Everything I Never Told You(6)

He tries to think: had Lydia seemed strange the night before? He had been away four whole days, by himself for the first time in his life, visiting Harvard—Harvard!—where he would be headed in the fall. In those last days of class before reading period—“Two weeks to cram and party before exams,” his host student, Andy, had explained—the campus had had a restless, almost festive air. All weekend he’d wandered awestruck, trying to take it all in: the fluted pillars of the enormous library, the red brick of the buildings against the bright green of the lawns, the sweet chalk smell that lingered in each lecture hall. The purposeful stride he saw in everyone’s walk, as if they knew they were destined for greatness. Friday he had spent the night in a sleeping bag on Andy’s floor and woke up at one when Andy’s roommate, Wes, came in with his girlfriend. The light had flicked on and Nath froze in place, blinking at the doorway, where a tall, bearded boy and the girl holding his hand slowly emerged from the blinding haze. She had long, red hair, loose in waves around her face. “Sorry,” Wes had said and flipped the lights off, and Nath heard their careful footsteps as they made their way across the common room to Wes’s bedroom. He had kept his eyes open, letting them readjust to the dark, thinking, So this is what college is like.

Now he thinks back to last night, when he had arrived home just before dinner. Lydia had been holed up in her room, and when they sat down at the table, he’d asked her how the past few days had been. She’d shrugged and barely glanced up from her plate, and he had assumed this meant nothing new. Now he can’t remember if she’d even said hello.

In her room, up in the attic, Hannah leans over the edge of her bed and fishes her book from beneath the dust ruffle. It’s Lydia’s book, actually: The Sound and the Fury. Advanced English. Not meant for fifth graders. She’d filched it from Lydia’s room a few weeks ago, and Lydia hadn’t even noticed. Over the past two weeks she’s worked her way through it, a little each night, savoring the words like a cherry Life Saver tucked inside her cheek. Tonight, somehow, the book seems different. Only when she flips back, to where she stopped the day before, does she understand. Throughout, Lydia has underlined words here and there, occasionally scribbling a note from class lectures. Order vs. chaos. Corruption of Southern aristocratic values. After this page, the book is untouched. Hannah flips through the rest: no notes, no doodles, no blue to break up the black. She’s reached the point where Lydia stopped reading, she realizes, and she doesn’t feel like reading any more.

Last night, lying awake, she had watched the moon drift across the sky like a slow balloon. She couldn’t see it moving, but if she looked away, then back through the window, she could see that it had. In a little while, she had thought, it would impale itself on the shadow of the big spruce in the backyard. It took a long time. She was almost asleep when she heard a soft thud, and for a moment she thought that the moon had actually hit the tree. But when she looked outside, the moon was gone, almost hidden behind a cloud. Her glow-in-the-dark clock said it was two A.M.

She lay quiet, not even wiggling her toes, and listened. The noise had sounded like the front door closing. It was sticky: you had to push it with your hip to get it to latch. Burglars! she thought. Through the window, she saw a single figure crossing the front lawn. Not a burglar, just a thin silhouette against darker night, moving away. Lydia? A vision of life without her sister in it had flashed across her mind. She would have the good chair at the table, looking out the window at the lilac bushes in the yard, the big bedroom downstairs near everyone else. At dinnertime, they would pass her the potatoes first. She would get her father’s jokes, her brother’s secrets, her mother’s best smiles. Then the figure reached the street and disappeared, and she wondered if she had seen it at all.

Now, in her room, she looks down at the tangle of text. It was Lydia, she’s sure of it now. Should she tell? Her mother would be upset that Hannah had let Lydia, her favorite, just walk away. And Nath? She thinks of the way Nath’s eyebrows have been drawn together all evening, the way he has bitten his lip so hard, without realizing, that it has begun to crack and bleed. He’d be angry, too. He’d say, Why didn’t you run out and catch her? But I didn’t know where she was going, Hannah whispers into the dark. I didn’t know she was really going anywhere.

? ? ?



Wednesday morning James calls the police again. Were there any leads? They were checking all possibilities. Could the officer tell them anything, anything at all? They still expected Lydia would come home on her own. They were following up and would, of course, keep the family informed.

James listens to all this and nods, though he knows Officer Fiske can’t see him. He hangs up and sits back down at the table without looking at Marilyn or Nath or Hannah. He doesn’t need to explain anything: they can tell by the look on his face that there’s no news.

It doesn’t seem right to do anything but wait. The children stay home from school. Television, magazines, radio: everything feels frivolous in the face of their fear. Outside, it’s sunny, the air crisp and cool, but no one suggests that they move to the porch or the yard. Even housekeeping seems wrong: some clue might be sucked into the vacuum, some hint obliterated by lifting the dropped book and placing it, upright, on the shelf. So the family waits. They cluster at the table, afraid to meet each other’s eyes, staring at the wood grain of the tabletop as if it’s a giant fingerprint, or a map locating what they seek.