Everything I Never Told You (26 page)

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and James mistook her hoarseness for deep gratitude.

“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll get along with everyone. You can never have too many friends.” And Lydia closed her eyes and nodded.

The next day, in honor of her birthday, she wore the necklace, as her father suggested. “Right after school,” James told her, “I’ll take you over to get your permit and we’ll have our first driving lesson before dinner.” Her mother said, “And after dinner, we’ll have cake. And I’ve got some special presents for the birthday girl.” Which meant books, Lydia thought. That night Nath would pack his suitcase. All day she consoled herself:
In six hours, I will have my permit. In two weeks, I will be able to drive away.

At three o’clock, her father pulled up in front of the school, but when Lydia picked up her bookbag and started for the sedan, she was surprised to see someone already in the passenger seat: a Chinese woman—a girl, really—with long black hair.

“So nice to finally meet you,” the girl said as Lydia climbed into the backseat. “I’m Louisa, your dad’s teaching assistant.”

James paused the car to let a cluster of junior boys meander across the street. “Louisa has an appointment and since I was coming this way anyway, I offered her a ride.”

“I shouldn’t have said yes,” Louisa said. “I should have just canceled it. I
hate
the dentist.”

As he crossed in front of the car, one of the juniors grinned at them through the windshield and pulled his eyes into slits with his fingers. The others laughed, and Lydia scrunched down in her seat. It occurred to her: the boys probably thought Louisa was her mother. Squirming, she wondered if her father was embarrassed, too, but in the front seat, James and Louisa hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Ten bucks says you don’t even have one cavity,” James said.

“Five,” Louisa said. “I’m just a poor grad student, not a rich professor.” She patted his arm playfully, and the tenderness in her face shocked Lydia. Her mother looked at her father this way, late at night, when he was caught up in his reading and she leaned against his armchair affectionately, before nudging him to bed. Louisa’s hand lingered on her father’s arm and Lydia stared at them, her father and this girl, cozy in the front seat like a little married couple, a tableau framed by the bright screen of the windshield, and she thought suddenly:
This girl is sleeping with my father.

It had never occurred to her before to think of her father as a man with desires. Like all teenagers, she preferred—despite her very existence—to imagine her parents as eternally chaste. But there was something in the way her father and Louisa touched, in their easy banter, that shocked her innocent sensibilities. To her, the faint crackle between them blazed so hotly that her cheeks flushed. They were lovers. She was sure of it. Louisa’s hand was still on her father’s arm and her father didn’t move, as if the caress were nothing unusual. In fact, James did not even notice: Marilyn often rested her hand on him just this way, and the feeling was too familiar to stand out. For Lydia, however, the way her father kept looking straight ahead, eyes still scanning the road, was all the confirmation she needed.

“So I hear it’s your birthday today,” Louisa said, twisting toward the backseat again. “Sixteen. I’m sure this will be a very special year for you.” Lydia didn’t respond, and Louisa tried again. “Do you like your necklace? I helped pick it out. Your dad asked my advice on what you might like.”

Lydia hooked two fingers beneath the chain, fighting the urge to yank it from her neck. “How would you know what I like? You don’t even know me.”

Louisa blinked. “I had some ideas. I mean, I’ve heard so much about you from your dad.”

Lydia looked her directly in the eye. “Really,” she said. “Daddy’s never mentioned you.”

“Come on, Lyddie,” James said, “you’ve heard me talk about Louisa. How smart she is. How she never lets those undergrads get away with anything.” He smiled at Louisa, and Lydia’s vision blurred.

“Daddy, where did you drive after you got
your
license?” she asked suddenly.

In the rearview mirror, James’s eyes flicked open in surprise. “To school, to swim practices and meets,” he said. “And on errands, sometimes.”

“But not on dates.”

“No,” James said. His voice cracked briefly, like a teenage boy’s. “No, not on dates.”

Lydia felt small and sharp and mean, like a tack. “Because you didn’t date. Right?” Silence. “Why not? Didn’t anybody want to go out with you?”

This time James kept his eyes on the road before them, and his hands on the wheel stiffened, elbows locking.

“Oh, now,” Louisa said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.” She put her arm on James’s elbow again, and this time she kept it there until they reached the dentist’s office, until James stopped the car and said, to Lydia’s outrage, “See you tomorrow.”

Despite his daughter glowering in the backseat, James did not realize anything was wrong. At the DMV, he kissed her on the cheek and took a chair. “You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’ll be right here when you’re done.” Thinking about how excited Lydia would be, permit in hand, he had forgotten all about the moment in the car. Lydia herself, still roiling with the secret she was sure she had discovered, turned away without a word.

In the test room, a woman handed her an exam booklet and a pencil and told her to take any empty seat. Lydia made her way toward the back corner of the room, stepping over bookbags and purses and the legs of the boy in the next-to-last row. Everything her father had ever said to her bounced back in a new tone:
You can never have too many friends.
She thought of her mother, sitting at home, doing the laundry, filling in a crossword, while her father— She was furious with him, furious with her mother for letting this happen. Furious with everyone.

At that moment Lydia realized the room had gone silent. Everyone’s head was bent over the test. She looked up at the clock, but it told her nothing: not when they started, not when the test ended, only the time, three forty-one. The second hand tick-tick-ticked around from eleven to twelve and the minute hand, like a long iron needle, jumped forward another notch. Three forty-two. She flipped her booklet open.
What color is a stop sign?
She filled in the circle for B:
Red.
What must you do if you see or hear an emergency vehicle coming from any direction?
In her haste, the pencil slipped outside the bubble in a jagged claw. A few rows up, a girl with pigtails rose, and the woman at the front gestured her into the next room. A moment later, the boy sitting next to her did the same. Lydia looked down at her booklet again. Twenty questions. Eighteen left to go.

