Everything I Never Told You (2 page)

For James, in his office, it is still just another Tuesday, and he clicks his pen against his teeth. A line of smudgy typing teeters slightly uphill:
Serbia was one of the most powerful of the Baltic nations.
He crosses out
Baltic,
writes
Balkan,
turns the page.
Archduke France Ferdinand was assassinated by members of Black Ann.
Franz, he thinks. Black
Hand.
Had these students ever opened their books? He pictures himself at the front of the lecture hall, pointer in hand, the map of Europe unfurled behind him. It’s an intro class, “America and the World Wars”; he doesn’t expect depth of knowledge or critical insight. Just a basic understanding of the facts, and one student who can spell
Czechoslovakia
correctly.

He closes the paper and writes the score on the front page—sixty-five out of one hundred—and circles it. Every year as summer approaches, the students shuffle and rustle; sparks of resentment sizzle up like flares, then sputter out against the windowless walls of the lecture hall. Their papers grow halfhearted, paragraphs trailing off, sometimes midsentence, as if the students could not hold a thought that long. Was it a waste, he wonders. All the lecture notes he’s honed, all the color slides of MacArthur and Truman and the maps of Guadalcanal. Nothing more than funny names to giggle at, the whole course just one more requirement to check off the list before they graduated. What else could he expect from this place? He stacks the paper with the others and drops the pen on top. Through the window he can see the small green quad and three kids in blue jeans tossing a Frisbee.

When he was younger, still junior faculty, James was often mistaken for a student himself. That hasn’t happened in years. He’ll be forty-six next spring; he’s tenured, a few silver hairs now mixed in among the black. Sometimes, though, he’s still mistaken for other things. Once, a receptionist at the provost’s office thought he was a visiting diplomat from Japan and asked him about his flight from Tokyo. He enjoys the surprise on people’s faces when he tells them he’s a professor of American history. “Well, I
am
American,” he says when people blink, a barb of defensiveness in his tone.

Someone knocks: his teaching assistant, Louisa, with a stack of papers.

“Professor Lee. I didn’t mean to bother you, but your door was open.” She sets the essays on his desk and pauses. “These weren’t very good.”

“No. My half weren’t either. I was hoping you had all the As in your stack.”

Louisa laughs. When he’d first seen her, in his graduate seminar last term, she’d surprised him. From the back she could have been his daughter: they had almost the same hair, hanging dark and glossy down to the shoulder blades, the same way of sitting with elbows pulled in close to the body. When she turned around, though, her face was completely her own, narrow where Lydia’s was wide, her eyes brown and steady. “Professor Lee?” she had said, holding out her hand. “I’m Louisa Chen.” Eighteen years at Middlewood College, he’d thought, and here was the first Oriental student he’d ever had. Without realizing it, he had found himself smiling.

Then, a week later, she came to his office. “Is that your family?” she’d asked, tilting the photo on his desk toward her. There was a pause as she studied it. Everyone did the same thing, and that was why he kept the photo on display. He watched her eyes move from his photographic face to his wife’s, then his children’s, then back again. “Oh,” she said after a moment, and he could tell she was trying to hide her confusion. “Your wife’s—not Chinese?”

It was what everyone said. But from her he had expected something different.

“No,” he said, and straightened the frame so that it faced her a little more squarely, a perfect forty-five-degree angle to the front of the desk. “No, she isn’t.”

Still, at the end of the fall semester, he’d asked her to act as a grader for his undergraduate lecture. And in April, he’d asked her to be the teaching assistant for his summer course.

“I hope the summer students will be better,” Louisa says now. “A few people insisted that the Cape-to-Cairo Railroad was in Europe. For college students, they have surprising trouble with geography.”

“Well, this isn’t Harvard, that’s for sure,” James says. He pushes the two piles of essays into one and evens them, like a deck of cards, against the desktop. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s all a waste.”

“You can’t blame yourself if the students don’t try. And they’re not all so bad. A few got As.” Louisa blinks at him, her eyes suddenly serious. “Your life is not a waste.”

James had meant only the intro course, teaching these students who, year after year, didn’t care to learn even the basic timeline. She’s twenty-three, he thinks; she knows nothing about life, wasted or otherwise. But it’s a nice thing to hear.

“Stay still,” he says. “There’s something in your hair.” Her hair is cool and a little damp, not quite dry from her morning shower. Louisa holds quite still, her eyes open and fixed on his face. It’s not a flower petal, as he’d first thought. It’s a ladybug, and as he picks it out, it tiptoes, on threadlike yellow legs, to hang upside down from his fingernail.

“Damn things are everywhere this time of year,” says a voice from the doorway, and James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning through. He doesn’t like Stan—a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he’s hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start
George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . .

“Did you want something, Stan?” James asks. He’s acutely conscious of his hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa’s shoulder, and pulls it back.

“Just wanted to ask a question about the dean’s latest memo,” Stanley says, holding up a mimeographed sheet. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“I have to get going anyway,” Louisa says. “Have a nice morning, Professor Lee. I’ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.” As she slides past Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she’s blushing, and his own face grows hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James’s desk.

“Good-looking girl,” he says. “She’ll be your assistant this summer too, no?”

