Everything I Never Told You

by Celeste Ng

  • • •

  “As soon as Lydia comes in,” Marilyn said, “we’ll say surprise. And then we’ll have dinner, and presents after.” Nath was up in his room, packing for his trip, and alone with her youngest, she was planning aloud, half talking to herself. Hannah, delighted to have her mother’s attention even by default, nodded sagely. Under her breath she practiced—Surprise! Surprise!—and watched her mother pipe Lydia’s name in blue onto the sheet cake. It was supposed to look like a driver’s license, a white-frosted rectangle with a photo of Lydia in the corner where the real photograph would be. Inside, it was chocolate cake. Because this was an extra-special birthday, Marilyn had baked this cake herself—from a box, true, but she had mixed it, one hand moving the mixer through the cake batter, the other holding the battered aluminum bowl still against the whirling blades. She had let Hannah pick out the tub of frosting, and now she squeezed out the last of the tube of decorator’s icing spelling L-Y-D and reached into the grocery bag for another.

  Such a special cake, Hannah thought, would taste extra-special, too. Better than just plain vanilla or chocolate. The box had shown a smiling woman hovering over a slice of cake and the words You mix in the love. Love, Hannah decided, would be sweet, like her mother’s perfume, and soft as marshmallows. Quietly she extended a finger, gouging a small dip in the perfectly smooth surface of the cake. “Hannah!” Marilyn snapped, and swatted her hand away.

  While her mother smoothed the dent with the spatula, Hannah touched the frosting on her finger to her tongue. It was so sweet her eyes watered, and when Marilyn wasn’t looking, she wiped the rest of it onto the backside of the tablecloth. She could tell by the little line between her mother’s eyebrows that she was still upset, and she wanted to lean her head against Marilyn’s aproned thigh. Then her mother would understand that she hadn’t meant to mess up the cake. But as she reached out, Marilyn set down the tube of icing mid-letter and lifted her head, listening. “That can’t be them already.”

  Beneath her feet, Hannah felt the floor shiver as the garage door groaned open. “I’ll get Nath.”

  By the time Hannah and Nath arrived downstairs, though, Lydia and their father had already come from the garage into the hallway, and the moment for Surprise had passed. Instead Marilyn took Lydia’s face between her hands and kissed her on the cheek, hard, leaving a red smudge of lipstick, like a welt.

  “You’re home early,” she said. “Happy birthday. And congratulations.” She held out a palm. “So? Let’s see it.”

  “I failed,” Lydia said. She glared from Nath to their mother, as if daring them to be upset.

  Marilyn stared. “What do you mean, you failed?” she said, honest surprise in her voice, as if she had never heard the word.

  Lydia said it again, louder: “I failed.” It was almost, Hannah thought, as if she were mad at their mother, mad at all of them. It could not be just the test. Her face was stony and still, but Hannah saw the tiny trembles—in her hunched shoulders, in her jaw clenched tight. As if she might shiver to pieces. She wanted to wrap her arms tight around her sister’s body, to hold her together, but she knew Lydia would only push her away. No one else noticed. Nath and Marilyn and James glanced at each other, unsure what to say.

  “Well,” Marilyn said at last. “You’ll just study the traffic rules and try again when you’re ready. It’s not the end of the world.” She tucked a stray lock of hair behind Lydia’s ear. “It’s okay. It’s not like you failed a school subject, right?”

  On any other day, this would have made Lydia boil over inside. Today—after the necklace, after the boys in front of the car, after the test, after Louisa—there was no room left in her for anger. Something within her tipped and cracked.

  “Sure, Mom,” she said. She looked up at her mother, around at her whole family, and smiled, and Hannah nearly ducked behind Nath. The smile was too wide, too bright, cheery and white-toothed and fake. On her sister’s face it was terrifying; it made Lydia look like a different person, a stranger. Again no one else noticed. Nath’s shoulders unhunched; James let out his breath; Marilyn wiped her hands, which had grown damp, on her apron.

  “Dinner’s not quite ready yet,” she said. “Why don’t you go up and take a shower and relax? We’ll eat early, as soon as it’s done.”

  “Great,” Lydia said, and this time Hannah actually did turn her face away until she heard her sister’s footsteps on the stairs.

