Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“Please,” Stefan says, “I just want to give you something,” and he lays the battered green notebook on the table. “To help you. I want to help you,” he says again in desperation, because both girls look terrified.

The sister says something in Japanese to Mitsuko, something terse and anxious, and pulls her sister into the shop and attempts to close the glass door behind them. But Stefan is there, worried now that they’ve misunderstood.

He pushes the door open, to explain, to put the notebook in her hands, and that’s when everything goes wrong. The Japanese owner screams at him from behind the counter, in broken English, to get out of his shop. Stefan screams back that this is none of his business. The girls cower in a corner by the counter, the sister yelling something over and over in Japanese and wrapping the tiny Mitsuko in her arms, protecting her from whatever harm is coming.

In the midst of all the chaos, Stefan suddenly understands that he left a crucial element out of his planning: Mitsuko doesn’t speak English. There is no way she can understand what he is offering. How could he not have realized that? How could he have been so stupid again?

Frantic now to right his wrong, Stefan approaches the girls again with the notebook and they scream and he tries to put it in Mitsuko’s hand. And then he’ll go. He tries to tell them that—“Just take it and I’ll go!”—but they don’t understand a word. They sink to the floor, trembling, and he’s heartsick and desperate, standing over them, pleading with them, the notebook thrust toward them.

And then suddenly four strong arms are dragging him away. Two big cops he didn’t even see enter thrust him out of the shop and slam him up against the hood of their patrol car, knocking the air out of him, twisting his arms behind him so they can snap on a pair of handcuffs. And Stefan doesn’t utter a word of protest.

Through the back window of the cruiser, as he’s being driven away, Stefan spots the tattered green notebook spread-eagled on the parking lot asphalt, and at that moment he understands that all is lost.

—

TWO HOURS LATER DANIEL AND STEFAN are sequestered in the same shabby, sterile, windowless room of the same Colorado Springs police station, waiting. Today one of the fluorescent lights has given up the ghost and half the room is in murky light. But where they sit, across from each other at the square table with the scarred top, the light is irritatingly bright and still flickering from time to time.

Stefan says nothing. He sits with his hands lank in his lap and stares at somebody’s initials — B.R.D. — gouged into the Formica with a pen. He is working on emptying his body of every emotion he possesses. It’s a tactic he’s practiced since childhood. If he doesn’t feel anything, nothing can hurt him.

Daniel’s hands are clasped in front of him on the table, his eyes fixed on the dark corner of the room. He’s frightened in a way that’s new to him. This isn’t fear of leaving the house, or fear of being trapped in a crowd, or fear of having a panic attack. This is the very real fear that his son might be taken away from him.

How did he let this happen? How did he fail to protect his son? What can he do now?

“Stefan…” he says tentatively.

“Don’t you say anything,” his son spits at him. “You don’t know. You have no idea.”

“Stefan,” Daniel says again, quietly, “I’ve been in love.”

“That has nothing to do with it!” And Stefan’s voice mounts into hysteria. “I was helping her! I was making sure she got into the Olympics!”

Daniel is completely nonplussed. Is his son crazy? At the very least he’s delusional. How has he missed all this in his child?

“The notebook,” Stefan says as he scrubs his knuckles across his face. Again and again. “The notebook…the notebook…” It’s a kind of keening.

Daniel doesn’t respond. He looks away. He has no idea what Stefan is talking about, and he’s not about to ask.

While the men sit in the airless room and wait, both hopeless for different reasons, the green-covered notebook at the center of this debacle is finally in Mitsuko’s hands. As Stefan laments its loss, the skater is carrying it into the police station, her sister on one side of her, Hideo Suzuki on the other. It was Mitsuko who picked the fluttering pages off the parking lot surface after the police took Stefan away. Even though she couldn’t read a word of it, she understood enough to know that Stefan valued what was in the book. She’s in the police station to return it to him.

Her sister wouldn’t let her go without her coach, and Suzuki agreed to take her only so he could talk to the policemen himself. The boy is a distraction. His presence, his antics, have pulled his student’s focus away from her skating, and he can’t have that. Stefan must be gone. Gone from the Ice Hall, gone from the streets of Colorado Springs. Gone from the planet, if that were possible.

Hideo speaks enough English to say “the tall boy,” and he points to Mitsuko. The station is small, and the day has been slow enough for the desk sergeant to know that this is Ron Sessions’s case, so he calls him to the lobby.

As the substantial officer enters the room, Mitsuko steps forward with the notebook held out in front of her, an offering. She’s as tiny as a bird, Sessions sees, a hummingbird. Not even five feet tall. No wonder the looming presence of the boy, who is well over six feet tall, frightened her. And she is shy, tentative, as she stands in front of him, but, he can also see, determined. She says something in Japanese to her coach and he translates it roughly: “For the boy. It is his.”

Mitsuko nods and places the notebook in Sessions’s hand. “Please,” she says in English.

“Are you here to file a complaint?”

No one answers. None of the three of them understand enough English to translate complaint .

Sessions tries again. “The boy — he committed a crime. You are here to tell us that?”

There is a rapid discussion in Japanese, with Mitsuko’s face coloring with emotion as she says something over and over again to her coach. He keeps shaking his head and arguing with her. At least that’s how it seems to Sessions.

Finally the coach turns to him. “No crime,” the Japanese man says, shaking his head as if he doesn’t agree with the words coming out of his mouth. “No crime,” he says again, and looks directly at Mitsuko, who nods and then says something very quickly in Japanese.

“She didn’t understand,” Suzuki tells Sessions.

“What?”

“The boy.”

Sessions heaves a sigh. They aren’t getting much of anywhere. The language barrier. The girl is so young.

Again Mitsuko tells her coach something and he translates. “He did not do anything.”

Now Sessions gets it — they’re not going to press charges, although he suspects that the coach would like to. But the man wasn’t there. It’s the word of the two girls, and they’ve decided it was a misunderstanding. Their position doesn’t give him much room to maneuver with the father and son waiting in the interrogation room.

“He go away,” Suzuki says, “right now.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Sessions tells them all.

“Thank you,” Mitsuko says, and lowers her eyes. “Thank you,” she says again.

Sessions brings the notebook with him when he opens the door of the interrogation room to find Daniel and Stefan sitting motionless, staring at nothing. He tosses it onto the table and Stefan sits up straighter.

“How did you—?”

“She brought it in. The girl.”

“But it’s for her !” And now Stefan puts his head in his hands and moans. He’s fucked this up, like he has fucked up everything in his life.