Deena Goldstone - Surprise Me

“I didn’t know,” Isabelle says softly.

“We had our second son when it looked like Ned could manage it — the new medication had been working for a while. We understood better what was wrong with him. I felt like I could see the warning signs even when they were subtle. We could live with this thing, this chronic depression, and contain it. But we were wrong.”

Bev stops talking. Isabelle puts a hand on her arm, lightly.

“You don’t have to—”

“One night when he was driving home from a working dinner with a client,” Bev continues, as if Isabelle hasn’t spoken, “a winter night — it had snowed that week but the skies were clear — his car went off the road and he was killed. We will never know why. Did he hit a patch of ice, or did he fall asleep while driving, or did he deliberately turn the wheel at the exact point on the road home where his car would sail into the air and plummet into a ravine fifty feet below?

“We’d been married twenty-three years at the time. Twenty-three years of taking care of a man with a chronic illness…That’s how I can take care of Daniel.” And finally Bev looks directly at Isabelle and smiles. “It’s what I do.”

Isabelle is speechless.

“Come on,” Bev says in her no-nonsense tone, “I’ll drive you back while Daniel sleeps.”

And the two women get up together, start toward Bev’s car.

“He agreed to hospice today,” Bev tells Isabelle as they walk. “The doctor arranged for it. A nurse will come out twice a week to start, and then more often as she’s needed.”

“That’s where we are, then.” Isabelle isn’t asking a question.

“That’s where we are.”

—

ISABELLE CALLS MICHAEL WHEN SHE GETS back to Bev’s house, as she has done almost every day she’s been away. Sometimes the conversations are lengthy, as Isabelle attempts to bring her husband into the world she’s inhabiting now of Daniel and illness. But most of the time the conversations are short, just a sort of checking in. Are you all right? Yes, are you?

Today she reaches Michael as he’s driving to a faculty meeting. There’s been a lot of hubbub about budget cuts from the state legislature. They don’t have a lot of time to talk, but really, all Isabelle needs is to hear his voice.

“How is he?” Michael asks, because he’s become almost as invested in Daniel’s condition as Isabelle.

“Today’s the first day we didn’t work together. Today Daniel agreed to hospice care.”

There’s silence on the line. Isabelle knows Michael well enough — they’ve been together almost a decade — to know that he’s trying to figure out how to say what he needs to say gracefully. She waits.

“You’ve turned a corner, then,” is what he comes up with.

“All the work we’ve done, the years Daniel put in on the book before I got here…I don’t know now if we can finish.”

“Wait and see. Don’t jump to conclusions, especially when they’re dire.”

She takes a deep breath, then answers, “Okay.”

“How are you, Bella?” The tenderest of nicknames for her, used only when he’s the most worried about her.

“Sad, Michael. I’m so impossibly sad.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“Yes, of course, and no. Let me see.”

“Okay.”

There’s more silence. Isabelle can hear that Michael is in the car — the sound of the motor, a car horn outside his open window.

“Where are you going?”

“A meeting about the proposed budget cuts. What will we do if they go through? Can we raise tuition again? Usual stuff. Not life-and-death.”

“Oh, tell me about it,” Isabelle says, and he can hear the relief in her voice. “I want to think about something besides life and death.”

And so he does: Governor Brown’s stand, the uproar at Boalt about how tuition hikes will eliminate more minority students. All familiar dilemmas, but Isabelle is so grateful to spend a few minutes listening to Michael’s measured voice describe the pros and cons of each side’s position. The world has a sort of order. Each side has a point. Michael is always fair in his evaluations. He talks her through a possible compromise he’s going to propose; maybe they can use it as a basis for discussion. Michael is hopeful they’ll come up with something. Problems have solutions. It’s all very comforting.

Michael was right: a corner had been turned. Now Bev sleeps at the cabin, because she doesn’t think Daniel should be alone at night. And now she gets him up in the mornings and dressed and walks him over to the blue sofa, his chest heaving with the exertion of just those few steps. She settles him there in preparation for Isabelle, who arrives early so Bev can go to the bakery and open it up.

Daniel usually has a good hour in the morning, and that’s when he and Isabelle work. There are no more long days filled with digressions. They both feel the urgency to finish, and they are so close. If he’s having a good day, or if he wakes from his nap with something on his mind, they might work a little in the afternoon, but that’s never certain.

This morning as Isabelle is tucking the afghan around Daniel’s legs — he’s always cold now, despite the summer weather — she asks him, “What do you want to title it?”

“Regrets of a Dying Man.”

She looks up quickly at his face. Is he serious? But Daniel is grinning. He’s teasing.

“It might sell a copy or maybe two,” Isabelle says as she sits down beside him, nudging his legs over so she has room, “since it promises so much entertainment in the reading. Regrets —sure, I want to read about someone’s regrets. And dying man —right up my alley.”

“Then there’ll be another regret from this dying man — that his final book didn’t sell a whit. But, hey, I’ll be dead, so who cares.”

Since his last visit to the doctor, Daniel seems to have found an unabashed dark humor. Isabelle suspects that the amped-up pain meds have something to do with this new attitude, or maybe it’s because everything is out on the table: Daniel’s body failing him at an ever-increasing rate, the hospice nurse coming regularly, the finish line looming for all to see.

“No, really, have you thought about a title?”

“Let’s finish the book first, then I’ll worry about a title.”

“Okay, fair enough.”

“And if we don’t get there, you title it.”

“If we don’t get there, I might just title it and rewrite the ending,” Isabelle says as a challenge.

But Daniel doesn’t take the bait. Instead he puts a hand on her knee, the immediate connection of their touch, so he can say quietly and deliberately, “There doesn’t seem to be any separation anymore between you and me and the book, Isabelle. Whatever you do with it when I’ve gone will be fine.”

“No, Daniel.” And Isabelle is moved beyond words that he trusts her so completely. She stands up and moves to the easy chair she always uses when they work. She doesn’t want him to see the tears in her eyes.

“We’ll finish,” she says, and it’s a promise she desperately hopes to keep.

She props her feet up on the sofa now, opens his laptop, bends her head over it, and gets to work. “Why won’t Rachel talk to Jack when he finds her living in that abandoned building?”

“Why should she? Nothing’s changed for her.”

“What if he explains himself to her? Why he acted the way he did. How it was based on principle.”

“You think that would cut any ice with a semideranged street person who hasn’t seen her father in years?”

“Maybe not. But maybe with a less deranged but equally stubborn daughter—”