Free Tell Me One Thing by Deena Goldstone

good.” Jamie turns from her and looks out his window at the ocean. The sky at the horizon line is turning purple. It will be dusk soon. “I can’t wait to hear the flip side,” Jamie says, his voice brittle and chopped.
    “Jamie, I almost died because I wouldn’t look at what was driving my life. Don’t check out on me here.”
    With effort he turns back to her, but he knows now that this “good part” is going to include things he doesn’t want to hear.
    “I had to let go of everything I believed about who I was and how I worked and what had made me. They have doctors there who help you do that—to see clearly, to be naked, psychologically speaking. When I came to Dad’s funeral, I had only done that work. I had stripped myself to the bone, and I was terrified. I hadn’t put myself together in a new way yet. That’s what you saw when I came to Buffalo.”
    “Who was that grim woman with the mustache?”
    Ellen laughs. It’s open and free. “Estella. She works there as a sort of psychiatric aide. The only way they’d let me leave was tohave someone with me, to take care of me, sort of. And they were right. I was barely functioning. It took another six months before I could see another way to be. Before I could leave all that need for violence behind.”
    She looks over to see how Jamie is taking all this. His face gives nothing away, even to her.
    “Here’s the thing—you can’t just bury all the shit we lived through and expect to have any sort of life.”
    “I have a life,” he says through tight lips.
    “Barely, Jamie, barely. Don’t you see how much you deny yourself?”
    He shakes his head.
Here it comes
, he thinks,
here comes the attack
.
    “Ellen,” he says as calmly as he can, “I hope you didn’t fly all this way to tell me how to live.”
    “I did!” she crows, as if he’s won the jackpot. “That’s exactly why I’m here! Because I learned something vital. Because I know now that what you’re doing is just burying everything. I chose to act it out. You choose to stuff it down. It’s the same shit, and it’s ruining your life as much as it ruined mine.”
    “Ellen …” and now his tone is a warning.
    “I want you to see what I now see—”
    “We’re different people, Ellen, you’re—”
    “I want you to have more, Jamie—”
    “I can’t!” And this last is a cry and it shuts Ellen’s mouth. She stares straight ahead as she takes Grape Street east, away from the ocean. At the first red light, she looks over at him. He looks so miserable.
    “I love you, Jamie.”
    “I know that, but we all have to find our own way through all this. I have something I love in my life, my teaching, and I consider myself lucky. Leave it be.”
    As the light turns green, she pulls ahead slowly. It’s crowdedhere already. People walking in groups toward Little Italy, some on the sidewalks, the overflow at the edges of the street.
    “Which street do I make a right on?”
    “India, and then park anywhere after Fir that you can.”
    “Okay.”
    There’s silence, but it is an unresolved silence. Ellen hasn’t given up. Jamie can sense her pent-up frustration. Her hands on the steering wheel are tight. She pushes herself against the back of the driver’s seat as if she will stand up at any moment. Her foot on the accelerator is heavy, and he can see she’s trying to figure out how to frame the next volley. He braces himself for the onslaught as she starts to talk again, tightly restrained.
    “I had to understand the violence in my life so I could eliminate it forever. Jamie, do you even realize how free I feel?”
    He shakes his head no.
    “That was my task, and yours is to open up the lockbox where you’ve stuffed everything since you were a teenager. The beatings. The night Dad almost killed you …”
    “Stop it, Ellen!”
    “I won’t stop it! I won’t give up on you!”
    She makes a right on India Street, too fast. Jamie can feel the car tremble. She doesn’t