by Celeste Ng
Jack was right: she had been afraid so long, she had forgotten what it was like not to be—afraid that, one day, her mother would disappear again, that her father would crumble, that their whole family would collapse once more. Ever since that summer without her mother, their family had felt precarious, as if they were teetering on a cliff. Before that she hadn’t realized how fragile happiness was, how if you were careless, you could knock it over and shatter it. Anything her mother wanted, she had promised. As long as she would stay. She had been so afraid.
So every time her mother said Do you want—? she had said yes. She knew what her parents had longed for, without them saying a word, and she had wanted them happy. She had kept her promise. And her mother had stayed. Read this book. Yes. Want this. Love this. Yes. Once, at the college museum, while Nath had pouted about missing the star show, she had spotted a nugget of amber with a fly trapped inside. “That’s four million years old,” Marilyn whispered, wrapping her arms around her daughter from behind. Lydia had stared until Nath, at last, had dragged them both away. Now she thought of the fly landing daintily in the pool of resin. Perhaps it had mistaken it for honey. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the puddle at all. By the time it had realized its mistake, it was too late. It had flailed, and then it had sunk, and then it had drowned.
Ever since that summer, she had been so afraid—of losing her mother, of losing her father. And, after a while, the biggest fear of all: of losing Nath, the only one who understood the strange and brittle balance in their family. Who knew all that had happened. Who had always kept her afloat.
That long-ago day, sitting in this very spot on the dock, she had already begun to feel it: how hard it would be to inherit their parents’ dreams. How suffocating to be so loved. She had felt Nath’s hands on her shoulders and been almost grateful to fall forward, to let herself sink. Then, when her head had plunged beneath the surface, the water was like a slap. She had tried to scream and coldness slid down her throat, choking her. She’d stretched out her toes looking for ground and there wasn’t any. Nothing when she reached out her arms. Only wetness and cold.
Then: warmth. Nath’s fingers, Nath’s hand, Nath’s arm, Nath pulling her back up and her head coming up out of the lake, water dripping out of her hair into her eyes and her eyes stinging. Kick, Nath had told her. His hands held her up, surprising her with their strength, their sureness, and she had felt warm all over. His fingers caught hers and right then she had stopped being afraid.
Kick your legs. I’ve got you. Kick.
It had been the same ever since. Don’t let me sink, she had thought as she reached for his hand, and he had promised not to when he took it. This moment, Lydia thought. This is where it all went wrong.
It was not too late. There on the dock, Lydia made a new set of promises, this time to herself. She will begin again. She will tell her mother: enough. She will take down the posters and put away the books. If she fails physics, if she never becomes a doctor, it will be all right. She will tell her mother that. And she will tell her mother, too: it’s not too late. For anything. She will give her father back his necklace and his book. She will stop holding the silent phone to her ear; she will stop pretending to be someone she is not. From now on, she will do what she wants. Feet planted firmly on nothing, Lydia—so long enthralled by the dreams of others—could not yet imagine what that might be, but suddenly the universe glittered with possibilities. She will change everything. She will tell Jack she’s sorry, that she’ll never tell his secret. If he can be brave, so sure of who he is and what he wants, perhaps she can, too. She’ll tell him that she understands.
And Nath. She will tell him that it’s all right for him to leave. That she will be fine. That he’s not responsible for her anymore, that he doesn’t need to worry. And then she will let him go.
And as she made this last promise, Lydia understood what to do. How to start everything over again, from the beginning, so she would never again be afraid to be alone. What she must do to seal her promises, to make them real. Gently she lowered herself into the rowboat and loosed the rope. As she pushed away from the dock, she expected a surge of panic. It didn’t come. Even once she had rowed, stroke by clumsy stroke, out onto the lake—far enough that the lamppost was just a dot, too small to contaminate the darkness around her—she felt strangely calm and confident. Above her the moon was coin-round, sharp and perfect. Beneath her the boat rocked so gently that she could hardly feel its motion. Looking up at the sky, she felt as if she were floating in space, completely untethered. She could not believe that anything was impossible.
