by Celeste Ng
But they won’t. It complicates the story, and the story—as it emerges from the teachers and the kids at school—is so obvious. Lydia’s quietness, her lack of friends. Her recent sinking grades. And, in truth, the strangeness of her family. A family with no friends, a family of misfits. All this shines so brightly that, in the eyes of the police, Jack falls into shadow. A girl like that and a boy like him, who can have—does have—any girl he wants? It is impossible for them to imagine what Nath knows to be true, let alone what he himself imagines. To his men, Officer Fiske often says, “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.” Nath, they would have said, is only hysterical. Hearing zebras everywhere. Now, face-to-face with the police, Nath can see that there is no point in mentioning Jack at all: they have already decided who is to blame.
Officer Fiske settles himself against the railing too. “We just wanted to chat a little, Nathan, in private. Maybe you’ll think of something you forgot. Sometimes brothers and sisters know things about each other their parents don’t, you know?”
Nath tries to agree, but nothing comes out. He nods. Today, he suddenly remembers, should have been his graduation.
“Was Lydia in the habit of sneaking out alone?” Officer Fiske asks. “There’s no need to worry. You’re not in trouble. Just tell us what you know.” He keeps saying just, as if it’s a tiny favor he wants, a little offhand thing. Talk to us. Tell us her secrets. Tell us everything. Nath starts to tremble. He’s positive the policemen can see him shaking.
“Had she ever snuck out by herself before, at night?” the younger policeman asks. Nath swallows, tries to hold himself still.
“No,” he croaks. “No, never.”
The policemen glance at each other. Then the younger one perches on the railing beside Nath, like a kid leaning against a locker before school, as if they’re friends. This is his role, Nath realizes. To act like the buddy, to coax him to talk. His shoes are polished so bright they reflect the sun, a blurry smudge of light at each big toe.
“Did Lydia usually get along with your parents?” The policeman shifts his weight, and the railing creaks.
Maybe you should join some clubs, too, honey, meet some new people. Would you like to take a summer class? That could be fun.
“Our parents?” Nath says. He hardly recognizes the voice that comes out as his. “Sure she did.”
“Did you ever see either of them hit her?”
“Hit her?” Lydia, so fussed over, so carefully tended, like a prize flower. The one perpetually on their mother’s mind, even when she was reading, dog-earing pages of articles Lydia might like. The one their father kissed first, every night, when he came home. “My parents would never hit Lydia. They loved her.”
“Did she ever talk about hurting herself?”
The porch railing starts to blur. All he can do is shake his head, hard. No. No. No.
“Did she seem upset the night before she disappeared?”
Nath tries to think. He had wanted to tell her about college, the lush green leaves against the deep red brick, how much fun it was going to be. How for the first time in his life he’d stood up straight, how from that new angle the world had looked bigger, wider, brighter. Except she had been silent all dinner, and afterward she’d gone right up to her room. He had thought she was tired. He had thought: I’ll tell her tomorrow.
And suddenly, to his horror, he begins to cry: wet, messy tears that dribble down his nose and into the collar of his shirt.
Both policemen turn away then, and Officer Fiske closes his notebook and fishes in his pocket for a handkerchief. “Keep it,” he says, holding it out to Nath, and he squeezes him on the shoulder once, hard, and then they’re gone.
• • •
Inside, Marilyn says to James, “So I have to ask your permission now, to speak in company?”
“That’s not what I meant.” James props his elbows on the table and rests his forehead on his hands. “You just can’t go making wild accusations. You can’t go berating the police.”
“Who’s berating? I’m just asking questions.” Marilyn drops her teacup into the sink and turns on the water. An angry soap froth rises in the drain. “Looking into all possibilities? He didn’t even listen when I said it could be a stranger.”
“Because you’re acting hysterical. You hear one news report and you get all these ideas in your head. Let it go.” James still hasn’t lifted his head from his hands. “Marilyn, just let it go.”
