Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

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.

They’re in his office. It’s late in the day and there are shadows in the room, but he doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t reach to turn on a light. Carmen watches as Roger Koenig moves files from one surface to another, looking for Ellen’s. What hair he has left is steel gray. His body speaks of decades without exercise, and if they allowed smoking in city buildings, Carmen is sure he would have a cigarette burning between his fingers.

Roger knows he’s been doing this too long. It gets harder instead of easier to wade through the misery of most people’s lives. He asks himself at least once every day why he doesn’t just quit, and then he moves on without an answer.

He must be at least sixty , Carmen thinks as she watches him search and curse quietly under his breath. More than twice my age. If I’m doing this kind of work in thirty years, shoot me , she makes a note to herself.

Carmen is always in forward motion, never resting anywhere for too long. It’s the only way she got to college and through law school. One brother was murdered by a gang member when he was fifteen and the other works in an auto body shop. Her father moved the family to San Diego for the agricultural work and never really learned English well enough to get any other kind of job. It was her mother who cleaned houses to keep them going. And it was her indomitable mother who pushed Carmen to get out, to reach higher. She feels the obligation of her success every day of her life.

“The girl was moved from the ICU to a regular room.” Carmen speaks to Roger’s back now. “She’s going to live. So now we know we have reckless driving bodily injury, not vehicular manslaughter. There was no intent.”

“The woman mowed down seven people, and the fact that the girl’s going to live doesn’t tell us anything about how she’s going to live. What shape she’s going to be in.”

“It was an accident, Roger. I have to keep telling you and Ellen the same thing. The woman’s devastated. She feels so guilty she wants to die. You want remorse — she’s a poster child for remorse.”

Finally, Roger finds Ellen’s file and sits down behind his desk to scan the papers in it. Carmen leans over, snaps on his desk lamp — she can’t bear that he’s squinting to see — and continues to talk while he reads. She has a solution to all this and she wants him to sign off on it.

“Her doctor from Spain, her shrink, will be here tomorrow. Ellen spent a year in her center, institute, rehab place, whatever you want to call it. And Dr. Smithfield will take her back and be responsible for her. There — perfect solution. Ellen will be out of the country. She won’t be driving anywhere near San Diego ever again, and she’ll be getting the treatment she obviously needs. Anger management, et cetera, et cetera.” Carmen waves her hand in the air to indicate the et cetera, et cetera. It’s not that she doesn’t care what happens to Ellen. She’s come to like her and to understand that this accident has undone all the careful rebuilding Ellen’s attempted in her life. What she’s trying to do is move this case along without any push-back from Roger.

“Don’t you have enough seriously bad people to put away?” she asks him, a genuine question. “Ellen isn’t one of them.”

He leans back in his chair. “What a mess.”

“Roger, look at the psychiatric eval.” Carmen leans across the overloaded desk and searches in Ellen’s open file, pulling out the shrink’s report. “Did you read it?”

“I must have,” he says.

She puts it in his hands and says very quietly, “The woman barely speaks. She’s stopped eating. You want to deal with a defendant who’s refusing food? We’re there.”

“Shit.”

They look at each other. Carmen waits. She’s giving him room to agree, and finally he does. He nods at her and she stands up, more relieved than she realized she’d be.

“We’re doing the best we can here,” she tells him as she opens the office door.

“You tell yourself that,” he says, but he’s already turned his back and is searching through a stack of case folders piled on a bookshelf.

WHEN THEY ALL MEET IN Judge Fornay’s courtroom, they present a united front. Roger proposes the settlement Carmen presented in his office and she concurs when asked. Dr. Smithfield, who is British and impressive and brisk, agrees to be responsible for Ellen’s treatment and Ellen says yes, very softly, she will return to Spain and stay there.

Jamie watches all this from the second row of the visitors’ seating. It looks like a form of theater to him, with all participants knowing their lines and delivering them on cue. He understands that everyone in the room wants to make this go away and that Carmen has crafted a path for that to happen. He’s grateful.

Afterward, he has only a few minutes alone with Ellen before she leaves with the doctor. In the two months she’s been in jail, Ellen has lost enough weight to look once more like a famine survivor. She’s punishing herself before anyone else can do it, and in the corridor of the courthouse he tries to tell her again, yet again, that it was an accident and not her fault.

“The sin of pride, Jamie,” she says in a voice so low that he instinctively leans forward toward her. “I was so sure I had the word and had to deliver it to you.”

“To help, Ellen—” he starts to say, but she isn’t finished.

“And look what I did! Destroyed. Everything I try, everything I touch …”

He can’t bear to hear the words of their father coming from her mouth— you are nothing, you deserve nothing . He gathers her into his arms, where she shuts her eyes, arms around his back, holding on tight, holding the memory of embracing her brother. They both know that it might be a very long time before they see each other again.