Tell Me One Thing Read online

  The man sitting there looked like everyone’s image of a cowboy—a body made lean from physical labor, a face weathered from being outside through all seasons, dark hair needing a cut and laced with gray, spilling over the collar of a blue work shirt. Late fifties, Jamie guessed. The man sat very still, the weight of his body on the balls of his feet, his back not touching the vinyl of a yellow molded chair. To Jamie he looked as if he was holding himself back from springing up and rushing out of this godforsaken place. Jamie’s eyes went to the man’s hands. They were open and splayed flat on his thighs, the only part of him that didn’t seem poised for flight.

  Jamie sat down next to him, knowing he needed to say something but without a clue what that might be. “Mr. Jewell?”

  Chet Jewell turned his eyes to Jamie. They were a pale blue, almost gray, and they contained so much bewilderment that Jamie almost got up and left. He didn’t know how to answer the question he saw there. Why? Why?

  “Are you a doctor?” is what Chet Jewell said instead.

  “No.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “I thought I might sit with you.”

  Chet’s eyes swept the clock mounted on the far wall. “Don’t you have anyplace better to be at two ten in the morning?”

  “No.”

  “No wife or kids?”

  “No.”

  And then he swiveled in his chair and really looked at Jamie. “What is all this to you?”

  “My sister was driving the car.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Jamie had no idea what Chet Jewell might do. Punch him? Toss him across the room? He looked capable of either. Instead, Celeste’s father nodded—he certainly understood grief when he saw it—and then turned his eyes away from Jamie, out the darkened windows that gave back nothing but his own haunted face.

  That first night they sat side by side for many hours, until the sun came up and Jamie had to go teach. Neither man spoke, but now there were two sets of eyes to scan the faces of the ICU nurses as they swept past the waiting room, busy, preoccupied. Something About Celeste? each man asked silently, afraid to speak. Not that night.

  And throughout the always dangerous predawn hours, when the world seems at its bleakest, Jamie offered what he could—a second body immobile in a chair, a second set of shoulders not quite touching, a second heartbeat to match the first.

  AFTER THAT, MORE NIGHTS THAN NOT, Jamie found himself making the twenty-minute drive from his condo to the hospital. Always late at night. Always without much premeditation. Oftentimes when sleep eluded him, he’d get up out of his solitary bed, gather the things he’d need for school the next day—the set of seventh-grade essays he’d graded earlier that evening or the questions for the poetry test he’d be giving his honors class—and make the drive with what he came to acknowledge as a quiet sense of anticipation. The desire has been born in him to sit beside Chet Jewell.

  For many nights the men don’t speak. That Chet nods when Jamie shows up and allows him to take the seat beside him is enough. Sometimes Jamie brings in coffee for the two of them, and that is appreciated.

  Both men come to know the night nurses who attach the tubes and watch the monitors and change the dressings and respond to the alarms when they go off: Patty Joe, blond and heavy, who is curt with everyone and seems too angry to work in such a tenuous place; Felicia, Filipina, demure and worried, who never makes eye contact with any of the relatives; Sandra, who is built to play basketball and never seems to speak. But it is Tamara they pay the most attention to. Both men sense she is the one who would give them what little information there is about Celeste.

  Tamara is small and tidy and efficient, that’s clear. A light brown woman in her forties, she seems confident without being showy. They can pick all that up by watching her work, and their eyes never leave her on the nights she’s on duty, following her as she weaves in and out of patients’ rooms.

  When she comes to the door of the waiting room to speak with Chet, she includes Jamie, assuming he is a family member, and no one corrects her. Her updates are usually short, delivered on the fly, but gratefully accepted. “Her temperature is down,” she tells them one night. “Her pupils are responding to light, that’s a good sign,” she tells them a few nights later. The men receive her words with nods and always a “thank you” from Chet but never a question of his own. It is almost as if he feels his only role is to wait and accept. As if what is happening in that ICU is beyond his ability to fully take in. Forming a question would be an impossibility.

  Several nights after Jamie begins to sit with Chet, Tamara comes to them one early morning. The sky is lightening out the window, a dove gray, then a slight blush of pink. She sits down, turns her chair to face them both, and Jamie’s heart sinks. Something serious must have happened to Celeste. Tamara never sits down to speak with them. But no, that isn’t it. It’s the seriousness of her instructions that makes her sit down. She tells them that Celeste’s coma is the body’s way of quieting the brain so it can begin its repair. She says they mustn’t lose hope; she’s seen amazing things in her twelve years working the ICU. Both men believe her when she speaks. She has that kind of gravitas.