In the brief silence that follows, Hannah slips under the table and huddles there, hugging her knees to her chest. The tablecloth casts a half-moon shadow on the linoleum. As long as she stays inside it, she thinks, curling her toes in closer, her parents will forget she’s there. She has never heard her parents fight before. Sometimes they bicker over who forgot to screw the cap back onto the toothpaste, or who left the kitchen light on all night, but afterward her mother squeezes her father’s hand, or her father kisses her mother’s cheek, and all is well again. This time, everything is different.
“So I’m just a hysterical housewife?” Marilyn’s voice is cool and sharp now, like the edge of a steel blade, and under the table Hannah holds her breath. “Well, someone is responsible. If I have to find out what happened to her myself, I will.” She scrubs at the counter with the dish towel and tosses it down. “I would think you’d want to know, too. But listen to you. Of course, officer. Thank you, officer. We can’t ask for more, officer.” The foam chokes its way down the drain. “I know how to think for myself, you know. Unlike some people, I don’t just kowtow to the police.”
In the blur of her fury, Marilyn doesn’t think twice about what she’s said. To James, though, the word rifles from his wife’s mouth and lodges deep in his chest. From those two syllables—kowtow—explode bent-backed coolies in cone hats, pigtailed Chinamen with sandwiched palms. Squinty and servile. Bowing and belittled. He has long suspected that everyone sees him this way—Stanley Hewitt, the policemen, the checkout girl at the grocery store. But he had not thought that everyone included Marilyn.
He drops his crumpled napkin at his empty place and pushes his chair from the table with a screech. “I have class at ten,” he says. Below the hem of the tablecloth, Hannah watches her father’s stocking feet—a tiny hole just forming at one heel—retreat toward the garage stairs. There’s a pause as he slips on his shoes, and a moment later, the garage door rumbles open. Then, as the car starts, Marilyn snatches the teacup from the sink and hurls it to the floor. Shards of china skitter across the linoleum. Hannah stays absolutely still as her mother runs upstairs and slams her bedroom door, as her father’s car backs out of the driveway with a mechanical little whine and growls away. Only when everything is completely quiet does she dare to crawl out from under the tablecloth, to pick the fragments of porcelain from the puddle of soapy water.
The front door creaks open, and Nath reappears in the kitchen, his eyes and nose red. From this she knows he has been crying, but she pretends not to notice, keeping her head bent, stacking the pieces one by one in her cupped palm.
“What happened?”
“Mom and Dad had a fight.” She tips the broken cup into the garbage can and wipes her damp hands on the thighs of her bell-bottoms. The water, she decides, will dry on its own.
“A fight? About what?”
Hannah lowers her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know.” Although there is no sound from their parents’ bedroom overhead, she is antsy. “Let’s go outside.”
Outside, without discussing it, she and Nath both head for the same place: the lake. All the way down the block, she scans the street carefully, as if their father might still be around the corner, no longer angry, ready to come home. She sees nothing but a few parked cars.
Hannah’s instincts, however, are good. Pulling out of the driveway, James too had been drawn to the lake. He had made a loop around it, once, twice, Marilyn’s words echoing in his mind. Kowtowing to the police. Over and over he hears it, the palpable disgust in her voic
e, how little she thought of him. And he cannot blame her. How could Lydia have been happy? Lee stood out in the halls. Few seemed to have known her well. Suicide Likely Possibility. He passes the dock where Lydia would have climbed into the boat. Then their little dead-end street. Then the dock again. Somewhere in the center of this circle his daughter, friendless and alone, must have dived into the water in despair. Lydia was very happy, Marilyn had said. Someone is responsible. Someone, James thinks, and a deep spike carves its way down his throat. He cannot bear to see the lake again. And then he knows where he wants to be.
He has rehearsed in his mind what to say to Louisa so often that this morning, he awoke with it on his lips. This was a mistake. I love my wife. This must never happen again. Now, when she opens the door, what comes out of his mouth is: “Please.” And Louisa gently, generously, miraculously opens her arms.