  “What happened?” Marilyn murmured to James, who shook his head. Hannah knew. Lydia hadn’t studied. Two weeks ago, before Lydia had come home after school, Hannah had explored her room, looking for treasures. She’d pocketed Lydia’s book from the floor of the closet and, beneath it, had found the rules and regulations pamphlet. When Lydia started to study, Hannah had thought, she would notice her book was missing. She would come looking for it. Every few days, she had checked, but the pamphlet hadn’t moved. Yesterday it had been half-covered by a pair of beige platforms and Lydia’s best bell-bottoms. And the book was still tucked upstairs under Hannah’s pillow.

  Upstairs, in her room, Lydia yanked at the necklace, which wouldn’t break. She unhooked it and slammed it inside its box, as if it were a wild thing, and pushed it deep beneath the bed. If her father asked where it was, she would say she was saving it for special occasions. She would say she didn’t want to lose it, don’t worry, she’d wear it next time, Daddy. In the mirror, a fine red line ringed her neck.

  By the time Lydia came down to dinner an hour later, the mark had faded away, though the feeling that accompanied it had not. She had dressed up as if for a party, her hair ironed dry and straight and glossy on the big ironing board, her lips coated with jam-colored gloss. James, looking at her, had a sudden memory of Marilyn when they’d first met. “Don’t you look nice,” he said, and Lydia forced herself to smile. She sat bolt upright with that same fake smile at the dinner table, like a doll on display, but only Hannah spotted its fakeness. Her back ached, watching Lydia, every bit of her did, and she slouched in her own chair until she nearly slid off the seat. As soon as dinner was over, Lydia patted her mouth with her napkin and stood up.

  “Wait,” Marilyn said. “There’s cake.” She went into the kitchen and in a moment emerged bearing the cake on a tray, candles aglow. The photo of Lydia was gone, the top of the cake refrosted to plain white, with just Lydia’s name. Hiding under the smooth white, Hannah thought, was the pretend driver’s license, the Congratulations and the blue L-Y-D. Though you couldn’t see it, it was there just underneath, covered up but smudged and unreadable and horrible. And you’d be able to taste it, too. Their father snapped picture after picture, but Hannah didn’t smile. Unlike Lydia, she had not yet learned to pretend. Instead she half shut her eyes, like she did during the scary parts of TV shows, so that she could only half see what came next.

  Which was this: Lydia waited for them to finish singing. As they reached the last line of the song, James held up the camera and she bent over the cake, lips pursed as if to kiss. Her perfectly made-up face smiled around the table, sweeping each of them in turn. Their mother. Their father. Nath. Hannah did not know everything Lydia thought she understood—the necklace, Louisa, all I want you to remember—but she knew that something had shifted inside her sister, that she was balanced on a dangerous, high-up ledge. She sat very still, as if one wrong move might tip Lydia off the edge, and Lydia blew out the flames with one quick puff.

  ten

  Lydia had been wrong about Louisa, of course. Back then, on his daughter’s birthday, James would have laughed at the very idea; the thought of anyone other than Marilyn in his bed, in his life, was preposterous. But back then, the thought of life without Lydia had been preposterous, too. Now both of those preposterous things have come true.

  When Louisa shuts the apartment door and returns to the bedroom, James is already buttoning his shirt. “You’re going?” she says. Inside, she still clings to the possibility
that Marilyn’s visit was just a coincidence, but she is fooling herself, and she knows it.

  James tucks in his shirt and fastens his belt. “I have to,” he says, and they both know this is true, too. “It may as well be now.” He’s not sure what to expect when he reaches home. Sobbing? Rage? A frying pan to the head? He doesn’t know yet, either, what he will say to Marilyn. “I’ll see you later,” he says to Louisa, who kisses his cheek, and this is the one thing he’s sure of.

  When he enters the house, just after noon, there is no sobbing, no rage—just silence. Nath and Hannah sit side by side on the living room couch, eyeing him warily as he passes through. It is as if they are watching a doomed man march to the gallows, and this is how James himself feels as he climbs the stairs to his daughter’s room, where Marilyn sits at Lydia’s desk, eerily calm. For a long while, she says nothing, and he wills himself still, keeps his hands steady, until she finally speaks.

  “How long?”

