Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

He shakes his head.

  “When my Spanish got better I was able to get a job at a construction company. All that experience in Buffalo helped. It turns out construction is pretty much construction anywhere in the world.”

  “Was that smart?” he asks her, his eyebrows raised.

  “You’re getting ahead of me here, and no, it turns out it wasn’t smart at all. That’s where I met Miguel.”

  “Your ‘savior’? You see, I was listening last night.”

  “At first, I couldn’t believe my luck. For starters, he was single and I hadn’t made it a practice to date single men. And he was gorgeous. Not that I’m all that superficial, but when you’ve just left Mickey Fogarty with his two dozen tattoos and questionable personal hygiene, gorgeous and clean go a long way.” Ellen pauses, mashes the crumbs of her pear tart into her plate with the back of her fork. Her eyes down, she finally says softly, “And he wanted me, really wanted me and told me why. Told me what I had and what I was that was worthwhile. He was the first person who ever …” And she trails off. She won’t get teary in front of Jamie.

  But when he says, “Oh, Ellen,” understanding exactly how unique that kind of validation would be to one of them, the O’Connor children, who never heard about their specialness from either parent, Ellen’s eyes fill anyway.

  She needs to back up to more neutral ground. She lays out some of the facts. “Miguel’s a lawyer, and he was counsel for the company building the shopping center we were working on. They’d had neighbor complaints about the height of the parking structure or something. Anyway, Miguel came into the office one day to go over the building specs with my boss, and when he walked in and we looked at each other, that was that.” Ellen shrugs as if all that followed was inevitable.

  “I’d never felt that before,” she tells him, “that instant connection. Miguel said he hadn’t, either. Do you know how powerful that feeling is, Jamie?”

  “Sounds exhausting to me.”

  “Oh, it was. Exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure, but mostly it was mesmerizing. For both of us. You’ve got to understand I wasn’t some infatuated teenager mooning after some guy who didn’t give a damn. Miguel was in this with me. It’s important that you understand that. He needed to see me every night. He’d call me sometimes every hour, all day. The rest of my life—my friends, the class I was taking, the attention I put into my work—they all fell away, and I was alive only for those hours I spent with Miguel.”

  There’s something about this Jamie doesn’t like, but he doesn’t say anything, simply nods as she continues to tell the story.

  As if Ellen were reading his thoughts, something they would often do as children, she quickly says, “And he was kind to me. He filled my little apartment with flowers, day after day, week after week, and then he began to buy me things. He had a set of dining room chairs delivered to my apartment.”

  “Did you need dining room chairs?”

  “No, but he said the ones I had weren’t comfortable and if he was going to have dinner with me every night, he wanted to be comfortable. And then he began to buy me clothes and jewelry. He’d take me to really expensive restaurants so I could wear the dress or the shawl or the jade earrings that he’d just bought me and he would tell me how beautiful I looked.

  “When he asked me to move in with him, there seemed to be no other answer but ‘Yes, of course, I love you, of course I will.’ ”

  “How long had you known him?” Jamie asks.

  “Two months.”

  “Did you bring the dining room chairs?”

  “Very funny, Jamie, and the answer is no. I left them with the apartment along with everything else I had acquired since I had moved to Malaga. It didn’t matter. They were just things. You’ve got to understand, I couldn’t believe my luck. I had gone to Spain to change my life, and here was proof that I’d been right. I had a man who loved me, who treated me like I was a prize. I had done it. I had escaped the O’Connor curse.”

  “How long did that feeling last?”

  “Okay, I know you want me to cut to the chase, but you need to believe that we had something that people long for all their lives.”

  “I get it, Ellen, but you’re not telling me this story because it all stayed that way, are you?”

  “No.”

  “When did it turn bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He snorts. “Weren’t you there? How can you not know?”

  “Stop being such a prick and I’ll tell you.”

  “Okay,” Jamie says, a bit chagrined. “Sorry.”

