Everything I Never Told You (28 page)

At last, perched in the far corner of the bookcase: the very first book Marilyn had ever bought for Lydia. Slender as a pamphlet, it teeters alone on the shelf, then tips.
Air hovers all around you,
the splayed pages read.
Though you can’t see it, it is still there.
Marilyn wants to burn the books that litter the carpet, to peel the wallpaper from the walls. Everything that reminds her of Lydia and all she could have been. She wants to stomp the very bookshelf to splinters. Stripped bare, it lists unsteadily, as if it is tired, and with one push she knocks it to the floor.

And there, in the hollow below the bottom shelf: a book. Thick. Red. A Scotch-taped spine. Even before Marilyn sees the photo, she knows what it is. But she turns it over anyway, with suddenly unsteady hands, still astonished to find Betty Crocker’s face implausibly, impossibly staring up at her.

Your cookbook,
Lydia had said.
I lost it.
Marilyn had been thrilled, had considered it an omen: her daughter had read her mind. Her daughter would never be confined to a kitchen. Her daughter wanted more. It had been a lie. She flips the pages she has not seen in years, tracing her mother’s pencil marks with her fingertip, smoothing the pockmarked pages where she had cried all those nights, in the kitchen, alone. Somehow Lydia had known: that this book had pulled on her mother like a heavy, heavy stone. She hadn’t destroyed it. She had hidden it, all those years; she had piled book after book atop it, weighting it down, so her mother would never have to see it again.

Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying,
Show me again, show me another.
Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.

And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps—and this thought chokes her—that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.

The door creaks open, and Marilyn slowly raises her head, as if Lydia might somehow, impossibly, appear. For a second the impossible happens: a small blurred ghost of little-girl Lydia, dark-haired, big-eyed. Hesitating in the doorway, clinging to the jamb. Please, Marilyn thinks. In this word is all she cannot phrase, even to herself. Please come back, please let me start over, please stay. Please.

Then she blinks, and the figure sharpens: Hannah, pale and trembling, her face glossy with tears.

“Mom,” she whispers.

Without thinking, Marilyn opens her arms, and Hannah stumbles into them.

•   •   •

Across town, at the liquor store, Nath sets a fifth of whiskey on the counter. He has tasted alcohol exactly once in his life: at Harvard, his host student had offered him a beer. He’d gulped down four, more excited by the idea of it than the flavor—it had tasted, to him, like fizzy urine—and for the rest of the evening, the room had wobbled slightly on its axis. Now he wants the world to spin loose and careen away.

The man behind the counter studies Nath’s face, then squints at the bottle of whiskey. Nath’s fingers twitch. At eighteen, he is allowed to buy only three-two beer, that watery stuff his classmates chugged at parties. But 3.2 percent isn’t strong enough for what he needs now. The clerk eyes him again and Nath prepares himself:
Go home, sonny, you’re too young for this stuff
.

Instead the clerk says, “Your sister that girl who died?”

Nath’s throat goes raw, like a wound. He nods, focusing on the shelf behind the counter, where cigarettes rise in neat red-and-white stacks.

Then the clerk takes down a second bottle of whiskey and puts it in a bag with the first. He slides the bag toward Nath, along with the ten-dollar bill Nath has set on the counter.

“Good luck to you,” he says, and turns away.

The quietest spot Nath knows is out on the edge of town, near the county line. He parks by the side of the road and pulls out one of the bottles. One gulp of whiskey, then another, burns its way down, and he pictures it torching away everything raw and red and painful inside him. It’s almost one, and by the time the first bottle is gone, only one car has passed by, a dark-green Studebaker with an old lady at the wheel. The whiskey isn’t working the way he’d hoped. He’d thought it would wipe his mind clean, like a sponge on a blackboard, but instead the world sharpens with each swallow, dizzying him with its details: the spatter of mud on the driver’s side mirror; the last digit of the odometer, frozen between 5 and 6; the stitching in the car seat, just beginning to fray. A stray leaf, caught between windshield and wiper, rattles in the breeze. As he works through the second bottle, he thinks, suddenly, of his father’s face as he’d walked out the door: the way he hadn’t even glanced at them, as if he were focused on something far-off on the horizon or deep, deep in the past. Something neither he nor Hannah could see, something they couldn’t touch even if they’d wanted to. The air inside the car grows thick, filling his lungs like cotton. Nath cranks the window down. Then—as the cool breeze rushes in—he pitches over the side and vomits both bottles of whiskey onto the curb.

•   •   •

In his own car, James too mulls over that moment on the stairs. After he’d pulled out of the driveway, he had driven without thinking, jamming his foot onto the gas pedal, heading wherever he can slam his foot to the floor. This is how he finds himself driving not back to Louisa’s, but across town, right past campus, onto the highway, nudging the needle to sixty, sixty-five, seventy. Only when a sign—
Toledo 15 miles
—flashes wide and green overhead does he realize how far he’s gone.

