Everything I Never Told You

by Celeste Ng

  Oh god, Lydia thought, not again. She blinked fiercely and focused on the corner of her desk, where some article her mother had clipped months ago still sat, furred now with dust.

  “Look at me.” Marilyn cupped Lydia’s chin in her hand and thought of all the things her own mother had never said to her, the things she had longed, her entire life, to hear. “You have your whole life in front of you. You can do anything you want.” She paused, looking over Lydia’s shoulder at the shelf crammed with books, the stethoscope atop the bookshelf, the neat mosaic of the periodic table. “When I’m dead, that’s all I want you to remember.”

  She meant: I love you. I love you. But her words sucked the breath from Lydia’s lungs: When I’m dead. All through that long-ago summer, she had thought her mother might really be dead, and those weeks and months had left a persistent, insistent ache in her chest, like a pulsing bruise. She had promised: anything her mother wanted. Anything at all. As long as her mother stayed.

  “I know, Mom,” she said. “I know.” She tugged her notebook from her bookbag. “I’ll get started.”

  “That’s my girl.” Marilyn kissed her on the head, right where her hair parted, and Lydia inhaled at last: shampoo, detergent, peppermint. A scent she had known all her life, a scent that, every time she smelled it, she realized she had missed. She curled her arms around Marilyn’s waist, pulling her close, so close she could feel her mother’s heartbeat against her cheek.

  “Enough of that,” Marilyn said at last, swatting Lydia playfully on the behind. “Get to work. Supper will be ready in half an hour.”

  All through dinner, the conversation with her mother writhed inside Lydia. She steeled herself with one thought: later, she would tell Nath all about it, and then she would feel better. She excused herself early, leaving half her plate untouched. “I’ve got to finish my physics,” she said, knowing her mother wouldn’t protest. Then, on her way upstairs, she passed the hall table, where her father had set the mail just before supper, and one envelope caught her eye: a Harvard seal in the corner, and beneath that, Admissions Office. She slit it open with her finger.

  Dear Mr. Lee, she read. We look forward to you joining us on campus April 29–May 2 and have matched you with a host student for your visit. She knew it had been coming, but it had not seemed real until now. The day after her birthday. Without thinking, she ripped the letter and envelope in two. And at that moment, Nath came out of the kitchen.

  “Thought I heard you out here,” he said. “Can I borrow—” He spotted the red crest on the torn envelope, the letter in pieces in Lydia’s hand, and froze.

  Lydia flushed. “It’s nothing important. I didn’t—” But she had crossed a line, and both of them knew it.

  “Gimme that.” Nath snatched the letter. “This is mine. Jesus. What are you doing?”

  “I just—” Lydia could not think of a way to finish.

  Nath pieced the ragged edges together, as if he could make the letter whole again. “This is about my visit. What the hell were you thinking? That if I didn’t get this, I couldn’t go?” Put so starkly, it sounded foolish and pathetic, and tears began to form in the corners of Lydia’s eyes, but Nath did not care. It was as if Lydia had been stealing from him. “Get it through your head: I’m going. I’m going that weekend. And I’m going in September.” He bolted for the stairs. “Jesus Christ. I can’t get out of this house fast enough.” In a moment, his door slammed overhead, and although Lydia knew he wouldn’t open it—nor did she know what she would say if he did—this did not stop her from knocking, again and again and again.

  The next afternoon, in Jack’s car, she stalled the engine over and over until Jack said they’d better call it a day.

  “I know what to do,” Lydia said. “I just can’t do it.” Her hand had cramped into a claw around the gearshift and she pried it away. Partners, she reminded herself. The gas and the clutch were partners. It struck her now: that wasn’t true. If one went up, the other had to go down. That was how everything went. Her grade in physics had gone up to a C-minus but her grade in history had slipped to a D. Tomorrow her English essay was due—two thousand words on Faulkner—but she could not even find her book. Maybe there was no such thing as partners, she thought. From all her studying, this flashed through her mind: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One went up and the other went down. One gained, the other lost. One escaped, the other was trapped, forever.

  The thought haunted her for days. Although Nath—cooled down now from the incident of the letter—was speaking to her again, she could not bear to mention it, even to apologize. Each night after dinner, despite her mother’s most pointed nagging, she stayed in her room alone instead of tiptoeing down the hall in search of sympathy. The night before her birthday, James rapped at her door.

  “You’ve seemed down the past couple of weeks,” he said. He held out a little blue velvet box the size of a deck of cards. “I thought an early present might cheer you up.” It had taken him some time, this gift, and he was proud of it. He had gone so far as to ask Louisa for advice on what a teenage girl might like, and this time, he was sure Lydia would love it.

  Inside the box lay a silver heart on a chain. “It’s beautiful,” Lydia said, surprised. At last, a present that was a present—not a book, not a hint—something she wanted, not something they wanted for her. This was the necklace she had longed for at Christmas. The chain slid through her fingers like a stream of water, so lithe it felt almost alive.

  James touched her dimple with a fingertip and twisted it, an old joke of his. “It opens.”