  “Talk to her,” Tamara tells them, “hold her hand and tell her that you’re here. Tell her that you’re not going anywhere and that you’ll be here when she wakes up.”

  Chet nods but he doesn’t move. “Now,” she says, “now you need to do that. Come on.” And she prompts him to stand up. “You, too,” she says to Jamie.

  “No … I’m not really …” he begins.

  “She’s got two hands and there’s two of you.”

  Jamie finds himself following the straight back of Chet Jewell into the sedated light of Celeste’s cubicle.

  She lies absolutely still. This is what death looks like is Jamie’s first thought, although he knows she isn’t dead. Her chest rises slightly as the machines breathe for her. The electronic screens all record some kind of activity, evidence that the body is alive, if not the mind.

  She doesn’t look like her pictures in the papers, of course. Those showed a girl who thought life was an adventure. There was a kind of friendly challenge to the cock of her head, to her open, grinning face. This young woman who lies so undefended in a startlingly white bed seems younger and somehow purified.

  Jamie hangs back in the doorway—he doesn’t belong here, he feels—and watches Chet pull a straight-backed chair close to the right side of the bed. The father takes his daughter’s lifeless hand in his two large, callused ones. They are trembling.

  “There’s another chair,” Chet says without looking at Jamie, but it is an invitation. Jamie comes into the room and positions a chair close to the other side of Celeste’s bed. That first night he can’t bring himself to reach for Celeste’s hand. He doesn’t have the right. Or the courage.

  Chet doesn’t seem to notice. His head is bowed. His eyes are closed. His hands cling to his daughter’s. Softly, he begins to talk, whispering really, a prayer: “Please … please … please … please …”

  That night and during the ones to come, over Celeste’s motionless body, the men begin to talk. In hushed voices, haltingly the first few nights, then more expansively. The whisperings of the machines against the quiet, the delicacy of Celeste’s condition, the cocoon of the ICU where the outside world doesn’t exist—all these make confessions possible.

  “Her mother left when she wasn’t even two,” Chet begins. “How does a mother leave her own child?”

  Jamie shakes his head. He doesn’t know the answer to that.

  “She said she didn’t know what she had signed on for. I took that to mean me. And probably life in Montana, on a ranch …” He shrugs. “Maybe that meant being a mother, too. I don’t know. She just left and never came back.”

  Chet looks up at Jamie. “Do you know what it is to raise a child? Yours or someone else’s?”

  “No.”

  “It lifts the spirit. If you’ve got someone like Ce
leste, it does that.”

  Jamie can’t imagine his own father, dead just over a year now, embracing anything resembling Chet’s sentiments. To Hugh O’Connor, his eight children were lumped together as “the little shits,” and he made it clear that they were a drain and a trouble and a cause of endless fury for their multiple shortcomings. The beatings the four boys endured for most of their growing up were their own damn faults, Hugh maintained, instead of the heedless cruelty Jamie has come to understand them to be. So this notion that raising a child “lifts the spirit” is as alien to Jamie as the environment the two men are occupying as they speak.

  Jamie tries for a minute to imagine his father in this room watching over one of his children, and he knows immediately that his father would never be here or anywhere near a hospital. When Marianne, the youngest of them and the favored, was tiny, she got in the way of one of her older brothers as he was carrying a large pot of spaghetti from stove to sink. She was burned very badly. Second- and third-degree burns over her chest and legs and in the hospital for weeks and weeks, Jamie remembers. His mother went every day and sat by Marianne’s crib and read to her from the worn children’s books that were always piled in an old basket in the basement of their brick house. But his father never came. There were excuses—“I’m working overtime to keep you kids in Catholic school,” or “Your mother does the visiting for both of us”—but even then, when he was just twelve years old, Jamie thought his father was a coward. He couldn’t face the hospital and the sight of Marianne bandaged and whimpering in pain.

  Jamie remembers his parents standing in their old kitchen, which was narrow and cramped like the whole house. And, like the whole house, it was filled up with useless stuff—ceramic figurines and broken sports equipment piled in a corner, discarded clothes thrown across chair backs, and Christmas decorations that have never been put away. It’s early morning and his mother is packing lunches for himself and Ellen.

