Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  They’re in his office. It’s late in the day and there are shadows in the room, but he doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t reach to turn on a light. Carmen watches as Roger Koenig moves files from one surface to another, looking for Ellen’s. What hair he has left is steel gray. His body speaks of decades without exercise, and if they allowed smoking in city buildings, Carmen is sure he would have a cigarette burning between his fingers.

  Roger knows he’s been doing this too long. It gets harder instead of easier to wade through the misery of most people’s lives. He asks himself at least once every day why he doesn’t just quit, and then he moves on without an answer.

  He must be at least sixty, Carmen thinks as she watches him search and curse quietly under his breath. More than twice my age. If I’m doing this kind of work in thirty years, shoot me, she makes a note to herself.

  Carmen is always in forward motion, never resting anywhere for too long. It’s the only way she got to college and through law school. One brother was murdered by a gang member when he was fifteen and the other works in an auto body shop. Her father moved the family to San Diego for the agricultural work and never really learned English well enough to get any other kind of job. It was her mother who cleaned houses to keep them going. And it was her indomitable mother who pushed Carmen to get out, to reach higher. She feels the obligation of her success every day of her life.

  “The girl was moved from the ICU to a regular room.” Carmen speaks to Roger’s back now. “She’s going to live. So now we know we have reckless driving bodily injury, not vehicular manslaughter. There was no intent.”

  “The woman mowed down seven people, and the fact that the girl’s going to live doesn’t tell us anything about how she’s going to live. What shape she’s going to be in.”

  “It was an accident, Roger. I have to keep telling you and Ellen the same thing. The woman’s devastated. She feels so guilty she wants to die. You want remorse—she’s a poster child for remorse.”

  Finally, Roger finds Ellen’s file and sits down behind his desk to scan the papers in it. Carmen leans over, snaps on his desk lamp—she can’t bear that he’s squinting to see—and continues to talk while he reads. She has a solution to all this and she wants him to sign off on it.

  “Her doctor from Spain, her shrink, will be here tomorrow. Ellen spent a year in her center, institute, rehab place, whatever you want to call it. And Dr. Smithfield will take her back and be responsible for her. There—perfect solution. Ellen will be out of the country. She won’t be driving anywhere near San Diego ever again, and she’ll be getting the treatment she obviously needs. Anger management, et cetera, et cetera.” Carmen waves her hand in the air to indicate the et cetera, et cetera. It’s not that she doesn’t care what happens to Ellen. She’s come to like her and to understand that this accident has undone all the careful rebuilding Ellen’s attempted in her life. What she’s trying to do is move this case along without any push-back from Roger.

  “Don’t you have enough seriously bad people to put away?” she asks him, a genuine question. “Ellen isn’t one of them.”

  He leans back in his chair. “What a mess.”

  “Roger, look at the psychiatric eval.” Carmen leans across the overloaded desk and searches in Ellen’s open file, pulling out the shrink’s report. “Did you read it?”

  “I must have,” he says.

  She puts it in his hands and says very quietly, “The woman barely speaks. She’s stopped eating. You want to deal with a defendant who’s refusing food? We’re there.”

  “Shit.”

  They look at each other. Carmen waits. She’s giving him room to agree, and finally he does. He nods at her and she stands up, more relieved than she realized she’d be.

  “We’re doing the best we can here,” she tells him as she opens the office door.

  “You tell yourself that,” he says, but he’s already turned his back and is searching through a stack of case folders piled on a bookshelf.

  WHEN THEY ALL MEET IN Judge Fornay’s courtroom, they present a united front. Roger proposes the settlement Carmen presented in his office and she concurs when asked. Dr. Smithfield, who is British and impressive and brisk, agrees to be responsible for Ellen’s treatment and Ellen says yes, very softly, she will return to Spain and stay there.

  Jamie watches all this from the second row of the visitors’ seating. It looks like a form of theater to him, with all participants knowing their lines and delivering them on cue. He understands that everyone in the room wants to make this go away and that Carmen has crafted a path for that to happen. He’s grateful.

