Everything I Never Told You(18)

“She had skipped ahead into physics. Her mom wanted her in with the juniors.”

“You were in that class. Aren’t you a senior?”

“I told you,” Jack says, impatient. “I had to take it over. I failed.”

Dr. Wolff’s voice, now: “He has a B-plus in the class this term. I told you you’d do fine if you would just do the work, Jack.”

Outside, Nath blinks. Jack? A B-plus?

A rustle, as if the policeman has turned the page of a notebook. Then: “What was the nature of your relationship with Lydia?” The sound of his sister’s name in the policeman’s voice, so crisp and official, as if it were nothing more than a label, startles Nath. It seems to startle Jack, too: there’s a sharpness to his tone that wasn’t there before.

“We were friends. That’s all.”

“Several people said they saw the two of you together after school in your car.”

“I was teaching her to drive.” Nath wishes he could see Jack’s face. Didn’t they know he must be lying? But the policeman seems to accept this.

“When was the last time you saw Lydia?” the policeman asks now.

“Monday afternoon. Before she disappeared.”

“What were you doing?”

“We were sitting in my car and smoking.”

A pause as the policeman makes a note of this. “And you were at the hospital, Mrs. Wolff?”

“Doctor.”

The policeman coughs gently. “Pardon me. Dr. Wolff. You were at work?”

“I usually take the evening shift. Every day except Sundays.”

“Did Lydia seem upset on Monday?”

Another pause before Jack responds. “Lydia was always upset.”

Because of you, Nath thinks. His throat is so tight the words can’t squeeze through. The edges of the door waver and blur, like a heat mirage. He digs his fingernail into his palm, hard, until the doorway sharpens again.

“Upset about what?”

“Upset about everything.” Jack’s voice is lower now, almost a sigh. “About her grades. About her parents. About her brother leaving for college. Lots of things.” He sighs then for real, and when he speaks again, his voice is brittle, ready to snap. “How should I know?”

Nath backs away from the door and creeps down the stairs. He doesn’t need to hear any more. At home, not wanting to see anyone, he slips upstairs to his room to ruminate over what he’s heard.

There’s no one for him to see anyway. While Nath fretted under the elm tree, his family has dispersed. During the car ride, Marilyn doesn’t look at James once, focusing instead on her knuckles, picking at her cuticles, fiddling with the strap of her handbag. As soon as they come inside, Marilyn says she wants to lie down, and Hannah too vanishes into her room without a word. For a moment James considers joining Marilyn in their bedroom. He’s filled with a deep longing to burrow against her, to feel her weight and warmth surrounding him, shielding him from everything else. To cling to her and feel her cling to him and let their bodies comfort each other. But something scratches and scratches at the edge of James’s mind, and at last he lifts his keys from the table again. There is something he must do at the office, urgently. It cannot wait another minute.

When the police had asked if he wanted a copy of the autopsy, he had given them his office address. Then yesterday, a thick manila envelope appeared in his mail cubby, and he decided he’d made a mistake: he didn’t want to see it, ever. At the same time, he could not bring himself to throw it away. Instead he slipped it into the bottom drawer of his desk and locked it. It would be there, he thought, if he ever changed his mind. He had never expected to.

It is lunchtime, and the office is almost empty; only Myrna, the department secretary, still sits at her desk, changing the ribbon of her typewriter. All the other office doors are shut, their frosted-glass windows dim. Now James unlocks the drawer, takes a deep breath, and slits the envelope open with his finger.

He has never seen an autopsy report before and expects charts and diagrams, but it opens like a teacher’s progress report: The subject is a well-developed, well-nourished Oriental female. It tells him things he already knows: that she was sixteen years old, sixty-five inches tall; that her hair was black, that her eyes were blue. It tells him things he hadn’t known: the circumference of her head, the length of each limb, that a small crescent moon scarred her left knee. It tells him that there were no intoxicants in her blood, that there were no signs of foul play or sexual trauma, but that suicide, homicide, or accident could not yet be determined. The cause of death was asphyxia by drowning.

And then it begins in earnest: The chest is opened using a Y-shaped incision.

He learns the color and size of each of her organs, the weight of her brain. That a white foam had bubbled up through her trachea and covered her nostrils and mouth like a lace handkerchief. That her alveoli held a thin layer of silt as fine as sugar. That her lungs had marbled dark red and yellow-gray as they starved for air; that like dough, they took the impression of a fingertip; that when they were sectioned with a scalpel, water flowed out. That in her stomach were snippets of lake-bottom weeds, sand, and six ounces of lake water she’d swallowed as she sank. That the right side of her heart had swollen, as if it had had too much to hold. That from floating head down in the water, the skin of her head and neck had reddened to her shoulders. That due to the low temperature of the water, she had not yet decomposed, but that the skin of her fingertips was just beginning to peel off, like a glove.