If your car begins to skid, you should . . .
All of the answers seemed plausible. She skipped ahead.
When are roads and highways most slippery?
How much distance should you leave between yourself and the vehicle in front of you under good road conditions?
To her right, a man with a mustache closed his booklet and put down his pencil. C, Lydia guessed. A. D. On the next page, she found a list of sentences she could not complete.
When driving behind a large truck on the freeway, you should
 . . .
To safely navigate a curve, you should . . . When backing up, you should . . .
She repeated each question to herself and got stuck on the last words, like a scratched record:
you should, you should, you should.
Then someone touched her shoulder, softly, and the woman from the front of the room said, “I’m sorry, dear, time’s up.”

Lydia kept her head bent over the desk, as if the words would not be true until she saw the woman’s face. A dark spot formed in the middle of the paper, and it took her a moment to realize it was the mark of a tear, that it was hers. She wiped the paper clean with her hand, then wiped her cheek. Everyone else had gone.

“It’s okay,” the woman said. “You only need fourteen right.” But Lydia knew she had filled in only five circles.

In the next room, where a man fed answer sheets into the scoring machine, she jabbed her finger with the tip of her pencil. “Eighteen right,” the man said to the girl in front of her. “Take this to the counter and they’ll take your picture and print your permit. Congratulations.” The girl gave a happy little skip as she passed through the door and Lydia wanted to slap her. There was a brief moment of silence as the man looked at Lydia’s form, and she focused on the splotch of mud on his boot.

“Well,” he said. “Don’t feel bad. Lots of people fail the first time.” He turned the paper faceup and again she saw the five dark circles, like moles, the rest of the sheet blank and bare. Lydia did not wait for her score. As the machine sucked in the answer sheet, she walked straight past him, back into the waiting room.

There was a long line at the counter for photos now; the man with the mustache counted the bills in his wallet, the girl who had skipped picked at her nail polish. The pigtailed girl and the boy had already gone. On the bench, James sat waiting. “So,” he said, looking down at her empty hands. “Where is it?”

“I failed,” she said. The two women beside her father on the bench looked up at her, then quickly away. Her father blinked, once, twice, as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

“It’s okay, honey,” he said. “You can try again this weekend.” In the cloud of disappointment and humiliation, Lydia did not remember, or care, that she could take the test again. In the morning, Nath would leave for Boston. All she could think was:
I will be here forever. I will never be able to get away.

James put his arm around his daughter, but it weighed on her shoulders like a lead blanket, and she shrugged it off.

“Can we go home now?” she said.

•   •   •

“As soon as Lydia comes in,” Marilyn said, “we’ll say surprise. And then we’ll have dinner, and presents after.” Nath was up in his room, packing for his trip, and alone with her youngest, she was planning aloud, half talking to herself. Hannah, delighted to have her mother’s attention even by default, nodded sagely. Under her breath she practiced—
Surprise! Surprise!
—and watched her mother pipe Lydia’s name in blue onto the sheet cake. It was supposed to look like a driver’s license, a white-frosted rectangle with a photo of Lydia in the corner where the real photograph would be. Inside, it was chocolate cake. Because this was an extra-special birthday, Marilyn had baked this cake herself—from a box, true, but she had mixed it, one hand moving the mixer through the cake batter, the other holding the battered aluminum bowl still against the whirling blades. She had let Hannah pick out the tub of frosting, and now she squeezed out the last of the tube of decorator’s icing spelling L-Y-D and reached into the grocery bag for another.

Such a special cake, Hannah thought, would taste extra-special, too. Better than just plain vanilla or chocolate. The box had shown a smiling woman hovering over a slice of cake and the words
You mix in the love.
Love, Hannah decided, would be sweet, like her mother’s perfume, and soft as marshmallows. Quietly she extended a finger, gouging a small dip in the perfectly smooth surface of the cake. “Hannah!” Marilyn snapped, and swatted her hand away.

While her mother smoothed the dent with the spatula, Hannah touched the frosting on her finger to her tongue. It was so sweet her eyes watered, and when Marilyn wasn’t looking, she wiped the rest of it onto the backside of the tablecloth. She could tell by the little line between her mother’s eyebrows that she was still upset, and she wanted to lean her head against Marilyn’s aproned thigh. Then her mother would understand that she hadn’t meant to mess up the cake. But as she reached out, Marilyn set down the tube of icing mid-letter and lifted her head, listening. “That can’t be them already.”

Beneath her feet, Hannah felt the floor shiver as the garage door groaned open. “I’ll get Nath.”

By the time Hannah and Nath arrived downstairs, though, Lydia and their father had already come from the garage into the hallway, and the moment for
Surprise
had passed
.
Instead Marilyn took Lydia’s face between her hands and kissed her on the cheek, hard, leaving a red smudge of lipstick, like a welt.

“You’re home early,” she said. “Happy birthday. And congratulations.” She held out a palm. “So? Let’s see it.”

“I failed,” Lydia said. She glared from Nath to their mother, as if daring them to be upset.

Marilyn stared. “What do you mean, you failed?” she said, honest surprise in her voice, as if she had never heard the word.

Lydia said it again, louder: “I
failed.
” It was almost, Hannah thought, as if she were mad at their mother, mad at all of them. It could not be just the test. Her face was stony and still, but Hannah saw the tiny trembles—in her hunched shoulders, in her jaw clenched tight. As if she might shiver to pieces. She wanted to wrap her arms tight around her sister’s body, to hold her together, but she knew Lydia would only push her away. No one else noticed. Nath and Marilyn and James glanced at each other, unsure what to say.