Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

Sessions and Daniel look at each other. The moaning from Stefan fills the small room, and each man, a father, is moved by the hopelessness in it.

“Look, son,” Sessions says as he pulls out a chair and sits down next to Stefan, “you’re in trouble.”

Stefan doesn’t raise his head, doesn’t remove his hands.

“Look at me!” And all traces of compassion are now gone from Sessions’s voice. If he’s going to get anywhere with this kid, he’s going to have to scare some sense into him. “Sit up straight and look at me when I talk to you!”

Stefan does, reluctantly.

“What did we agree to the last time you were here? You tell me. I want to hear it.”

Stefan mumbles something that Sessions finds unacceptable. “What? You need to tell me what our bargain was, son. What you were going to do so that there wouldn’t be any more trouble. Say it. Tell me.”

Stefan mumbles a few words. “Stay away” is what it sounds like.

“What? I can’t understand a fucking word you’re saying! What was our agreement?”

“Not bother…”

“Speak in goddamn sentences!”

And as the duet of mumbles and shouts plays out across the table from him, Daniel picks up the notebook and opens it. There it all is, the whole story of his son’s futile, clueless life. Endless pages in Stefan’s meticulous, tiny script. In black ink he has carefully created charts with a place for the date, then the skating move, and then a number grade based on a 1–5 scale: double axel, triple toe loop—4.75; triple flip…great speed coming out—5; triple lutz…you nailed it—5! Every turn, every spin and leap and dip, has been noted and graded. Pages and pages and pages of observations. And in red pen Daniel sees Stefan’s notation of mistakes: under-rotated triple axel…insufficient speed on triple lutz to permit triple toe loop…head angle tucked down. But it’s the lines of purple ink that crack Daniel’s heart open, because they contain so much longing: lovely, gentle quality…soaring jumps…I saw 4 minutes of joy.

Only from a distance, hidden behind these supposedly objective comments, can Stefan allow himself to love this girl. When Daniel reads, You skate like an angel from heaven, he closes the book. He can’t read any more, because it’s too revealing. Here is a boy who sees himself as the damaged goods Daniel feels him to be. And Daniel is ashamed of himself for communicating all this to his child.

“And what did you do?” Sessions is now shouting. “Did you leave her alone?”

“For a while,” Stefan manages.

“Not good enough, Stefan. I said permanently. Leave her alone permanently ! You remember that discussion? Do you? Answer me, son!”

But Stefan is gone. His eyes on his lap, he shakes his head, doesn’t speak, doesn’t look up. Everything is lost. What difference does it make where he ends up — jail, his father’s apartment, which feels like jail?

And Daniel can’t bear it anymore, the cop browbeating his son, the hopelessness weighting Stefan’s shoulders. “We’re leaving,” he says as he stands up.

“That’s up to me,” Sessions says. “Sit down.”

Daniel doesn’t. “No, we’re leaving Colorado.”

At that Stefan raises his head.

“If I guarantee that we will move to another state? In another time zone, somewhere back east, say. If I’m responsible for him, if I tell you that he won’t leave my side, will that do it? Will that solve the problem?”

“But Dad, where would we go?” Stefan is panicked. He can’t be that far away from her. From Mitsuko.

“If you tell the girl that? If you reassure her? Would that solve the problem?”

Sessions shrugs.

“He fell in love and lost all judgment.” Daniel is speaking to the father inside Ron Sessions, to the man who gave him his card and told him he understands about raising sons. Very softly Daniel says, “Haven’t you and I done pretty much the same at one time or another?” He shows the cop the open notebook. “He meant well. Look. He wanted to help. It’s all here.”

And Stefan presses the heels of his hands over his face. His father understands. He never thought he would. But he does.

Daniel watches the cop scan Stefan’s pages, and when Sessions’s face settles into surrender, Daniel knows that their flight from Colorado is what he can do for his son. Perhaps the only thing.

It is the action that keeps Stefan out of jail, Daniel believes. And so, in early May, father and son are on the move again, across the high plains of Colorado on I-76, through the entire state of Nebraska on I-80, and then into Iowa, past Des Moines to Grinnell College in the center of the state, halfway between the capital and Iowa City. It isn’t the East Coast, but it is where Daniel can find a job. And it is far enough.

By the end of the academic year Daniel is in New Hampshire, the southwestern part, just over the Massachusetts state line, in a tiny town called Winnock, population 394. His stay in Iowa, at Grinnell College, lasted two semesters. He experienced it as a year of polite, well-mannered students overshadowed by Stefan’s constant, unrelieved anger, all of it directed toward him.

Stefan blamed Daniel for their flight from Colorado, convinced somehow that his father could have negotiated a better outcome than the one he did, that there was a way to keep Stefan out of jail and remain in Colorado Springs, close enough to Mitsuko Kita that he could have found a way to see her again.

During one of their endless arguments, Daniel finds the legal definition of stalking in one of the criminal law books he had Stefan bring home from Grinnell’s library for just that purpose — to scare some sense into his son: “ ‘Stalking involves severe intrusions on the victim’s personal privacy and autonomy, with an immediate and long-lasting impact on quality of life as well as risks to security and safety of the victim even in the absence of express threats of physical harm.’ ” Daniel reads that last part out again, but Stefan is pacing through the apartment — long, irate strides, head down, hands stuffed in his jeans pockets — and appears not to be listening.

“If someone ‘repeatedly follows, approaches, contacts, places under surveillance, or makes any form of communication with another person,’ then they’re stalking.” Daniel is shouting now. “And it’s a class five felony! A felony means jail time, Stefan! That’s what was waiting for you in Colorado if we had stayed!”

His son yells right back—“You’re crazy!”—and slams out of their apartment. Every fight is some variation on the same theme, until twelve months of unrelenting battle culminate in Stefan’s driving Daniel to Winnock to deposit his father with his sister, Alina.

In counterpoint to his son’s relentless demands — Stefan’s caretaking and anger two sides of the same filial imperative: that his father pay attention to him — Daniel’s daughter seems to need nothing from him. Or from the world around her, either.

When asked, Alina always maintains that she chose this remote town in New Hampshire, almost an hour northwest of Boston, for its beauty. But Daniel suspects that Winnock’s isolation is a key factor. Here Alina can go for weeks without seeing or speaking to anyone. And she is content, or at least she insists that she’s content. The arrival of her father is not welcome, that much is clear. She has no interest in him. She has no need to mend what was irrevocably broken back when she was five.

She takes him in because Stefan delivers him and she loves her brother and can see that he is at the end of his rope.

“Your turn,” is what Stefan says as he deposits Daniel on the gravel driveway of what looks like a small barn. “We’re going to kill each other if you don’t take him.” And Daniel didn’t dispute those words. In fact, he says little. By this point he has come to see himself as a piece of unwanted luggage handed over from one child, who is done with him, to another, who has no need for him.