Tell Me One Thing Read online

  Nicole shrugs. “Maybe there’s someone out there, but ‘it ain’t me, babe.’ ” She gathers her papers together into a neat pile, edges aligned, and affixes a metal clip to the corner before she slides them into a backpack. “Doesn’t matter … I’m married now, so … ancient history.”

  “It matters to me,” Ellen says quietly and the other woman nods. There isn’t anything else to say. Nicole gets up, carefully pushes her chair back under the table. “He’s a good man, but …” There’s a shake of her head, as if she still hasn’t figured Jamie out. And then she’s gone.

  Ellen sits in the empty room for a moment, more unsettled than she’d like to be by this confirmation of her brother’s life as solitary and self-denying.

  She needs to go back to Sweet & Savory, she suddenly realizes.

  WHEN ELLEN’S SEATED UNDER THE AWNING, at one of the bright metal tables, the same waiter brings her cappuccino and a wedge of spinach quiche she ordered inside. Today he’s wearing a yellow patterned bandanna across his forehead instead of the red he favored the morning she arrived.

  “Hey,” he says as he sets her food down, as if he remembers her.

  “Hi. I was here on Sunday morning with my brother. Do you remember? You brought us our coffees.”

  “Sure. You were my first customers, like at seven, right after we opened.”

  “Yes.” Ellen is more pleased than she has a right to be that he remembers them. “You seemed to know my brother.”

  “Just from here. I musta seen him ten, twenty times.”

  “Can I ask you something, then? About Jamie?”

  And immediately the kid looks wary. “I don’t really know him at all, like personally, you know?”

  “Was he usually alone?”

  The kid stops to think, as though a lot of money rode on the answer. “Yeah, I can’t remember him coming in with anyone, except, of course, for you.”

  “Okay, thanks, that’s it.”

  And the kid smiles again, hugely relieved, that was easy. He passed whatever test Ellen had put out there in front of him. “Anything else I can get you?”

  Ellen just shakes her head and he leaves her. She sips her coffee—God, that’s good—and takes in the morning information, from Nicole, from this kid. None of it surprises her. It just confirms for her that she made the right choice in coming.

  And then she starts to get angry. Calm down, she tells herself, but instead her mind runs endless loops of images of Jamie’s life—the spartan apartment that looks like nobody lives there, his separateness in the teachers’ lounge, that pretty teacher he wouldn’t have, his solitary meals sitting right at this table. She’s growing angrier and angrier.

  Get a grip, she tries to tell herself again, but it’s not working. She can feel the heat of anger rising. She knows the pale skin on her chest, now her cheeks, is flushing red. And she knows it isn’t good. She reaches for her cell phone, punches in a number she knows by heart.

  The woman who answers speaks in Spanish. Ellen answers in kind as she asks for Dr. Smithfield. And then Ellen’s face breaks wide with relief before she switches to English, “Amanda, thank God you’re there.”

  A decidedly English voice, with a lilt of humor, answers, “Ellen, I’m always here.”

  “I’m angry. I’m too angry at what I’ve found here. Jamie is denying himself everything but his teaching. There’s nothing else.”

  “That’s Jamie’s life. His responsibility. You know that, so why are you so—?”

  “Because the son of a bitch is winning! Because he’s still destroying Jamie’s life, only now it’s from the grave!” She’s yelling, her voice strident, suddenly much too aggressive and very loud. People at the other sidewalk tables are looking at her, then turning their eyes away, embarrassed.

  “That’s Jamie’s life. You need to take care of your own.”

  Ellen doesn’t answer. Instead she closes her eyes and tries to take a few good, deep breaths.

  “Ellen?”

  Finally Ellen lowers her shoulders, sits up straighter. “I know. I’m here. It’s all right. You’re right. I can only do what I can do.”

  “You can love him, Ellen. I know you can do that.”

  And Ellen smiles. “I can. Thank you. Again and again and again.”

  “I’ll see you when you get back,” Amanda Smithfield says, and she hangs up.

