Everything I Never Told You (7 page)

The morning of the wedding, as they waited in the courthouse, Marilyn’s mother kept fiddling with the clasp of her purse. They’d gotten there almost an hour early, worried about traffic, about parking, about missing their spot with the justice of the peace. James had put on a new suit and kept patting the breast pocket, checking for the rings through the navy-blue wool. Such a timid and nervous gesture made Marilyn want to kiss him right there in front of everyone. In twenty-five minutes she would be his wife. And then her mother stepped closer and took Marilyn’s elbow in a grip that felt like a clamp.

“Let’s touch up your lipstick,” she said, nudging Marilyn toward the ladies’ room.

She should have known it was coming. All morning her mother had been dissatisfied with everything. Marilyn’s dress wasn’t white but cream. It didn’t look like a wedding dress; it was too plain, like something a
nurse
would wear. She didn’t know why Marilyn wouldn’t get married in a church. There were plenty nearby. She didn’t like the weather in Boston; why was it so gray in June? Daisies weren’t a wedding flower; why not roses instead? And why was she in such a
hurry,
why get married now, why not wait awhile?

It would have been easier if her mother had used a slur. It would have been easier if she had insulted James outright, if she had said he was too short or too poor or not accomplished enough. But all her mother said, over and over, was, “It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.” Leaving
it
unnamed, hanging in the air between them.

Marilyn pretended not to hear and took her lipstick from her purse.

“You’ll change your mind,” her mother said. “You’ll regret it later.”

Marilyn swiveled up the tube and bent close to the mirror, and her mother grabbed her by both shoulders suddenly, desperately. The look in her eyes was fear, as if Marilyn were running along the edge of a cliff.

“Think about your children,” she said. “Where will you live? You won’t fit in anywhere. You’ll be sorry for the rest of your life.”

“Stop it,” Marilyn shouted, slamming her fist against the edge of the sink. “This is my life, Mother. Mine.” She jerked herself free and the lipstick went flying, then skittered to a stop on the floor tiles. Somehow she had made a long red streak down her mother’s sleeve. Without another word, she pushed the door of the bathroom open, leaving her mother alone.

Outside, James glanced anxiously at his wife-to-be. “What’s wrong?” he murmured, leaning close. She shook her head and whispered quickly, laughingly: “Oh, my mother just thinks I should marry someone more like me.”
Then she took his lapel in her fist, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him. Ridiculous, she thought. So obvious that she didn’t even need to say it.

Just days before, hundreds of miles away, another couple had married, too—a white man, a black woman, who would share a most appropriate name: Loving. In four months they would be arrested in Virginia, the law reminding them that Almighty God had never intended white, black, yellow, and red to mix, that there should be no
mongrel citizens,
no
obliteration of racial pride.
It would be four years before they protested, and four years more before the court concurred, but many more years before the people around them would, too. Some, like Marilyn’s mother, never would.

When Marilyn and James separated, her mother had returned from the ladies’ room and stood silently watching them from a distance. She had blotted her sleeve again and again on the roller towel, but the red mark still showed beneath the damp spot, like an old bloodstain. Marilyn wiped a smudge of lipstick from James’s upper lip and grinned, and he patted his breast pocket again, checking the rings. To her mother it looked as if James were congratulating himself.

Afterward, the wedding reduced to a slideshow in Marilyn’s memory: the thin white line, like a hair, in the justice’s bifocals; the knots of baby’s breath in her bouquet; the fog of moisture on the wineglass her old roommate, Sandra, raised to toast. Under the table, James’s hand in hers, the strange new band of gold cool against her skin. And across the table, her mother’s carefully curled hair, her powdered face, her lips kept closed to cover the crooked incisor.

