Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

Now that she’s on a smaller, more rural road, purportedly the road that will take her to Daniel, her concentration is maniacally focused. She’s even too angry to rehearse what she will say once she’s in front of him. She feels possessed. It doesn’t help that she took the red-eye to Boston, didn’t sleep on the plane, got into her Dodge Neon without stopping for rest, and drove straight through with only the awful coffee from Speedy Mart Gas propelling her forward.

She almost misses the turnoff to the O’Malleys’ farmhouse. The teenager at the gas station told her to look for a small hand-painted sign stuck into the ground right at the turnoff that reads CERAMICS FOR SALE. What he didn’t say was that the wooden shingle was practically covered up by ropes of ivy gone wild.

Isabelle sees it just at the last second and manages the right turn with a slight skid. Quickly she slows the car, because the road ahead is unpaved dirt and narrow, and tries to slow her breathing, as well. To calm down, now that she is here. To figure out what she is going to say. Suddenly the reality of confronting Daniel seems overwhelming.

She drives up to the large white house on the slight rise. There are no cars parked there because the O’Malleys are in Boston, but she gets out of her rental, grabs her copy of Out of the Blue, which for some reason she has kept on her lap through the whole circuitous route to Daniel’s home, and knocks on the front door. And then knocks again more loudly and calls out, “Hello!” but no one comes. She hadn’t thought of this possibility — that no one would be home. That she could have traveled all the way across the country to encounter empty space, devoid of people.

She steps back, off the front porch, and surveys where she’s landed. The white clapboard house in front of her, with its wide wraparound porch, is imposing and inviting at the same time. A line of wooden rocking chairs immediately springs to mind, even though the porch is now empty. Probably not where Daniel lives, Isabelle concedes to herself.

She backs up onto the gravel driveway to see a red barnlike structure to her right, then a meadow; then the forest seems to start. Daniel’s small cottage, sheltered by the birch trees, isn’t visible from the main driveway.

“Daniel!” she yells. Then, louder: “Daniel, where are you? Daniel! Daniel!” She’s screaming in frustration now, in hopelessness. Could she have come all this way for nothing?

And suddenly the door of the barn opens and a tall, scowling woman about her age is standing there, clearly unhappy to have been interrupted. Her hands and the front of her jeans are caked with wet clay and she has a dirty towel slung across her shoulder.

Alina takes in this obviously distraught young woman who clutches her father’s latest book to her chest and knows she’s facing trouble. Here is a melodrama waiting to happen, and she distinctly wants no part of it.

“He’s not here.”

“But he will be? Tell me he will be.”

“I don’t keep track of his comings and goings.” And Isabelle immediately knows who she is.

“You’re Alina, right?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Isabelle.”

Alina shrugs; the name means nothing to her. She and Daniel don’t share personal information.

“I came all the way from California.”

And then they’re at a stalemate. Isabelle seems to have run out of things to say and to be deflating by the second — her shoulders slump, her arms fall to her sides. Then she bends over and rests her hands on her thighs, as if she’s too weary to stand upright, and Alina yields a bit. The same instinct that allowed her to take in Orphan as a tiny puppy kicks in. Isabelle seems so lost.

“He usually walks back from town.” And she points. “That road there.”

Relief floods Isabelle — he’s here, somewhere here. Her trip wasn’t an act of complete insanity.

“Thank you. You see this book…the novel he wrote…what he wrote about me…”

Alina waves her hand in dismissal — the last thing she wants is to become entangled with her father’s affairs — and turns back to her barn. “You’ll have to take all that up with him.” And she’s gone, back to her work.

Town —so that’s where the town of Winnock is. And from the years of e-mails Isabelle knows that Daniel goes there in the mornings for his coffee and Internet and then comes home to work. He’s told her all this. What he neglected to tell her was what he was working on! Her! Some fantasy of a love affair! As if he had a right to everything she is and every thought and fear that she so completely trusted him with. How could he?!

Furious again, Isabelle sets out on the road Alina pointed out, her feet crunching the brittle carpet of fallen leaves, marching along in the very caramel-colored boots that featured so prominently in the first sentence of Daniel’s novel, boots she deliberately chose to wear today. Wrapped in a thick green wool cape knitted by Fanny as a Christmas present last year and valued despite its many flaws and dropped stitches, Isabelle could be mistaken for a warrior of sorts.

Now she’s murmuring to herself, head down, rehearsing what she has to say, needs to tell him: How dare you? What is your definition of trust? What gave you the right?

Walking in the opposite direction, home from Winnock to his cabin, Daniel is feeling even better than he did earlier that morning, because he finally managed to e-mail Isabelle. He found the right words, he feels, to present the novel as a celebration of her. Finally!

Unaccustomed as he is to the condition others label “happiness,” he can’t deny that he feels, at this minute, on this path, with Orphan running ahead of him and the natural world conspiring to flaunt all its beauty at him, that life is good.

He hears in the distance Orphan’s frenzied barking, and even that racket is somehow comforting — Orphan ferreting out an animal, Orphan being the adventurous dog that he is. But the barking doesn’t stop. Doesn’t change pitch or taper off. He’s got something.

There have been times over the years when Daniel has had to pull Orphan back from a seriously annoyed black bear he’s managed to drive up a tree, and once from a standoff with a snarling bobcat. That one was scary, the large cat cornered and ready to spring. Orphan wouldn’t have gotten the better of that confrontation if Daniel hadn’t intervened in time, so now he picks up his pace.

As he runs down the road toward home, the barking gets louder, and then there he is: Orphan, hunkered down, his hindquarters in the air and brutish, manic barks cascading rat-a-tat, one after another, filling up the woods with insistent noise.

What he has cornered is a woman, a young woman, whose back is pressed up against the long, irregular furrows of a sugar maple trunk, and who looks to be flapping long green wings at the frenzied dog. A young woman who is…Isabelle? Isabelle here? For a crucial second, two, Daniel’s brain can’t quite compute what his eyes see. He stands frozen.

“Daniel! Get this crazy dog away from me!”

“Isabelle?” And he doesn’t move, simply stares at her as if he’s hallucinating, as if she might vaporize into a whirl of dust at any moment. He’s conjured her — he must have — from all the thought and love he put into her e-mail.

“Daniel — the dog! Get the dog!”

And Daniel grabs Orphan’s collar. “It’s okay…Easy, Orphan, back off.” And the dog does. He presses himself against Daniel’s leg, not quite sure yet that he shouldn’t be protecting him from the tall, winged interloper. But the barking grinds down to a low-pitched growl.

“This is your dog?”

“Well, Alina’s, but we tend to share him.”