In Louisa’s bed, he can stop thinking—about Lydia, about the headlines, about the lake. About what Marilyn must be doing at home. About who is responsible. He focuses on the curve of Louisa’s back and the pale silk of her thighs and the dark sweep of her hair, which brushes his face again and again and again. Afterward, Louisa wraps her arms around him from behind, as if he is a child, and says, “Stay.” And he does.
• • •
What Marilyn has been doing is pacing Lydia’s room, tingling with fury. It’s obvious what the police think, with all their hinting: No evidence of anyone in the boat with her. Would you say Lydia was a lonely girl? It’s obvious, too, that James agrees. But her daughter could not have been so unhappy. Her Lydia, always smiling, always so eager to please? Sure, Mom. I’d love to, Mom. To say she could have done such a thing to herself—no, she had loved them too much for that. Every single night, before she went up to bed, she found Marilyn wherever she was—in the kitchen, in the study, in the laundry room—and looked her full in the face: I love you, Mom. See you tomorrow. Even that last night she had said it—tomorrow—and Marilyn had given her a quick squeeze and a little smack on the shoulder and said, “Hurry up now, it’s late.” At this thought, Marilyn sinks to the carpet. If she had known, she’d have held Lydia a little longer. She would have kissed her. She would have put her arms around her daughter and never let go.
Lydia’s bookbag lies slouched against her desk, where the police had left it after they’d searched it, and Marilyn pulls it into her lap. It smells of rubber erasers, of pencil shavings, of spearmint gum—precious, schoolgirl smells. In her embrace, books and binders shift under the canvas like bones under skin. She cradles the bag, sliding the straps over her shoulders, letting its weight hug her tight.
Then, in the half-unzipped front pocket, she spots something: a flash of red and white. Hidden beneath Lydia’s pencil case and a bundle of index cards, a slit gapes in the lining of the bag. A small tear, small enough to slip by the busy policemen, intended to escape an even sharper eye: a mother’s. Marilyn works her hand inside and pulls out an open package of Marlboros. And, beneath that, she finds something else: an open box of condoms.
She drops both, as if she has found a snake, and pushes the bookbag out of her lap with a thud. They must belong to someone else, she thinks; they could not be Lydia’s. Her Lydia did not smoke. As for the condoms—
Inside, Marilyn cannot quite convince herself. That first afternoon, the police had asked, “Does Lydia have a boyfriend?” and she had answered, without hesitation, “She’s barely sixteen.” Now she looks down at the two tiny boxes, caught in the hammock of her skirt, and the outlines of Lydia’s life—so sharp and clear before—begin to waver. Dizzy, she rests her head against the side of Lydia’s desk. She will find out everything she doesn’t know. She will keep searching until she understands how this could have happened, until she understands her daughter completely.
• • •
At the lake, Nath and Hannah settle on the grass and stare out over the water in silence, hoping for the same enlightenment. On a normal summer day, at least half a dozen kids would be splashing in the water or jumping off the pier, but today, the lake is deserted. Maybe the kids are afraid to swim now, Nath thinks. What happened to bodies in the water? Did they dissolve, like tablets? He doesn’t know, and as he contemplates the possibilities, he is glad that his father allowed no one to see Lydia’s body but himself.
He stares out over the water, letting time tick away. Only when Hannah sits up and waves to someone does he emerge from his daze, his attention slowly centering on the street: Jack, in a faded blue T-shirt and jeans, walking home from graduation with a robe slung over his arm—as if it were just an ordinary day. Nath hasn’t seen him since the funeral, though he’s been peeking out at Jack’s house two or three times a day. As Jack spots Nath, his face changes. He looks away, quickly, as if pretending he hasn’t seen either of them, and walks faster. Nath pushes himself to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“To talk to Jack.” In truth he’s not sure what he’s going to do. He’s never been in a fight before—he’s skinnier and shorter than most of the boys in his class—but he has vague visions of grabbing Jack by the front of his T-shirt and pinning him to a wall, of Jack suddenly admitting his culpability. It was my fault: I lured her, I persuaded her, I tempted her, I disappointed her. Hannah lunges forward and grabs his wrist.
