Tell Me One Thing (7 page)

“Okay,” she says reasonably, “I’ve given you a lot to take in.”

“Would you call that an understatement?”

And she grins at him. “Yep.”

•  •  •

WHEN HE LEAVES FOR SCHOOL
the next morning, she comes with him. She wants to see where he works and then she wants to explore San Diego. She’ll drive around a bit and then pick him back up at three thirty. They arrange it over breakfast, sitting at his breakfast bar, drinking their coffees, and idly reading the morning paper.

She seems so calm to Jamie, so present, so unaffected by the story she told him last night that part of him doesn’t believe her. How could she have gone through what she described (and he has a feeling she left a great deal out) and still be the Ellen he knows? The two things can’t quite coexist in his mind.

When she looks up from the paper and sees him scrutinizing her, she again knows what he’s thinking. “I survived, Jamie, and something miraculous happened because of all the pain. Don’t judge until you hear the rest of the story.”

“Give me a breather here, El.”

She laughs. “I can wait.”

Jamie’s school is close to the water. It seems to Ellen that practically everything in San Diego is within sight of the Pacific Ocean. The middle-school building is part of a vast old military base. Some of the other buildings have been renovated, too, and Jamie points out the elementary school and the high school as he parks in the teachers’ lot.

“We’re all part of a charter school run by a private corporation. They leased the land from the Defense Department, refurbished the buildings, and set all this up.”

“So it’s a private school?” Ellen asks as they open the large glass double doors and walk into the main hallway. Inside, the building has been opened up with skylights and bright paint colors horizontally striped along the walls.

“No,” Jamie explains, “we’re part of the San Diego Unified School District. The kids have to meet their standards, but because we’re a charter, they pretty much leave us alone.”

“Well, that should suit you just fine,” Ellen says, and she looks at him sideways as they enter the main office so he can check his mailbox.

“Very funny.” But he doesn’t seem at all offended as he grabs a fistful of mail from a cubbyhole, one in a row of several dozen along the left-hand wall of the office. “You want some more coffee before class starts?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

He points her across the hall to the teachers’ lounge. It’s a long, narrow room with windows overlooking the front of the school. Someone’s taken the trouble to put together a cozy room—easy chairs in the same primary colors as the hallways.
Everything in this school seems to pop out at you
, Ellen thinks.
Do they need to wake people up?
Some of the chairs have ottomans next to them, useful for putting up aching feet or as a place for the paper overload that always seems to accompany any teacher. There are two small, round tables for catching up on work in one corner of the room and an efficient coffee area with a tiny sink and under-counter refrigerator and the ever-going coffeemaker opposite it.

Jamie pours them each a mug of coffee and introduces Ellen to the handful of teachers who are getting ready for their day. “My sister Ellen, everyone. She’s visiting from Spain.”

The teachers are friendly. They greet her. She sips her coffee and looks around the room. More teachers have come in to grab a cup of coffee or simply as a respite before the day officially begins. They stand in twos and threes, chatting. But, she sees, not Jamie. He’s over by the windows, by himself, reading what looks like a memo. No one approaches him and he doesn’t look up. It bothers her that he is the singular person in a room of groups and conversation, and she’s watching him, waiting for him to turn and talk to someone or have someone talk to him, and so she doesn’t see a very pretty woman in her thirties come over to her.

“I didn’t know Jamie had a sister,” she says.

“Jamie has four sisters.”

“Really?” The woman seems puzzled.

She’s fine boned, wrenlike, with honey-colored hair that today she’s pulled back into a sleek ponytail, not a tendril escaping. Immediately Ellen can tell that this woman has been pretty all her life and takes it for granted. No makeup. Clothes that seem too casual for teaching—cargo pants, a T-shirt advertising San Diego State, and running shoes. Next to her Ellen feels like an unruly Amazon, her wiry reddish hair unattended, her five-foot-seven height oversized.

“I’m Nicole. I’ve known your brother forever.”

“And you didn’t know he has four sisters and three brothers?”

“I wouldn’t call your brother much of a talker.” And this last is said with just enough of an undertone of bitterness that Ellen pays more attention.

“Well, you know,” Ellen says, defending Jamie without even thinking about it, “when you grow up in a family of eight, there’s not much of a chance to talk. We shout. We’re really good at shouting.”

“There were times I would have been thrilled to hear him shout, but I never did,” Nicole says as she moves off, glancing at Jamie as she does. “Enjoy your visit.”

Okay
, Ellen thinks as she watches Nicole move across the room,
did she just mean what I think she meant?
She glances at Nicole’s left hand as she grabs the doorknob, surprised to see a wedding ring set with diamonds on her fourth finger.
Ancient history? Recent history? Recent enough for her to still be pissed
.

IN JAMIE’S FIRST-PERIOD CLASS
, his sixth graders, they’re discussing “The Road Not Taken,” the Robert Frost poem. Ellen sits at
the back of the class and takes it all in. She can see immediately that her brother is in his element, and she relaxes.

Jamie has led the kids to see that the two roads that “diverged in a yellow wood” are more than just paths through the forest. He tells them nothing. He asks questions and entertains many answers without calling any of them wrong, and so the atmosphere in the class encourages conversation. Ellen can see that the kids raise their hands eagerly, that they are confident Jamie will listen to them. And he’s animated, moving around the class, touching a student on a shoulder here and there, even clapping his hands at one answer from a quiet, dark-skinned boy in the back. “Yes, Ritesh!” he says. “ ‘The traveler’ could be any of us—‘and sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler.’ That’s right!” The boy shimmers with good feeling that Jamie has rewarded his opinion.

And when they get to the last stanza, Jamie reads it out loud. “ ‘I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’ ”

There’s a moment of silence after he finishes reading, and then a large boy with a puzzled look on his face blurts out, “What difference?” And there’s laughter from the other kids.

“A good question, Kyle,” Jamie says, and then to the class, “What is ‘the difference’ Frost is talking about?” More silence. No one seems to know exactly.

Jamie catches Ellen’s eye and they smile at each other. “The difference” has been the subtext of all their conversations the last few days.

Before Jamie can lead his sixth graders to an understanding of Frost’s words, the bell rings and the kids get up, gather their things, books into their backpacks, jackets across shoulders. Jamie has a group of kids around him as one class files out and another
files in, so Ellen keeps her seat at the back of the room. She doesn’t want to intrude, simply to observe.

As much as Ellen is thrilled to see Jamie in his element, when his second-period class starts with a discussion of the same poem, she’s not sitting still for a repeat. She gestures to Jamie that she’ll see him later and slips out the door.

As she’s walking down the quiet hallways, murmurs of teachers’ voices coming from open doorways, she recognizes the yellow doorway into the teachers’ lounge and slips in to return her coffee cup.

At first glance, she thinks the room is empty, but as she rinses the mug in the sink, she notices the woman she spoke with that morning, Nicole, sitting at one of the round tables, grading papers. Her head is down. Her body is still, no wasted motions, only her hand with a red pen in it moves. She takes up such a small space in the room that it isn’t hard to miss her.

“You teach math?” Ellen asks when Nicole looks up and smiles at her.

“Algebra, I and II.” Then, “Did you watch Jamie teach?”

“Yes.”

“He loves it, doesn’t he?”

“A lot,” Ellen says as she comes and sits at the table with Nicole. Then, “How well do you know each other?”

“Oh, I could say intimately and not at all.”

Ellen nods. She knows exactly what this woman is talking about.

“But he disappointed you?”

“Just till I got it through my thick head that he’d rather be alone than with me.”

“Or anybody?” Is that what Nicole is saying—that her brother doesn’t want anyone close to him?

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.