  Afterward, he has only a few minutes alone with Ellen before she leaves with the doctor. In the two months she’s been in jail, Ellen has lost enough weight to look once more like a famine survivor. She’s punishing herself before anyone else can do it, and in the corridor of the courthouse he tries to tell her again, yet again, that it was an accident and not her fault.

  “The sin of pride, Jamie,” she says in a voice so low that he instinctively leans forward toward her. “I was so sure I had the word and had to deliver it to you.”

  “To help, Ellen—” he starts to say, but she isn’t finished.

  “And look what I did! Destroyed. Everything I try, everything I touch …”

  He can’t bear to hear the words of their father coming from her mouth—you are nothing, you deserve nothing. He gathers her into his arms, where she shuts her eyes, arms around his back, holding on tight, holding the memory of embracing her brother. They both know that it might be a very long time before they see each other again.

  It is Ellen who pulls away first. As much as she loves Jamie, it is Dr. Smithfield she needs now. The doctor stands waiting, discreetly, several feet away. But she’s ready when Ellen comes to her. Jamie watches the two women walk away from him, and he sees his sister reach for the hand of the older woman and hold it tightly. If he believed in the language of touch, he would be reassured.

  BECAUSE HE’S TAKEN A SICK DAY from school to be in court with Ellen, he is at loose ends once the proceedings are over—nowhere he has to be, no one who’s waiting for him. And so he goes home to his condo, where he’s lived for the past decade.

  When he walks in at noon, the first things he sees are the brightly patterned throw pillows Ellen bought to liven up the space. All those years she was away in Spain, all those years he let go by without any real contact. There’s e-mail and smartphones and now there’s Skype. Why is it that neither of them is very good about being in touch? Ellen never even let him know she was coming.

  As he looks around his living room now, he knows she was right. He is content to live with so little. He never replaced the fresh flowers Ellen arranged in vases on the top of the bookshelf, in the center of the dining room table, or refilled the blue bowl she bought and piled with lemons. “I love the contrast of the blue and yellow,” she explained to Jamie and he had nodded. He liked the contrast, too, but once the lemons were gone, the bowl sat empty.

  Today, without work to structure his time, he has no idea what to do with himself. He could grade papers, he thinks. As an English teacher with five classes to teach, he always has papers to grade, but he’s restless. It’s a feeling he distinctly doesn’t like and has managed to almost eliminate from his life by carefully scheduling his time: the hour he gets up, his forty-five-minute run after school, his singular nights at the dining room table grading papers and eating something he’s warmed up in the microwave.

  All that routine has served to hold the restlessness and anxiety at bay, but now he can’t settle down enough to really concentrate and he finds himself grabbing his car keys and closing the front door behind him.

  When he enters University Hospital, he’s struck by how busy it is. For two months he has been visiting in the slightly surreal hours surrounding midnight. But he knows the way to Celeste’s room on the fourth floor, three floors below and a world apart from the ICU, and makes his way through the crowded co
rridors to get there.

  Now she’s out of danger. Now she’s recovering. Her broken bones are mending—her left leg has a steel plate and wire and screws holding it back together. Her shattered pelvis is healing. But it’s the trauma of the head injury that will take months, if not years, to resolve. Everyone—the various doctors who sweep in and out and whom they barely know, the therapists, and Dr. Banerjee, who has been with Celeste from the beginning—has told them not to expect the same carefree graduate student who made friends easily, spoke up in class frequently, and had strong opinions about almost everything.

  Today she speaks with effort. Often there are pauses as she searches within her injured brain to find the word she wants. There are gaps in her memory, and these pain Chet the most, Jamie thinks, because it means he’s lost part of the little girl he raised. Will they come back? None of the doctors will make definitive statements about anything except the fact that she’s out of danger.

