Free Tell Me One Thing by Deena Goldstone Page B

marks. And one channel ran animated drawings of the bodies’ trajectories as they flew, endlessly, through the air.
    Jamie’s colleagues at Pacific Village Middle School turned up on news cameras regularly, all expressing shock.
Jamie was so quiet, such a gifted teacher
, they uniformly said. Some had met Ellen when she visited school to watch Jamie teach.
She seemed so nice
, they said. Everyone seemed genuinely puzzled how something so awful could happen to such decent people.
    That question had led to the second round of media speculation. Mental health experts, from the safety of their armchairs,offered opinions about the driver’s possible mental state—repressed hostility, depressive disorder, a subconscious suicide wish. Then legal experts weighed in on probable trial strategies for both sides. None were shy to predict outcomes and sentences.
    But no one had talked to Ellen. She was in jail. Her bail had been set at five hundred thousand dollars, and neither Jamie nor anyone he knew had the kind of money it would have taken to get her out.
    Seven people had been injured, two seriously. A forty-seven-year-old manager at a Sears store in Chula Vista had suffered broken bones, a lacerated spleen, and internal bleeding. He was recovering. The other, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, was still in the intensive-care unit, where her survival chances had been broadcast almost hourly by every local news outlet.
    It is Celeste that Jamie comes to see in the middle of the night. The first time, five days after the accident, he felt compelled to go. He knew it made no sense. What could he offer? Why would anyone want him there? Logical questions, but completely irrelevant to the imperative he felt. He needed to be there.
    He waited until very late at night, after the news cameras were gone and the hospital staff was a skeleton crew. Then it was simple to slip through the emergency entrance. No one paid him much attention at two o’clock in the morning. He took the elevator up to the seventh floor. He knew where the intensive-care unit was from the time one of his students had swallowed too many of her mother’s pills. Jamie had kept the vigil with her family until the girl was out of danger and moved to the psychiatric floor.
    When he walked into the waiting room of the ICU, he knew immediately that the man sitting alone in there was her father. The papers had said she was from Montana, doing graduate work in marine biodiversity and conservation. They all mentioned shehad grown up on a horse farm not far from Helena, as if there was something faintly exotic about it all—life on a ranch, raised by a single father.
    The man sitting there looked like everyone’s image of a cowboy—a body made lean from physical labor, a face weathered from being outside through all seasons, dark hair needing a cut and laced with gray, spilling over the collar of a blue work shirt. Late fifties, Jamie guessed. The man sat very still, the weight of his body on the balls of his feet, his back not touching the vinyl of a yellow molded chair. To Jamie he looked as if he was holding himself back from springing up and rushing out of this godforsaken place. Jamie’s eyes went to the man’s hands. They were open and splayed flat on his thighs, the only part of him that didn’t seem poised for flight.
    Jamie sat down next to him, knowing he needed to say something but without a clue what that might be. “Mr. Jewell?”
    Chet Jewell turned his eyes to Jamie. They were a pale blue, almost gray, and they contained so much bewilderment that Jamie almost got up and left. He didn’t know how to answer the question he saw there.
Why? Why?
    “Are you a doctor?” is what Chet Jewell said instead.
    “No.”
    “What is it, then?”
    “I thought I might sit with you.”
    Chet’s eyes swept the clock mounted on the far wall. “Don’t you have anyplace better to be at two ten in the morning?”
    “No.”
    “No wife or