by Celeste Ng
Lydia, five years old, standing on tiptoe to watch vinegar and baking soda foam in the sink. Lydia tugging a heavy book from the shelf, saying, Show me again, show me another. Lydia, touching the stethoscope, ever so gently, to her mother’s heart. Tears blur Marilyn’s sight. It had not been science that Lydia had loved.
And then, as if the tears are telescopes, she begins to see more clearly: the shredded posters and pictures, the rubble of books, the shelf prostrate at her feet. Everything that she had wanted for Lydia, which Lydia had never wanted but had embraced anyway. A dull chill creeps over her. Perhaps—and this thought chokes her—that had dragged Lydia underwater at last.
The door creaks open, and Marilyn slowly raises her head, as if Lydia might somehow, impossibly, appear. For a second the impossible happens: a small blurred ghost of little-girl Lydia, dark-haired, big-eyed. Hesitating in the doorway, clinging to the jamb. Please, Marilyn thinks. In this word is all she cannot phrase, even to herself. Please come back, please let me start over, please stay. Please.
Then she blinks, and the figure sharpens: Hannah, pale and trembling, her face glossy with tears.
“Mom,” she whispers.
Without thinking, Marilyn opens her arms, and Hannah stumbles into them.
• • •
Across town, at the liquor store, Nath sets a fifth of whiskey on the counter. He has tasted alcohol exactly once in his life: at Harvard, his host student had offered him a beer. He’d gulped down four, more excited by the idea of it than the flavor—it had tasted, to him, like fizzy urine—and for the rest of the evening, the room had wobbled slightly on its axis. Now he wants the world to spin loose and careen away.
The man behind the counter studies Nath’s face, then squints at the bottle of whiskey. Nath’s fingers twitch. At eighteen, he is allowed to buy only three-two beer, that watery stuff his classmates chugged at parties. But 3.2 percent isn’t strong enough for what he needs now. The clerk eyes him again and Nath prepares himself: Go home, sonny, you’re too young for this stuff.
Instead the clerk says, “Your sister that girl who died?”
Nath’s throat goes raw, like a wound. He nods, focusing on the shelf behind the counter, where cigarettes rise in neat red-and-white stacks.
Then the clerk takes down a second bottle of whiskey and puts it in a bag with the first. He slides the bag toward Nath, along with the ten-dollar bill Nath has set on the counter.
“Good luck to you,” he says, and turns away.
The quietest spot Nath knows is out on the edge of town, near the county line. He parks by the side of the road and pulls out one of the bottles. One gulp of whiskey, then another, burns its way down, and he pictures it torching away everything raw and red and painful inside him. It’s almost one, and by the time the first bottle is gone, only one car has passed by, a dark-green Studebaker with an old lady at the wheel. The whiskey isn’t working the way he’d hoped. He’d thought it would wipe his mind clean, like a sponge on a blackboard, but instead the world sharpens with each swallow, dizzying him with its details: the spatter of mud on the driver’s side mirror; the last digit of the odometer, frozen between 5 and 6; the stitching in the car seat, just beginning to fray. A stray leaf, caught between windshield and wiper, rattles in the breeze. As he works through the second bottle, he thinks, suddenly, of his father’s face as he’d walked out the door: the way he hadn’t even glanced at them, as if he were focused on something far-off on the horizon or deep, deep in the past. Something neither he nor Hannah could see, something they couldn’t touch even if they’d wanted to. The air inside the car grows thick, filling his lungs like cotton. Nath cranks the window down. Then—as the cool breeze rushes in—he pitches over the side and vomits both bottles of whiskey onto the curb.
• • •
In his own car, James too mulls over that moment on the stairs. After he’d pulled out of the driveway, he had driven without thinking, jamming his foot onto the gas pedal, heading wherever he can slam his foot to the floor. This is how he finds himself driving not back to Louisa’s, but across town, right past campus, onto the highway, nudging the needle to sixty, sixty-five, seventy. Only when a sign—Toledo 15 miles—flashes wide and green overhead does he realize how far he’s gone.