  I can love him, Ellen tells herself again. And it calms her. Yes, that is something she can do.

  “THERE’S A PLACE IN THE COUNTRYSIDE outside Malaga where people get a second chance to be alive.”

  “This is the good part, right?”

  Ellen nods, smiles at Jamie. “This is the good part.… I went from the hospital to Tracy’s and then to ‘A Safe Place’—that’s the name of it, ‘Un Lugar Seguro.’ And they’re not kidding. No one who isn’t wanted can get in, and no one who’s in can get out.”

  “Sounds like a prison.”

  “No, no, more like a womb.”

  They’re driving from Jamie’s school, where Ellen has picked him up, into the heart of the San Diego downtown, to the annual ArtWalk. Hundreds of local artists display their work. There are usually several bands, including a mariachi, and food stalls. It’s a street festival, and Jamie goes every year. He wants to show it to Ellen.

  It’s late on a Friday afternoon, and Ellen, who spent the week exploring, is at the wheel. She feels like she knows her way around now.

  The week has gone well for both of them. Breakfasts and dinners together. Each day inching closer to that sense of seamlessness they shared as children. Jamie went to work. Ellen explored. One day she went to the Wild Animal Park and rode the little tram around its acres and acres, visiting the Elephant Valley and the African Outpost, where she saw cheetahs and warthogs, and the Gorilla Forest, and the giraffes, of course the giraffes, her favorite. Another day she drove to La Jolla and walked the wide, clear beaches for miles. When Jamie got home he found her sun- and wind-burned and lazy with relaxation. They watched a DVD that night of Doubt because neither had ever seen it and both had plenty of memories of nuns and priests to add to the mix. They stretched out on Jamie’s forest green couch, now with colorful throw pillows under their heads, and ate popcorn for dinner and talked to each other and the TV screen all the way through the movie. A perfect evening.

  “If you want to be crass about it, it’s a rehab hospital,” Ellen continues as she drives, “only it looks like a spa—all the buildings have thick white walls and tile roofs, there’s bougainvillea draped over everything, I mean everything, in that shocking magenta. There are two pools, a massage room, a kitchen that turns out only organic food that is amazingly good, and acres of olive trees with paths and patios everywhere. You get the picture. Very tranquil. Muy tranquilo. Very expensive. Muy caro. Miguel paid for it. He sort of had to—he’d put me in the hospital twice. He didn’t want me to press charges.”

  Jamie watches her as she talks and steers the car down the Pacific Coast Highway, through the crowded Friday afternoon traffic, the endlessly blue ocean on their right. She does it effortlessly, as if she were the world’s most competent person.

  “What were you rehabbing from?”

  “Are you kidding me? From our childhood.”

  “Then all eight of us should be in a place like that.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “Really, Ellen, can you be a bit more specific?”

  She doesn’t answer him directly. She thinks about how to go about this conversation for a minute and then says, “You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were subjected to the kind of violence we were as kids, then as an adult, you’d avoid any situation that might conceivably lead there.”

  “I have,” Jamie says.

  “We’ll get to you in a minute. There’s a flip side to all this.”

  “Oh, good.” Jamie turns from her and looks out his window at the ocean. The sky at the horizon line is turning purple. It will be dusk soon. “I can’t wait to hear
the flip side,” Jamie says, his voice brittle and chopped.

  “Jamie, I almost died because I wouldn’t look at what was driving my life. Don’t check out on me here.”

  With effort he turns back to her, but he knows now that this “good part” is going to include things he doesn’t want to hear.

  “I had to let go of everything I believed about who I was and how I worked and what had made me. They have doctors there who help you do that—to see clearly, to be naked, psychologically speaking. When I came to Dad’s funeral, I had only done that work. I had stripped myself to the bone, and I was terrified. I hadn’t put myself together in a new way yet. That’s what you saw when I came to Buffalo.”

  “Who was that grim woman with the mustache?”

