Tell Me One Thing (6 page)

Yes, there’s plenty Ellen could latch onto in this campaign she seems to be embarked upon. Will she listen? That’s the question he asks himself. Will she believe him when he assures her he sees the perimeters of the bargain he’s struck with himself and he’s made peace with them?

•  •  •

WHEN HE OPENS THE FRONT DOOR
forty-five minutes later, sweaty and winded, it looks like Armageddon in his kitchen. Dirty pots are piled in the sink and across the countertops. Does he own all those or did Ellen buy some? Used plates and bowls are piled on every available surface and the floor. The bright red skins and pulp of tomatoes are smeared across a wooden chopping board like bloody entrails. Part of a chicken carcass rests, inexplicably, on his breakfast bar next to bowls of mussels and shrimp. On the stove some kind of sausage—chorizo, Ellen tells him later—is sizzling away at too high a heat and suddenly his smoke alarm goes off with a deafening shriek. And in the middle of all this, Ellen turns around, grinning with manic goodwill, and greets him, “Welcome to paella Espagnia!”

“Turn the burner off!” Jamie shouts.

“What?!”

And he does it himself, switching off the gas, moving the frying pan away, and then ripping the batteries out of the smoke alarm. The sudden quiet is like a slap in the face.

Ellen sneaks a quick peek at her brother’s face and knows she has to quickly salvage this. “I had it all under control until that damn thing went off.”

“That ‘damn thing’ goes off when you’re in danger of burning the whole place down.”

Ellen takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want this evening to start off with an argument. She gathers her calmness around her with a second deep breath. Firmly, without rancor, she tells him, “Go take a shower and I’ll finish up here. You’ll be amazed when you get back.”

He grunts and goes.

When he comes out of his bedroom twenty minutes later, his black hair wet, sleeked back and curling around his neck, barefoot, wearing a pair of comfortable jeans and an old T-shirt, he
sees a large platter of just-finished paella resting on the dining room table. It smells amazing. New straw placemats hold his old white dishes. Patterned napkins Ellen must have also bought—Jamie would never buy anything with a pattern—finish the place settings. A bottle of red wine and a round loaf of crusty bread he recognizes from Sweet & Savory take up the middle of the table. It all looks so sumptuous, so lovingly prepared, that his heart melts. He scrupulously avoids looking into the kitchen.

“Wow,” he says softly.

“Sit down,” Ellen says, “I’m going to feed you.”

And she does. She spoons out the paella, cuts the bread, pours him some wine. He feels taken care of in a way he hasn’t since Nicole left three years before.

When they were first dating, Nicole would cook for him, but by the time the relationship was in trouble, six months later, the cooking had stopped.
There is no upside
, she had told him,
to giving to someone who isn’t giving back
.

The thing is, he was giving, only not nearly enough for most reasonable people. Why didn’t he confide in her, she asked, or “share his feelings” about anything important? He couldn’t explain beyond the imperfect and inadequate “That’s how I am.”

He wouldn’t agree to have her move in, and he needed to be alone too many nights a week for her to feel truly wanted. At first she had thought she’d win him over; hence the cooking and the acquiescence to his need for nights alone. But when nothing progressed, when she felt as though they were still in week three of their dating, she began to complain and then push him to argue, but he wouldn’t. He knew what was coming and he wouldn’t try to talk her out of it. He simply shook his head when she told him she was leaving.

“Say something!” she threw at him. “Argue with me. Tell me
you need more time. Convince me there’s really a loving, giving Jamie trapped in old habits! Speak to me! I’m walking out the door here, Jamie.”

“I understand” is what he said so quietly she almost missed it.

She stared at him in disbelief and then, when he didn’t say another word, the sorrow that flooded her pretty face made him turn away. “Pathetic” was the last word he heard before the slam of the front door.

After the paella, Ellen serves him coffee and a caramelized pear tart she bought along with the bread. It’s then that she picks up her story from the night before.

She says, with a grin to acknowledge that she’s quoting him, “So I went to Spain for a fresh start.”

“That I understand.” Jamie is playing along.

“And at first it felt like that. I stayed with Tracy for a few weeks while I found a job and a tiny room. I took Spanish lessons. I walked around the city a lot on my own. It all felt sort of pure, you know? Like, the simpler the better. No entanglements. Just me getting through each day, learning the city a little more, learning Spanish a little more. Seeing Tracy and Rafael but really no one else. It all felt manageable and I felt like I was calming down. I didn’t call Mom or Dad. I e-mailed them occasionally, but part of my recovery, I realized, was scaling those old relationships way back.”

“Why do you think I’m three thousand miles away?”

“I get it, Jamie. I never questioned your move away, did I?”

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 blacked 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.”