Everything I Never Told You

by Celeste Ng

But she’d felt as if she’d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle, had secrets.

Because more than anything, her mother had wanted to stand out; because more than anything, her father had wanted to blend in. Because those things had been impossible.

A few months later, when they married, they would make a pact: to let the past drift away, to stop asking questions, to look forward from then on, never back.

Lydia is not inside, she reminds herself, taking a deep breath, only her body—but then where is Lydia herself?

Marilyn, unaware that her youngest is listening so closely, so longingly, blots her eyes and replaces the diaries on the shelf and makes herself a promise. She will figure out what happened to Lydia. She will find out who is responsible. She will find out what went wrong.

She will find out everything she doesn’t know. She will keep searching until she understands how this could have happened, until she understands her daughter completely.

Only one thing in the house still reminded Lydia of her mother: the big red cookbook.

If her mother ever came home and told her to finish her milk, she thought, the page wavering to a blur, she would finish her milk. She would brush her teeth without being asked and stop crying when the doctor gave her shots. She would go to sleep the second her mother turned out the light. She would never get sick again. She would do everything her mother told her. Everything her mother wanted.

That most important word: tomorrow. Every day Lydia cherished it. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the museum to look at the dinosaur bones. Tomorrow we’ll learn about trees. Tomorrow we’ll study the moon. Every night a small promise extracted from her mother: that she would be there in the morning.

He did not know exactly how it had happened but everything had gone askew, like a teeter-totter unevenly weighted. Everything in their life—their mother, their father, even he himself—slid, now, toward Lydia. Like gravity, there was no resisting it. Everything orbited her.

When his palms hit her shoulders, when the water closed over her head, Lydia had felt relief so great she had sighed in a deep choking lungful. She had staggered so readily, fell so eagerly, that she and Nath both knew: that she felt it, too, this pull she now exerted, and didn’t want it. That the weight of everything tilting toward her was too much.

He pushed her in. And then he pulled her out. All her life, Lydia would remember one thing. All his life, Nath would remember another.