Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

Six years after they all began living together and four years after Isabelle and Michael married, when Avi was seventeen and a junior in high school, he began to switch his attention from his largely absent father to his steady and available stepfather. Maturity? Casey’s increasing absences? Michael’s faithfulness? Isabelle guessed a little of all of those contributed to Avi’s turning to Michael, who was simply grateful. He had been waiting a long time.

Now the two men have a bond that’s largely unspoken but very strong. They both love Isabelle. They see the good in each other even as they acknowledge how very different the studious Michael and the adventure-seeking Avi are. It’s understood by both that they would stand beside the other if ever their presence was needed. And that their small family, which they’ve cobbled together, would be honored.

For Isabelle, her turning point came a couple of months after she and Michael began seeing each other. It was an early morning in March and she had gotten up with enough time to have a cup of coffee and skim the Chronicle before her day began in earnest. It had taken her years to have the discipline to actually do it — get out of bed early — but it made such a difference to have a half hour to herself before getting Avi up, which always took some doing, and driving him to school, and stopping by Full of Beans and hopefully spending a few minutes with Michael, and then opening the store. Meir came in later and later these days, now that he’d passed his eighty-first birthday. All the attendant ills of his heedless lifestyle — high blood pressure, Type 2 diabetes, and especially gout, which somehow delighted him, since it was such a literary affliction — were taking their toll. And so she found herself leaving the bookstore later and having less time at the end of the day. A quiet half hour in the morning somehow made all that possible.

As she gathered in her newspaper, which never seemed to make it up onto her front porch, as she would have liked, she noticed that Fanny hadn’t turned the TV off the night before. She often forgot these days. If Meir was eighty-one, Fanny would be eighty-five. And she had slowed down, too. Not her mouth or her opinions, but her knees kept her mostly at home, and her cough seemed constant and more debilitating.

Isabelle peered in the front window. Yes, the television was going, blasting away, really, since Fanny’s hearing had diminished along with everything else. But she wasn’t stretched out on her BarcaLounger. She must have made it to bed but forgotten the TV. And then Isabelle saw her, sprawled on the floor, facedown, her arms above her head as if in surprise, positioned between the living and dining rooms, motionless.

“Fanny!” Isabelle screamed as she pounded on the window. “Fanny!” And then she ran to get the emergency key Isabelle had long ago insisted upon, despite Fanny’s resistance to anything so practical.

As soon as she opened the front door, she knew immediately that Fanny was gone: there was a void, a startling absence in the house. “Fanny…” she said softly as she knelt beside her body. “Oh, Fanny…alone, you died alone…Oh, no.”

Michael came as soon as she called him and put his arms around her and held her as she cried and called the police and the mortuary and turned her head into his shoulder so she wouldn’t have that awful image of Fanny wrapped in a body bag, being carried out for the last time.

And it was Michael who sat with her and helped her tell Avi what had happened. For Avi, at almost ten, this was his first significant death. And Michael knew something about that, having seen both his parents through theirs.

It was Michael who went and retrieved Fanny’s ashes and stood with Isabelle and Meir, who could barely stand, so overcome with grief was he, as they sealed the ashes away in the mausoleum at Mount Sinai Cemetery in Orinda.

I love this man, Isabelle found herself thinking, when her thoughts should have been of Fanny and all their years together and all her neighbor had given Avi and herself. And she did think of that often in the days and weeks to come, but at the moment, as pale spring sunlight filtered into the dank room from the narrow skylight and Avi leaned back against her legs, needing to be touching her, and Michael put a hand on Meir’s arm to hold him up, she suddenly realized that she loved Michael Davidov and that he probably loved her.

With Fanny gone next door, Isabelle’s half of the duplex never again felt like home to her; there was always a sense of loss associated with it now. And when Michael asked them to move in with him, she discussed it with Avi, who shrugged his shoulders and refused to offer an opinion. “Whatever, Mom,” was the best he would do.

Michael lived in the perfect house to begin anew. It had been rebuilt by the previous owner on the site of their original stucco house, destroyed by the inferno that was the 1991 Oakland hills fire. Over three thousand homes were incinerated that Sunday in October, and many people hadn’t had the heart to rebuild. But not the Constantines — they had had the courage and the stubbornness and the money and the vision to construct a house completely of concrete, glass, and steel. Anything that could burn was eliminated from the building plans. It was all form and line and open spaces, tucked into the hillside with grand views of the bay. The garden was planted with spiky succulents.

Michael bought it ten years later because of its unrepentant modernity. After his divorce he was looking only to the future, and he felt the house made a statement that he was ready to embrace. Isabelle understood that immediately, and it comforted her. She was also ready to look only forward, as long as Michael was by her side.

Daniel was the one anchor to her past life that she had no desire to cut loose. After her precipitous visit to Winnock in the summer of 2000, their e-mails became more intimate and far-ranging and funny. They knew each other in a more fundamental way now. The days together, the sex, had opened up areas of feeling and connection that had been incipient but never realized. Now they both felt more entitled, as Isabelle had put it. They e-mailed many times a day if they felt like it, or sometimes days or weeks would go by without contact, but it didn’t matter. Once they began again, it was as if no time had passed. There were no requirements they honored, no prescribed way they had to be with each other, only acceptance and an almost visceral understanding of the other. When they needed to, one or the other would pick up the phone and call.

Daniel started that custom one day in the spring of 2001, about six months after Isabelle’s visit to Winnock. What had happened during the previous week was so unexpected, so unsettling, that an e-mail couldn’t contain it. He needed to hear Isabelle’s voice. He needed her immediate, unfiltered response to translate what he had just experienced into some emotional language he could understand.

Stefan had shown up on his doorstep unannounced, after almost a five-year absence. All he knew about his son were the few crumbs of information Alina grudgingly doled out when he asked, “Have you heard from your brother?”

“He’s in Youngstown,” Alina told him the first time he asked.

“Why Youngstown? What’s he doing there?”

And Alina shrugged, conversation finished as far as she was concerned.

When Daniel asked for an address or phone number, Alina would shake her head. “He e-mails me.”

“Then could you give me his e-mail address?”

“Let me ask him first.” But she never would. And gradually Daniel gave up asking, in much the same way he gave up communication with Stephanie when she proved so difficult. To Daniel, it always felt like every move forward he tried to make concerning his children netted him nothing but resistance, and so when he opened the door of his cabin early one April morning to see Stefan loping across the awakening meadow still wet with dew, he was stunned.