one
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the
morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous(not harmful/not offensive)
fact: Lydia is late forbreakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has
placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia’s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks.
Driving to work, Lydia’s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest
Ohio’s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia’s
brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the
corner of the kitchen, Lydia’s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes,
sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It’s she who
says, at last, “Lydia’s taking a long time today.”
Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter’s door and sees the bed unslept in: neat
hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and
convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the
floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a
postcard of Einstein. Lydia’s duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet.
Lydia’s green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia’s bottle of Baby Soft
atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no
Lydia.
Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there,
covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A
grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she’d somehow missed before. I
was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right
here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed
curtains glow like a blank television screen.
Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of
the frame. Her silence says everything. “I’ll check outside,” she says at last.
“Maybe for some reason—” She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads
for the front door, as if Lydia’s footprints might be crushed into the hall runner.
Nath says to Hannah, “She was in her room last night. I heard her radio Nath says to Hannah,
“She was in her room last night. I heard her radioplaying. At eleven thirty.”
He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight.
“Can you be kidnapped if you’re sixteen?” Hannah asks.
Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded
milk.
Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a
second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens
sometimes—their faces are so alike you’d see one in the corner of your eye and
mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-
cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different,
Lydia’s ink-black instead of their mother’s honey-blond. He and Hannah take
after their father—once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store
and asked, “Chinese?” and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves
and wholes, she’d nodded sagely. “I knew it,” she said. “By the eyes.” She’d
tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying
genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more
reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too.
Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again.
“The car’s still here,” she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can’t
drive; she doesn’t even have a learner’s permit yet. Last week she’d surprised
them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn’t even let her sit in the
driver’s seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the
bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No
one moves.
“Are we still going to school today?” Hannah asks.
Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain
with a show of efficiency. “You’ve both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and
drop Hannah off on your way.” Then: “Don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s going
on.” She doesn’t look at either of them. Neither looks at her.
When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to
keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left
her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of
tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove
and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her
hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she
touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing
there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first
time. Marilyn didn’t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. 1977, May 3, six thirty in the
morning, no one knows anything but this innocuous(not harmful/not offensive)
fact: Lydia is late forbreakfast. As always, next to her cereal bowl, her mother has
placed a sharpened pencil and Lydia’s physics homework, six problems flagged with small ticks.
Driving to work, Lydia’s father nudges the dial toward WXKP, Northwest
Ohio’s Best News Source, vexed by the crackles of static. On the stairs, Lydia’s
brother yawns, still twined in the tail end of his dream. And in her chair in the
corner of the kitchen, Lydia’s sister hunches moon-eyed over her cornflakes,
sucking them to pieces one by one, waiting for Lydia to appear. It’s she who
says, at last, “Lydia’s taking a long time today.”
Upstairs, Marilyn opens her daughter’s door and sees the bed unslept in: neat
hospital corners still pleated beneath the comforter, pillow still fluffed and
convex. Nothing seems out of place. Mustard-colored corduroys tangled on the
floor, a single rainbow-striped sock. A row of science fair ribbons on the wall, a
postcard of Einstein. Lydia’s duffel bag crumpled on the floor of the closet.
Lydia’s green bookbag slouched against her desk. Lydia’s bottle of Baby Soft
atop the dresser, a sweet, powdery, loved-baby scent still in the air. But no
Lydia.
Marilyn closes her eyes. Maybe, when she opens them, Lydia will be there,
covers pulled over her head as usual, wisps of hair trailing from beneath. A
grumpy lump bundled under the bedspread that she’d somehow missed before. I
was in the bathroom, Mom. I went downstairs for some water. I was lying right
here all the time. Of course, when she looks, nothing has changed. The closed
curtains glow like a blank television screen.
Downstairs, she stops in the doorway of the kitchen, a hand on each side of
the frame. Her silence says everything. “I’ll check outside,” she says at last.
“Maybe for some reason—” She keeps her gaze trained on the floor as she heads
for the front door, as if Lydia’s footprints might be crushed into the hall runner.
Nath says to Hannah, “She was in her room last night. I heard her radio Nath says to Hannah,
“She was in her room last night. I heard her radioplaying. At eleven thirty.”
