Surprise Me (36 page)

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

M
ichael 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—”

“Leave Alina out of this.”

“She walks with me sometimes when I’m going back to town. Did you know that, Daniel, she and that new dog of hers?”

“Trixie.”

“Yes, and I know she’s desperate to ask questions about you. She wants to know how you’re doing, but she doesn’t say anything. She simply walks alongside me and takes whatever nuggets of information I give her.”

“Crumbs—she’s content with crumbs.”

“Why, Daniel? Why are these women—Rachel, your daughter—content with so little?”

“Have you seen Alina’s rooms? Have you been inside her barn?”

“Yes.”

“She won’t even allow herself any
color
.”

Isabelle laughs. “Maybe she just likes white.”

“She’d argue with you if you said this, but she doesn’t think she deserves much of anything.”

“Because you left her?”

“Because she mattered so little that I could leave her.”

“But that’s not the way you felt.”

“Leaving her was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.”

“You should tell her that.”

“Should I shout it across the meadow?”

Isabelle throws up her hands. “Surely you could find another way.”

“I don’t think anymore that it would make any difference.”

“It would. I guarantee you, it would.”

“Well, the next time she comes to visit me, I’ll broach the subject.”

“Impossible. You’re both impossible. Has either one of you heard of the notion of forgiveness?”

And they’re off, discussing forgiveness, arguing a bit, talking about Daniel and Alina and then veering off into the fictional territory of Jack Dyson and his daughter, until Daniel stops midsentence and switches gears. “When I’m not making sense anymore, I want you to go home. Take the manuscript and the laptop and go home. I won’t have you see me at the end. Promise me that.”

“All right.”

“Whenever that is—if it’s tomorrow. Whenever. If I can’t find the words I want to say, then I’m not here.”

—

WORDS, WHICH BROUGHT THEM TOGETHER ORIGINALLY
: Isabelle’s words on paper, then Daniel’s words to her. And all the new words Isabelle wrote during the semester to please him. And then their e-mails to each other—words on a screen, words they cherished for so many years.

And now it’s Daniel’s words that bind them inextricably together. Will there be time for him to find the right ones to finish the book? Can Isabelle speak the right words to help him?

For twenty years words have been their lifeline, and now Isabelle can see, almost day by day, that Daniel is slowly losing the ability to produce them. Speaking takes more and more exertion, so Isabelle moves to the floor next to the couch to better hear whatever Daniel manages to say, however softly. Soon, she knows, the effort of producing the breath for even a few words will be too much and he’ll fall silent.

The hospice nurse orders a hospital bed, and Daniel leaves it only to make his slow walk to the bathroom. While they work, Isabelle sits on the bed, at the foot, and types in every syllable Daniel manages to get out. During the pauses, while Daniel is either thinking of what to say next or gathering his strength to voice his next sentence, Isabelle keeps a hand on his ankle.
Don’t leave me yet. I’m here.

And then the day comes when Daniel leans back against the many pillows propped up behind him and is finally able to say, “Done.”

True to his earlier decision, he ends the novel with the messiness of life, without the rapprochement between father and daughter Isabelle had so hoped for.

Her head is bent over her computer when she hears him declare the book finished, and she remains frozen there, afraid to look up and meet his eyes. She knows before she hears it what he’s going to say next. But he waits for her, for her eyes to find his, and finally she looks up and meets his gaze.

Daniel is smiling. Relieved, she can tell. Happy. At this moment, happy.

“Go home now.”

She nods, ignoring the tears that fill her eyes. She comes to sit beside him on the bed and he reaches his arms out for her and she embraces him. Oh, he’s hardly there—so thin.

She tells him, her lips at his ear, “You have made all the difference.”

And he leans back again against the pillows, exhausted, content, smiling at her with such love that her heart seizes. “Yes,” he tells her, “you have.”

And then, because tears are streaming down her cheeks, he says, “Don’t cry,” and raises a large hand and wipes away as many of the tears as he can, and she takes his hand in hers and holds on. She can’t lose him. She is losing him. How can this be?

“I have a title,” he tells her, and she nods. She can’t speak.
“Regrets of a Grateful Man,”
he says, and despite herself she smiles at him through her tears, as he had hoped.

—

SHE LEAVES HIM BECAUSE HE TELLS
her she must and she honors that last request, closing the door to his cabin for the last time and walking, simply walking, because she doesn’t know what else to do. Sobbing and walking, blind, and desperate to outwalk the grief, but it doesn’t happen.

She walks through the birch forest behind the cabin and across the open field above that and then along the two-lane road which curves and winds its way eventually to Winnock. Without thinking, she finds herself climbing the rise of the small hillock that leads to the pond where the beavers live. And it is here that she stops and stands and simply cries out her heartache into the stillness of the late-summer air until her chest hurts and her throat is raw and she has run out of tears.

Finally she sits on the ground, arms wrapped around her knees, a tight bundle rocking back and forth in misery. The beavers are there, the same family she has come to know—the diligent parents, the two smaller adolescents. Their work on the dam is finished, she can see, and the pond is full and secure. But they have a new building project. Some sort of structure is going up above the waterline, made from the same kind of sticks and branches and mud. It’s a mound, almost like a wooden igloo. A home—it must be their home for the coming cold weather. Isabelle has hardly registered the change, but the days have begun to shorten, the evenings hold a hint of chill. While it wouldn’t be the end of summer back in California, here in New Hampshire fall comes sooner, and the beavers know it, and they are preparing to survive. Of course.

And Isabelle sits and watches them as she has for all the weeks she’s been here, engrossed in their industriousness, their determination to get on with it, and when she stands up and prepares to walk back to town, she is calmer. Resolved.

It is when Isabelle comes through the birch trees toward Foyle’s Pond that she sees the white Toyota parked in the gravel driveway and recognizes it. Nancy, the hospice nurse, must be with Daniel. And there she is, just leaving Daniel’s cabin, closing the door softly.

Nancy is the most composed person Isabelle has ever met, tender even, and Daniel likes her, Isabelle knows. They all rely on her now—Bev, Daniel, and Isabelle—to answer questions, to make Daniel as comfortable as he can be, to show up whenever they need her. A small woman in her late forties, with strong hands and an unadorned face, she makes her way across the meadow toward her car, parked in front of the barn.

Alina is out in the garden harvesting yellow crookneck squash and foot-long zucchini, shaded now by the massive faces of bright yellow sunflowers, eight feet tall. When Nancy waves, Alina straightens up and returns it, then stands amid the overflowing garden, watching while Nancy gets into her car and drives slowly down the O’Malleys’ unpaved road and out toward the main highway.

Isabelle doesn’t move. Something makes her stay where she is, hidden by the trees. She’s waiting, but she doesn’t know why.

And then Alina dusts the earth off the knees of her jeans and walks across the meadow with her long and determined steps. She doesn’t hesitate at the door of Daniel’s cottage. She simply opens it, bends her head to enter, and closes it behind her.

And when Isabelle walks past, to get to the path through the trees that leads to town, she can see, through the two tall windows next to Daniel’s bed, that Alina is doing exactly what Isabelle had hoped she would do. She’s taken a kitchen chair and positioned it beside the hospital bed. She is sitting beside her father and she has his hand in hers.

Isabelle turns away—this intimacy isn’t hers to witness—and starts on the path into town that she first walked alone so many years ago, the day she came looking for Daniel. The very path they walked many times together after that. The path that will take her back to the bounty of her present life in Oakland, with Michael, who is waiting, eager for her always. The man she chose. The man who makes all the good things in her life possible.