Surprise Me (13 page)

And suddenly a small, tidy man is standing in the doorway. He is maybe five feet five or so, impeccably dressed: expensive wool slacks, a cashmere sweater, a beautifully tailored black trench coat draped with an alpaca scarf in subtle shades of plum. His salt-and-pepper hair is cut close to his head, and his face, with its small, regular features, is distinguished only by deep bruises of exhaustion under his eyes. He has two large suitcases with him and looks astonished to see Isabelle there, as astonished as Isabelle is to see him.

After surveying the rest of the room, the man sighs, as if he has figured it out. “Casey?” he asks.

Isabelle points to the screen, to the footage of toppled buildings and flooded streets. “There’s been an earthquake and tsunami in the Philippines.”

The man sits down on the nearest chair. “I heard.”

“That’s where he is.”

“And he didn’t tell you I was coming home today.” It’s not a question.

“He left so suddenly, you know. The phone call came and he was gone. I’m sure he would have if—”

“Right,” the man says, without much conviction. And then he looks at Isabelle, really looks at her, and she grabs the blanket around herself more closely.

“Orson Pratt,” he tells her.

“Isabelle Rothman. I’m a friend of Casey’s.”

“I figured.” Then: “Well, this is awkward.”

“No, no.” Isabelle gets up from the couch, clicks off the TV, trails the blanket as she quickly moves out of the room. Orson winces as she drags it, bites his tongue so he doesn’t bark at her to pick up the end, for God’s sake. “I’ll be out of here in five minutes,” she says as she makes her way into the bedroom and closes the door.

Orson sighs again. With Casey there’s always one surprise or another.

Isabelle surveys the bedroom and is overcome with embarrassment. It’s a wreck—the bed unmade, clothes everywhere, plates of half-eaten food. She’s lived here and in the living room since Casey left, trailing morosely between the two rooms. Now she sees it with Orson’s eyes and she’s frankly horrified. If she were the owner of this house and in her right mind, as Orson seems to be, she’d be furious.

The owner of the house walks into the kitchen and averts his eyes; nobody’s cleaned up for days. It must be the girl. The last time Casey house-sat for him, he had the decency to clean and spruce and leave the house spotless.

He pushes up the sleeves of his cashmere sweater, turns on the water, starts to rinse the dishes and load the dishwasher. It’s the last thing he wants to do. He’s been on a fifteen-hour flight from Rome and he wants a hot shower and a long nap.

In the bedroom, Isabelle packs like one of the three Furies, flinging everything she owns into her one suitcase and cramming it shut. Luckily, her mother never sent her clothes—one more dramatic show of anger from Ruth:
You choose to defy me, you cannot have anything that resides in this house, including my love.
Isabelle hasn’t spoken with her mother since that unpleasant phone call home to announce that she was staying in the Bay Area. She’s called her father at work several times, but she hasn’t given him the phone number at the house. She doesn’t have any confidence that he wouldn’t bend under pressure and divulge it to her mother.

Now Isabelle is glad her mother has been so vengeful. There’s so much less to pack. She looks around the room in distress. What to do with all of Casey’s things? He’s lived here far longer, and his clothes and shoes and soccer balls and papers for work and his hiking boots and his yoga mat and his general
stuff
is everywhere. She does the best she can. She piles up everything of his neatly in a corner of the room. She strips the bed of their sheets—this last act like peeling off a layer of her own skin—and remakes it with fresh linens. There, that looks a little better.

When she sees Orson in the kitchen, washing her dishes, she’s mortified. “Please,” she says as she stands in the doorway, dirty plates in one hand, suitcase in the other, laptop in its case slung over her shoulder, “let me clean up the kitchen before I go.”

Orson shuts off the water, finds a towel to dry his hands, and turns slowly to look at her. “The best thing you can do,” he tells her as he takes the plates from her hand and adds them to the pile next to the sink, “is just go.” He wants his house to himself. He wants her to disappear.

She nods; there’s nothing to say to that. And she turns and walks across the living room, toward the front door, when he adds one more sentence. He can’t help it. “And if I were you, I’d ask Casey why he didn’t tell you that I was coming home today.”

“Oh, because it was all so sudden—” Isabelle begins.

