Everything I Never Told You (17 page)

“Were you good while I was away?” she asked, crouching on the linoleum beside them. “Did you behave?”

To Lydia, her mother’s return was nothing short of a miracle. She had made a promise and her mother had heard it and come home. She would keep her word. That afternoon, when her father had hung up the phone and said those astonishing words—
Your mother is coming home—
she had made a decision: her mother would never have to see that sad cookbook again. At Mrs. Allen’s, she had made a plan, and after her father had picked them up—
Shh, not a peep, your mother is sleeping—
she had taken it away. “Mama,” she said into her mother’s hip now. “While you were gone. Your cookbook.” She swallowed. “I—lost it.”

“You did?” To her astonishment, Marilyn felt no anger. No: she felt pride. She pictured her daughter tossing the cookbook onto the grass and stomping it into the mud with her shiny Mary Janes and walking away. Tossing it into the lake. Setting it ablaze. To her own surprise, she smiled. “Did you do that,” she said, curling her arm around her small daughter, and Lydia hesitated, then nodded.

It was a sign, Marilyn decided. For her it was too late. But it wasn’t too late for Lydia. Marilyn would not be like her own mother, shunting her daughter toward husband and house, a life spent safely behind a deadbolt. She would help Lydia do everything she was capable of. She would spend the rest of her years guiding Lydia, sheltering her, the way you tended a prize rose: helping it grow, propping it with stakes, arching each stem toward perfection. In Marilyn’s belly, Hannah began to fidget and kick, but her mother could not yet feel it. She buried her nose in Lydia’s hair and made silent promises. Never to tell her to sit up straight, to find a husband
,
to keep a house. Never to suggest that there were jobs or lives or worlds not meant for her; never to let her hear
doctor
and think only
man.
To encourage her, for the rest of her life, to do more than her mother had.

“All right,” she said, releasing her daughter at last. “Who’s hungry?”

James was already taking plates from the cupboard, distributing napkins, lifting the lid of the top box in a whiff of meat-scented steam. Marilyn put a slice of pepperoni pizza on each of their plates, and Nath, with a deep, contented sigh, began to eat. His mother was home, and tomorrow there would be hard-boiled eggs for breakfast, hamburgers and hot dogs for supper, strawberry shortcake for dessert. Across the table, Lydia stared down at her portion in silence, at the red circles dotting the surface, at the long thin threads of cheese tying it back to the box.

Nath was only half-right: the next day there were hot dogs and hamburgers, but no eggs, no shortcake. James grilled the meat himself, charring it slightly, but the family, determined to celebrate, ate it anyway. In fact, Marilyn would refuse to cook at all after her return, each morning popping frozen waffles into the toaster, each evening heating a frozen potpie or opening a can of SpaghettiOs. She had other things on her mind. Math, she thought that Fourth of July; she will need math, this daughter of mine. “How many buns inside the bag?”
she asked, and Lydia tapped each with her finger, counting up. “How many hot dogs are on the grill? How many won’t have buns?”
At each right answer, her mother smoothed her hair and cuddled her against her thigh.

All day Lydia added up. If everybody ate one hot dog, how many would be left over for tomorrow? If she and Nath got five sparklers each, how many would they have all together? By the time dark fell and fireworks blossomed in the sky, she counted ten kisses from her mother, five caresses, three times her mother called her
my smart girl.
Every time she answered a question, a dimple appeared in her mother’s cheek like a little fingerprint. “Another,” she begged, every time her mother stopped. “Mama, ask me another.” “If that’s really what you want,” her mother said, and Lydia nodded. “Tomorrow,” Marilyn said, “I’ll buy you a book and we’ll read it together.”

Instead of just one book, Marilyn bought a stack:
The Science of Air. Why There Is Weather. Fun with Chemistry.
At night, after she tucked Nath in, she perched on the edge of Lydia’s bed and lifted one from the top. Lydia huddled against her, listening to the deep, underground drum of her mother’s heartbeat. When her mother breathed in, she breathed in. When her mother breathed out, she breathed out. Her mother’s voice seemed to come from within her own head. “Air is everywhere,” her mother read. “Air hovers all around you. Though you can’t see it, it is still there. Everywhere you go, air is there.” Lydia snuggled deeper into her mother’s arms, and by the time they reached the last page, she was almost asleep. “Read me another,” she murmured, and when Marilyn, thrilled, whispered, “Tomorrow, all right?” Lydia nodded so hard her ears rang.

That most important word:
tomorrow.
Every day Lydia cherished it. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the museum to look at the dinosaur bones. Tomorrow we’ll learn about trees. Tomorrow we’ll study the moon. Every night a small promise extracted from her mother: that she would be there in the morning.

And in return, Lydia kept her own promise: she did everything her mother asked. She learned to write the plus sign, like a little stunted
t
. She counted on her fingers every morning, adding up over the cereal bowl. Four plus two. Three plus three. Seven plus ten. Whenever her mother stopped, she asked for more, which made her mother glow, as if Lydia had flicked on a light. She stood on the step stool over the sink, aproned from neck to ankle, and pinched baking soda into a jar of vinegar. “That’s a chemical reaction,” her mother said, and Lydia nodded as the foam gurgled down the drain. She played store with her mother, making change with pennies and nickels: two cents for a hug, four cents for a kiss. When Nath plunked down a quarter and said, “Bet you can’t do that one,” their mother shooed him away.