How appropriate, he thinks. Toledo. It strikes him that there is a beautiful symmetry to life. Ten years ago, Marilyn had fled here, leaving everything behind. Now it is his turn. He takes a deep breath and presses the pedal more firmly. He has said it at last, what he had been most afraid to say, what she had most longed to hear: Pretend that you never met me. That none of this ever happened. He has undone the great mistake of her life.
Except—and he can’t deny this, no matter how he tries—Marilyn had not seemed grateful. She had flinched, as if he’d spat in her face. She had bitten her lips once, twice, as if swallowing a hard, painful seed. The car veers toward the shoulder, gravel shuddering under its wheels.
She left first, James reminds himself, nudging the car to the center of the road again. This is what she’s wanted all along. Yet even as he thinks this, he knows it is untrue. The yellow line wavers and weaves. To James, years of unabashed stares prickling his spine, as if he were an animal in the zoo, years of mutters in the street—chink, gook, go home—stinging his ears, different has always been a brand on his forehead, blazoned there between the eyes. It has tinted his entire life, this word; it has left its smudgy fingerprints on everything. But different had been different for Marilyn.
Marilyn: young and unafraid in a classroom of men. Draining the urine from her flasks, plugging her ears by filling her head with dreams. A white blouse in a sea of navy-blue blazers. How she had longed for different: in her life, in herself. It is as if someone has lifted his world and turned it sideways and set it down again. Marilyn, packing those dreams away in lavender for their daughter, disappointment layered beneath her smile. Triply sequestered by house and dead-end street and tiny college town, her hands soft and uncalloused but idle. The intricate gears of her mind ticking silently at no one, thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee. And now, alone in their daughter’s room, surrounded by the relics of their daughter’s life, no lavender, only dust, in the air. It has been so long since he thought of his wife as a creature of want.
Later—and for the rest of his life—James will struggle to piece words to this feeling, and he will never quite manage to say, even just to himself, what he really means. At this moment he can think only one thing: how was it possible, he wonders, to have been so wrong.
• • •
Back in Middlewood, Nath does not know how long he lies there, sprawled across the front seat. All he knows is this: someone opens the car door. Someone calls his name. Then a hand grips his shoulder, warm and gentle and strong, and it doesn’t let go.
To Nath, fighting through a deep and groggy stupor, the voice sounds like his father’s, though his father has never spoken his name so softly, or touched him with such tenderness. In the moment before he opens his eyes, it is his father, and even when the world comes into focus to reveal hazy sunshine, a police cruiser, Officer Fiske crouching beside him in the open car door, it is still true. It is Officer Fiske who peels the empty whiskey bottle from his fingers and helps him lift his head, but in his heart it is his father who says, with such kindness that Nath begins to cry, “Son, it’s time to go home.”
eleven
In April, home was the last place Nath wanted to be. All month—weeks before his visit to campus—he stacked books and clothes in a growing pile. Every evening before bed, he slipped the letter from beneath his pillow and reread it, savoring the details: a junior from Albany, Andrew Bynner, an astrophysics major, would escort him around campus, engage him in intellectual and practical discussions over meals in the dining hall, and host him for the long weekend. Friday to Monday, he thought, looking at his plane tickets; ninety-six hours. By the time he took his
suitcase down, after Lydia’s birthday dinner, he had already sorted the things he’d take with him from those he’d leave behind.
Even with her door closed, Lydia could hear it: the click-click of the suitcase latches opening, then a thud as the lid hit the floor. Their family never traveled. Once, when Hannah was still a baby, they’d visited Gettysburg and Philadelphia. Their father had plotted out the whole trip in the road atlas, a chain of places so steeped in Americana that it oozed out everywhere: in the names of the gas stations—Valley Forge Diesel—and in the diner specials when they stopped for lunch—Gettystown Shrimp, William Penn’s Pork Tenderloin. Then, at every restaurant, the waitresses had stared at her father, then at her mother, then at her and Nath and Hannah, and she knew, even as a child, that they’d never come back. Since then, their father had taught summer classes every year, as if—she rightly suspected—to avoid raising the question of family vacations.
