Tell Me One Thing (10 page)

Maybe it’s the late hour. Maybe it’s the exhaustion of too many nights spent here in the ICU. Probably it’s the sanctuary of Celeste’s room, but Jamie finds himself doing something he never does. He begins to talk about himself, about his past. About his father’s drinking and his brutality. About his mother’s complicity even though she never lifted a hand to any of them. About how she refused to intervene between his father’s titanic rages and any one of her children.

It’s time for Jamie to go. To return to his condo, grab a quick shower, and get to school. He stands and stretches. The two men have been sitting there for five hours.

“That’s all three thousand miles and twenty-five years ago.
Now,” he says, “I’m doing the best I can.” Jamie isn’t sure, even as he says it, whether it’s the truth.

ON A THURSDAY NIGHT SOMEWHERE BETWEEN
eleven and midnight, when Jamie arrives in the ICU, he finds Chet pacing outside Celeste’s room. All the curtains are drawn and it’s impossible to know what’s going on, but he can immediately see that Chet is upset.

“What’s happening?”

“She’s thrashing around in there.”

“She is?” Jamie is stunned. He hasn’t seen her so much as move a finger. “What are they doing with her?”

“Giving her some kind of test to figure out what’s going on.”

The men wait together, Chet pacing when he can no longer stand still. They can hear groans and angry sounds coming from the room, and then the door opens and Dr. Banerjee comes out. He’s a neurologist, originally from India, and he’s inordinately polite.

“Please,” he says to both men, “would you join me in the waiting room?”

Chet says yes, but looks past the doctor to see if Celeste is all right and meets Tamara’s eyes. She stands in the doorway of the room and indicates with a tilt of her head that they should hear the doctor out.

The men find the well-worn plastic chairs in the waiting room and the compact, brown-skinned doctor leans forward so they can talk quietly.

“She’s struggling to wake up,” he tells them in a soft voice, marked with that distinctive Indian lilt, “and many times that struggle is fueled by anger. That’s what you’re hearing. The more aware the patient is of what she’s feeling, sometimes the angrier she becomes.”

Chet stares at the doctor as if he hasn’t understood one word he said. There’s a long, drawn-out silence. Jamie looks at Chet, waits for him to respond to the doctor’s words, but Chet appears frozen in space. So Jamie, totally unaccustomed to asserting himself, finds his voice for the two of them. “Are you saying she’s coming out of the coma?”

“We think so.”

Jamie glances again at Chet before he continues. “And what will she be like, if she does?”

“Ah, you’re asking for my crystal-ball properties. I’m afraid I haven’t any. We must just wait and see. Wait and see.” And the doctor stands up to indicate the moment is over. “We’ll talk tomorrow, then.” And he’s gone.

JAMIE TAKES THE NEWS TO HIS SISTER
Ellen at the San Diego County Jail, where she’s been since the accident. Her public defender, a young woman named Carmen Arteaga, uses Celeste’s recovery to bolster her case for deportation instead of incarceration. Ellen has been living in Spain for the past seven years, Carmen reminds the prosecutor as they discuss her case, one among too many they both have to handle.

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 corridors 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?”