  “It started so quietly I wasn’t even aware of what was going on. His daily phone calls became sort of ‘Where are you? What are you doing?’ instead of ‘I miss you. I can’t stop thinking about you.’ Do you see the difference?”

  “He was checking up on you.”

  “Yes! But would you have recognized that right away?” Jamie shrugs and Ellen shakes her head at her own gullibility. “Well, I didn’t. Then he began to say things like ‘I don’t like you in that dress, wear the green one I bought you.’ And I’d think, ‘What difference does it make?’ And I’d go and change into the dress he liked.… Then he began to tell me my friends were boring and we’d only go out together if we were seeing his friends. He said I could see my friends during the day. But I didn’t. Somehow, because Miguel didn’t like them, I wasn’t interested in seeing them.”

  “Tracy, too?” Jamie asks.

  “Not at the beginning, but when it got bad, then, yes, I cut Tracy out of my life, too.”

  “When did it get bad, Ellen?” Jamie asks quietly.

  “When I quit my job.”

  “Because he wanted you to?”

  “Because he told me to. He made a lot of money and he had family money, and after we’d been together for about a year, he told me that my job was getting in the way of our life together. He wanted me to travel with him. He wanted me at home when he got home. What did I do all day at my job that was so important? Nothing, I realized, it wasn’t important. Miguel was what was important.… So I quit my job.”

  Ellen won’t meet Jamie’s eyes as she tells him, “And then I became his prisoner. He set new rules—I had to call him before I left the apartment and when I got home, the minute I got home. If he didn’t like where I said I was going, he told me to stay home. I began to lie to him so I could go out, and when he found out I was lying, he got very angry.”

  “Did he hit you?” Ellen won’t answer. “Ellen, did he hit you?” Jamie asks again, more insistent.

  “That wasn’t the worst of it,” Ellen finally whispers. “It became this sort of ritual for him. He’d tie me up.…”

  “Oh God …” escapes from Jamie.

  “He had this elaborate way of doing it depending on which part of my body was going to get the punishment.”

  “Don’t!” Jamie says. He can’t hear this, but Ellen continues on anyway.

  “And then he’d find the spot he wanted. It was always a soft spot, somewhere that could be covered up with clothes, and he’d cut me.…”

  “No …” Jamie is moaning now. “Please …”

  “And he’d tell me this would all stop if I’d only be good, what he was asking for was only reasonable. Wasn’t it reasonable that he know where the woman he loved was? Wasn’t it reasonable that he be able to believe what she told him? Wasn’t that reasonable, he’d ask me, and I had to agree or he’d find another soft spot.”

  Jamie gets up abruptly. He can’t hear any more of this, but Ellen grabs his forearm. “Sit down. I’m not finished.” And as much as he’s desperate to walk away, to wipe from his consciousness what she’s just told him, he looks into his sister’s urgent face and sits down again.

  “But I didn’t just give in. I began to fight back. And that’s when it got really scary. We began to inflict major damage on each other. Not just black eyes and bruises, but I broke his wrist once and he pushed me across the kitchen one night and I fell against the stove and blacke
d out. And he couldn’t revive me and so I ended up in the emergency room with a serious concussion.”

  “And that did it?” Jamie asks, begging her to tell him that this horrendous story is over.

  “You would think, wouldn’t you, that that would have been enough.” Ellen sits back and says this without emotion, as if she’s telling the story of someone else, someone completely crazy. Someone who has no relationship to her.

  “You didn’t leave him then?!”

  “Not the first time I showed up in the hospital, but the second time, yes. But only because he was arrested and when I was well enough to go home, he wasn’t there.… Before he made bail, I did the one smart thing in the middle of all this mess: I called Tracy and she came and got me.”

  “Is that the end of this story?” Jamie asks her. “Because I don’t think I can hear any more.”

  “The rest of the story is good,” she says. “The rest of the story is how I became this paragon of health and happiness that you see before you. The rest of the story is what I came to California to tell you.”