That was the last time Marilyn saw her mother.

three

Until the day of the funeral, Marilyn has never thought about the last time she would see her daughter. She would have imagined a touching bedside scene, like in the movies: herself white-haired and elderly and content, in a satin bed jacket, ready to say her good-byes; Lydia a grown woman, confident and poised, holding her mother’s hands in hers, a doctor by then, unfazed by the great cycle of life and death. And Lydia, though Marilyn does not admit it, is the face she would want to see last—not Nath or Hannah or even James, but the daughter she thinks of first and always. Now her last glimpse of Lydia has already passed: James, to her bewilderment, has insisted on a closed-casket funeral. She will not even get to see her daughter’s face one last time, and for the past three days, she has told James this over and over, sometimes furious, sometimes through tears. James, for his part, cannot find the words to tell her what he discovered on going to identify Lydia’s body: there is only half a face left, barely preserved by the cold water of the lake; the other half had already been eaten away. He ignores his wife and keeps his eyes trained on the rearview mirror as he backs into the street.

The cemetery is only a fifteen-minute walk from their house, but they drive anyway. As they turn onto the main road that circles the lake, Marilyn looks sharply to the left, as if she’s spotted something on the shoulder of her husband’s jacket. She doesn’t want to see the pier, the rowboat now re-moored, the lake itself stretching out into the distance. James has the car windows rolled up tight, but the breeze shakes the leaves of the trees on the banks and corrugates the surface of the water. It will be there forever, the lake: every time they leave their house, they will see it. In the backseat, Nath and Hannah wonder in unison if their mother will turn her head away for the rest of her life, every time she passes by. The lake glints in the sun like a shiny tin roof, and Nath’s eyes begin to water. It seems inappropriate for the light to be so bright, for the sky to be so blue, and he’s relieved when a cloud drifts over the sun and the water turns from silver to gray.

At the cemetery, they pull into the parking lot. Middlewood is proud of its garden cemetery, a sort of graveyard and botanical garden in one, with winding paths and small brass signs to identify the flora. Nath remembers middle-school science trips with sketch pads and field guides; once the teacher had promised ten extra-credit points to the person who could gather the most kinds of leaves. There had been a funeral that day, too, and Tommy Reed had tiptoed between rows of folding chairs to the sassafras tree, right in the middle of the eulogy, and plucked a leaf from a low-hanging branch. Mr. Rexford hadn’t noticed and had complimented Tommy on being the only one to find
Sassafras albidum,
and the whole class had stifled giggles and high-fived Tommy on the bus ride home. Now, as they walk single file toward the cluster of chairs set up in the distance, Nath wants to go back in time and punch Tommy Reed.

In Lydia’s honor, the school has closed for the day, and Lydia’s classmates come, lots of them. Looking at them, James and Marilyn realize just how long it has been since they’ve seen these girls: years. For a moment they don’t recognize Karen Adler with her hair grown long, or Pam Saunders without her braces. James, thinking of the crossed-out list of names, finds himself staring and turns away. Slowly the chairs fill with some of Nath’s classmates, with juniors and freshmen he finds vaguely familiar but doesn’t really know. Even the neighbors, as they file in, feel like strangers. His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends. Hannah and Nath recognize a few professors from the university, their father’s teaching assistant, but most of the faces in the chairs are strangers. Why are they even here, Nath wonders, and when the service starts and they all crane their necks toward the coffin at the front, under the sassafras tree, he understands. They are drawn by the spectacle of sudden death. For the past week, ever since the police dragged the lake, the headlines in the Middlewood
Monitor
have all been about Lydia.
Oriental Girl Found Drowned in Pond.

The minister looks like President Ford, flat-browed, white-toothed, clean-cut, and solid. The Lees do not attend church, but the funeral home had recommended him, and James had accepted without asking any questions. Now James sits up straight, pressing the chair’s back into his shoulder blades, and tries to listen to the service. The minister reads the Twenty-third Psalm, but in the revised text:
I have everything I need
instead of
I shall not want; Even if I walk through a very dark valley
instead of
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
It feels disrespectful, a corner cut. Like burying his daughter in a plywood box.
What else could you expect from this town,
he thinks. On his right, the scent of the lilies on the casket hits Marilyn like a warm, wet fog, and she nearly retches. For the first time, she wishes she were the sort of woman, like her mother, who carried a handkerchief. She would have pressed it to her face and let it filter the air, and when she lowered it the cloth would be dirty pink, the color of old bricks. Beside her, Hannah knits her fingers. She would like to worm her hand onto her mother’s lap, but she doesn’t dare. Nor does she dare look at the coffin. Lydia is not inside, she reminds herself, taking a deep breath, only her body—but then where is Lydia
herself? Everyone is so still that to the birds floating overhead, she thinks, they must look like a cluster of statues.