  Ellen laughs. It’s open and free. “Estella. She works there as a sort of psychiatric aide. The only way they’d let me leave was to have someone with me, to take care of me, sort of. And they were right. I was barely functioning. It took another six months before I could see another way to be. Before I could leave all that need for violence behind.”

  She looks over to see how Jamie is taking all this. His face gives nothing away, even to her.

  “Here’s the thing—you can’t just bury all the shit we lived through and expect to have any sort of life.”

  “I have a life,” he says through tight lips.

  “Barely, Jamie, barely. Don’t you see how much you deny yourself?”

  He shakes his head. Here it comes, he thinks, here comes the attack.

  “Ellen,” he says as calmly as he can, “I hope you didn’t fly all this way to tell me how to live.”

  “I did!” she crows, as if he’s won the jackpot. “That’s exactly why I’m here! Because I learned something vital. Because I know now that what you’re doing is just burying everything. I chose to act it out. You choose to stuff it down. It’s the same shit, and it’s ruining your life as much as it ruined mine.”

  “Ellen …” and now his tone is a warning.

  “I want you to see what I now see—”

  “We’re different people, Ellen, you’re—”

  “I want you to have more, Jamie—”

  “I can’t!” And this last is a cry and it shuts Ellen’s mouth. She stares straight ahead as she takes Grape Street east, away from the ocean. At the first red light, she looks over at him. He looks so miserable.

  “I love you, Jamie.”

  “I know that, but we all have to find our own way through all this. I have something I love in my life, my teaching, and I consider myself lucky. Leave it be.”

  As the light turns green, she pulls ahead slowly. It’s crowded here already. People walking in groups toward Little Italy, some on the sidewalks, the overflow at the edges of the street.

  “Which street do I make a right on?”

  “India, and then park anywhere after Fir that you can.”

  “Okay.”

  There’s silence, but it is an unresolved silence. Ellen hasn’t given up. Jamie can sense her pent-up frustration. Her hands on the steering wheel are tight. She pushes herself against the back of the driver’s seat as if she will stand up at any moment. Her foot on the accelerator is heavy, and he can see she’s trying to figure out how to frame the next volley. He braces himself for the onslaught as she starts to talk again, tightly restrained.

  “I had to understand the violence in my life so I could eliminate it forever. Jamie, do you even realize how free I feel?”

  He shakes his head no.

  “That was my task, and yours is to open up the lockbox where you’ve stuffed everything since you were a teenager. The beatings. The night Dad almost killed you …”

  “Stop it, Ellen!”

  “I won’t stop it! I won’t give up on you!”

  She makes a right on India Street, too fast. Jamie can feel the car tremble. She doesn’t realize. She’s focused on Jamie, on having him understand, on saving his life. The ArtWalk is right in front of them, down about a block. The street and sidewalk are packed with people, walking toward it. Families with children in strollers. People who’ve come with their dogs. There’s a live band at the corner of Fir and India, and their amplified sound blasts out into the twilight air.

  “Ellen!” he yells above the music. He wants her to slow down, but he’s not sure she can hear him.

  “You have to listen to me, Jamie!” Her voice is urgent. She’s searching his face to see how far she can push.

  “Look!” He’s pointing at the people in front of them clogging the street, but she’s too intent upon her mission. She will save her brother. She won’t be derailed.

  “Your life is at stake!” She’s screaming now over the music, her body taut, rising up from the seat, her foot pressing down on the accelerator, but she doesn’t realize. The car is speeding. The streets are clogged with pedestrians.

  “Stop!” he screams at her. “Stop, Ellen, stop!”

  He grabs the wheel, but it’s too late. The first body hits the car with a sickening thud. The next with a scream that pierces his heart and shatters it.

  Ellen slams on the brakes and the car comes to a shuddering stop. She stares with horror at the carnage in front of her, unable to move. Jamie pushes open the passenger door and gets out. To see what happened, to help if he can. But it’s too late, he sees. Oh God, it’s too late. The damage has already been done.