He stops, remembering that he had not said goodnight.
“Can you be kidnapped if you’re sixteen?” Hannah asks.
Nath prods at his bowl with a spoon. Cornflakes wilt and sink into clouded
milk.
Their mother steps back into the kitchen, and for one glorious fraction of a
second Nath sighs with relief: there she is, Lydia, safe and sound. It happens
sometimes—their faces are so alike you’d see one in the corner of your eye and
mistake her for the other: the same elfish chin and high cheekbones and left-
cheek dimple, the same thin-shouldered build. Only the hair color is different,
Lydia’s ink-black instead of their mother’s honey-blond. He and Hannah take
after their father—once a woman stopped the two of them in the grocery store
and asked, “Chinese?” and when they said yes, not wanting to get into halves
and wholes, she’d nodded sagely. “I knew it,” she said. “By the eyes.” She’d
tugged the corner of each eye outward with a fingertip. But Lydia, defying
genetics, somehow has her mother’s blue eyes, and they know this is one more
reason she is their mother’s favorite. And their father’s, too.
Then Lydia raises one hand to her brow and becomes his mother again.
“The car’s still here,” she says, but Nath had known it would be. Lydia can’t
drive; she doesn’t even have a learner’s permit yet. Last week she’d surprised
them all by failing the exam, and their father wouldn’t even let her sit in the
driver’s seat without it. Nath stirs his cereal, which has turned to sludge at the
bottom of his bowl. The clock in the front hall ticks, then strikes seven thirty. No
one moves.
“Are we still going to school today?” Hannah asks.
Marilyn hesitates. Then she goes to her purse and takes out her keychain
with a show of efficiency. “You’ve both missed the bus. Nath, take my car and
drop Hannah off on your way.” Then: “Don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s going
on.” She doesn’t look at either of them. Neither looks at her.
When the children have gone, she takes a mug from the cupboard, trying to
keep her hands still. Long ago, when Lydia was a baby, Marilyn had once left
her in the living room, playing on a quilt, and went into the kitchen for a cup of
tea. She had been only eleven months old. Marilyn took the kettle off the stove
and turned to find Lydia standing in the doorway. She had started and set her
hand down on the hot burner. A red, spiral welt rose on her palm, and she
touched it to her lips and looked at her daughter through watering eyes. Standing
there, Lydia was strangely alert, as if she were taking in the kitchen for the first
time. Marilyn didn’t think about missing those first steps, or how grown up her
daughter had become. The thought that flashed through her mind wasn’t How
did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and
wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn’t
remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare
feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn
often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry.
Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and
she would not have known.
She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she
was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she’d felt as if
she’d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle,
had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama
pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia’s cheek
and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter’s small body.
Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise.
The high school’s number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator,
and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger
while the phone rings.
“Middlewood High,” the secretary says on the fourth ring. “This is Dottie.”
She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her
fading red hair in a beehive. “Good morning,” she begins, and falters. “Is my
daughter in class this morning?”
Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. “To whom am I speaking,
please?”
It takes her a moment to remember her own name. “Marilyn. Marilyn Lee.
My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade.”
“Let me look up her schedule. First period—” A pause. “Eleventh-grade
physics?”
“Yes, that’s right. With Mr. Kelly.”
“I’ll have someone run down to that classroom and check.” There’s a thud as
the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk.
Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few
years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that
the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look
for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile
trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police
immediately if your child cannot be found.
“Mrs. Lee?” the secretary says. “Your daughter was not in her first-period
class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?”
Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . .
“Did you want something, Stan?” James asks. He’s acutely conscious of his
hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa’s
shoulder, and pulls it back.
“Just wanted to ask a question about the dean’s latest memo,” Stanley says,
holding up a mimeographed sheet. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
“I have to get going anyway,” Louisa says. “Have a nice morning, Professor
Lee. I’ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.” As she slides past
Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she’s blushing, and his own face grows
hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James’s desk.
“Good-looking girl,” he says. “She’ll be your assistant this summer too, no?”