  Lydia flipped the locket open and froze. Inside were two pictures the size of her thumbnail: one of her father, one of her—dolled up for the ninth-grade dance the year before. All the way home, she had told him what a wonderful time she’d had. The photo of her father smiled broadly, fondly, expectantly. The photo of herself looked away, serious, resentful, sullen.

  “I know this year has been tough, and your mother’s been asking a lot of you,” James said. “Just remember, school isn’t everything. It’s not as important as friendship, or love.” Already he could see a faint line worrying a crease between Lydia’s brows, dark circles blooming beneath her eyes from late-night studying. He wanted to smooth that wrinkle with his thumb, to wipe the shadows away like dust. “Every time you look at this, just remember what really matters. Every time you look at this, I want you to smile. Promise?”

  He fiddled with the clasp of the necklace, struggling with the tiny spring loop. “I wanted gold, but a reliable source told me everyone was wearing silver this year,” he said. Lydia ran a finger along the velvet lining of the box. Her father was so concerned with what everyone was doing: I’m so glad you’re going to the dance, honey—everyone goes to the dance. Your hair looks so pretty that way, Lyddie—everyone has long hair these days, right? Anytime she smiled: You should smile more—everyone likes a girl who smiles. As if a dress and long hair and a smile could hide everything about her that was different. If her mother let her go out like the other girls, she thought, it might not matter what she looked like—Jackie Harper had one blue eye and one green, and she’d been voted Most Social last year. Or if she looked like everyone else, perhaps it would not matter that she had to study all the time, that she could not go out on the weekends until she’d done all her homework, that she could not go out with boys at all. One or the other might be overcome. To be pulled both ways—no dress, no book, no locket could help that.

  “There we go,” James said, the catch springing open at last. He refastened it at her nape, and the metal cut a line of cold, like a ring of ice, around her throat. “What do you think? Do you like it?” Lydia understood: this was meant to remind her of all he wanted for her. Like a string tied around her finger, only this lay around her neck.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered, and James mistook her hoarseness for deep gratitude.

 
“Promise me,” he said, “that you’ll get along with everyone. You can never have too many friends.” And Lydia closed her eyes and nodded.

  The next day, in honor of her birthday, she wore the necklace, as her father suggested. “Right after school,” James told her, “I’ll take you over to get your permit and we’ll have our first driving lesson before dinner.” Her mother said, “And after dinner, we’ll have cake. And I’ve got some special presents for the birthday girl.” Which meant books, Lydia thought. That night Nath would pack his suitcase. All day she consoled herself: In six hours, I will have my permit. In two weeks, I will be able to drive away.

  At three o’clock, her father pulled up in front of the school, but when Lydia picked up her bookbag and started for the sedan, she was surprised to see someone already in the passenger seat: a Chinese woman—a girl, really—with long black hair.

  “So nice to finally meet you,” the girl said as Lydia climbed into the backseat. “I’m Louisa, your dad’s teaching assistant.”

  James paused the car to let a cluster of junior boys meander across the street. “Louisa has an appointment and since I was coming this way anyway, I offered her a ride.”

  “I shouldn’t have said yes,” Louisa said. “I should have just canceled it. I hate the dentist.”

  As he crossed in front of the car, one of the juniors grinned at them through the windshield and pulled his eyes into slits with his fingers. The others laughed, and Lydia scrunched down in her seat. It occurred to her: the boys probably thought Louisa was her mother. Squirming, she wondered if her father was embarrassed, too, but in the front seat, James and Louisa hadn’t noticed a thing.

  “Ten bucks says you don’t even have one cavity,” James said.

  “Five,” Louisa said. “I’m just a poor grad student, not a rich professor.” She patted his arm playfully, and the tenderness in her face shocked Lydia. Her mother looked at her father this way, late at night, when he was caught up in his reading and she leaned against his armchair affectionately, before nudging him to bed. Louisa’s hand lingered on her father’s arm and Lydia stared at them, her father and this girl, cozy in the front seat like a little married couple, a tableau framed by the bright screen of the windshield, and she thought suddenly: This girl is sleeping with my father.

  It had never occurred to her before to think of her father as a man with desires. Like all teenagers, she preferred—despite her very existence—to imagine her parents as eternally chaste. But there was something in the way her father and Louisa touched, in their easy banter, that shocked her innocent sensibilities. To her, the faint crackle between them blazed so hotly that her cheeks flushed. They were lovers. She was sure of it. Louisa’s hand was still on her father’s arm and her father didn’t move, as if the caress were nothing unusual. In fact, James did not even notice: Marilyn often rested her hand on him just this way, and the feeling was too familiar to stand out. For Lydia, however, the way her father kept looking straight ahead, eyes still scanning the road, was all the confirmation she needed.

  “So I hear it’s your birthday today,” Louisa said, twisting toward the backseat again. “Sixteen. I’m sure this will be a very special year for you.” Lydia didn’t respond, and Louisa tried again. “Do you like your necklace? I helped pick it out. Your dad asked my advice on what you might like.”

  Lydia hooked two fingers beneath the chain, fighting the urge to yank it from her neck. “How would you know what I like? You don’t even know me.”

  Louisa blinked. “I had some ideas. I mean, I’ve heard so much about you from your dad.”