“He knew that.” Orson cuts her off, too tired for politeness. “He’s been doing this work for years, this relief work, and he left you holding the bag, young lady.” And Orson turns away from her, back to the sink, back to the dishes and the pots that have to be scrubbed, and Isabelle opens the front door and is gone.

It’s only when she hits College Avenue that she realizes she doesn’t know where she’s going. The only person she knows is Deepti, but she’s in San Francisco. There’s nobody on this side of the bay, and she can’t go into the city; she can’t be that far away.
From what?
she asks herself. Well, from Casey when he returns. And then another slap of recognition: he won’t have any way to contact her. He had the phone number at the house, but that’s all. Wherever she ends up, he won’t know.

And that realization causes her to sink down to the curb, at the intersection of College and Durant, as the gravity of the situation settles in: she’s homeless and alone and has no way to get in touch with Casey.

There’s too much to figure out, so sitting on the curb, her suitcase beside her, idly watching the hordes of students pass her on their way to class is the most she can manage. Nobody takes much notice of her. She looks like she could be one of them, a Berkeley student who’s stopped for a minute or is waiting for a friend. It’s the suitcase at her side and perhaps the look of hopelessness on her face that prompt a boy riding a skateboard down the incline that is Durant Avenue to yell at her as he whizzes by, “The hotel’s one block down!” and he’s gone.

Isabelle cranes her neck and there it is—the Hotel Durant, an old stone building on the corner of Bowditch and Durant. It even has a long vertical sign on the edge of the building with the word
HOTEL
spelled out from top to bottom in very large white letters against a slate-blue background. A hotel! A place she can stay until she figures out her next move.

When given a choice at the front desk, she chooses a room on the fifth floor so she can look out across the beautiful Berkeley campus and maybe capture some of the lightness she felt when she and Casey were cocooned in their tree house.

And then she falls asleep. She’s exhausted. The last two months have been the happiest of her life, but they’ve also worn her out. All that defying her parents’ expectations, her own reticence—a history that reads to her now like a playbook for misery. This, all that she’s experienced with Casey, is life full to the brim.

It’s when she wakes up, just as the Campanile is striking four o’clock, that she immediately realizes she has to go back to Orson Pratt’s house. Now that she has found a place to stay, she has to give him the number so he can give it to Casey.

She arrives at Orson’s door with an enormous bundle of flowers, winter blooms bought at a shop on Telegraph Avenue—giant snapdragons with stems two feet long, magenta stock with the musty smell she loves so much, interspersed with sprays of prickly pink Australian heather, all cushioned by shiny green leaves and wrapped in clear cellophane, finished off with a purple bow. She knocks and waits and no one comes. She knocks again with the same result. Just as she’s laying the flowers down on the doorstep, her note of apology tucked into the foliage, Orson opens the door. He’s wearing a silk robe over bare feet and white shins and looks furious to be awake.

“Oh, no.” Isabelle is dismayed that yet again, despite her best intentions, she’s annoyed him. “I woke you. I’m so sorry. I just…well, take the flowers and go back to sleep.” And she puts the bouquet in his arms and starts down the stairs.

“Is that all?” he finally says to her retreating back. “The flowers?”

And she turns around slowly. “Well, no, actually, it was to bring you the flowers, yes. To apologize, really, there’s a note in there…” She comes back up the steps and fishes the small white card out of the mass of flowers, shows it to him so he won’t miss it. “But also…I wrote down the number of where I’m staying—it’s on the back of the card—in case Casey calls. Do you think you could give it to him?”

“All right,” he says. His voice is weary.

Isabelle wants to add,
Promise me you won’t forget,
but of course she doesn’t. Instead she adds, “As soon as they have some phone lines up on Mindoro, I’m sure he’ll call.”

Orson stares at her. “How long have you known Casey?”

“About two months.”

“So you’ve never been through one of his trips?”

“No.”

“They can take a long time.” He puts it as delicately as he knows how. He’s not a delicate person.

“I would suppose.”

She’s not quite sure what he’s getting at. And he sees that, sees that she’s not processing what he’s trying to tell her, and he sighs. There’s something compelling about this girl. She looks so lost and so hopeful at the same time.