In the distance, the light from the dock shone like a star. If she squinted, she could just make out the dim shape of the dock itself, the pale line of boards against the darker night. When she got a little closer, she thought, she would be able to see it perfectly: the boards worn smooth by generations of bare feet, the posts that held them up just above the surface of the water. Carefully, she got to her feet, spreading her arms as the boat swayed. It was not so far. She could do this, she was certain. All she had to do was kick. She would kick her way to the dock and reach up to the planks and pull herself up out of the water. Tomorrow morning, she would ask Nath about Harvard. What it was like there. She would ask him about the people he met, the classes he would take. She would tell him he’d have a wonderful time.
She looked down at the lake, which in the dark looked like nothing, just blackness, a great void spreading beneath her. It will be all right, she told herself, and she stepped out of the boat into the water.
twelve
All the way home, James thinks to himself: It is not too late. It is not too late. With each mile marker, he repeats it until he is back in Middlewood, the college and then the lake whipping by. When at last he pulls into their driveway, the garage door is open, and Marilyn’s car nowhere in sight. Each breath sways him, no matter how hard he tries to keep upright. All these years he has remembered only: She ran away. He has taken this for granted: She came back. And: She stayed. As he reaches for the front doorknob, his legs wobble. It is not too late, he assures himself, but inside, he quavers. He cannot blame her if she has gone away again, this time for good.
In the front hall, a heavy silence greets him, like that of a funeral. Then he steps into the living room and sees a small figure huddled on the floor. Hannah. Curled in a ball, hugging herself with both arms. Eyes a watery red. He remembers suddenly a long-ago afternoon, two motherless children on a cold doorstep.
“Hannah?” he whispers, even as he feels himself collapsing, like an old building grown too weak to stand. His bag drops from his fingers to the floor. It’s as if he’s breathing through a straw. “Where’s your mother?”
Hannah looks up. “Upstairs. Sleeping.” Then—and this is what gives James his breath again—“I told her you would come home.” Not smugly, not triumphantly. Just a fact, round and simple as a bead.
James sinks to the carpet beside his small daughter, silenced by gratitude, and Hannah considers whether to say more. For there is more, much more: how she and her mother had curled up together on Lydia’s bed and cried and cried all afternoon, holding each other so close that their tears mixed, until her mother had fallen asleep. And how, half an hour ago, her brother had arrived home in a police car, rumpled and groggy and stinking to high heaven but strangely serene, and had gone straight up to his room and into bed. Hannah, peeking from behind the curtain, had seen Officer Fiske at the wheel, and late that night, Marilyn’s car will quietly reappear in the driveway, washed, keys set neatly on the driver’s seat. It can wait, she decides. She is used to keeping people’s secrets, and there is something more pressing to tell her father.
She tugs at his arm, pointing upward, and James is surprised by how small her hands are, and how strong. “Look.”
At first, so overcome with relief, so accustomed to ignoring his youngest, he sees nothing. It is not too late, he thinks, glancing up at the ceiling
, clean and bright as a new sheet of paper in the late-afternoon sun. Not yet the end.
“Look,” Hannah insists again, tipping his head with a peremptory hand. She has never dared to be so bossy, and James, startled, looks carefully and sees it at last: a white footprint against the off-white, as if someone has stepped in paint and then onto the ceiling, leaving one faint but perfect track. He has never noticed it before. Hannah catches his eye and the look on her face is serious and proud, as if she’s discovered a new planet. It’s ridiculous, really, a footprint on the ceiling. Unexplainable and pointless and magical.
Hannah giggles, and to James it sounds like the tinkling of a bell. A good sound. He laughs too, for the first time in weeks, and Hannah, suddenly bold, nestles close to her father. It feels familiar, the way she melts into him. It reminds him of something he’s forgotten.