  Lydia looked her directly in the eye. “Really,” she said. “Daddy’s never mentioned you.”

  “Come on, Lyddie,” James said, “you’ve heard me talk about Louisa. How smart she is. How she never lets those undergrads get away with anything.” He smiled at Louisa, and Lydia’s vision blurred.

  “Daddy, where did you drive after you got your license?” she asked suddenly.

  In the rearview mirror, James’s eyes flicked open in surprise. “To school, to swim practices and meets,” he said. “And on errands, sometimes.”

  “But not on dates.”

  “No,” James said. His voice cracked briefly, like a teenage boy’s. “No, not on dates.”

  Lydia felt small and sharp and mean, like a tack. “Because you didn’t date. Right?” Silence. “Why not? Didn’t anybody want to go out with you?”

  This time James kept his eyes on the road before them, and his hands on the wheel stiffened, elbows locking.

  “Oh, now,” Louisa said. “I don’t believe that for a minute.” She put her arm on James’s elbow again, and this time she kept it there until they reached the dentist’s office, until James stopped the car and said, to Lydia’s outrage, “See you tomorrow.”

  Despite his daughter glowering in the backseat, James did not realize anything was wrong. At the DMV, he kissed her on the cheek and took a chair. “You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’ll be right here when you’re done.” Thinking about how excited Lydia would be, permit in hand, he had forgotten all about the moment in the car. Lydia herself, still roiling with the secret she was sure she had discovered, turned away without a word.

  In the test room, a woman handed her an exam booklet and a pencil and told her to take any empty seat. Lydia made her way toward the back corner of the room, stepping over bookbags and purses and the legs of the boy in the next-to-last row. Everything her father had ever said to her bounced back in a new tone: You can never have too many friends. She thought of her mother, sitting at home, doing the laundry, filling in a crossword, while her father— She was furious with him, furious with her mother for letting this happen. Furious with everyone.

  At that moment Lydia realized the room had gone silent. Everyone’s head was bent over the test. She looked up at the clock, but it told her nothing: not when they started, not when the test ended, only the time, three forty-one. The second hand tick-tick-ticked around from eleven to twelve and the minute hand, like a long iron needle, jumped forward another notch. Three forty-two. She flipped her booklet open. What color is a stop sign? She filled in the circle for B: Red. What must you do if you see or hear an emergency vehicle coming from any direction? In her haste, the pencil slipped outside the bubble in a jagged claw. A few rows up, a girl with pigtails rose, and the woman at the front gestured her into the next room. A moment later, the boy sitting next to her did the same. Lydia looked down at her booklet again. Twenty questions. Eighteen left to go.

  If your car begins to skid, you should . . . All of the answers seemed plausible. She skipped ahead. When are roads and highways most slippery? How much distance should you leave between yourself and the vehicle in front of you under good road conditions? To her right, a man with a mustache closed his booklet and put down his pencil. C, Lydia guessed. A. D. On the next page, she found a list of sentences she could not complete. When driving behind a large truck on the freeway, you should . . . To safely navigate a curve, you should . . . When backing up, you should . . . She repeated each question to herself and got stuck on the last words, like a scratched record: you should, you should, you should. Then someone touched her shoulder, softly, and the woman from the front of the room said, “I’m sorry, dear, time’s up.”

  Lydia kept her head bent over the desk, as if the words would not be true until she saw the woman’s face. A dark spot formed in the middle of the paper, and it took her a moment to realize it was the mark of a tear, that it was hers. She wiped the paper clean with her hand, then wiped her cheek. Everyone else had gone.

  “It’s okay,” the woman said. “You only need fourteen right.” But Lydia knew she had filled in only five circles.

  In the next room, where a man fed answer sheets into the scoring machine, she jabbed her finger with the tip of her pencil. “Eighteen right,” the man said to the girl in front of her. “Take this to the counter and they
’ll take your picture and print your permit. Congratulations.” The girl gave a happy little skip as she passed through the door and Lydia wanted to slap her. There was a brief moment of silence as the man looked at Lydia’s form, and she focused on the splotch of mud on his boot.

  “Well,” he said. “Don’t feel bad. Lots of people fail the first time.” He turned the paper faceup and again she saw the five dark circles, like moles, the rest of the sheet blank and bare. Lydia did not wait for her score. As the machine sucked in the answer sheet, she walked straight past him, back into the waiting room.

  There was a long line at the counter for photos now; the man with the mustache counted the bills in his wallet, the girl who had skipped picked at her nail polish. The pigtailed girl and the boy had already gone. On the bench, James sat waiting. “So,” he said, looking down at her empty hands. “Where is it?”

  “I failed,” she said. The two women beside her father on the bench looked up at her, then quickly away. Her father blinked, once, twice, as if he hadn’t heard her properly.

  “It’s okay, honey,” he said. “You can try again this weekend.” In the cloud of disappointment and humiliation, Lydia did not remember, or care, that she could take the test again. In the morning, Nath would leave for Boston. All she could think was: I will be here forever. I will never be able to get away.

  James put his arm around his daughter, but it weighed on her shoulders like a lead blanket, and she shrugged it off.

  “Can we go home now?” she said.