  “You know what, El, I don’t think I’m ready to hear it now.”

  “Okay,” she says reasonably, “I’ve given you a lot to take in.”

  “Would you call that an understatement?”

  And she grins at him. “Yep.”

  • • •

  WHEN HE LEAVES FOR SCHOOL the next morning, she comes with him. She wants to see where he works and then she wants to explore San Diego. She’ll drive around a bit and then pick him back up at three thirty. They arrange it over breakfast, sitting at his breakfast bar, drinking their coffees, and idly reading the morning paper.

  She seems so calm to Jamie, so present, so unaffected by the story she told him last night that part of him doesn’t believe her. How could she have gone through what she described (and he has a feeling she left a great deal out) and still be the Ellen he knows? The two things can’t quite coexist in his mind.

  When she looks up from the paper and sees him scrutinizing her, she again knows what he’s thinking. “I survived, Jamie, and something miraculous happened because of all the pain. Don’t judge until you hear the rest of the story.”

  “Give me a breather here, El.”

  She laughs. “I can wait.”

  Jamie’s school is close to the water. It seems to Ellen that practically everything in San Diego is within sight of the Pacific Ocean. The middle-school building is part of a vast old military base. Some of the other buildings have been renovated, too, and Jamie points out the elementary school and the high school as he parks in the teachers’ lot.

  “We’re all part of a charter school run by a private corporation. They leased the land from the Defense Department, refurbished the buildings, and set all this up.”

  “So it’s a private school?” Ellen asks as they open the large glass double doors and walk into the main hallway. Inside, the building has been opened up with skylights and bright paint colors horizontally striped along the walls.

  “No,” Jamie explains, “we’re part of the San Diego Unified School District. The kids have to meet their standards, but because we’re a charter, they pretty much leave us alone.”

  “Well, that should suit you just fine,” Ellen says, and she looks at him sideways as they enter the main office so he can check his mailbox.

  “Very funny.” But he doesn’t seem at all offended as he grabs a fistful of mail from a cubbyhole, one in a row of several dozen along the left-hand wall of the office. “You want some more coffee before class starts?”

  “Do you even have to ask?”

  He points her across the hall to the teachers’ lounge. It’s a long, narrow room with windows overlooking the front of the school. Someone’s taken the trouble to put together a cozy room—easy chairs in the same primary colors as the hallways. Everything in this school seems to pop out at you, Ellen thinks. Do they need to wake people up? Some of the chairs have ottomans next to them, useful for putting up aching feet or as a place for the paper overload that always seems to accompany any teacher. There are two small, round tables for catching up on work in one corner of the room and an efficient coffee area with a tiny sink and under-counter refrigerator and the ever-going coffeemaker opposite it.

  Jamie pours them each a mug of coffee and introduces Ellen to the handful of teachers who are getting ready for their day. “My sister Ellen, everyone. She’s visiting from Spain.”

  The teachers are friendly. They greet her. She sips her coffee and looks around the room. More teachers have come in to grab a cup of coffee or simply as a respite before the day officially begins. They stand in twos and threes, chatting. But, she sees, not Jamie. He’s over by the windows, by himself, reading what looks like a memo. No one approaches him and he doesn’t look up. It bothers her that he is the singular person in a room of groups and conversation, and she’s watching him, waiting for him to turn and talk to someone or have someone talk to him, and so she doesn’t see a very pretty woman in her thirties come over to her.

  “I didn’t know Jamie had a sister,” she says.

  “Jamie has four sisters.”

  “Really?” The woman seems puzzled.

  She’s fine boned, wrenlike, with honey-colored hair that today she’s pulled back into a sleek ponytail, not a tendril escaping. Immediately Ellen can tell that this woman has been pretty all her life and takes it for granted. No makeup. Clothes that seem too casual for teaching—cargo pants, a T-shirt advertising San Diego State, and running shoes. Next to her Ellen feels like an unruly Amazon, her wiry reddish hair unattended, her five-foot-seven height oversized.