  Outside, Nath and Hannah crouch on the top step in wordless accord, holding their breath, listening to the voices that carry down the hall.

  “Since—the funeral.”

  “The funeral.” Marilyn, still studying the carpet, presses her lips into a thin line. “She’s very young. How old is she? Twenty-two? Twenty-three?”

  “Marilyn. Stop it.”

  Marilyn doesn’t stop it. “She seems sweet. Quite docile—that’s a nice change, I suppose. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I guess you’re long overdue for a trade-in. She’d make a very nice little wife.”

  James, to his surprise, blushes. “No one’s talking about—”

  “Not yet. But I know what she wants. Marriage. Husband. I know her type.” Marilyn pauses, remembering her younger self, her mother’s proud whisper: a lot of wonderful Harvard men. “My mother spent her whole life trying to turn me into that type.”

  At the mention of Marilyn’s mother, James stiffens, as if he has turned to ice. “Oh, yes. Your poor mother. And then you went and married me.” He chokes out a laugh. “What a disappointment.”

  “I am disappointed.” Marilyn’s head snaps up. “I thought you were different.” What she means is: I thought you were better than other men. I thought you wanted better than that. But James, still thinking of Marilyn’s mother, hears something else.

  “You got tired of different, didn’t you?” he says. “I’m too different. Your mother knew it right away. You think it’s such a good thing, standing out. But look at you. Just look at you.” He takes in Marilyn’s honey-colored hair; her skin, even paler than usual from a month spent indoors. Those sky-colored eyes he has adored for so long, first in his wife’s face and then in his child’s. Things he has never said, never even hinted to Marilyn before, pour from his mouth. “You’ve never been in a room where no one else looked like you. You’ve never had people mock you to your face. You’ve never been treated like a stranger.” He feels as if he has vomited, violently, and he drags the back of his hand across his lips. “You have no idea what it’s like, being different.”

  For a moment James looks young and lonely and vulnerable, like the shy boy she’d met so long ago, and half of Marilyn wants to gather him in her arms. The other half of her wants to batter him with her fists. She gnaws her lip, letting the two sides struggle. “Sophomore year, in the lab, the men used to sneak up behind me and try to lift up my skirt,” she says at last. “One time they came in early and pissed in all of my beakers. When I complained, the professor put his arm around me and said—” The memory catches in her throat, like a burr. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Life’s too short and you’re too beautiful. You know what? I didn’t care. I knew what I wanted. I was going to be a doctor.” She glares at James, as if he has contradicted her. “Then—fortunately—I came to my senses. I stopped trying to be different. I did just what all the other girls were doing. I got married. I gave all that up.” A thick bitterness coats her tongue. “Do what everyone else is doing. That’s all you ever said to Lydia. Make friends. Fit in. But I didn’t want her to be just like everyone else.” The rims of her eyes ignite. “I wanted her to be exceptional.”

  On the stairs, Hannah holds her breath. She is afraid to move anything, even a fingertip. Maybe if she stays perfectly still, her parents will stop talking. She can hold the world motionless, and everything will be all right.

  “Well, now you can marry this one,” Marilyn says. “She seems like the serious type. You know what that means.” She holds up her left hand, where the wedding ring glints dully. “A girl like that wants the whole package. Matchbox house, picket fence. Two-point-three kids.” She lets out one hard, sharp, terrifying bark of a laugh, and out on the landing, Hannah hides her face against Nath’s arm. “I suppose she’ll be more than happy to trade student life for all that. I just hope she doesn’t regret it.”

  At this word—regret—something in James flares. A hot biting smell, like overheating wires, pricks his nostrils. “Like you do?”

  A sudden and stunned silence. Though Hannah’s face is still pressed into Nath’s shoulder, she can picture her mother exactly: her face frozen, the rims of her eyes a deep red. If she cries, Hannah thinks, it won’t be tears. It will be little drops of blood.

  “Get out,” Marilyn says at last. “Get out of this house.”

  James touches his pocket for his keys, then realizes they are still in his hand: he had not even put them down. As if he had known inside, all along, that he would not be staying.

  “Let’s pretend,” he says, “that you never met me. That she was never born. That none of this ever happened.” Then he is gone.