  His father is wearing his white overalls with the name “O’Connor Plumbing” on the back in brown script, and he’s pouring hot coffee into a large thermos.

  She wants to see you, Hugh, his mother is saying in his memory.

  Aw, she’ll see enough of me when she comes on home.

  Just a few minutes would do her a world of good.

  You tell her that I love her. His father is grabbing his heavy plaid jacket, preparing to leave.

  Hugh, his mother says, and this is as close to a rebuke as she ever gets, the child’s two years old.

  Don’t tell me I don’t know how old my children are. Hugh is angry. He slams the back door as he leaves.

  No, Jamie knows with certainty, his father would never show up in the intensive-care unit and hold the hand of his daughter and plead with her to live. To wake up and live.

  SOMETIMES JAMIE AND CELESTE’S FATHER talk about mundane things. It is an escape route from the surrealism of where they are. And the stories pull them both back to a time before Jamie’s sister turned his car into a lethal weapon and before Celeste lay supremely helpless in a hospital bed. Chet talks about how the family he works for, the Swensons, has transformed what had been for generations a working horse and cattle ranch into what is euphemistically called a “guest ranch.” Chet spits out the two words. Jamie doesn’t have to ask him how he feels about the transition.

  “Now we have to take these people along when we move the cattle from one pasture to the next or let ’em watch the colt training or drop what we’re supposed to be doing and take them out on a ‘ride,’ as if that’s an activity, ‘a ride.’ That’s how we get from place to place—on a horse. It’s not an activity.”

  Jamie smiles slightly. He can’t help it. Chet is so indignant.

  “You ever been on a horse?”

  “No. I’m a city boy. From Buffalo.”

  “Well, let me tell you—you have a relationship with a horse, a real one, then you don’t need many people in your life.”

  “I’ve gotten to that point without the horse,” Jamie says, grinning.

  “I thought so.”

  ONE NIGHT, WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, Chet starts to talk about what Celeste was like as a child. How she took to all the ranch life like a natural. How she could ride well by the time she was four. How, when she got older, she loved to help him in the spring, during foaling season. That they’d stay up all night together if a mare was having a hard time and Celeste would never complain. And about how excited she’d get when the foal was finally born. She always said it was worth it, the long hours, the cold in the middle of the night, because Look, she’d say, Dad, look what we got!

  That’s why, Chet admits to Jamie, he couldn’t understand her need to go so far away for college. She insisted she had to be somewhere she could see the ocean. That was the criterion—not how good the school was, or how much it cost, or how big or small it was, just that the ocean be nearby. Like there was some magical pull to be near the sea.

  “That’s what we do,” Jamie tells Chet, “we find the opposite and we move toward it. It’s part of finding yourself.”

  “Celeste was herself. More than anyone I ever knew.”

  “That was one self,” Jamie says quietly, “the one who was your daughter and who lived on a horse ranch in Montana and had never been to the West Coast. She needed to find other selves. That you didn’t know, precisely because you didn’t know them … It’s what they’re supposed to do in order to grow up.”

  Chet is silent a long time. He watches his daughter’s face as if the answer is there, but not so much as an eyelash flutters. Then Chet asks in a harsh whisper, “Then it wasn’t me?”

  “No,” says Jamie without equivocation, even though he’s just met this man and has never spoken a word to his daughter. He knows that the right answer is “no” and he says it again, firmly. And he sees Chet sigh with what Jamie interprets as relief.

  “HOW DO YOU KNOW SO MUCH about what teenage girls have to do?” Chet asks him later that night, after he’s had time to mull over what Jamie has told him.

  “I don’t really, but I’ve been teaching middle school for thirteen years now, and you pick up some things just from being around them so much.”

  “What do you teach?” Another personal question from Chet.

  “English.”

  “And you like it?”

  “It saves my life.”

  Chet nods. He understands how something can do that. He knows that without the horses he wouldn’t be much alive.

  “And the rest?”

  “There is no ‘rest.’ ” Jamie shrugs, a bit embarrassed but he says it anyway. “Just an old-fashioned Irish bachelor.”

  “That mean you’re gay?”

  At that Jamie laughs softly, not offended as Chet feared. “No, that means I’ve never married and don’t really see any chance of it.”

  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 st
unned. 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.