Everything I Never Told You (29 page)

Nath pushed the door open. “Which one’s better?”

He held up two shirts, a hanger in each hand, so they flanked his face like curtains. On his left, a plain blue, his best dress shirt, the one he had worn to his junior award ceremony last spring. On the right, a paisley she’d never seen before, a price tag still dangling from the cuff.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Bought it,” Nath said with a grin. All his life, whenever he needed new clothes, their mother dragged him to Decker’s Department Store, and he agreed to anything she picked out in order to go home faster. Last week, counting over his ninety-six hours, he had driven himself to the mall for the first time and bought this shirt, plucking the bright pattern from the rack. It had felt like buying a new skin, and now his sister sensed this, too.

“A little fancy for going to class.” Lydia did not right herself. “Or is that how they expect you to dress at Harvard?”

Nath lowered the hangers. “There’s a mixer for visiting students. And my host student wrote me—he and his roommates are throwing a party that weekend. To celebrate the end of term.” He held the patterned shirt against him, tucking collar beneath chin. “Maybe I’d better try it on.”

He disappeared into the bathroom, and Lydia heard the scrape of hanger on shower rod. A mixer: Music, dancing, beer. Flirting. Phone numbers and addresses scribbled on scraps of paper.
Write me. Call me. We’ll get together.
Slowly her feet slid down to rest on her pillow. A mixer. Where new students got whirled together and blended up and turned into something new.

Nath reappeared in the doorway, fastening the top button of the paisley shirt. “What do you think?”

Lydia bit her lip. The blue pattern against the white suited him; it made him look thinner, taller, tanner. Though the buttons were plastic, they gleamed like pearl. Already Nath looked like a different person, someone she’d known once a long time ago. Already she missed him.

“The other one’s better,” she said. “You’re going to college, not Studio 54.” But she knew Nath had already made up his mind.

Late that night, just before midnight, she tiptoed into Nath’s room. She had wanted to tell him all evening about their father and Louisa, about what she’d seen in the car that afternoon, what she
knew
was going on. Nath had been too preoccupied, and pinning down his attention had been like catching smoke in her hands. This was her last chance. He would be leaving in the morning.

In the dim room, only the small desk lamp was on, and Nath was in his old striped pajamas, kneeling at the windowsill. For a moment Lydia thought he was praying, and, embarrassed at catching him in such a private moment—like seeing him naked—she began to close the door. Then, at the sound of her footsteps, Nath turned, his smile as incandescent as the moon just beginning to swell over the horizon, and she realized she’d been wrong. The window was open. He had not been praying, but dreaming—which, she would realize later, came to almost the same thing.

“Nath,” she began. The rush of things she wanted to say churned in her head:
I saw. I think. I need.
Such a large thing to break into tiny granules of words. Nath didn’t seem to notice.

“Look at that,” he whispered, with such awe that Lydia sank to her knees beside him and peered out. Above them, the sky rolled out a deep black, like a pool of ink, littered with stars. They were nothing like the stars in her science books, blurred and globby as drops of spit. They were razor-sharp, each one precise as a period, punctuating the sky with light. Tipping her head back, she could not see the houses or the lake or the lamps on the street. All she could see was the sky, so huge and dark it could crush her. It was like being on another planet. No—like floating in space, alone. She searched for the constellations she had seen on Nath’s posters: Orion, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper. The diagrams seemed childish now, with their straight lines and primary colors and stick-figure shapes. Here the stars dazzled her eyes like sequins.
This is what infinity looks like,
she thought. Their clarity overwhelmed her, like pinpricks at her heart.

“Isn’t that amazing,” Nath’s voice said softly, out of the darkness. Already he sounded light-years away.

“Yeah,” Lydia heard her own voice say, barely a whisper. “Amazing.”

•   •   •

The next morning, as Nath tucked his toothbrush into its case, Lydia hovered in the doorway. In ten minutes, their father would drive him to the airport in Cleveland, where TWA would carry him to New York, then Boston. It was four thirty
A.M.

“Promise you’ll call and tell me how things are going.”

“Sure,” Nath said. He stretched the elastic straps over his folded clothes in a neat X and clapped the suitcase shut.

“You promise?”

“I promise.” Nath shut the latches with one finger, then hoisted the suitcase by the handle. “Dad’s waiting. I’ll see you Monday.”

And just like that, he was gone.

Much later, when Lydia came downstairs for breakfast, she could almost pretend that nothing had changed. Her homework lay beside her breakfast bowl with four little ticks in the margin; across the table, Hannah picked pebbles of cereal from her bowl. Their mother sipped oolong and leafed through the newspaper. Only one thing was different: Nath’s place was empty. As if he had never been there.

“There you are,” Marilyn said. “Better hurry and fix this, sweetheart, or you won’t have time to eat before the bus.”

Lydia, who felt as if she were floating, made her way to the table. Marilyn, meanwhile, skimmed the paper—Carter’s approval rating 65 percent, Mondale settling into role of “Senior Adviser,” asbestos banned, another shooting in New York—before her eyes came to rest on a small human-interest story in the corner of the page.
Los Angeles Doctor Revives Man in Coma for Six Years.
Amazing, she thought. She smiled up at her daughter, who stood clinging to the back of her chair as if, without it, she might drift away.

