Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

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.