Everything I Never Told You(50)
“I dunno,” she said. “People decide what you’re like before they even get to know you.” She eyed him, suddenly fierce. “Kind of like you did with me. They think they know all about you. Except you’re never who they think you are.”
Jack stayed silent for a long time, staring down at the castle in the center of the steering wheel. They would never be friends now. He hated Nath, and after what she’d just said, he would hate her, too. He would kick her out of the car and drive away. Then, to Lydia’s surprise, Jack pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and held it out. A peace offering.
Lydia did not wonder where they would go. She did not think, then, about what excuse she’d offer her mother, the excuse that—with an inspired smirk—would be her cover for all her afternoons with Jack: that she’d stayed after school to do physics extra credit. She did not even think about Nath’s shocked and anxious face when he learned where she had been. Looking out over the lake, she could not know that in three months she would be at its bottom. At that moment she simply took the proffered cigarette and, as Jack flicked the lighter, touched its tip to the flame.
eight
James is all too familiar with this kind of forgetting. From Lloyd Academy to Harvard to Middlewood, he has felt it every day—that short-lived lull, then the sharp nudge to the ribs that reminded you that you didn’t belong. It seemed a false comfort to him, like a zoo animal crouched in its cage, ignoring the gawking eyes, pretending it is still running wild. Now, a month after Lydia’s funeral, he treasures those moments of forgetting.
Others might have found refuge in a pint of whiskey, or a bottle of vodka, or a six-pack of beer. James, though, has never liked the taste of alcohol, and he finds it does not dull his mind; it only turns him a dark beet-red, as if he has endured some terrible battering, while his mind races all the faster. He takes long drives, crisscrossing Middlewood, following the highway almost to Cleveland before turning back. He takes sleeping pills from the drugstore, and even in his dreams, Lydia is dead. Again and again, he finds only one place where he can stop thinking: Louisa’s bed.
He tells Marilyn that he’s going in to class, or to meet with students; on weekends, he says he has papers to grade. These are lies. The dean had canceled his summer class the week after Lydia’s death. “Take some time for yourself, James,” he had said, touching James gently on the shoulder. He did this with everyone he needed to soothe: students enraged over low grades, faculty slighted by the grants they did not receive. His job was to make losses feel smaller. But the students never turned their C-minuses into Bs; new funding never materialized. You never got what you wanted; you just learned to get by without it. And the last thing James wants is time for himself—being at home is unbearable. At every moment, he expects Lydia to appear in the doorway, or to hear the squeak of her floorboards overhead. One morning, he heard footsteps in her room, and before he could stop himself, he ran upstairs, breathless, only to find Marilyn pacing before Lydia’s desk, opening and closing her desk drawers. Get out, he wanted to shout, as if this were a sacred space. Now, every morning, he picks up his briefcase, as if he is going to teach, and drives in to the college. Even in his office, he finds himself mesmerized by the family photo on his desk, where Lydia—barely fifteen, then—peers out, ready to leap through the frame’s glass and leave everyone behind. By afternoon, he finds himself at Louisa’s apartment, plunging into her arms, then between her legs, where, blessedly, his mind shuts off.
But after leaving Louisa’s, he remembers again, and he is always angrier than before. On the way back to his car one evening, he seizes a stray bottle from the street and hurls it into the side of Louisa’s building. Other nights, he fights the temptation to steer into a tree. Nath and Hannah try to stay out of his way, and he and Marilyn have barely exchanged a word in weeks. As the Fourth of July approaches, James passes the lake and finds that someone has festooned the dock with bunting and red and white balloons. He swerves to the side of the road and rips it all down, bursting each balloon under his heel. When everything has sunk beneath the surface of the water, and the dock lies solemn and barren, he heads home, still shaking.
The sight of Nath rummaging in the refrigerator sets him ablaze again. “You’re wasting power,” James says. Nath shuts the door, and his quiet obedience only makes James angrier. “Do you always have to be in the way?”
“Sorry,” Nath says. He cups a hard-boiled egg in one hand, a paper napkin in the other. “I didn’t expect you.” Out of the car, with its lingering air of exhaust and engine grease, James realizes he can smell Louisa’s perfume on his skin, musky and spicy-sweet. He wonders if Nath can, too.
“What do you mean, you didn’t expect me?” he says. “Don’t I have a right to come into my own kitchen after a hard day of work?” He sets his bag down. “Where’s your mother?”
“In Lydia’s room.” Nath pauses. “She’s been in there all day.”
Under his son’s eye, James feels a sharp prickle between his shoulder blades, as if Nath is blaming him.
“For your information,” he says, “my summer course comes with a great deal of responsibility. And I have conferences. Meetings.” His face flushes at the memory of that afternoon—Louisa kneeling before his chair, then slowly unzipping his fly—and this makes him angry. Nath stares, lips slightly pursed, as if he wants to frame a question but can’t get past the W—, and suddenly, James is furious. For as long as he has been a father, James has believed that Lydia looked like her mother—beautiful, blue-eyed, poised—and that Nath looked like him: dark, hesitating in midspeech, preparing to stumble over his own words. He forgets, most of the time, that Lydia and Nath resemble each other, too. Now, in Nath’s face, James suddenly sees a flash of his daughter, wide-eyed and silent, and the pain of this makes him cruel. “You’re just home all day. Do you have any friends at all?”