  • • •

  Out on the landing, there is no time to run: Hannah and Nath have not even stood up when their father emerges into the hallway. At the sight of his children, James stops short. It is clear they’ve heard everything. For the past two months, every time he sees one of them, he sees a fragment of their missing sister—in the tilt of Nath’s head, in the long sweep of hair half screening Hannah’s face—and he leaves the room abruptly, without truly understanding why. Now, with both of them watching, he edges past, not daring to meet their eyes. Hannah presses herself to the wall, letting their father pass, but Nath stares straight at him, silently, with a look James can’t quite parse. The sound of his car as it whines out of the driveway, then speeds away, has the ring of finality; all of them hear it. Silence settles over the house like ash.

  Then Nath leaps to his feet. Stop, Hannah wants to say, but she knows Nath won’t. Nath pushes Hannah aside. His mother’s keys dangle from their hook in the kitchen, and he takes them and heads for the garage.

  “Wait,” Hannah calls, out loud this time. She is not sure whether he is chasing their father or if he is running away as well, but she knows that what he has planned is dreadful. “Nath. Wait. Don’t.”

  He doesn’t wait. He backs out of the garage, nicking the lilac bush beside the door, and then he, too, is gone.

  Upstairs, Marilyn hears none of this. She shuts the door of Lydia’s room, and a thick, heavy quiet wraps itself around her like a smothering blanket. With one finger, she strokes Lydia’s books, the neat binders in a row, each labeled in marker with the class and date. A coarse fur of dust now coats everything—the row of blank diaries, the old science fair ribbons, the pinned-up postcard of Einstein, the covers of each binder, the spines of each book. She imagines emptying Lydia’s room piece by piece. The tiny holes and unfaded patches that will mar the wallpaper when the posters and pictures come down; the carpet, crushed beneath the furniture, that will never rise again. Like her own mother’s house after everything had been cleared away.

  She thinks of her mother coming home alone all those years to an empty house, the bedroom kept just as it was, with fresh bedsheets, for the daughter who would never return, her husband long since gone, in some other woman’s bed now. You loved so hard and hoped so much and then you ended up with nothing
. Children who no longer needed you. A husband who no longer wanted you. Nothing left but you, alone, and empty space.

  With one hand, she pulls Einstein from the wall and tears him in two. Then the periodic table, useless now. She yanks the earpieces from Lydia’s stethoscope; she ravels the prize ribbons to satin shreds. One by one she topples the books from the shelf. The Color Atlas of Human Anatomy. Women Pioneers of Science. With each one, Marilyn’s breath becomes more fierce. How Your Body Works. Chemistry Experiments for Children. The Story of Medicine. She remembers every single one. It is like rewinding time, working her way backward through Lydia’s entire life. An avalanche piles up at her feet. Downstairs, huddled beneath the hall table, Hannah hears heavy thumps, like stone after stone thudding to the floor.

  At last, perched in the far corner of the bookcase: the very first book Marilyn had ever bought for Lydia. Slender as a pamphlet, it teeters alone on the shelf, then tips. Air hovers all around you, the splayed pages read. Though you can’t see it, it is still there. Marilyn wants to burn the books that litter the carpet, to peel the wallpaper from the walls. Everything that reminds her of Lydia and all she could have been. She wants to stomp the very bookshelf to splinters. Stripped bare, it lists unsteadily, as if it is tired, and with one push she knocks it to the floor.

  And there, in the hollow below the bottom shelf: a book. Thick. Red. A Scotch-taped spine. Even before Marilyn sees the photo, she knows what it is. But she turns it over anyway, with suddenly unsteady hands, still astonished to find Betty Crocker’s face implausibly, impossibly staring up at her.

  Your cookbook, Lydia had said. I lost it. Marilyn had been thrilled, had considered it an omen: her daughter had read her mind. Her daughter would never be confined to a kitchen. Her daughter wanted more. It had been a lie. She flips the pages she has not seen in years, tracing her mother’s pencil marks with her fingertip, smoothing the pockmarked pages where she had cried all those nights, in the kitchen, alone. Somehow Lydia had known: that this book had pulled on her mother like a heavy, heavy stone. She hadn’t destroyed it. She had hidden it, all those years; she had piled book after book atop it, weighting it down, so her mother would never have to see it again.