Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You

Except he can’t tell his parents that now. He watches his mother scribble names on the back of an old receipt, and when she says to him and Hannah, “Anyone else you can think of?” he thinks of Jack and says no.

All spring, Lydia has been hanging around Jack — or the other way around. Every afternoon, practically, driving around in that Beetle of his, coming home just in time for dinner, when she pretended she’d been at school all the time. It had emerged suddenly, this friendship — Nath refused to use any other word. Jack and his mother have lived on the corner since the first grade, and once Nath thought they could be friends. It hadn’t turned out that way. Jack had humiliated him in front of the other kids, had laughed when Nath’s mother was gone, when Nath had thought she might never come back. As if, Nath thinks now, as if Jack had any right to be talking, when he had no father. All the neighbors had whispered about it when the Wolffs had moved in, how Janet Wolff was divorced, how Jack ran wild while she worked late shifts at the hospital. That summer, they’d whispered about Nath’s parents, too — but Nath’s mother had come back. Jack’s mother was still divorced. And Jack still ran wild.

And now? Just last week, driving home from an errand, he’d seen Jack out walking that dog of his. He had come around the lake, about to turn onto their little dead-end street, when he saw Jack on the path by the bank, tall and lanky, the dog loping just ahead of him toward a tree. Jack was wearing an old, faded T-shirt and his sandy curls stood up, unbrushed. As Nath drove past, Jack looked up and gave the merest nod of the head, a cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth. The gesture, Nath had thought, was less one of greeting than of recognition. Beside Jack, the dog had stared him in the eye and casually lifted its leg. And Lydia had spent all spring with him.

If he says anything now, Nath thinks, they’ll say, Why didn’t we know about this before? He’ll have to explain that all those afternoons when he’d said, “Lydia’s studying with a friend,” or “Lydia’s staying after to work on math,” he had really meant, She’s with Jack or She’s riding in Jack’s car or She’s out with him god knows where . More than that: saying Jack’s name would mean admitting something he doesn’t want to. That Jack was a part of Lydia’s life at all, that he’d been part of her life for months.

Across the table, Marilyn looks up the numbers in the phone book and reads them out; James does the calling, carefully and slowly, clicking the dial around with one finger. With each call his voice becomes more confused. No? She didn’t mention anything to you, any plans? Oh. I see. Well. Thank you anyway. Nath studies the grain of the kitchen table, the open album in front of him. The missing photo leaves a gap in the page, a clear plastic window showing the blank white lining of the cover. Their mother runs her hand down the column of the phone book, staining her fingertip gray. Under cover of the tablecloth, Hannah stretches her legs and touches one toe to Nath’s. A toe of comfort. But he doesn’t look up. Instead he closes the album, and across the table, his mother crosses another name off the list.

When they’ve called the last number, James puts the telephone down. He takes the slip of paper from Marilyn and crosses out Karen Adler, bisecting the K into two neat Vs. Under the line he can still see the name. Karen Adler. Marilyn never let Lydia go out on weekends until she’d finished all her schoolwork — and by then, it was usually Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, those Sunday afternoons, Lydia met her friends at the mall, wheedling a ride: “A couple of us are going to the movies. Annie Hall. Karen is dying to see it.” He’d pull a ten from his wallet and push it across the table to her, meaning: All right, now go and have some fun. He realizes now that he had never seen a ticket stub, that for as long as he can remember, Lydia had been alone on the curb when he came to take her home. Dozens of evenings he’d paused at the foot of the stairs and smiled, listening to Lydia’s half of a conversation float down from the landing above: “Oh my god, I know, right? So then what did she say?” But now, he knows, she hasn’t called Karen or Pam or Jenn in years. He thinks now of those long afternoons, when they’d thought she was staying after school to study. Yawning gaps of time when she could have been anywhere, doing anything. In a moment, James realizes he’s obliterated Karen Adler’s name under a crosshatch of black ink.

He lifts the phone again and dials. “Officer Fiske, please. Yes, this is James Lee. We’ve called all of Lydia’s—” He hesitates. “Everyone she knows from school. No, nothing. All right, thank you. Yes, we will.”

“They’re sending an officer out to look for her,” he says, setting the receiver back on the hook. “They said to keep the phone line open in case she calls.”

Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony. The phone does not ring. At midnight, James sends the children to bed and, though they don’t argue, stands at the foot of the stairs until they’ve gone up. “Twenty bucks says Lydia calls before morning,” he says, a little too heartily. No one laughs. The phone still does not ring.

Upstairs, Nath shuts the door to his room and hesitates. What he wants is to find Jack — who, he’s sure, knows where Lydia is. But he cannot sneak out with his parents still awake. His mother is already on edge, startling every time the refrigerator motor kicks on or off. In any case, from the window he can see that the Wolffs’ house is dark. The driveway, where Jack’s steel-gray VW usually sits, is empty. As usual, Jack’s mother has forgotten to leave the front-door light on.

He tries to think: had Lydia seemed strange the night before? He had been away four whole days, by himself for the first time in his life, visiting Harvard — Harvard! — where he would be headed in the fall. In those last days of class before reading period—“Two weeks to cram and party before exams,” his host student, Andy, had explained — the campus had had a restless, almost festive air. All weekend he’d wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall. The purposeful stride he saw in everyone’s walk, as if they knew they were destined for greatness. Friday he had spent the night in a sleeping bag on Andy’s floor and woke up at one when Andy’s roommate, Wes, came in with his girlfriend. The light had flicked on and Nath froze in place, blinking at the doorway, where a tall, bearded boy and the girl holding his hand slowly emerged from the blinding haze. She had long, red hair, loose in waves around her face. “Sorry,” Wes had said and flipped the lights off, and Nath heard their careful footsteps as they made their way across the common room to Wes’s bedroom. He had kept his eyes open, letting them readjust to the dark, thinking, So this is what college is like.

Now he thinks back to last night, when he had arrived home just before dinner. Lydia had been holed up in her room, and when they sat down at the table, he’d asked her how the past few days had been. She’d shrugged and barely glanced up from her plate, and he had assumed this meant nothing new. Now he can’t remember if she’d even said hello.

In her room, up in the attic, Hannah leans over the edge of her bed and fishes her book from beneath the dust ruffle. It’s Lydia’s book, actually: The Sound and the Fury. Advanced English. Not meant for fifth graders. She’d filched it from Lydia’s room a few weeks ago, and Lydia hadn’t even noticed. Over the past two weeks she’s worked her way through it, a little each night, savoring the words like a cherry Life Saver tucked inside her cheek. Tonight, somehow, the book seems different. Only when she flips back, to where she stopped the day before, does she understand. Throughout, Lydia has underlined words here and there, occasionally scribbling a note from class lectures. Order vs. chaos. Corruption of Southern aristocratic values. After this page, the book is untouched. Hannah flips through the rest: no notes, no doodles, no blue to break up the black. She’s reached the point where Lydia stopped reading, she realizes, and she doesn’t feel like reading any more.