“Don’t.”
“It’s because of him,” Nath says. “She never went wandering out in the middle of the night before he came along.”
Hannah yanks his arm, dragging him back to his knees, and Jack, almost jogging now, blue commencement robe fluttering behind him, reaches their street. He glances back at them over his shoulder and there’s no mistaking it: fear in the hunch of his shoulders, fear in the way his gaze flicks to Nath, then quickly away. Then he turns the corner and disappears. In a few seconds, Nath knows, Jack will climb the stairs of his porch and open the door and be out of reach. He tries to wrench himself free, but Hannah’s nails sink into his skin. He had not known a child could be so strong.
“Get off me—”
Both of them tumble back into the grass, and at last Hannah lets go. Nath sits up slowly, breathless. By now, he thinks, Jack is safe inside his house. Even if he rang the doorbell and banged on the door, Jack would never come out.
“What the hell did you do that for?”
With one hand, Hannah combs a dead leaf from her hair. “Don’t fight with him. Please.”
“You’re crazy.” Nath rubs his wrist, where her fingers have scratched five red welts. One of them has begun to bleed. “Jesus Christ. All I wanted was to talk to him.”
“Why are you so mad at him?”
Nath sighs. “You saw how weird he was at the funeral. And just now. Like there’s something he’s afraid I’ll find out.” His voice drops. “I know he had something to do with this. I can feel it.” He kneads his chest with his fist, just below his throat, and thoughts he has never voiced fight their way to the surface. “You know, Lydia fell in the lake once, when we were little,” he says, and his fingertips begin to quiver, as if he has said something taboo.
“I don’t remember that,” Hannah says.
“You weren’t born yet. I was only seven.”
Hannah, to his surprise, slides over to sit beside him. Gently, she puts her hand on his arm, where she’s scratched it, and leans her head against him. She has never dared sit so close to Nath before; he and Lydia and their mother and father are too quick to shrug her off or shoo her away. Hannah, I’m busy. I’m in the middle of something. Leave me alone. This time—she holds her breath—Nath lets her stay. Though he says nothing more, her silence tells him she is listening.
six
The summer Lydia fell in the lake, the summer Marilyn went missing: all of them had tried to forget it. They did not talk about it; they never mentioned it. But it lingered, like a bad smell. It had suffused them so deeply it could never wash out.
Every morning, James called the police. Did they need more photographs of Marilyn? Was there a
ny more information he could give? Were there any more people he could call? By mid-May, when Marilyn had been gone for two weeks, the officer in charge of the case told him, gently, “Mr. Lee, we appreciate all the help you’ve provided. And we’re keeping an eye out for the car. I can’t promise we’ll find anything, though. Your wife took clothes with her. She packed suitcases. She took her keys.” Officer Fiske, even then, hated to give out false hopes. “This kind of thing happens sometimes. Sometimes people are just too different.” He did not say mixed, or interracial, or mismatched, but he didn’t have to. James heard it anyway, and he would remember Officer Fiske very clearly, even a decade later.
To the children, he said, “The police are looking. They’ll find her. She’ll come home soon.”
Lydia and Nath remembered it this way: weeks passed and their mother was still gone. At recess the other children whispered and teachers gave them pitying looks and it was a relief when school finally ended. After that their father stayed in his study and let them watch television all day, from Mighty Mouse and Underdog in the morning to I’ve Got a Secret late at night. When Lydia asked, once, what he did in the study, he sighed and said, “Oh, I just putter around.” She thought of her father wearing soft rubber shoes and taking small steps on the smooth floor: putter putter putter. “It means reading books and things, stupid,” Nath said, and the soft rubber shoes turned into her father’s plain brown ones with the fraying laces.