  When Jamie walks into her room now, he finds Celeste sitting up in bed, attempting to read a simple Dr. Seuss book, Horton Hatches the Egg, and she’s frowning. It’s not going well. Her luxurious dark hair was cropped off sometime in the first week of her stay in the ICU. They needed to lift off part of her skull to relieve the cranial pressure, and when she slowly came through that crisis, the doctors returned the piece of bone. Now the hair that has grown in covers her scalp in soft curls not even an inch long. Her complexion is the milk white of skin that hasn’t seen the sun in too long.

  In the pictures in the papers and on TV from before the accident she looked so animated, so healthy and eager. Here was a girl who rode a horse with confidence before she started kindergarten, who held her own at a dining table full of opinionated, wisecracking cowboys. A girl who demanded she be able to see the ocean every day or she wasn’t going to college. Anyone who knew her then might have trouble recognizing her now. For Jamie, this is the Celeste he knows, and to him her fragility is part of the package.

  She looks up, surprised to see him. “You come …” she says and there’s a pause before she finishes her thought. “… at night.”

  “Yes. You remember that?”

  She nods. “My dad.”

  “Yes, usually when Chet is here.” In fact Jamie has never been in her room without Chet as a buffer. He realizes he’s uncertain exactly how to behave.

  “His … friend.” It’s a statement.

  “I hope so,” Jamie answers and she immediately understands what he’s saying, the implication of it, a higher brain function.

  And she smiles. “Yes,” and Jamie smiles back at her.

  “Where is your dad?”

  And the smile fades. She can’t remember where he went. She shakes her head. She knows he was here but doesn’t remember where he said he was going. And Jamie sees the anxiety—that her father has gone, that she can’t remember.

  “I’ll just go find him for you.”

  “Oh … thank you.” And it’s said with such relief. Such a simple thing that he can do for her.

  JAMIE FINDS CHET IN THE ATRIUM at the end of the hall. A plaque at the door lets everyone know that the money to build it was donated by a grateful family whose loved one was saved by the medical staff at University Hospital. It’s a place for patients who are allowed out of bed to sit with their families and remember what the outside world looks like. The room is filled with plants—palms and ficus trees—and wicker patio furniture and glass-topped tables.

  Chet is standing at the far end, looking out through the glass wall, lost in thought.

  “Chet,” Jamie says quietly as he walks toward him, watching Celeste’s father turn to him.

  “What are you doing here during the day?”

  “No school” is all Jamie says. He won’t talk to Chet of Ellen and the court and her flight back to Spain.

  “They want to move her to this rehab hospital.”

  “That’s good, then, isn’t it? It’s the next step.”

  Chet shakes his head. He doesn’t know if it’s good.

  “For how long?” Jamie asks.

  “No one knows.” Then, “I have to get back. They’ve been great, the Swensons. Understanding about it all, patient, telling me to take all the time I need, but there’s a limit. You can understand that. They’ve got a business to run, and without me there things are beginning to fall apart.”

  Chet stops, turns away, and stares out over Balboa Park, a carpet of green from this height made up of the tops of all the trees. Jamie knows this man well enough now after weeks and weeks of nighttime hours spent in conversation and silence to know there’s more. He waits.

  “I’m going to ask this of you, but you can say no. You hear me. You need to feel free to say no.”

  Jamie says simply, “Don’t worry about that. Whatever the question.”

  Chet turns his pale eyes on Jamie’s face, searches there for the grit behind the quick words. “Be here for Celeste because I can’t be.”

  “I will.”

  HONORING THAT PROMISE, Jamie now makes twice-weekly trips north to Encinitas and the Scribner Rehabilitation Hospital, every Wednesday and Sunday afternoons. Chet travels eighteen hours from Helena, Montana, to Encinitas twice a month, leaving the middle of the day on a Friday, driving through the night, sometimes pulling over for a few hours of sleep before continuing on, usually arriving late Saturday afternoon and having to leave again by noon on Sunday to get back to Helena by Monday morning.