How appropriate, he thinks. Toledo. It strikes him that there is a beautiful symmetry to life. Ten years ago, Marilyn had fled here, leaving everything behind. Now it is his turn. He takes a deep breath and presses the pedal more firmly. He has said it at last, what he had been most afraid to say, what she had most longed to hear:
Pretend that you never met me. That none of this ever happened.
He has undone the great mistake of her life.

Except—and he can’t deny this, no matter how he tries—Marilyn had not seemed grateful. She
had flinched, as if he’d spat in her face.
S
he had bitten her lips once, twice, as if swallowing a hard, painful seed. The car veers toward the shoulder, gravel shuddering under its wheels.

She left first, James reminds himself, nudging the car to the center of the road again. This is what she’s wanted all along. Yet even as he thinks this, he knows it is untrue. The yellow line wavers and weaves. To James, years of unabashed stares prickling his spine, as if he were an animal in the zoo, years of mutters in the street—
chink, gook, go home—
stinging his ears,
different
has always been a brand on his forehead, blazoned there between the eyes. It has tinted his entire life, this word; it has left its smudgy fingerprints on everything. But
different
had been different for Marilyn.

Marilyn: young and unafraid in a classroom of men. Draining the urine from her flasks, plugging her ears by filling her head with dreams. A white blouse in a sea of navy-blue blazers. How she had longed for
different:
in her life, in herself. It is as if someone has lifted his world and turned it sideways and set it down again. Marilyn, packing those dreams away in lavender for their daughter, disappointment layered beneath her smile. Triply sequestered by house and dead-end street and tiny college town, her hands soft and uncalloused but idle. The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee. And now, alone in their daughter’s room, surrounded by the relics of their daughter’s life, no lavender, only dust, in the air. It has been so long since he thought of his wife as a creature of want.

Later—and for the rest of his life—James will struggle to piece words to this feeling, and he will never quite manage to say, even just to himself, what he really means. At this moment he can think only one thing: how was it possible, he wonders, to have been so wrong.

•   •   •

Back in Middlewood, Nath does not know how long he lies there, sprawled across the front seat. All he knows is this: someone opens the car door. Someone calls his name. Then a hand grips his shoulder, warm and gentle and strong, and it doesn’t let go.

To Nath, fighting through a deep and groggy stupor, the voice sounds like his father’s, though his father has never spoken his name so softly, or touched him with such tenderness. In the moment before he opens his eyes, it
is
his father, and even when the world comes into focus to reveal hazy sunshine, a police cruiser, Officer Fiske crouching beside him in the open car door, it is still true. It is Officer Fiske who peels the empty whiskey bottle from his fingers and helps him lift his head, but in his heart it is his father who says, with such kindness that Nath begins to cry, “Son, it’s time to go home.”

eleven

In April, home was the last place Nath wanted to be. All month—weeks before his visit to campus—he stacked books and clothes in a growing pile. Every evening before bed, he slipped the letter from beneath his pillow and reread it, savoring the details: a junior from Albany, Andrew Bynner, an
astrophysics major,
would escort him around campus, engage him in intellectual and practical discussions over meals in the dining hall, and host him for the long weekend. Friday to Monday, he thought, looking at his plane tickets; ninety-six hours. By the time he took his suitcase down, after Lydia’s birthday dinner, he had already sorted the things he’d take with him from those he’d leave behind.

Even with her door closed, Lydia could hear it: the click-click of the suitcase latches opening, then a thud as the lid hit the floor. Their family never traveled. Once, when Hannah was still a baby, they’d visited Gettysburg and Philadelphia. Their father had plotted out the whole trip in the road atlas, a chain of places so steeped in Americana that it oozed out everywhere: in the names of the gas stations—Valley Forge Diesel—and in the diner specials when they stopped for lunch—
Gettystown Shrimp, William Penn’s Pork Tenderloin.
Then, at every restaurant, the waitresses had stared at her father, then at her mother, then at her and Nath and Hannah, and she knew, even as a child, that they’d never come back. Since then, their father had taught summer classes every year, as if—she rightly suspected—to avoid raising the question of family vacations.

In Nath’s room, a drawer shut with a bang. Lydia leaned back on her bed and propped her heels on the postcard of Einstein. In her mouth, the sick-sweet taste of frosting still lingered; in her stomach, the birthday cake roiled. At the end of summer, she thought, Nath would pack not just the one suitcase but a trunk and a stack of boxes, all his books and all his clothes, everything he owned. The telescope would disappear from the corner; the stacks of aeronautics magazines would vanish from the closet. A band of dust would border the bare shelves, clean wood at the back where the books had once stood. Every drawer, when she opened it, would be empty. Even the sheets on his bed would be gone.