Everything I Never Told You(20)

Somewhere in this room, she is sure, is the answer to what happened. And there, on the bottom shelf of the bookcase, she sees the neat row of diaries lined up by year. Marilyn had given Lydia her first diary the Christmas she was five, a flowered one with gilt edges and a key lighter than a paper clip. Her daughter had unwrapped it and turned it over and over in her hands, touching the tiny keyhole, as if she didn’t know what it was for. “For writing down your secrets,” Marilyn had said with a smile, and Lydia had smiled back up at her and said, “But Mom, I don’t have any secrets.”

At the time, Marilyn had laughed. What secrets could a daughter keep from her mother, anyway? Still, every year, she gave Lydia another diary. Now she thinks of all those crossed-out phone numbers, that long list of girls who said they barely knew Lydia at all. Of boys from school. Of strange men who might lurch out of the shadows. With one finger, she tugs out the last diary: 1977. It will tell her, she thinks. Everything Lydia no longer can. Who she had been seeing. Why she had lied to them. Why she went down to the lake.

The key is missing, but Marilyn jams the tip of a ballpoint into the catch and forces the flimsy lock open. The first page she sees, April 10, is blank. She checks May 2, the night Lydia disappeared. Nothing. Nothing for May 1, or anything in April, or anything in March. Every page is blank. She takes down 1976. 1975. 1974. Page after page of visible, obstinate silence. She leafs backward all the way to the very first diary, 1966: not one word. All those years of her daughter’s life unmarked. Nothing to explain anything.

Across town, James wakes in a blurry haze. It’s almost evening, and Louisa’s apartment has grown dim. “I have to go,” he says, dizzy with the thought of what he has done, and Louisa wraps herself in the sheet and watches him dress. Under her gaze, his fingers grow clumsy: he misbuttons his shirt not once but twice, and even when he gets it on properly it doesn’t feel right. It hangs strangely, pinching him under the arms, bulging at his belly. How did you say good-bye, after something like this?

“Goodnight,” he says finally, lifting his bag, and Louisa says simply, “Goodnight.” As if they’re leaving the office, as if nothing has happened. Only in the car, when his stomach begins to rumble, does he realize there’d been no lunch at Louisa’s apartment, that he had never actually expected there to be.

And while James clicks on his headlights and eases the car into motion, stunned at how much has happened in one day, his son peers through his bedroom window in the growing dimness, staring out at Jack’s house, where the porch light has just turned on, where the police car has long since pulled away. Up in the attic, Hannah curls up in her bed, sifting through each detail of the day: the white spot on each of her father’s knuckles as he grasped the steering wheel; the tiny beads of sweat that clung to the minister’s upper lip, like dew; the soft thump the coffin made as it touched the bottom of the grave. The small figure of her brother—spied through the west-facing window of her room—rising slowly from Jack’s front steps and trudging home, head bowed. And the faint questioning creak of her mother’s bedroom door opening, answered by the quiet click of Lydia’s door latching shut. She has been in there for hours. Hannah wraps her arms around herself and squeezes, imagines comforting her mother, her mother’s arms comforting her in return.

Marilyn, unaware that her youngest is listening so closely, so longingly, blots her eyes and replaces the diaries on the shelf and makes herself a promise. She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.





four



Just before Marilyn had given Lydia that first diary, the university had held its annual Christmas party. Marilyn had not wanted to go. All fall she’d been wrestling a vague discontentment. Nath had just started the first grade, Lydia had just started nursery school, Hannah had not yet even been imagined. For the first time since she’d been married, Marilyn found herself unoccupied. She was twenty-nine years old, still young, still slender. Still smart, she thought. She could go back to school now, at last, and finish her degree. Do everything she’d planned before the children came along. Only now she couldn’t remember how to write a paper, how to take notes; it seemed as vague and hazy as something she had done in a dream. How could she study when dinner needed cooking, when Nath needed to be tucked in, when Lydia wanted to play? She leafed through the Help Wanted ads in the paper, but they were all for waitresses, accountants, copywriters. Nothing she knew how to do. She thought of her mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had hoped to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order. Without meaning to, she’d acquired it. There was nothing more her mother could have wished her. The thought did not put her in a festive mood.

James, however, had insisted that they put in an appearance at the Christmas party; he was up for tenure in the spring, and appearances mattered. So they had asked Vivian Allen from across the street to babysit Nath and Lydia, and Marilyn put on a peach cocktail dress and her pearls and they headed to the crepe-papered gymnasium, where a Christmas tree had been erected on the midcourt line. Then, after the obligatory round of hellos and how-are-yous, she retreated to the corner, nursing a cup of rum punch. That was where she ran into Tom Lawson.

Tom brought her a slice of fruitcake and introduced himself—he was a professor in the chemistry department; he and James had worked together on the thesis committee of a double-majoring student who’d written about chemical warfare in World War I. Marilyn tensed against the inevitable questions—And what do you do, Marilyn?—but instead they exchanged the usual benign civilities: how old the children were, how nice this year’s Christmas tree looked. And when he began to tell her about the research he was doing—something to do with the pancreas and artificial insulin—she interrupted to ask if he needed a research assistant, and he stared at her over his plate of pigs in blankets. Marilyn, afraid of seeming unqualified, offered a flood of explanations: she had been a chemistry major at Radcliffe and she’d been planning on medical school and she hadn’t quite finished her degree—yet—but now that the children were a bit older—