Inside Lydia could feel it: everything that was to come. One day the books would have no pictures. The problems would grow longer and harder. There would be fractions, decimals, exponents. The games would get trickier. Over meat loaf her mother would say, “Lydia, I’m thinking of a number. If you multiply by two and add one, you get seven.” She would count her way back until she got the right answer, and her mother would smile and bring in the dessert. One day her mother would give her a real stethoscope. She would undo the top two buttons of her blouse and press the chestpiece to her skin and Lydia would hear her mother’s heart directly. “Doctors use these,” her mother would say. It was far away then, tiny in the distance, but Lydia already knew it would happen. The knowledge hovered all around her, clinging to her, every day getting thicker. Everywhere she went, it was there. But every time her mother asked, she said
yes, yes, yes.

•   •   •

Two weeks later, Marilyn and James drove to Toledo to retrieve her clothes and books. “I can go alone,” Marilyn insisted. By then the marble and the barrette and the button nestled quietly, forgotten, in the pocket of her dress in the closet. Already the dress was growing tight and soon Marilyn would give it away to Goodwill, with her tiny, forgotten talismans still tucked inside. Still, her eyes stung at the thought of emptying that apartment, sealing her books back into cartons, tossing her half-filled notebooks into the rubbish. She wanted privacy for this little funeral. “Really,” she said. “You don’t have to come.” James, however, insisted. “I don’t want you lifting anything heavy in your condition,” he said. “I’ll ask Vivian Allen to stop by and watch the kids for the afternoon.”

As soon as James and Marilyn had gone, Mrs. Allen turned the TV to a soap opera and sat down on the couch. Lydia hugged her knees under the dining table, cookbookless; Nath picked lint from the carpet and glowered. His mother woke him up and tucked him in, but Lydia filled up all the spaces in between. He knew the answer to every question their mother asked, but whenever he tried to jump in, she shushed him while Lydia counted on her fingers. At the museum, he wanted to watch the star show in the planetarium, but they spent the whole day looking at the skeletons, the model of the digestive system, whatever Lydia wanted. That very morning, he had come down to the kitchen early, clutching his folder of news clippings, and his mother, still in her bathrobe, gave him a sleepy smile over the rim of her teacup. It was the first time she had really
looked
at him since she came home, and something fluttered in his throat like a little bird. “Can I have a hard-boiled egg?” he asked, and, like a miracle, she said, “All right.” For a moment he forgave her everything. He decided he would show her the pictures of the astronauts he’d been collecting, his lists of launches, everything. She would understand them. She would be impressed.

Then, before he could say a word, Lydia padded down the steps, and his mother’s attention flitted away and alighted on Lydia’s shoulders. Nath pouted in the corner, flicking the edges of his folder, but no one paid any attention to him until his father came into the kitchen. “Still mooning over those astronauts?” he said, plucking an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter. He laughed at his own joke and bit into the apple, and even across the kitchen Nath had heard the hard crunch of teeth piercing skin. His mother, listening to Lydia recount last night’s dream, had not. She had forgotten all about his egg. The little bird in his throat had died and swelled so that he could hardly breathe.

On the couch, Mrs. Allen let out a little stuttering snore. A thread of spit oozed down her chin. Nath headed outside, leaving the front door half-open, and jumped down off the porch. The ground slammed into his heels like a jolt of electricity. Above him the sky stretched out pale steel gray.

“Where are you going?” Lydia peeked around the door.

“None of your business.” He wondered if Mrs. Allen would hear, if she would wake and come out and call them back, but nothing happened. Without looking, he knew Lydia was watching, and he strode right down the middle of the street, daring her to follow. And in a moment, she did.

She followed him all the way to the lake and to the end of the little pier. The houses on the other side of the water looked like dollhouses, tiny and scaled-down and perfect. Inside, mothers were boiling eggs or baking cakes or making pot roasts, or maybe fathers were poking the coals in the barbecue, turning the hot dogs with a fork so that the grill made perfect black lines all over. Those mothers had never gone far away and left their children behind. Those fathers had never slapped their children or kicked over the television or laughed at them.

“Are you going swimming?” Lydia peeled off her socks and tucked one in each shoe, then perched at the end of the dock beside him, dangling her feet over the edge. Someone had left a Barbie doll in the sand, naked and muddy, one of its arms gone. Nath pried off the other and threw it into the water. Then the leg, which was harder. Lydia began to fidget.

“We better go home.”

“In a minute.” In his hands, the head of the Barbie had turned around to face her back.

“We’ll get in trouble.” Lydia reached for a sock.

The other leg wouldn’t come off, and Nath turned on his sister. He felt himself unsteady, struggling for balance, as if the world had tipped to one side. He did not know exactly how it had happened but everything had gone askew, like a teeter-totter unevenly weighted. Everything in their life—their mother, their father, even he himself—slid, now, toward Lydia. Like gravity, there was no resisting it. Everything orbited her.

Later on, Nath would never be able to disentangle what he said and what he thought and what he only felt. He would never be sure whether he said anything at all. All Nath would know, for sure, was this: he pushed Lydia into the water.

Whenever he remembered this moment, it lasted forever: a flash of complete separateness as Lydia disappeared beneath the surface. Crouched on the dock, he had a glimpse of the future: without her, he would be completely alone. In the instant after, he knew it would change nothing. He could feel the ground still tipping beneath him. Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be pulled into the vacuum she left behind.

More than this: the second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn’t want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.

In reality, it was only a few seconds before Nath jumped into the water. He ducked under, grabbed Lydia’s arm, pulled her to the surface, pedaling furiously.

Kick, he gasped. Kick.
Kick.

They floundered their way to the edge of the lake, moving slowly toward the shallows until their feet hit the sandy bottom and they lurched aground. Nath wiped mud from his eyes. Lydia vomited a mouthful of lake water into the grass. For a minute, two, three, they lay facedown, catching their breath. Then Nath pushed himself to his feet, and to his surprise, Lydia reached up to clutch his hand.
Don’t let go,
she meant, and, dizzy with gratitude, Nath gave it.