In Nath’s room, a drawer shut with a bang. Lydia leaned back on her bed and propped her heels on the postcard of Einstein. In her mouth, the sick-sweet taste of frosting still lingered; in her stomach, the birthday cake roiled. At the end of summer, she thought, Nath would pack not just the one suitcase but a trunk and a stack of boxes, all his books and all his clothes, everything he owned. The telescope would disappear from the corner; the stacks of aeronautics magazines would vanish from the closet. A band of dust would border the bare shelves, clean wood at the back where the books had once stood. Every drawer, when she opened it, would be empty. Even the sheets on his bed would be gone.
Nath pushed the door open. “Which one’s better?”
He held up two shirts, a hanger in each hand, so they flanked his face like curtains. On his left, a plain blue, his best dress shirt, the one he had worn to his junior award ceremony last spring. On the right, a paisley she’d never seen before, a price tag still dangling from the cuff.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Bought it,” Nath said with a grin. All his life, whenever he needed new clothes, their mother dragged him to Decker’s Department Store, and he agreed to anything she picked out in order to go home faster. Last week, counting over his ninety-six hours, he had driven himself to the mall for the first time and bought this shirt, plucking the bright pattern from the rack. It had felt like buying a new skin, and now his sister sensed this, too.
“A little fancy for going to class.” Lydia did not right herself. “Or is that how they expect you to dress at Harvard?”
Nath lowered the hangers. “There’s a mixer for visiting students. And my host student wrote me—he and his roommates are throwing a party that weekend. To celebrate the end of term.” He held the patterned shirt against him, tucking collar beneath chin. “Maybe I’d better try it on.”
He disappeared into the bathroom, and Lydia heard the scrape of hanger on shower rod. A mixer: Music, dancing, beer. Flirting. Phone numbers and addresses scribbled on scraps of paper. Write me. Call me. We’ll get together. Slowly her feet slid down to rest on her pillow. A mixer. Where new students got whirled together and blended up and turned into something new.
Nath reappeared in the doorway, fastening the top button of the paisley shirt. “What do you think?”
Lydia bit her lip. The blue pattern against the white suited him; it made him look thinner, taller, tanner. Though the buttons were plastic, they gleamed like pearl. Already Nath looked like a different person, someone she’d known once a long time ago. Already she missed him.
“The other one’s better,” she said. “You’re going to college, not Studio 54.” But she knew Nath had already made up his mind.
Late that night, just before midnight, she tiptoed into Nath’s room. She had wanted to tell him all evening about their father and Louisa, about what she’d seen in the car that afternoon, what she knew was going on. Nath had been too preoccupied, and pinning down his attention had been like catching smoke in her hands. This was her last chance. He would be leaving in the morning.
In the dim room, only the small desk lamp was on, and Nath was in his old striped pajamas, kneeling at the windowsill. For a moment Lydia thought he was praying, and, embarrassed at catching him in such a private moment—like seeing him naked—she began to close the door. Then, at the sound of her footsteps, Nath turned, his smile as incandescent as the moon just beginning to swell over the horizon, and she realized she’d been wrong. The window was open. He had not been praying, but dreaming—which, she would realize later, came to almost the same thing.
“Nath,” she began. The rush of things she wanted to say churned in her head: I saw. I think. I need. Such a large thing to break into tiny granules of words. Nath didn’t seem to notice.
“Look at that,” he whispered, with such awe that Lydia sank to her knees beside him and peered out. Above them, the sky rolled out a deep black, like a pool of ink, littered with stars. They were nothing like the stars in her science books, blurred and globby as drops of spit. They were razor-sharp, each one precise as a period, punctuating the sky with light. Tipping her head back, she could not see the houses or the lake or the lamps on the street. All she could see was the sky, so huge and dark it could crush her. It was like being on another planet. No—like floating in space, alone. She searched for the constellations she had seen on Nath’s posters: Orion, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper. The diagrams seemed childish now, with their straight lines and primary colors and stick-figure shapes. Here the stars dazzled her eyes like sequins. This is what infinity looks like, she thought. Their clarity overwhelmed her, like pinpricks at her heart.
