Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

Later on, Nath would never be able to disentangle what he said and what he thought and what he only felt. He would never be sure whether he said anything at all. All Nath would know, for sure, was this: he pushed Lydia into the water.

Whenever he remembered this moment, it lasted forever: a flash of complete separateness as Lydia disappeared beneath the surface. Crouched on the dock, he had a glimpse of the future: without her, he would be completely alone. In the instant after, he knew it would change nothing. He could feel the ground still tipping beneath him. Even without Lydia, the world would not level. He and his parents and their lives would spin into the space where she had been. They would be pulled into the vacuum she left behind.

More than this: the second he touched her, he knew that he had misunderstood everything. When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn’t want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.

In reality, it was only a few seconds before Nath jumped into the water. He ducked under, grabbed Lydia’s arm, pulled her to the surface, pedaling furiously.

Kick, he gasped. Kick. Kick.

They floundered their way to the edge of the lake, moving slowly toward the shallows until their feet hit the sandy bottom and they lurched aground. Nath wiped mud from his eyes. Lydia vomited a mouthful of lake water into the grass. For a minute, two, three, they lay facedown, catching their breath. Then Nath pushed himself to his feet, and to his surprise, Lydia reached up to clutch his hand. Don’t let go, she meant, and, dizzy with gratitude, Nath gave it.

They trudged home in silence, making damp slodges on the sidewalk. Except for Mrs. Allen’s snores, there was no noise but the sound of water dripping from their clothes to the linoleum. They had been gone only twenty minutes, but it felt as though eons had passed. Quietly they tiptoed upstairs and hid their wet clothes in the hamper and put on dry, and when their parents returned with suitcases and boxes of books, they said nothing. When their mother complained about the water spots on the floor, Nath said he had spilled a drink. At bedtime, Nath and Lydia brushed their teeth sociably at the sink, taking turns to spit, saying goodnight as if it were any other night. It was too big to talk about, what had happened. It was like a landscape they could not see all at once; it was like the sky at night, which turned and turned so they couldn’t find its edges. It would always feel too big. He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.

• • •

Middlewood Elementary held its annual welcome-back picnic on the last weekend in August. Their mother pressed one hand to her belly, where Hannah grew heavier every day; their father carried Lydia on his shoulders as they walked across the parking lot. After lunch, there were contests: who could hit a Wiffle ball the farthest, who could toss the most beanbags into a coffee can, who could guess the number of jelly beans in the one-gallon Mason jar. Nath and James entered the father-son egg race, each balancing a raw egg in a teaspoon like an offering. They made it almost all the way to the finish line before Nath tripped and dropped his. Miles Fuller and his father crossed the line first and Mrs. Hugard, the principal, gave them the blue ribbon.

“It’s okay,” James said, and for a moment Nath felt better. Then his father added, “Now, if they had a contest for reading all day—” All month he had been saying things like this: things that sounded like jokes but weren’t. Every time, as he heard his own voice, James bit the tip of his tongue, too late. He did not understand why he said these things to Nath, for that would have meant understanding something far more painful: that Nath reminded him more and more of himself, of everything he wanted to forget from his own boyhood. He knew only that it was becoming a reflex, one that left him smarting and ashamed, and he glanced away. Nath looked down at his broken egg, yolk trickling between blades of grass, whites seeping into the soil. Lydia gave him a small smile, and he ground the shell into the dirt with his sneaker. When his father turned his back, Nath spat into the lawn at his feet.

And then came the three-legged race. A teacher looped a handkerchief around Lydia’s and Nath’s ankles and they hobbled to the starting line, where other children were tethered to their parents, or to siblings, or to each other. They had hardly begun to run when Lydia caught the edge of Nath’s shoe under her own and stumbled. Nath threw an arm wide for balance and wobbled. He tried to match Lydia’s stride, but when Lydia swung her leg forward, Nath pulled back. The handkerchief around their ankles was tied so tight their feet throbbed. It didn’t loosen, yoking them together like mismatched cattle, and it didn’t come undone, even when they jerked in opposite directions and tumbled face-forward onto the soft, damp grass.

Ten years later it had still not come undone. Years passed. Boys went to war; men went to the moon; presidents arrived and resigned and departed. All over the country, in Detroit and Washington and New York, crowds roiled in the streets, angry about everything. All over the world, nations splintered and cracked: North Vietnam, East Berlin, Bangladesh. Everywhere things came undone. But for the Lees, that knot persisted and tightened, as if Lydia bound them all together.

Every day, James drove home from the college — where he taught his cowboy class term after term after term, until he could recite the lectures word for word — mulling over the slights of the day: how two little girls, hopscotching on the corner, had seen him brake at the stop sign and thrown pebbles at his car; how Stan Hewitt had asked him the difference between a spring roll and an egg roll; how Mrs. Allen had smirked when he drove past. Only when he reached home and saw Lydia did the bitter smog dissipate. For her, he thought, everything would be different. She would have friends to say, Don’t be an idiot, Stan, how the hell would she know? She would be poised and confident; she would say, Afternoon, Vivian, and look right at her neighbors with those wide blue eyes. Every day, the thought grew more precious.

Every day, as Marilyn unboxed a frozen pie or defrosted a Salisbury steak — for she still refused to cook, and the family quietly accepted this as the price of her presence — she made plans: Books she would buy Lydia. Science fair projects. Summer classes. “Only if you’re interested,” she told Lydia, every time. “Only if you want to.” She meant it, every time, but she did not realize she was holding her breath. Lydia did. Yes, she said, every time. Yes. Yes. And her mother would breathe again. In the newspaper — which, between loads of washing, Marilyn read front to back, metering out the day, section by section — she saw glimmers of hope. Yale admitted women, then Harvard. The nation learned new words: affirmative action; Equal Rights Amendment; Ms. In her mind, Marilyn spun out Lydia’s future in one long golden thread, the future she was positive her daughter wanted, too: Lydia in high heels and a white coat, a stethoscope round her neck; Lydia bent over an operating table, a ring of men awed at her deft handiwork. Every day, it seemed more possible.