Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

The summer Lydia fell in the lake, the summer Marilyn went missing: all of them had tried to forget it. They did not talk about it; they never mentioned it. But it lingered, like a bad smell. It had suffused them so deeply it could never wash out.

Every morning, James called the police. Did they need more photographs of Marilyn? Was there any more information he could give? Were there any more people he could call? By mid-May, when Marilyn had been gone for two weeks, the officer in charge of the case told him, gently, “Mr. Lee, we appreciate all the help you’ve provided. And we’re keeping an eye out for the car. I can’t promise we’ll find anything, though. Your wife took clothes with her. She packed suitcases. She took her keys.” Officer Fiske, even then, hated to give out false hopes. “This kind of thing happens sometimes. Sometimes people are just too different.” He did not say mixed, or interracial, or mismatched, but he didn’t have to. James heard it anyway, and he would remember Officer Fiske very clearly, even a decade later.

To the children, he said, “The police are looking. They’ll find her. She’ll come home soon.”

Lydia and Nath remembered it this way: weeks passed and their mother was still gone . At recess the other children whispered and teachers gave them pitying looks and it was a relief when school finally ended. After that their father stayed in his study and let them watch television all day, from Mighty Mouse and Underdog in the morning to I’ve Got a Secret late at night. When Lydia asked, once, what he did in the study, he sighed and said, “Oh, I just putter around.” She thought of her father wearing soft rubber shoes and taking small steps on the smooth floor: putter putter putter. “It means reading books and things, stupid,” Nath said, and the soft rubber shoes turned into her father’s plain brown ones with the fraying laces.

What James actually did, each morning, was take a small envelope from his breast pocket. After the police had gone that first night with a snapshot of Marilyn and assurances they’d do all they could, after he had scooped the children up and tucked them in bed with their clothes still on, he had noticed the shredded scraps of paper in the bedroom wastebasket. One by one he plucked them from the cotton balls, the old newspapers, the tissues smudged with his wife’s lipsticked kiss. He had pieced them together on the kitchen table, matching torn edge to torn edge. I always had one kind of life in mind and things have turned out very differently. The bottom half of the sheet was blank, but he hadn’t stopped until every fragment was placed. She had not even signed it.

He read the note over and over, staring at the tiny cracks of wood grain snaking between the patches of white, until the sky outside shifted from navy to gray. Then he slipped the scraps of paper into an envelope. Every day — though he promised himself this time would be the last time — he settled Nath and Lydia in front of the television, locked the door to his study, and pulled out the shreds of note again. He read it while the children moved from cartoons to soap operas to game shows, while they sprawled, unsmiling, in front of Bewitched and Let’s Make a Deal and To Tell the Truth, while — despite Johnny Carson’s best zingers — they sank into sleep.

When they had married, he and Marilyn had agreed to forget about the past. They would start a new life together, the two of them, with no looking back. With Marilyn gone, James broke that pact again and again. Each time he read the note, he thought of her mother, who had never referred to him by name, only indirectly — to Marilyn — as your fiancé. Whose voice he had heard on their wedding day, echoing out into the marble lobby of the courthouse like an announcement on the P.A. system, so loud heads had turned: It’s not right, Marilyn. You know it’s not right. Who had wanted Marilyn to marry someone more like her. Who had never called them again after their wedding. All this must have come back to Marilyn as she ate at her mother’s table and slept in her mother’s bed: what a mistake she’d made, marrying him. How her mother had been right all along. I have kept all these feelings inside me for a long time, but now, after being in my mother’s house again, I think of her and realize I cannot put them aside any longer. In kindergarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. The first time it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache. So he read the note again and again. He remembered everything he could: Marilyn kneeling to lace Nath’s sneaker; Marilyn lifting his collar to slide in the stays. Marilyn as she was that first day in his office: slender and serious and so focused that he didn’t dare look at those eyes directly.

It didn’t stop hurting. His eyes didn’t stop watering.

When he heard the station’s late-night sign-off and the national anthem begin to play, he would slip the scraps of Marilyn’s note into the envelope and tuck it back into his shirt pocket. Then he tiptoed into the living room, where the children lay curled up together on the floor by the sofa, illuminated by the test pattern on the television. The Indian at the top of the screen glared as James carried first Lydia, then Nath, to bed. Then — because, without Marilyn, the bed felt too empty, like a barren plateau — he returned to the living room, swaddling himself in an old crocheted afghan on the sofa and studying the circles on the screen until the signal cut off. In the morning, it all began again.

Each morning Lydia and Nath, finding themselves back in their beds, wondered for just a moment if the universe had righted itself: perhaps they might enter the kitchen and find their mother at the stove, waiting for them with love and kisses and hard-boiled eggs. Neither ever mentioned this most tender hope, but each morning, when they met in the kitchen and found no one there but their father, in rumpled pajamas, setting out two empty bowls, they looked at each other and knew. Still gone.

They tried to keep busy, trading the marshmallows from their cereal to make breakfast last as long as they could: a pink for an orange, two yellows for a green. At lunchtime, their father made sandwiches, but he never got it right — not enough peanut butter, or not enough jelly, or cut crosswise instead of in triangles like their mother would have. Lydia and Nath, suddenly tactful, said nothing, even at dinner, when there would be peanut butter and jelly again.

The only time they left the house was for the grocery store. “Please,” Nath begged one day on the way home, as the lake glided past the car windows. “Please can we swim. Just an hour. Just five minutes. Just ten seconds.” James, his eyes on the rearview mirror, did not slow the car. “You know Lydia doesn’t know how,” he said. “I’m not ready to play lifeguard today.” He turned onto their street, and Nath slid across the backseat and pinched Lydia’s arm.

“Baby,” he hissed. “We can’t swim because of you. ”

Across the street, Mrs. Allen was weeding her garden, and when the car doors opened, she waved them over. “James,” she said. “James, I haven’t seen you in a while.” She held a sharp little rake and wore pink and purple gloves, but when she leaned on the inside of the garden gate and peeled them off, Lydia spotted half-moons of dirt under her fingernails.

“How is Marilyn?” Mrs. Allen asked. “She’s been away quite a while, hasn’t she? I do hope everything is all right.” Her eyes were excited and bright, as if — Nath thought — she might get a present.