“You know what I’d do with your sister sometimes?” he says slowly. “When she was small, really small, even smaller than you. You know what I’d do?” He lets Hannah climb onto his back. Then he stands and turns side to side, feeling her weight shift against him. “Where’s Lydia?” he says. “Where’s Lydia?”
He’d say this, over and over, while she nestled her face in his hair and giggled. He could feel her hot little breath on his scalp, on the back of his ears. He’d wander the living room, peering behind furniture and around doorways. “I can hear her,” he’d say. “I can see her foot.” He’d squeeze her ankle, clutched tight in his hand. “Where is she? Where’s Lydia? Where could she be?” He would twist his head and she’d duck, squealing, while he pretended not to notice her hair dangling over his shoulder. “There she is! There’s Lydia!” He’d spin faster and faster, Lydia clinging tighter and tighter, until he collapsed on the rug, letting her roll, laughing, off his back. She never got tired of it. Found and lost and found again, lost in plain sight, pressed to his back, her feet clasped in his hands. What made something precious? Losing it and finding it. All those times he’d pretended to lose her. He sinks down on the carpet, dizzy with loss.
Then he feels small arms curling round his neck, the warmth of a small body leaning against him.
“Daddy?” Hannah whispers. “Will you do that again?”
And he feels himself rising, pushing himself back up to his knees.
• • •
There is so much more to do, so much yet to be mended. But for now, he thinks only of this, his daughter, here in his arms. He had forgotten what it was like to hold a child—to hold anyone—like that. How their weight sank into you, how they clung instinctively. How they trusted you. It is a long time before he is ready to let her go.
And when Marilyn wakes and comes downstairs, just as the light is fading, this is what she finds: her husband cradling their youngest in a circle of lamplight, a tender look of calm on his face.
“You’re home,” Marilyn says. All of them know it is a question.
“I’m home,” James says, and Hannah rises on tiptoes, edging toward the door. She can feel the room is poised on the edge—of what, she’s not sure, but she does not want to destroy this beautiful, sensitive balance. Accustomed to being overlooked, she sidles toward her mother, ready to slip by unnoticed. Then Marilyn touches a gentle hand to her shoulder, and Hannah’s heels land on the floor with a surprised thump.
“It’s all right,” Marilyn says. “Your father and I just need to talk.” Then—and Hannah flushes with delight—she kisses her on the head, right where the hair parts, and says, “We’ll see you in the morning.”
Halfway up the steps, Hannah pauses. From downstairs, she hears only a low murmur of voices, but for once she does not creep back down to listen. We’ll see you in the morning, her mother had said, and she takes this as a promise. She tiptoes across the landing—past Nath’s room, where behind the closed door her brother lies in a dreamless sleep, the remnants of the whiskey slowly steaming from his pores; past Lydia’s room, which looks, in the dark, like nothing has changed, though nothing could be further from the truth; all the way up to her own room, where through the windows the lawn outside is just beginning to turn from inky blue to black. Her glow-in-the-dark clock reads just past eight, but it feels later, like the middle of the night, the darkness quiet and thick as a down comforter. She wraps that feeling around her. From up here, she can’t hear her parents talking. But it’s enough to know that they’re there.
• • •
Downstairs, Marilyn lingers in the doorway, one hand on the jamb. James tries to swallow, but something hard and sharp lodges in his throat, like a fishbone. Once he had been able to read his wife’s mood even from her back. By the tilt of her shoulders, by the shifting of her weight from left foot to right, he would have known what she was thinking. But it’s been a long time since he looked at her carefully, and now, even face-to-face, all he can see are the faint wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, the faint wrinkles where her blouse has been crushed, then straightened.
“I thought you’d gone,” she says at last.
When James’s voice squeezes around the sharp thing in his throat, it comes out thin and scratched. “I thought you had.”
And for the moment, this is everything they need to say.