  Aftermath

  HAVING SPENT MOST OF HIS FORTY-THREE years intimately acquainted with the notion that the sins of the father are visited upon the son, Jamie O’Connor now contemplates the sins of the sister. Deep in the middle of the night, as he drives from his home to University Hospital, he tries to determine what his responsibility is to carry those.

  Twenty-four days ago his sister Ellen plowed into a crowd of people walking to a street fair. She was driving his car. He was there, sitting in the passenger’s seat. Should he hold himself culpable for her act? For not insisting when she picked him up from school that Friday afternoon that she slide over and let him drive? Should he have seen she was in no shape to be behind the wheel?

  But she seemed fine, Jamie argues with himself. By now, he’s had this internal debate too many times to count. It’s boring and compelling and urgent all at the same time. She drove with confidence. Like a pro. She could have given a master class on how to navigate the I-5 Freeway, he reminds himself yet again.

  All right, then, maybe he can’t fault himself for not taking the wheel at the beginning of the ride, but what about once she became agitated? Once he saw her knuckles whiten, her hands clutch the steering wheel too tightly? What about when he saw her back press up against the driver’s seat as if she wanted nothing more than to burst through her skin?

  But how do you do that? How do you force a person to stop a car safely? When I yelled at her to stop, did that just make things worse?

  A groan escapes from deep within him and Jamie shakes his head slightly, alone in his car. What part of this disaster was his fault? What should he have seen that he missed? How much of the carnage could he have realistically prevented? There are no answers to his questions. He knows that now. It is the weight of this burden that propels him through the streets of San Diego.

  It seemed to Jamie for weeks after the accident that there was nothing else on the local television news or in the papers—“Sister of San Diego Teacher Crashes Car into ArtWalk Crowd.” Several people had whipped out their cell phones at the first horrified scream, and their grainy videos were played on the networks obsessively. Various police officers were interviewed on camera. The accident-reconstruction people brought out their renderings of tire tracks and skid marks. And one channel ran animated drawings of the bodies’ trajectories as they flew, endlessly, through the air.

  Jamie’s colleagues at Pacific Village Middle School turned up on news cameras regularly, all expressing shock. Jamie was so quiet, such a gifted teacher, they uniformly said. Some had met Ellen when she visited school to watch Jamie teach. She see
med so nice, they said. Everyone seemed genuinely puzzled how something so awful could happen to such decent people.

  That question had led to the second round of media speculation. Mental health experts, from the safety of their armchairs, offered opinions about the driver’s possible mental state—repressed hostility, depressive disorder, a subconscious suicide wish. Then legal experts weighed in on probable trial strategies for both sides. None were shy to predict outcomes and sentences.

  But no one had talked to Ellen. She was in jail. Her bail had been set at five hundred thousand dollars, and neither Jamie nor anyone he knew had the kind of money it would have taken to get her out.

  Seven people had been injured, two seriously. A forty-seven-year-old manager at a Sears store in Chula Vista had suffered broken bones, a lacerated spleen, and internal bleeding. He was recovering. The other, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, was still in the intensive-care unit, where her survival chances had been broadcast almost hourly by every local news outlet.

  It is Celeste that Jamie comes to see in the middle of the night. The first time, five days after the accident, he felt compelled to go. He knew it made no sense. What could he offer? Why would anyone want him there? Logical questions, but completely irrelevant to the imperative he felt. He needed to be there.

  He waited until very late at night, after the news cameras were gone and the hospital staff was a skeleton crew. Then it was simple to slip through the emergency entrance. No one paid him much attention at two o’clock in the morning. He took the elevator up to the seventh floor. He knew where the intensive-care unit was from the time one of his students had swallowed too many of her mother’s pills. Jamie had kept the vigil with her family until the girl was out of danger and moved to the psychiatric floor.

  When he walked into the waiting room of the ICU, he knew immediately that the man sitting alone in there was her father. The papers had said she was from Montana, doing graduate work in marine biodiversity and conservation. They all mentioned she had grown up on a horse farm not far from Helena, as if there was something faintly exotic about it all—life on a ranch, raised by a single father.