  Jamie makes sure to give them, father and daughter, their time alone. On the weekends Chet visits, Jamie is careful to arrive after two on Sunday. Celeste is often quiet when he first gets there. He knows he’s a poor substitute for her father, but he does what he can.

  At first, he didn’t know how to fill the time. Especially when Celeste was newly arrived, conversation was stilted and painful. For Jamie, it was very difficult to watch her struggle to find the words she wanted to say. He found himself talking way too much to fill up the dead air, and he felt that what he brought to her was of no interest, not that she gave any indication that was so. She listened carefully and sometimes struggled to ask a question when he fell silent and always remembered from visit to visit what he had told her.

  He talked about what mattered most to him, his students, weaving stories so that Celeste got to know particular ones. He spoke about Colleen McAllister from his honors class, serious beyond her thirteen years, and he confessed that he searched for her essay when grading their papers. It lifted his spirits to read her carefully crafted paragraphs, always holding something thoughtful in them. Embarrassed to be so self-revealing, Jamie nevertheless admitted that her essays validate the effort he puts into his teaching. He reddened a bit when he admitted that to Celeste and shrugged to take the edge off his words, but she understood. Slowly, she said, “She gets it.”

  “Yes!” Jamie said. “She hears me and then does some thinking on her own. Original thinking. A teacher can’t ask for more.”

  He’s pacing in her room as they talk, and she’s watching him from a wheelchair. Recently, they’ve allowed her to get out of bed, with help from Nadia, her physical therapist, and sit in a wheelchair for a few hours a day. It’s a task that’s exhausting and disheartening that it’s so exhausting. For a girl who would ride a horse all day without tiring, Celeste feels defeated by the simple act of sitting upright in her chair for two hours. Everyone tells her this will improve, but her body tells her it will be a long time. And so she tries to concentrate on Jamie and not on the weakness in her muscles or the fatigue that sweeps over her in waves.

  She watches Jamie’s excitement as he paces, and it makes her smile to see him so enthusiastic. He’s such a nice man, she thinks but cannot say. But he doesn’t think so.

  And then there are the days he talks about the students who concern him the most. He doesn’t want to worry her, he says before he begins, but she shakes her head—no, it won’t. Peter Brosner from his sixth-grade English class is the student he lies awake at night thin
king about.

  “He never meets your eyes,” Jamie explains to Celeste, “even when I speak with him alone, after the rest of the class has gone. He only looks at his shoes, nods, mumbles, then hightails it out of the room as fast as he can. When I walk around the class to lecture, I can see that instead of taking notes, he’s constantly drawing these grotesque images of weapons attacking flesh. Comic-book images, but still …”

  “Angry,” Celeste says.

  “Yes.” Jamie sighs. “Very. I know something about that.”

  “No.” Celeste shakes her head. She doesn’t experience Jamie as angry at all. “Not now.”

  “A sleeping dragon inside me.” He makes a scary face. “Don’t wake it up.”

  Celeste grins at him. “Okay.”

  “I’ve tried talking to his parents, but they really don’t want to know. They tell me it’s all the video games and they shrug, what can you do, they say, all the kids play them.” Jamie shakes his head. He doesn’t believe for a moment that it’s the video games. Celeste reaches out and places a hand on his forearm in comfort. It’s the first time she’s touched him, and it stops their conversation. He finds he wants to take that hand in his and bring it to his lips—a revelation—but, of course, he doesn’t. He moves away, goes to stand next to the large window. What is he supposed to do now? He needs a moment to regroup, damp down the emotion, smooth the surface. It’s a skill he’s perfected.

  He looks out at the cloud-dotted sky, endlessly blue, and knows that the weather will be like this for months. Beautiful San Diego in the summer. Will she have to see it all from this window? he wonders. Celeste watches him and waits.

  “I’ve been talking too much” is what he finally says, not looking at her, very afraid of what he might say next.

  “No.”