Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

The barn Alina stands in front of has been rehabilitated — a coat of deep red paint, new windows, and a black shingled roof. And the main house, which is just visible on a slight rise to the left, is a sprawling, stately white clapboard structure with a deep front porch.

Daniel faces his two adult children and waits for his fate to be decided.

“You can’t stay here,” Alina tells him, gesturing vaguely to the structure behind her. “There’s only one bedroom.”

“All right.” Daniel looks at Stefan. What next?

“Not all right,” Stefan says. “What about the cottage? Where I stayed that time. That’s what I thought — the cottage.”

Alina shrugs. “If he wants to.”

“He has no choice,” Stefan insists.

“All right, then, let me get the key.”

And although uninvited, Daniel follows his daughter through her open front door. He’s curious to see how she lives.

In front of him is a spare and pristine living room, everything in it white — the walls, the planked ceiling, the intricate lace curtains at the windows, the slipcovered sofa. That is why his eye is drawn to the large blue-and-gray fieldstone fireplace, which bisects the right wall, and its white-painted mantel, where found objects are grouped in threes and fours. Seedpods. Twigs. Stones. The skeletons of several small animals, white and brittle. A bird’s nest. The display is simple and beautiful, composed by a sure hand. Through an open doorway Daniel can glimpse a tiny jewel box of a kitchen. More white — cabinets, sink, refrigerator. The entire effect is both restful and austere.

There’s a closed door to the left of the front door.

“The one bedroom?”

“Where I work.”

“I thought you were teaching.”

“I was. Not anymore.”

“And now what do you do?”

She opens the door so he can see what lies beyond. The space is large and open. It is easy to see the barn that this structure used to be — a tall, pitched roof with heavy wood struts crisscrossing beneath the roof, a concrete floor, windows high up in what must have once been the hayloft.

One wall is lined with crude shelves made of bricks and wood planks. They are crowded with salmon-colored bowls and dishes, vases, goblets, whatever can be made of clay. There’s a large structure of stacked cement blocks, looking like a small fortress, which Daniel understands is a firing kiln, and there’s a potter’s wheel under a window.

“These are yours?” Daniel asks. The bowls are delicate and willowy, with rims that undulate. The vases pour upward at their edge like outstretched arms. Everything is delicate and beautiful even in this primitive, unfired state.

“That’s what I do now,” Alina says. “I take care of the O’Malleys’ land and they let me stay here and work.” She turns, looks at Daniel, appraising him. “And now you’re here.” The last thing she wants is this problem that Stefan has dumped in her lap.

“You don’t have to—” Daniel starts, without really knowing what the end of that sentence is going to be, but his daughter interrupts him.

“The cottage is only one room.”

“Okay.” Daniel is determined to be agreeable. What choice does he have?

She shrugs and grabs a key from a nail by the door. “Come on, then,” she says, and tromps out in her heavy boots, Daniel following.

His daughter is formidable, Daniel sees. She wears jeans caked with dried clay, a torn T-shirt with The Vagina Monologues in faded script across her breasts, and those hiking boots that lace all the way up her shins. Her honey-colored hair is pulled back into a low ponytail and tied with a length of twine. Her hands are callused and look supremely capable. She seems so strong and self-reliant. And Daniel is immediately jealous. To be as at home in the world as she is, marching quickly ahead of him now across a meadow bursting on this June day with wild lupines and woolly-headed lavender bergamot and milkweed plants crowned with vivid yellow-and-black Monarch butterflies.

Alina’s destination is a small stone building with a low door and a roof of charcoal slate, situated on the edge of a pond.

“Foyle’s Pond,” she tells him, keeping her sentences short and factual. “And this was once the springhouse for the farm.”

With a copse of birch trees creeping up behind the building and large granite blocks in shades of gray and amber making up the walls, Daniel can see that it must have been an ideal spot for keeping perishables cool.

Alina hands him the key. “The O’Malleys remodeled it some, but it isn’t much.”

Daniel shrugs. He doesn’t need much. Four walls. A door he can close to keep the rest of the world at bay.

“Two miles farther down the road you came in on is the town. Winnock.” She points him in the right direction. “I work during the day. Every day. You’ll have to fend for yourself.” And with that, she turns and walks back across the meadow, the way they came.

Daniel watches her strong strides quickly put distance between them, and then a high-pitched tone, a whistle, cuts through the quiet air. And immediately an image flashes across his mind of a five-year-old Alina, lips pursed into an O, the tip of her tongue lodged against her lower teeth as he taught her, struggling to push just the right amount of breath out to make that whistle. Nothing, for days and days, but she didn’t give up. They practiced together for weeks, in the car when he drove her to school, on the sofa after dinner, her determined little face bunched with concentration, fierce even then, until she finally got it. Surprised at herself, but oh, so proud. And then, less than a month later, he was gone. Left: he should be clear. Less than a month later, he left.

Now she whistles a second time, and a medium-sized mutt, a blur of white and brown, shoots out of the trees, bounding toward her and circling his daughter with leaps of happiness as she walks back to her barn. To Daniel, it feels as if Alina has forgotten him as soon as her back is turned.

From across the meadow he watches Stefan open the trunk of the car, take out his three boxes of books and two suitcases, put them on the gravel, get into the car, back it up, and head down the driveway toward the main road. On the drive from Iowa to New Hampshire, Stefan made the case, relentlessly, that he needed the car more than Daniel did. Daniel is afraid to drive, Stefan reminded him, and, besides, where was there to go? The car would just sit there rusting out and being wasted, while he, Stefan, already had plans for it. Daniel, exhausted from all the years of arguing and opposing his son, agreed to let Stefan take the car. Which he is now doing. Down the driveway, almost to the end, and then the car stops abruptly and Stefan gets out and lopes across the meadow to Daniel.

“This is for the best,” is his parting statement.

Daniel shrugs. “I don’t see much alternative.”

“Right, that’s what I mean. We wore out our welcome.”

With each other? Daniel wants to ask but doesn’t. No need to start all that up again. He simply nods, raises a hand to rest across Stefan’s shoulder in parting. “Son—” But Stefan has already turned and is now sprinting through the wildflowers, desperate, it seems, to get in the car and be on his way.

And then Daniel really is on his own, the next chapter of his life in front of him, inside the stone cottage. He stoops a bit as he opens the heavy wood door to see a small room with thick granite walls — the kind of walls that weep with moisture in the winter. A basic, unfinished wood floor. Through a door to his left he can see a serviceable bathroom. There’s a small fireplace in the rear wall, its stone blackened from use and never cleaned, a simple wrought-iron bed to its left, and an old stove, an older refrigerator, and an enameled sink along the right, open shelves with a few mismatched dishes above it. Two easy chairs, looking like garage-sale rejects, upholstered in a faded stripe, are positioned to face the fireplace; a braided rag rug in autumn colors spans the floor between the chairs and the hearth. A simple wooden table, maybe four feet long, and two straight-backed chairs are angled next to the stove. Four long, narrow windows, two on either side wall, reach almost to the floor and are curtainless.