Out of the corner of his eye, Nath spots Jack sitting at the edge of the crowd beside his mother. He imagines grabbing Jack by the shirt collar to find out what he knows. For the past week, his father has called the police every morning asking for new information, but Officer Fiske says only, over and over, that they are still investigating. If only the police were here now, Nath thinks. Should he tell his father? Jack stares at the ground in front of him, as if he is too ashamed to look up. And then, when Nath himself glances back to the front, the coffin has already been lowered into the ground. The polished wood, the white lilies fastened to its top—vanished, just like that: nothing but the blank space where it had once stood. He’s missed it all. His sister is gone.

Something wet touches his neck. He reaches up to wipe it away and discovers that his whole face is wet, that he’s been crying silently. On the other side of the crowd, Jack’s blue eyes are suddenly fixed on him, and Nath blots his cheek in the crook of his arm.

The mourners begin to leave, a thin line of backs filing toward the parking area and the street. A few of Nath’s classmates, like Miles Fuller, give him a sympathetic glance, but most—embarrassed by his tears—decide not to speak to him, and turn away. They won’t have another chance; in light of Nath’s high grades and the tragic situation, the principal will exempt him from the last three weeks of school, and Nath himself will decide not to attend commencement. Some of the neighbors circle the Lees, squeezing their arms and murmuring condolences; a few of them pat Hannah on the head, as if she’s a tiny child, or a dog. Except for Janet Wolff, her usual white doctor’s coat replaced by a trim black suit, James and Marilyn don’t recognize most of them. By the time Janet reaches her, Marilyn’s palms feel grimy, her whole body dirty, like a rag passed from hand to soiled hand, and she can barely stand Janet’s touch on her elbow.

On the other side of the grave, Jack stands off to the side, waiting for his mother, half-hidden in the shadow of a big elm. Nath weaves his way over, cornering him against the tree trunk, and Hannah, trapped at her parents’ side by a thicket of adults, watches her brother nervously.

“What are you doing here?” Nath demands. Up close, he can see that Jack’s shirt is dark blue, not black, that though he’s wearing dress pants he still has on his old black-and-white tennis shoes with the hole in the toe.

“Hey,” Jack says, eyes still on the ground. “Nath. How are you?”

“How do you think I am?” Nath’s voice cracks, and he hates himself for it.

“I gotta go,” Jack says. “My mom’s waiting.” A pause. “I’m really sorry about your sister.” He turns away, and Nath catches him by the arm.

“Are you?” He’s never grabbed anyone before, and he feels tough doing it, like a detective in a movie. “You know, the police want to talk to you.” People are beginning to stare—James and Marilyn hear their son’s raised voice and look around—but he doesn’t care. He leans in closer, almost to Jack’s nose. “Look, I know she was with you that Monday.”

For the first time Jack looks Nath in the face: a flash of startled blue eyes. “She told you?”

Nath lurches forward so that he and Jack are chest to chest. Blood throbs in his right temple. “She didn’t have to tell me. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“Look, Nath,” Jack mumbles. “If Lydia told you that I—”

He breaks off suddenly, as Nath’s parents and Dr. Wolff come within earshot. Nath stumbles backward a few steps, glaring at Jack, at his father for interrupting, at the elm tree itself for not being farther away.

“Jack,” Dr. Wolff says sharply. “Everything all right?”

“Fine.” Jack glances at Nath, then at the adults. “Mr. Lee, Mrs. Lee, I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you for coming,” says James. He waits until the Wolffs have started down the curving path out of the cemetery before grabbing Nath by the shoulder. “What’s the matter with you?” he hisses. “Picking a fight at your sister’s funeral.”

Behind his mother, Jack gives a quick backward glance, and when his gaze meets Nath’s, there’s no doubt: he is frightened. Then he turns the curve and is gone.