“Isn’t that amazing,” Nath’s voice said softly, out of the darkness. Already he sounded light-years away.
“Yeah,” Lydia heard her own voice say, barely a whisper. “Amazing.”
• • •
The next morning, as Nath tucked his toothbrush into its case, Lydia hovered in the doorway. In ten minutes, their father would drive him to the airport in Cleveland, where TWA would carry him to New York, then Boston. It was four thirty A.M.
“Promise you’ll call and tell me how things are going.”
“Sure,” Nath said. He stretched the elastic straps over his folded clothes in a neat X and clapped the suitcase shut.
“You promise?”
“I promise.” Nath shut the latches with one finger, then hoisted the suitcase by the handle. “Dad’s waiting. I’ll see you Monday.”
And just like that, he was gone.
Much later, when Lydia came downstairs for breakfast, she could almost pretend that nothing had changed. Her homework lay beside her breakfast bowl with four little ticks in the margin; across the table, Hannah picked pebbles of cereal from her bowl. Their mother sipped oolong and leafed through the newspaper. Only one thing was different: Nath’s place was empty. As if he had never been there.
“There you are,” Marilyn said. “Better hurry and fix this, sweetheart, or you won’t have time to eat before the bus.”
Lydia, who felt as if she were floating, made her way to the table. Marilyn, meanwhile, skimmed the paper—Carter’s approval rating 65 percent, Mondale settling into role of “Senior Adviser,” asbestos banned, another shooting in New York—before her eyes came to rest on a small human-interest story in the corner of the page. Los Angeles Doctor Revives Man in Coma for Six Years. Amazing, she thought. She smiled up at her daughter, who stood clinging to the back of her chair as if, without it, she might drift away.
• • •
Nath did not call that night, when Lydia shrank and shriveled beneath her parents’ undeflected attention. I got a course catalog from the college—do you want to take statistics this summer? Anyone ask you to prom yet? Well, I’m sure someone will soon. He did not call Saturday, when Lydia cried herself to sleep, or on Sunday, when she awoke with eyes still scalding. So this is what it will be like, she thought to herself. As if I never had a brother at all.
With Nath gone, Hannah followed Lydia like a puppy, scampering to her door each morning before Lydia’s clock radio had even gone off, her voice breathless, just short of a pant. Guess what? Lydia, guess what? It was never guessable and never important: it was raining; there were pancakes for breakfast; there was a blue jay in the spruce tree. Each day, all day, she trailed Lydia suggesting things they could do—We could play Life, we could watch the Friday Night Movie, we could make Jiffy Pop. All her life, Hannah had hovered at a distance from her brother and sister, and Lydia and Nath had tacitly tolerated their small, awkward moon. Now Lydia noticed a thousand little things about her sister: the way she twitched her nose once-twice, fast as a rabbit, when she was talking; the habit she had of standing on her toes, as if she had on invisible high heels. And then, Sunday afternoon, as Hannah climbed into the wedges Lydia had kicked off, she delivered her latest idea—We could go play by the lake. Lydia, let’s go play by the lake—and Lydia noticed something else, shiny and silver beneath Hannah’s shirt.
“What’s that?”
Hannah tried to turn away, but Lydia jerked her collar down to reveal what she’d already half glimpsed: a lithe silver chain, a slender silver heart. Her locket. She hooked it with one finger, and Hannah teetered, staggering out of Lydia’s shoes with a thump.
“What are you doing with that?”
Hannah glanced at the doorway, as if the correct answer might be painted on the wall. Six days ago she had found the little velvet box beneath Lydia’s bed. “I didn’t think you wanted it,” she whispered. Lydia wasn’t listening. Every time you look at this, she heard her father say, just remember what really matters. Being sociable. Being popular. Blending in. You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain. Hannah, so pleased in that little silver snare, looked like her younger self—timid, gawky, shoulders just beginning to stoop under the weight of something that seemed so thin and silver and light.