  “I’m Nicole. I’ve known your brother forever.”

  “And you didn’t know he has four sisters and three brothers?”

  “I wouldn’t call your brother much of a talker.” And this last is said with just enough of an undertone of bitterness that Ellen pays more attention.

  “Well, you know,” Ellen says, defending Jamie without even thinking about it, “when you grow up in a family of eight, there’s not much of a chance to talk. We shout. We’re really good at shouting.”

  “There were times I would have been thrilled to hear him shout, but I never did,” Nicole says as she moves off, glancing at Jamie as she does. “Enjoy your visit.”

  Okay, Ellen thinks as she watches Nicole move across the room, did she just mean what I think she meant? She glances at Nicole’s left hand as she grabs the doorknob, surprised to see a wedding ring set with diamonds on her fourth finger. Ancient history? Recent history? Recent enough for her to still be pissed.

  IN JAMIE’S FIRST-PERIOD CLASS, his sixth graders, they’re discussing “The Road Not Taken,” the Robert Frost poem. Ellen sits at the back of the class and takes it all in. She can see immediately that her brother is in his element, and she relaxes.

  Jamie has led the kids to see that the two roads that “diverged in a yellow wood” are more than just paths through the forest. He tells them nothing. He asks questions and entertains many answers without calling any of them wrong, and so the atmosphere in the class encourages conversation. Ellen can see that the kids raise their hands eagerly, that they are confident Jamie will listen to them. And he’s animated, moving around the class, touching a student on a shoulder here and there, even clapping his hands at one answer from a quiet, dark-skinned boy in the back. “Yes, Ritesh!” he says. “ ‘The traveler’ could be any of us—‘and sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler.’ That’s right!” The boy shimmers with good feeling that Jamie has rewarded his opinion.

  And when they get to the last stanza, Jamie reads it out loud. “ ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’ ”

  There’s a moment of silence after he finishes reading, and then a large boy with a puzzled look on his face blurts out, “What difference?” And there’s laughter from the other ki
ds.

  “A good question, Kyle,” Jamie says, and then to the class, “What is ‘the difference’ Frost is talking about?” More silence. No one seems to know exactly.

  Jamie catches Ellen’s eye and they smile at each other. “The difference” has been the subtext of all their conversations the last few days.

  Before Jamie can lead his sixth graders to an understanding of Frost’s words, the bell rings and the kids get up, gather their things, books into their backpacks, jackets across shoulders. Jamie has a group of kids around him as one class files out and another files in, so Ellen keeps her seat at the back of the room. She doesn’t want to intrude, simply to observe.

  As much as Ellen is thrilled to see Jamie in his element, when his second-period class starts with a discussion of the same poem, she’s not sitting still for a repeat. She gestures to Jamie that she’ll see him later and slips out the door.

  As she’s walking down the quiet hallways, murmurs of teachers’ voices coming from open doorways, she recognizes the yellow doorway into the teachers’ lounge and slips in to return her coffee cup.

  At first glance, she thinks the room is empty, but as she rinses the mug in the sink, she notices the woman she spoke with that morning, Nicole, sitting at one of the round tables, grading papers. Her head is down. Her body is still, no wasted motions, only her hand with a red pen in it moves. She takes up such a small space in the room that it isn’t hard to miss her.

  “You teach math?” Ellen asks when Nicole looks up and smiles at her.

  “Algebra, I and II.” Then, “Did you watch Jamie teach?”

  “Yes.”

  “He loves it, doesn’t he?”

  “A lot,” Ellen says as she comes and sits at the table with Nicole. Then, “How well do you know each other?”

  “Oh, I could say intimately and not at all.”

  Ellen nods. She knows exactly what this woman is talking about.

  “But he disappointed you?”

  “Just till I got it through my thick head that he’d rather be alone than with me.”

  “Or anybody?” Is that what Nicole is saying—that her brother doesn’t want anyone close to him?