•   •   •

Nath did not call that night, when Lydia shrank and shriveled beneath her parents’ undeflected attention.
I got a course catalog from the college—do you want to take statistics this summer? Anyone ask you to prom yet? Well, I’m sure someone will soon.
He did not call Saturday, when Lydia cried herself to sleep, or on Sunday, when she awoke with eyes still scalding. So this is what it will be like, she thought to herself. As if I never had a brother at all.

With Nath gone, Hannah followed Lydia like a puppy, scampering to her door each morning before Lydia’s clock radio had even gone off, her voice breathless, just short of a pant.
Guess what? Lydia, guess what?
It was never guessable and never important: it was raining; there were pancakes for breakfast; there was a blue jay in the spruce tree. Each day, all day, she trailed Lydia suggesting things they could do—
We could play Life, we could watch the
Friday Night Movie,
we could make Jiffy Pop.
All her life, Hannah had hovered at a distance from her brother and sister, and Lydia and Nath had tacitly tolerated their small, awkward moon. Now Lydia noticed a thousand little things about her sister: the way she twitched her nose once-twice, fast as a rabbit, when she was talking; the habit she had of standing on her toes, as if she had on invisible high heels. And then, Sunday afternoon, as Hannah climbed into the wedges Lydia had kicked off, she delivered her latest idea—
We could go play by the lake. Lydia, let’s go play by the lake
—and Lydia noticed something else, shiny and silver beneath Hannah’s shirt.

“What’s that?”

Hannah tried to turn away, but Lydia jerked her collar down to reveal what she’d already half glimpsed: a lithe silver chain, a slender silver heart. Her locket. She hooked it with one finger, and Hannah teetered, staggering out of Lydia’s shoes with a thump.

“What are you doing with that?”

Hannah glanced at the doorway, as if the correct answer might be painted on the wall. Six days ago she had found the little velvet box beneath Lydia’s bed. “I didn’t think you wanted it,” she whispered. Lydia wasn’t listening.
Every time you look at this,
she heard her father say,
just remember what really matters.
Being sociable
.
Being popular. Blending in.
You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain.
Hannah, so pleased in that little silver snare, looked like her younger self—timid, gawky, shoulders just beginning to stoop under the weight of something that seemed so thin and silver and light.

With a loud crack, her hand struck Hannah’s cheek, knocking her back, snapping her head to the side. Then she looped her whole hand through the chain and twisted, hard, jerking her forward like a dog on a choke collar.
I’m sorry,
Hannah began, but nothing emerged except a soft gasp. Lydia twisted harder. Then the necklace snapped, and both sisters found they could breathe again.

“You don’t want that,” Lydia said, the gentleness in her voice surprising Hannah, surprising Lydia herself. “Listen to me. You think you do. You don’t.” She bunched the necklace in her fist. “Promise me you’ll never put this on again. Ever.”

Hannah shook her head, eyes wide. Lydia touched her sister’s throat, her thumb smoothing the tiny thread of blood where the chain had sliced into the skin.

“Don’t ever smile if you don’t want to,” she said, and Hannah, half-blinded by the spotlight of Lydia’s whole attention, nodded. “Remember that.”

Hannah kept her word: later that night, and for years to come, she would look back on this moment, each time touching her throat, where the red mark of the chain had long since faded away. Lydia had looked more anxious than angry, the necklace dangling from her fingers like a dead snake; she had sounded almost sad, as if she had done something wrong, not Hannah. The necklace was, in fact, the last thing Hannah would ever steal. But this moment, this last talk with her sister, would puzzle her for a long time.

That evening, in the safety of her room, Lydia pulled out the piece of loose-leaf on which Nath had scrawled his host student’s number. After dinner—when her father retreated to his study and her mother settled into the living room—she unfolded it and picked up the telephone on the landing. The phone rang six times before someone answered and, in the background, she could hear the raucous sounds of a party just getting under way. “Who?” the voice on the other end said, twice, and at last Lydia gave up whispering and snapped, “Nathan Lee. The visiting student.
Nathan Lee
.” Minutes ticked by, each ratcheting up the long-distance charge—though by the time the bill came, James would be too devastated to notice. Downstairs, Marilyn clicked the television dial around and around:
Rhoda. Six Million Dollar Man. Quincy. Rhoda
again. Then, finally, Nath came on the line.

“Nath,” Lydia said. “It’s me.” To her surprise, tears welled in her eyes just at the sound of his voice—though his voice was deeper and blunter than usual, as if he had a cold. In fact, Nath was three-quarters through the first beer of his life, and the room was beginning to take on a warmish glow. Now his sister’s voice—flattened by long distance—sliced through that glow like a blunt knife.

“What’s the matter?”

“You didn’t call.”

“What?”

“You promised you’d call.” Lydia wiped her eyes with the back of one wrist.

“That’s why you’re calling?”

“No, listen, Nath. I need to tell you something.” Lydia paused, puzzling over how to explain. In the background, a burst of laughter swelled like a wave crashing ashore.

Nath sighed. “What happened? Did Mom nag you about your homework?” He tipped the bottle to his lips and found the beer had gone warm, and the stale liquid shriveled his tongue. “Wait, let me guess. Mom bought you a special present, but it was just a
book.
Dad bought you a new dress—no, a diamond necklace—and he expects you to
wear
it. Last night at dinner you had to talk and talk and
talk
and all their attention was on you. Am I getting warmer?”