Tell Me One Thing (11 page)

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 thinking 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.”

“We should do something more fun.”

“This is … fun.”

Finally, he turns from the window, an action plan in mind. He
grins at her, shaking his head to disagree with her. “Girl, you have been cooped up too long. I need to remind you what fun is!”

SO NOW, ON SUNDAYS, HE BRINGS
a DVD for them to see. They make a pact that they will go through the American Film Institute’s one hundred best comedies. They like the silly movies best, the sillier the better, films he would never have seen on his own:
Duck Soup
,
Blazing Saddles
,
There’s Something About Mary
,
It’s a Mad
,
Mad
,
Mad
,
Mad World
—the title of which resonates particularly with both of them.

They’re outrageous and crude and very funny. Celeste gets all the jokes, another positive sign, Dr. Banerjee says. Jamie has dubbed Sunday afternoons “Movie Matinee Day,” and it gives them something to look forward to. It’s when they can laugh together, Jamie always leading the way, getting the jokes a split second before she does. He assumes it’s her injured brain still having trouble processing quickly, but mostly it’s because Celeste’s attention is often focused on Jamie. Because she watches his face light up with laughter, hers comes second.

And then, there is Celeste’s secret. Despite the relaxed happiness of Sunday afternoons, it’s Wednesdays that she looks forward to the most. Jamie arrives after teaching summer school, and there isn’t enough time for a movie then. They have to talk or sit quietly, and it’s those hours that get her through the long week of physical therapy and occupational therapy and cognitive therapy and speech therapy, the hardest one of all.

She needs her speech therapy. She needs to be able to say all the words that are swimming around her brain, just out of reach of her tongue. She needs to tell Jamie that he has saved her life. That if she didn’t have his visits to look forward to she thinks she’d give up. She needs to make him see how good he is. She’s
listened enough to understand that he feels he’s worth something only when he’s teaching, and she wants to tell him that this isn’t so. That the Jamie she knows from the hospital rooms she’s inhabited these many months, to her that Jamie is beautiful.

But she can’t say anything any of those things yet, not with the complexity that might make him believe her.

IN THE TIME BETWEEN THE END
of summer school and the beginning of the fall semester, Jamie has several unscheduled weeks. In prior years he used those days to prepare for the coming school year. He meticulously made his lesson plans for all five classes. He reread the books or plays or essays that he would assign so that they were fresh in his mind, even though he had taught most of them for years. He would go to school and rearrange his classroom. But not this year. This summer none of that happens, because he finds himself making the drive north many times a week. He tries to convince himself that he is fulfilling the promise he made to Chet, that the trips north are altruistic, but he knows that’s not even half the story.

One Tuesday afternoon when he arrives exactly at one thirty, as he said he would, he finds Celeste waiting at the elevator for him, standing up, holding on to a walker. When he steps out onto the floor, she turns without a word and takes four steps, unaided, before she collapses back into the waiting wheelchair Nadia holds for her.

Jamie is astonished. “You’re walking.…”

“I wanted … a surprise …” she manages to say, breathing hard from the exertion.

“You pulled it off, didn’t you? Wow, you’re walking!”

“A little …”

“But a little leads to a lot, right, Nadia?”

“We think so.”

“I want …”—Celeste struggles for the word and then when she finds it, she grins at him—“a … reward.”

“And what would that be?”

“The ocean … I want … to see … the ocean.”

Jamie looks at Nadia for permission. “Could I take her?”

And before Nadia can answer, Celeste says, “I say yes!”

THE REHAB FACILITY HAS BEAUTIFUL GROUNDS
, carefully planted and landscaped with level walkways, fountains with benches around them, but Celeste isn’t interested. Only the ocean will do, and so Jamie has to push her chair past the manicured lawns and the curved flower beds bursting on this late summer’s day with cosmos and zinnias and salvia in shades of purple. They cross the main driveway and come out onto the winding road that brings visitors to the hospital and then continues on.

Jamie pushes Celeste along the shoulder of the road, being careful to look for cars, conscious that her safety is in his hands, but she seems supremely unconcerned. She puts her head back and takes in the feel of the sun on her skin. Her eyes are closed and she is smiling.

“I smell it,” she says to him. And so does he. The ocean.

Carefully, afraid that he might be jostling her newly knit bones too much, he turns off the road and cuts across the yellowing late summer grass of an empty field. He knows that if he can get her to the edge of it, she will be able to overlook the ocean. She will be able to see for miles.

She doesn’t open her eyes. She waits. He doesn’t talk, because he’s concentrating on the uneven surface of the dirt, attempting to pick out the least bumpy path. And then he stops the chair, sets the two hand brakes, and kneels down beside her so that he can
see what she will be seeing. And yes, the view is perfect—Swami’s Beach is in front of them. The sun is on the water. The waves are shallow and rhythmic, running up the sand in frilly white ruffles. The horizon line goes on forever, blending with the bluest sky of the summer.

“Here,” he says to her. And she opens her eyes. It’s all there. All in front of her. All that she has longed for these many arduous months.

“Oh, Jamie,” she says, “thank you.”

And she takes his hand and brings it to her and holds it with both of her hands. He lets her. He wants her to.

“Now,” she says, “I can get well.”

Tell Me One Thing