Everything I Never Told You(53)

“You’re the kind of girl I should have married,” he whispers afterward. It is the kind of thing every man says to his lover, but to him it feels like a revelation. Louisa, half-asleep in the crook of his arm, does not hear him, but the words snake into her ear, giving her the tangled dreams of every other other woman. He will leave her—he will marry me—I will make him happy—there will be no other woman.

? ? ?



At home, when Nath and Hannah come downstairs, Marilyn sits motionless at the kitchen table. Though it is past ten o’clock, she is wearing her bathrobe still, hugged so tightly around her that they cannot see her neck, and they know there is bad news even before she chokes out the word suicide. “Was it?” Nath asks slowly, and, turning for the stairs without looking at either of them, Marilyn says only, “They say it was.”

For half an hour, Nath pokes at the dregs of cereal in the bottom of his bowl while Hannah watches him nervously. He has been checking the Wolffs’ house every day, looking for Jack, trying to catch him—though for what, he isn’t quite sure. One time he even climbed the porch steps and peeked in the window, but no one is ever home. Jack’s VW hasn’t puttered down the street in days. At last, Nath pushes the bowl away and reaches for the telephone. “Get out,” he says to Hannah. “I want to make a phone call.” Halfway up the stairs, Hannah pauses, listening to the slow clicks as Nath dials. “Officer Fiske,” he says after a moment, “this is Nathan Lee. I’m calling about my sister.” His voice drops, and only bits and pieces come through: Ought to reexamine. Tried to talk to him. Acting evasive. Toward the end, only one word is audible. Jack. Jack. As if Nath cannot say the name without spitting.

After Nath puts the phone down, so hard the bells jangle, he shuts himself in his room. They think he’s being hysterical, but he knows there’s something there, that there’s some connection to Jack, some missing piece of the puzzle. If the police don’t believe him, his parents won’t either. His father is hardly home these days anyway, and his mother has locked herself in Lydia’s room again; through the wall he can hear her pacing, like a prowling cat. Hannah raps at his door, and he puts on a record, loud, until he can’t hear the sound of her knuckles, or his mother’s footsteps, anymore. Later, none of them will remember how the day passes, only a numbed blur, overshadowed by all that would happen the next day.

When evening falls, Hannah opens her door and peers through the crack. A razor of light slices under Nath’s door, another under Lydia’s. All afternoon Nath had played his record over and over, but he has finally let it wind to a stop, and now a thick silence, like fog, seeps out onto the landing. Tiptoeing downstairs, she finds the house dark, her father still gone. The kitchen faucet drips: plink, plink, plink. She knows she should turn it off, but then the house will be silent, and at the moment this is unbearable. Back in her room, she imagines the faucet dripping to itself in the kitchen. With every plink, another bead of water would form on the brushed steel of the sink.

She longs to climb into her sister’s bed and sleep, but with her mother there, she cannot, and to console herself, Hannah circles the room, checking her treasures, pulling each from its hiding place and examining it. Tucked between mattress and box spring: the smallest spoon from her mother’s tea set. Behind the books on the shelf: her father’s old wallet, the leather worn thin as tissue. A pencil of Nath’s, his toothmarks revealing wood grain beneath the yellow paint. These are her failures. The successes are all gone: the ring on which her father kept his office keys; her mother’s best lipstick, Rose Petal Frost; the mood ring Lydia used to wear on her thumb. They were wanted and missed and hunted down in Hannah’s hands. These aren’t a toy, said her father. You’re too young for makeup, said her mother. Lydia had been more blunt: Stay out of my things. Hannah had folded her hands behind her back, savoring the lecture, nodding solemnly as she memorized the shape of them standing there beside the bed. When they were gone, she repeated each sentence under her breath, redrawing them in the empty spot where they’d been.

All she has left are things unwanted, things unloved. But she doesn’t put them back. To make up for them being unmissed, she counts them carefully, twice, rubs a spot of tarnish from the spoon, snaps and unsnaps the change pocket of the wallet. She’s had some of them for years. No one has ever noticed they were gone. They slipped away silently, without even the plink of a drop of water.

She knows Nath is convinced, no matter what the police say, that Jack brought Lydia to the lake, that he had something to do with it, that it’s his fault. In his mind, Jack dragged her into the boat, Jack pushed her underwater, Jack’s fingerprints are pressed into her neck. But Nath is all wrong about Jack.

This is how she knows. Last summer, she and Nath and Lydia had been down at the lake. It was hot and Nath had gone in for a swim. Lydia sunbathed on a striped towel in her swimsuit on the grass, one hand over her eyes. Hannah had been listing Lydia’s many nicknames in her mind. Lyd. Lyds. Lyddie. Honey. Sweetheart. Angel. No one ever called Hannah anything but Hannah. There were no clouds, and in the sun, the water had looked almost white, like a puddle of milk. Beside her, Lydia let out a little sigh and settled her shoulders deeper into the towel. She smelled like baby oil and her skin gleamed.

As Hannah squinted, looking for Nath, she thought of possibilities. “Hannah Banana”—they might call her that. Or something that had nothing to do with her name, something that sounded strange but that, from them, would be warm and personal. Moose, she thought. Bean. Then Jack had strolled by, with his sunglasses perched atop his head, even though it was blindingly bright.