Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

Officer Fiske settles himself against the railing too. “We just wanted to chat a little, Nathan, in private. Maybe you’ll think of something you forgot. Sometimes brothers and sisters know things about each other their parents don’t, you know?”

Nath tries to agree, but nothing comes out. He nods. Today, he suddenly remembers, should have been his graduation.

“Was Lydia in the habit of sneaking out alone?” Officer Fiske asks. “There’s no need to worry. You’re not in trouble. Just tell us what you know.” He keeps saying just, as if it’s a tiny favor he wants, a little offhand thing. Talk to us. Tell us her secrets. Tell us everything. Nath starts to tremble. He’s positive the policemen can see him shaking.

“Had she ever snuck out by herself before, at night?” the younger policeman asks. Nath swallows, tries to hold himself still.

“No,” he croaks. “No, never.”

The policemen glance at each other. Then the younger one perches on the railing beside Nath, like a kid leaning against a locker before school, as if they’re friends. This is his role, Nath realizes. To act like the buddy, to coax him to talk. His shoes are polished so bright they reflect the sun, a blurry smudge of light at each big toe.

“Did Lydia usually get along with your parents?” The policeman shifts his weight, and the railing creaks.

Maybe you should join some clubs, too, honey, meet some new people. Would you like to take a summer class? That could be fun.

“Our parents?” Nath says. He hardly recognizes the voice that comes out as his. “Sure she did.”

“Did you ever see either of them hit her?”

“Hit her?” Lydia, so fussed over, so carefully tended, like a prize flower. The one perpetually on their mother’s mind, even when she was reading, dog-earing pages of articles Lydia might like. The one their father kissed first, every night, when he came home. “My parents would never hit Lydia. They loved her.”

“Did she ever talk about hurting herself?”

The porch railing starts to blur. All he can do is shake his head, hard. No. No. No.

“Did she seem upset the night before she disappeared?”

Nath tries to think. He had wanted to tell her about college, the lush green leaves against the deep red brick, how much fun it was going to be. How for the first time in his life he’d stood up straight, how from that new angle the world had looked bigger, wider, brighter. Except she had been silent all dinner, and afterward she’d gone right up to her room. He had thought she was tired. He had thought: I’ll tell her tomorrow.

And suddenly, to his horror, he begins to cry: wet, messy tears that dribble down his nose and into the collar of his shirt.

Both policemen turn away then, and Officer Fiske closes his notebook and fishes in his pocket for a handkerchief. “Keep it,” he says, holding it out to Nath, and he squeezes him on the shoulder once, hard, and then they’re gone.

• • •

Inside, Marilyn says to James, “So I have to ask your permission now, to speak in company?”

“That’s not what I meant.” James props his elbows on the table and rests his forehead on his hands. “You just can’t go making wild accusations. You can’t go berating the police.”

“Who’s berating? I’m just asking questions.” Marilyn drops her teacup into the sink and turns on the water. An angry soap froth rises in the drain. “Looking into all possibilities? He didn’t even listen when I said it could be a stranger.”

“Because you’re acting hysterical. You hear one news report and you get all these ideas in your head. Let it go.” James still hasn’t lifted his head from his hands. “Marilyn, just let it go. ”

In the brief silence that follows, Hannah slips under the table and huddles there, hugging her knees to her chest. The tablecloth casts a half-moon shadow on the linoleum. As long as she stays inside it, she thinks, curling her toes in closer, her parents will forget she’s there. She has never heard her parents fight before. Sometimes they bicker over who forgot to screw the cap back onto the toothpaste, or who left the kitchen light on all night, but afterward her mother squeezes her father’s hand, or her father kisses her mother’s cheek, and all is well again. This time, everything is different.

“So I’m just a hysterical housewife?” Marilyn’s voice is cool and sharp now, like the edge of a steel blade, and under the table Hannah holds her breath. “Well, someone is responsible. If I have to find out what happened to her myself, I will.” She scrubs at the counter with the dish towel and tosses it down. “I would think you’d want to know, too. But listen to you. Of course, officer. Thank you, officer. We can’t ask for more, officer. ” The foam chokes its way down the drain. “I know how to think for myself, you know. Unlike some people, I don’t just kowtow to the police.”

In the blur of her fury, Marilyn doesn’t think twice about what she’s said. To James, though, the word rifles from his wife’s mouth and lodges deep in his chest. From those two syllables— kowtow —explode bent-backed coolies in cone hats, pigtailed Chinamen with sandwiched palms. Squinty and servile. Bowing and belittled. He has long suspected that everyone sees him this way — Stanley Hewitt, the policemen, the checkout girl at the grocery store. But he had not thought that everyone included Marilyn.

He drops his crumpled napkin at his empty place and pushes his chair from the table with a screech. “I have class at ten,” he says. Below the hem of the tablecloth, Hannah watches her father’s stocking feet — a tiny hole just forming at one heel — retreat toward the garage stairs. There’s a pause as he slips on his shoes, and a moment later, the garage door rumbles open. Then, as the car starts, Marilyn snatches the teacup from the sink and hurls it to the floor. Shards of china skitter across the linoleum. Hannah stays absolutely still as her mother runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door, as her father’s car backs out of the driveway with a mechanical little whine and growls away. Only when everything is completely quiet does she dare to crawl out from under the tablecloth, to pick the fragments of porcelain from the puddle of soapy water.

The front door creaks open, and Nath reappears in the kitchen, his eyes and nose red. From this she knows he has been crying, but she pretends not to notice, keeping her head bent, stacking the pieces one by one in her cupped palm.

“What happened?”

“Mom and Dad had a fight.” She tips the broken cup into the garbage can and wipes her damp hands on the thighs of her bell-bottoms. The water, she decides, will dry on its own.

“A fight? About what?”

Hannah lowers her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know.” Although there is no sound from their parents’ bedroom overhead, she is antsy. “Let’s go outside.”

Outside, without discussing it, she and Nath both head for the same place: the lake. All the way down the block, she scans the street carefully, as if their father might still be around the corner, no longer angry, ready to come home. She sees nothing but a few parked cars.

Hannah’s instincts, however, are good. Pulling out of the driveway, James too had been drawn to the lake. He had made a loop around it, once, twice, Marilyn’s words echoing in his mind. Kowtowing to the police. Over and over he hears it, the palpable disgust in her voice, how little she thought of him. And he cannot blame her. How could Lydia have been happy? Lee stood out in the halls. Few seemed to have known her well. Suicide Likely Possibility. He passes the dock where Lydia would have climbed into the boat. Then their little dead-end street. Then the dock again. Somewhere in the center of this circle his daughter, friendless and alone, must have dived into the water in despair. Lydia was very happy, Marilyn had said. Someone is responsible. Someone, James thinks, and a deep spike carves its way down his throat. He cannot bear to see the lake again. And then he knows where he wants to be.