeves of his cashmere sweater, turns on the water, starts to rinse the dishes and load the dishwasher. It’s the last thing he wants to do. He’s been on a fifteen-hour flight from Rome and he wants a hot shower and a long nap.

In the bedroom, Isabelle packs like one of the three Furies, flinging everything she owns into her one suitcase and cramming it shut. Luckily, her mother never sent her clothes — one more dramatic show of anger from Ruth: You choose to defy me, you cannot have anything that resides in this house, including my love. Isabelle hasn’t spoken with her mother since that unpleasant phone call home to announce that she was staying in the Bay Area. She’s called her father at work several times, but she hasn’t given him the phone number at the house. She doesn’t have any confidence that he wouldn’t bend under pressure and divulge it to her mother.

Now Isabelle is glad her mother has been so vengeful. There’s so much less to pack. She looks around the room in distress. What to do with all of Casey’s things? He’s lived here far longer, and his clothes and shoes and soccer balls and papers for work and his hiking boots and his yoga mat and his general stuff is everywhere. She does the best she can. She piles up everything of his neatly in a corner of the room. She strips the bed of their sheets — this last act like peeling off a layer of her own skin — and remakes it with fresh linens. There, that looks a little better.

When she sees Orson in the kitchen, washing her dishes, she’s mortified. “Please,” she says as she stands in the doorway, dirty plates in one hand, suitcase in the other, laptop in its case slung over her shoulder, “let me clean up the kitchen before I go.”

Orson shuts off the water, finds a towel to dry his hands, and turns slowly to look at her. “The best thing you can do,” he tells her as he takes the plates from her hand and adds them to the pile next to the sink, “is just go.” He wants his house to himself. He wants her to disappear.

She nods; there’s nothing to say to that. And she turns and walks across the living room, toward the front door, when he adds one more sentence. He can’t help it. “And if I were you, I’d ask Casey why he didn’t tell you that I was coming home today.”

“Oh, because it was all so sudden—” Isabelle begins.

“He knew that.” Orson cuts her off, too tired for politeness. “He’s been doing this work for years, this relief work, and he left you holding the bag, young lady.” And Orson turns away from her, back to the sink, back to the dishes and the pots that have to be scrubbed, and Isabelle opens the front door and is gone.

It’s only when she hits College Avenue that she realizes she doesn’t know where she’s going. The only person she knows is Deepti, but she’s in San Francisco. There’s nobody on this side of the bay, and she can’t go into the city; she can’t be that far away. From what? she asks herself. Well, from Casey when he returns. And then another slap of recognition: he won’t have any way to contact her. He had the phone number at the house, but that’s all. Wherever she ends up, he won’t know.

And that realization causes her to sink down to the curb, at the intersection of College and Durant, as the gravity of the situation settles in: she’s homeless and alone and has no way to get in touch with Casey.

There’s too much to figure out, so sitting on the curb, her suitcase beside her, idly watching the hordes of students pass her on their way to class is the most she can manage. Nobody takes much notice of her. She looks like she could be one of them, a Berkeley student who’s stopped for a minute or is waiting for a friend. It’s the suitcase at her side and perhaps the look of hopelessness on her face that prompt a boy riding a skateboard down the incline that is Durant Avenue to yell at her as he whizzes by, “The hotel’s one block down!” and he’s gone.

Isabelle cranes her neck and there it is — the Hotel Durant, an old stone building on the corner of Bowditch and Durant. It even has a long vertical sign on the edge of the building with the word HOTEL spelled out from top to bottom in very large white letters against a slate-blue background. A hotel! A place she can stay until she figures out her next move.