“Yes.” James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip, walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley’s grin, to feel Stanley’s slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along the spines of James’s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this moment, for that last second when Stan’s leer was the worst problem on his mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption that at first he doesn’t hear the anxiety in Marilyn’s voice.

“James?” she says. “Could you come home?”

•   •   •

The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don’t even know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister’s room. He expects talcum powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the policemen just
look:
at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the rounded pink lid of Lydia’s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child’s head in his hand.

Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves.

“What does that mean?” Nath says. “
Most?
What does that mean?”

The policeman peers over the top of his bifocals. “In the vast majority of cases,” he says.

“Eighty percent?” Nath says. “Ninety? Ninety-five?”

“Nathan,” James says. “That’s enough. Let Officer Fiske do his work.”

The younger officer jots down the particulars in his notebook: Lydia Elizabeth Lee, sixteen, last seen Monday May 2, flowered halter-neck dress, parents James and Marilyn Lee. At this Officer Fiske studies James closely, a memory surfacing in his mind.

“Now, your wife also went missing once?” he says. “I remember the case. In sixty-six, wasn’t it?”

Warmth spreads along the back of James’s neck, like sweat dripping behind his ears. He is glad, now, that Marilyn is waiting by the phone downstairs. “That was a misunderstanding,” he says stiffly. “A miscommunication between my wife and myself. A family matter.”

“I see.” The older officer pulls out his own pad and makes a note, and James raps his knuckle against the corner of Lydia’s desk.

“Anything else?”

In the kitchen, the policemen flip through the family albums looking for a clear head shot. “This one,” Hannah says, pointing. It’s a snapshot from last Christmas. Lydia had been sullen, and Nath had tried to cheer her up, to blackmail a smile out of her through the camera. It hadn’t worked. She sits next to the tree, back against the wall, alone in the shot. Her face is a dare. The directness of her stare, straight out of the page with not even a hint of profile, says
What are you looking at?
In the picture, Nath can’t distinguish the blue of her irises from the black of her pupils, her eyes like dark holes in the shiny paper. When he’d picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister’s face. But now, he admits, looking at the photograph in Hannah’s hand, this looks like her—at least, the way she looked when he had seen her last.

“Not that one,” James says. “Not with Lydia making a face like that. People will think she looks like that all the time. Pick a nice one.” He flips a few pages and pries out the last snapshot. “This one’s better.”

At her sixteenth birthday, the week before, Lydia sits at the table with a lipsticked smile. Though her face is turned toward the camera, her eyes are looking at something outside the photo’s white border. What’s so funny? Nath wonders. He can’t remember if it was him, or something their father said, or if Lydia was laughing to herself about something none of the rest of them knew. She looks like a model in a magazine ad, lips dark and sharp, a plate of perfectly frosted cake poised on a delicate hand, having an improbably good time.

James pushes the birthday photo across the table toward the policemen, and the younger one slides it into a manila folder and stands up.

“This will be just fine,” he says. “We’ll make up a flyer in case she doesn’t turn up by tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’m sure she will.” He leaves a fleck of spit on the photo album page and Hannah wipes it away with her finger.

“She wouldn’t just leave,” Marilyn says. “What if it’s some crazy? Some psycho kidnapping girls?” Her hand drifts to that morning’s newspaper, still lying in the center of the table.

“Try not to worry, ma’am,” Officer Fiske says. “Things like that, they hardly ever happen. In the vast majority of cases—” He glances at Nath, then clears his throat. “The girls almost always come home.”

When the policemen have gone, Marilyn and James sit down with a piece of scratch paper. The police have suggested they call all of Lydia’s friends, anyone who might know where she’s gone. Together they construct a list: Pam Saunders. Jenn Pittman. Shelley Brierley. Nath doesn’t correct them, but these girls have never been Lydia’s friends. Lydia has been in school with them since kindergarten, and now and then they call, giggly and shrill, and Lydia shouts through the line, “I got it.” Some evenings she sits for hours on the window seat on the landing, the phone base cradled in her lap, receiver wedged between ear and shoulder. When their parents walk by, she lowers her voice to a confidential murmur, twirling the cord around her little finger until they go away. This, Nath knows, is why his parents write their names on the list with such confidence.

But Nath’s seen Lydia at school, how in the cafeteria she sits silent while the others chatter; how, when they’ve finished copying her homework, she quietly slides her notebook back into her bookbag. After school, she walks to the bus alone and settles into the seat beside him in silence. Once, he had stayed on the phone line after Lydia picked up and heard not gossip, but his sister’s voice duly rattling off assignments—
read Act I of
Othello,
do the odd-numbered problems in Section 5—
then quiet after the hang-up click. The next day, while Lydia was curled on the window seat, phone pressed to her ear, he’d picked up the extension in the kitchen and heard only the low drone of the dial tone. Lydia has never really had friends, but their parents have never known. If their father says, “Lydia, how’s Pam doing?” Lydia says, “Oh, she’s great, she just made the pep squad,” and Nath doesn’t contradict her. He’s amazed at the stillness in her face, the way she can lie without even a raised eyebrow to give her away.

Except he can’t tell his parents that now. He watches his mother scribble names on the back of an old receipt, and when she says to him and Hannah, “Anyone else you can think of?” he thinks of Jack and says no.