Everything I Never Told You(32)

“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 any 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.

What James actually did, each morning, was take a small envelope from his breast pocket. After the police had gone that first night with a snapshot of Marilyn and assurances they’d do all they could, after he had scooped the children up and tucked them in bed with their clothes still on, he had noticed the shredded scraps of paper in the bedroom wastebasket. One by one he plucked them from the cotton balls, the old newspapers, the tissues smudged with his wife’s lipsticked kiss. He had pieced them together on the kitchen table, matching torn edge to torn edge. I always had one kind of life in mind and things have turned out very differently. The bottom half of the sheet was blank, but he hadn’t stopped until every fragment was placed. She had not even signed it.

He read the note over and over, staring at the tiny cracks of wood grain snaking between the patches of white, until the sky outside shifted from navy to gray. Then he slipped the scraps of paper into an envelope. Every day—though he promised himself this time would be the last time—he settled Nath and Lydia in front of the television, locked the door to his study, and pulled out the shreds of note again. He read it while the children moved from cartoons to soap operas to game shows, while they sprawled, unsmiling, in front of Bewitched and Let’s Make a Deal and To Tell the Truth, while—despite Johnny Carson’s best zingers—they sank into sleep.

When they had married, he and Marilyn had agreed to forget about the past. They would start a new life together, the two of them, with no looking back. With Marilyn gone, James broke that pact again and again. Each time he read the note, he thought of her mother, who had never referred to him by name, only indirectly—to Marilyn—as your fiancé. Whose voice he had heard on their wedding day, echoing out into the marble lobby of the courthouse like an announcement on the P.A. system, so loud heads had turned: It’s not right, Marilyn. You know it’s not right. Who had wanted Marilyn to marry someone more like her. Who had never called them again after their wedding. All this must have come back to Marilyn as she ate at her mother’s table and slept in her mother’s bed: what a mistake she’d made, marrying him. How her mother had been right all along. I have kept all these feelings inside me for a long time, but now, after being in my mother’s house again, I think of her and realize I cannot put them aside any longer. In kindergarten, he had learned how to make a bruise stop hurting: you pressed it over and over with your thumb. The first time it hurt so much your eyes watered. The second time it hurt a little less. The tenth time, it was barely an ache. So he read the note again and again. He remembered everything he could: Marilyn kneeling to lace Nath’s sneaker; Marilyn lifting his collar to slide in the stays. Marilyn as she was that first day in his office: slender and serious and so focused that he didn’t dare look at those eyes directly.