He sits down on his doorstep, wraps the silk robe around his legs, puts the flowers down next to him. “There’s always a flood somewhere or a hurricane or another earthquake or a famine that’s reached the tipping point.”

Isabelle sits down next to him on the step, folding her long legs under her, settling in. He seems to be inviting her to talk about Casey, and she wants nothing more in the world than to do that. She hungers to do that. “That’s why I admire what he does so much. There’s all this need and he doesn’t just brush it aside. I mean, some people give money when there’s a natural disaster, but really, how much effort does that take? And then there’s Casey, who sees a crisis and is there!”

“Every time,” Orson says pointedly.

“Yes! He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

Orson nods grimly and stands, the flowers in his arms. “There was no need, but thank you for these.”

Isabelle stands with him, suddenly realizing that she towers over him, both of them awkward now. “I’ll just go.”

He nods, then watches her make her way down the railroad-tie steps. She’s almost skipping until she stops midway down the staircase and turns to him. “You won’t forget?” She couldn’t stop herself from asking.

Orson shakes his head: no, he won’t. If Casey ever calls, he’ll tell him where Isabelle is.

CHAPTER EIGHT

D
aniel surveys the faces of the students in his creative writing seminar, English 452 in the catalog, and despairs. None is Isabelle’s. Of the nine people sitting around the worn conference table in Room 17A of Holmes Hall (named after Julia Archibald Holmes, the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak, in 1858) on the campus of Colorado Plains College, eight look bored and the remaining one looks terrified.

Corinne Berlinger, in honor of the upcoming holiday Sunday, wears a red sweatshirt with Christmas bells ringing across her chest and the words to “Jingle Bells” floating beneath in wavy script. She’s the terrified one. He’s giving the class back their final stories today, and she seems to be the only one who cares what he thinks of them. Too bad she writes like an inferior Hallmark card. She’s not going to be happy with his comments.

The rest of the students have placed their backsides on their chairs in the spirit of doing time, like prisoners on a lengthy sentence. And none of them can write, either. Daniel chalks up the lack of talent to the preponderance of military bases in the Colorado Springs area—Peterson Air Force Base, Fort Carson, Falcon Air Force Base. He’s sure that the present or former military personnel who somehow end up in his classes haven’t the imagination to write creatively. That was his prejudice before the semester started and that’s his conclusion now as the semester limps toward its finish.

Daniel knows he should be grateful for this teaching job. He was desperate when he accepted it, but right now, after three months of reading his students’ work, he’d prefer to put a gun to his head than continue on. But he has to. He’s been offered a second semester, and since he has no alternative, he gave himself a stern talking to and found the appropriate answer: “I’d be glad to.”

And then there’s Stefan, who has stuck to him like flypaper, flapping around him constantly, never leaving him alone the way he used to when they lived in Los Angeles. It’s as if the drive to Colorado cemented some kind of attachment for his son that he’d been missing for the twenty-one years Daniel was absent from his life.
You always pay for your mistakes,
Daniel reminds himself. And now he’s paying for abandoning his two children as part of his first divorce.

Of course Stephanie was furious at him when he first left her. And when she kept the kids away as punishment, he wasn’t surprised. Even before the separation, his wife had watched the undeniable connection he and five-year-old Alina shared with a jaundiced eye. “Two peas in a pod,” Stephanie would say with alarm, as if it were a problem that had to be solved. Stefan, three years younger, Stephanie kept close to her before Daniel left—almost in counterbalance—and even closer after.

But he could have demanded to see them, could have stayed in Erie and fought for that right. Maybe even hired an attorney. Another man, a better man, would have. But he didn’t. He escaped to New York, where he could pretend to be someone else, a promising young writer, and never looked back. The least he can do is be honest about his own culpability. He chose the path of least resistance years ago, selfishly, and now he has Stefan mooning over him, trying to make up for all the years of drought.

And mistake number two: never finishing his much-maligned, rarely-worked-on novel in progress so he has to make his living teaching these Colorado dolts. Oh, where is Isabelle when he needs her cheeky attitude, her
engagement
? Still in Berkeley, he supposes, although he has no way of knowing, because once she announced via e-mail that she was having great sex, her communications with Daniel ceased.