Some things they will never discuss: James will never talk to Louisa again, and he will be ashamed of this for as long as he lives. Later, slowly, they will piece together other things that have never been said. He will show her the coroner’s report; she will press the cookbook into his hands. How long it will be before he speaks to his son without flint in his voice; how long it will be before Nath no longer flinches when his father speaks. For the rest of the summer, and for years after that, they will grope for the words that say what they mean: to Nath, to Hannah, to each other. There is so much they need to say.
In this moment of silence, something touches James’s hand, so light he can barely feel it. A moth, he thinks. The sleeve of his shirt. But when he looks down, he sees Marilyn’s fingers curled over his, the merest curve as they squeeze. He has almost forgotten what it felt like, to touch her. To be forgiven even just this much. He bows his head and rests it on the back of her hand, overwhelmed with gratitude at having one more day.
In bed, they touch each other gently, as if it’s the first time they’ve ever been together: his hand sliding carefully across the small of her back, her fingers careful and deliberate as she undoes the buttons of his shirt. Their bodies are older now; he can feel his shoulders sagging, he can see the silver scars from childbirth crisscrossing just below her waistline. In the dark they are careful of each other, as if they know they are fragile, as if they know they can break.
• • •
In the night, Marilyn wakes and feels her husband’s warmth beside her, smells the sweet scent of him, like toast, mellowed and organic and bittersweet. How lovely it would be to stay curled here against him, to feel his chest rising and falling against her, as if it were her own breath. Right now, though, there is something else she must do.
At the doorway to Lydia’s room, she pauses with her hand on the knob and rests her head against the frame, remembering that last evening together: how a glint of light had caught Lydia’s water glass and she’d looked at her daughter across the table and smiled. Spinning out her daughter’s future, brimming with confidence, she’d never imagined even for a second that it might not happen. That she might be wrong about anything.
That evening, that sureness, feels ancient now, like something grown small with the distance of years. Something she’d experienced before her children, before marrying, while she was still a child herself. She understands. There is nowhere to go but on. Still, part of her longs to go back for one instant—not to change anything, not even to speak to Lydia, not to tell her anything at all. Just to open the door and see her daughter there, asleep, one more time, and know all was well.
And when at last she opens the door, this is what she sees. The shape of her d
aughter there in the bed, one long lock of hair stretched across the pillow. If she looks hard, she can even see the rise and fall of the flowered comforter with each breath. She knows she’s been granted a vision, and she tries not to blink, to absorb this moment, this last beautiful image of her daughter sleeping.
Someday, when she’s ready, she’ll pull the curtains, gather the clothing from the bureau, stack the books from the floor and pack them away. She’ll wash the sheets, open desk drawers, empty the pockets of Lydia’s jeans. When she does, she’ll find only fragments of her daughter’s life: coins, unsent postcards, pages torn from magazines. She’ll pause over a peppermint, still twisted in cellophane, and wonder if it’s significant, if it had meant something to Lydia, if it was just overlooked and discarded. She knows she’ll find no answers. For now, she watches the figure in the bed, and her eyes fill with tears. It’s enough.
• • •
When Hannah comes downstairs, just as the sun is rising, she counts carefully: two cars in the driveway. Two rings of keys on the hall table. Five sets of shoes—one Lydia’s—by the door. Though this last causes a sting, just between the collarbones, these sums bring her comfort. Now, peeking through the front window, she sees the Wolffs’ door open and Jack and his dog emerge. Things will never be the same again; she knows this. But the sight of Jack and his dog, heading for the lake, brings her comfort, too. As if the universe is slowly returning to normal.
For Nath, though, at his window upstairs, the opposite is true. Awaking from his deep and drunken sleep, the whiskey purged from his body, everything seems new: the outlines of his furniture, the sunbeams slicing across the carpet, his hands before his face. Even the pain in his stomach—he hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast, and that, like the whiskey, is long gone—feels bright and clean and sharp. And now, across the lawn, he spots what he’s sought every day for so long. Jack.