Celeste Ng: Everything I Never Told You

Last night, lying awake, she had watched the moon drift across the sky like a slow balloon. She couldn’t see it moving, but if she looked away, then back through the window, she could see that it had. In a little while, she had thought, it would impale itself on the shadow of the big spruce in the backyard. It took a long time. She was almost asleep when she heard a soft thud, and for a moment she thought that the moon had actually hit the tree. But when she looked outside, the moon was gone, almost hidden behind a cloud. Her glow-in-the-dark clock said it was two A.M.

She lay quiet, not even wiggling her toes, and listened. The noise had sounded like the front door closing. It was sticky: you had to push it with your hip to get it to latch. Burglars! she thought. Through the window, she saw a single figure crossing the front lawn. Not a burglar, just a thin silhouette against darker night, moving away. Lydia? A vision of life without her sister in it had flashed across her mind. She would have the good chair at the table, looking out the window at the lilac bushes in the yard, the big bedroom downstairs near everyone else. At dinnertime, they would pass her the potatoes first. She would get her father’s jokes, her brother’s secrets, her mother’s best smiles. Then the figure reached the street and disappeared, and she wondered if she had seen it at all.

Now, in her room, she looks down at the tangle of text. It was Lydia, she’s sure of it now. Should she tell? Her mother would be upset that Hannah had let Lydia, her favorite, just walk away. And Nath? She thinks of the way Nath’s eyebrows have been drawn together all evening, the way he has bitten his lip so hard, without realizing, that it has begun to crack and bleed. He’d be angry, too. He’d say, Why didn’t you run out and catch her? But I didn’t know where she was going, Hannah whispers into the dark. I didn’t know she was really going anywhere.

• • •

Wednesday morning James calls the police again. Were there any leads? They were checking all possibilities. Could the officer tell them anything, anything at all? They still expected Lydia would come home on her own. They were following up and would, of course, keep the family informed.

James listens to all this and nods, though he knows Officer Fiske can’t see him. He hangs up and sits back down at the table without looking at Marilyn or Nath or Hannah. He doesn’t need to explain anything: they can tell by the look on his face that there’s no news.

It doesn’t seem right to do anything but wait. The children stay home from school. Television, magazines, radio: everything feels frivolous in the face of their fear. Outside, it’s sunny, the air crisp and cool, but no one suggests that they move to the porch or the yard. Even housekeeping seems wrong: some clue might be sucked into the vacuum, some hint obliterated by lifting the dropped book and placing it, upright, on the shelf. So the family waits. They cluster at the table, afraid to meet each other’s eyes, staring at the wood grain of the tabletop as if it’s a giant fingerprint, or a map locating what they seek.

It’s not until Wednesday afternoon that a passerby notices the rowboat out on the lake, adrift in the windless day. Years ago, the lake had been Middlewood’s reservoir, before the water tower was built. Now, edged with grass, it’s a swimming hole in summer; kids dive off the wooden dock, and for birthday parties and picnics, a park employee unties the rowboat kept there. No one thinks much of it: a slipped mooring, a harmless prank. It is not a priority. A note is made for an officer to check it; a note is made for the commissioner of parks. It’s not until late Wednesday, almost midnight, that a lieutenant, going over loose ends from the day shift, makes the connection and calls the Lees to ask if Lydia ever played with the boat on the lake.

“Of course not,” James says. Lydia had refused, refused, to take swim classes at the Y. He’d been a swimmer as a teenager himself; he’d taught Nath to swim at age three. With Lydia he’d started too late, and she was already five when he took her to the pool for the first time and waded into the shallow end, water barely to his waist, and waited. Lydia would not even come near the water. She’d laid down in her swimsuit by the side of the pool and cried, and James finally hoisted himself out, swim trunks dripping but top half dry, and promised he would not make her jump. Even now, though the lake is so close, Lydia goes in just ankle-deep in summer, to wash the dirt from her feet.

“Of course not,” James says again. “Lydia doesn’t know how to swim.” It’s not until he says these words into the telephone that he understands why the police are asking. As he speaks, the entire family catches a chill, as if they know exactly what the police will find.

It’s not until early Thursday morning, just after dawn, that the police drag the lake and find her.

How had it begun? Like everything: with mothers and fathers. Because of Lydia’s mother and father, because of her mother’s and father’s mothers and fathers. Because long ago, her mother had gone missing, and her father had brought her home. Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.

In her first year at Radcliffe, 1955, Marilyn had enrolled in introductory physics, and her advisor glanced at her course schedule and paused. He was a plump man with a tweed suit and a crimson bowtie, a dark gray hat brim-down on the table beside him. “Why do you want to take physics?” he asked, and she explained shyly that she was hoping to become a doctor. “Not a nurse?” he’d said, with a chuckle. From a folder he pulled her high-school transcript and studied it. “Well,” he said. “I see you received very good grades in your high-school physics course.” She’d had the highest grade in her class, had set the curve on every test; she had loved physics. But he couldn’t know that. On the transcript, it said only “A.” She held her breath, waiting, afraid he would tell her that science was too hard, that she’d better try something like English or history instead. In her mind she prepared her retort. Instead he said, “All right, then, why don’t you try chemistry — if you think you can handle it,” and signed her course slip and handed it over, just like that.

When she arrived at the laboratory, though, she found herself the only girl in a room of fifteen men. The instructor tut-tutted and said, “Miss Walker, you’d better tie up those golden locks.” “Can I light the burner for you?” someone else would say. “Let me open that jar for you.” When she broke a beaker, the second day of class, three men rushed to her side. “Careful,” they said. “Better let us help.” Everything, she soon realized, started with better: “Better let me pour that acid for you.” “Better stand back — this will make a pop.” By the third day of class, she decided to show them. She said no, thank you, when people offered to make her pipettes, then hid a grin as they watched her melt glass tubes over the Bunsen burner and stretch them, like taffy, into perfectly tapered droppers. While her classmates sometimes splashed their lab coats, burning holes all the way down through their suits, she measured acids with steady hands. Her solutions never bubbled onto the counter like baking-soda volcanoes. Her results were the most accurate; her lab reports the most complete. By midterm, she set the curve for every exam, and the instructor had stopped smirking.