“Yes.” James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip,
walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He
wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley’s grin, to feel Stanley’s
slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug
with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the
insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along
the spines of James’s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this
moment, for that last second when Stan’s leer was the worst problem on his
mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption
that at first he doesn’t hear the anxiety in Marilyn’s voice.
“James?” she says. “Could you come home?”
• • •
The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of
times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don’t even
know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister’s room. He expects talcum
powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the
policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the
floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the
rounded pink lid of Lydia’s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child’s head in his
hand.
Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves
within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves.
“What does that mean?” Nath says. “Most? What does that mean?”
The policeman peers over the top of his bifocals. “In the vast majority of
cases,” he says.
“Eighty percent?” Nath says. “Ninety? Ninety-five?”“Eighty percent?” Nath says. “Ninety? Ninety-five?”
“Nathan,” James says. “That’s enough. Let Officer Fiske do his work.”
The younger officer jots down the particulars in his notebook: Lydia
Elizabeth Lee, sixteen, last seen Monday May 2, flowered halter-neck dress,
parents James and Marilyn Lee. At this Officer Fiske studies James closely, a
memory surfacing in his mind.
“Now, your wife also went missing once?” he says. “I remember the case. In
sixty-six, wasn’t it?”
Warmth spreads along the back of James’s neck, like sweat dripping behind
his ears. He is glad, now, that Marilyn is waiting by the phone downstairs. “That
was a misunderstanding,” he says stiffly. “A miscommunication between my
wife and myself. A family matter.”
“I see.” The older officer pulls out his own pad and makes a note, and James
raps his knuckle against the corner of Lydia’s desk.
“Anything else?”
In the kitchen, the policemen flip through the family albums looking for a
clear head shot. “This one,” Hannah says, pointing. It’s a snapshot from last
Christmas. Lydia had been sullen, and Nath had tried to cheer her up, to
blackmail a smile out of her through the camera. It hadn’t worked. She sits next
to the tree, back against the wall, alone in the shot. Her face is a dare. The
directness of her stare, straight out of the page with not even a hint of profile,
says What are you looking at? In the picture, Nath can’t distinguish the blue of
her irises from the black of her pupils, her eyes like dark holes in the shiny
paper. When he’d picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted
capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister’s face. But now, he admits,
looking at the photograph in Hannah’s hand, this looks like her—at least, the
way she looked when he had seen her last.
“Not that one,” James says. “Not with Lydia making a face like that. People
will think she looks like that all the time. Pick a nice one.” He flips a few pages
and pries out the last snapshot. “This one’s better.”
At her sixteenth birthday, the week before, Lydia sits at the table with a
lipsticked smile. Though her face is turned toward the camera, her eyes are
looking at something outside the photo’s white border. What’s so funny? Nath
wonders. He can’t remember if it was him, or something their father said, or if
Lydia was laughing to herself about something none of the rest of them knew.
She looks like a model in a magazine ad, lips dark and sharp, a plate of perfectly
frosted cake poised on a delicate hand, having an improbably good time.
James pushes the birthday photo across the table toward the policemen, and
the younger one slides it into a manila folder and stands up.
“This will be just fine,” he says. “We’ll make up a flyer in case she doesn’t“This will be just fine,” he says. “We’ll make up a flyer in case she doesn’t
turn up by tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’m sure she will.” He leaves a fleck of spit
on the photo album page and Hannah wipes it away with her finger.
“She wouldn’t just leave,” Marilyn says. “What if it’s some crazy? Some
psycho kidnapping girls?” Her hand drifts to that morning’s newspaper, still
lying in the center of the table.
“Try not to worry, ma’am,” Officer Fiske says. “Things like that, they hardly
ever happen. In the vast majority of cases—” He glances at Nath, then clears his
throat. “The girls almost always come home.”
When the policemen have gone, Marilyn and James sit down with a piece of
scratch paper. The police have suggested they call all of Lydia’s friends, anyone
who might know where she’s gone. Together they construct a list: Pam
Saunders. Jenn Pittman. Shelley Brierley. Nath doesn’t correct them, but these
girls have never been Lydia’s friends. Lydia has been in school with them since
kindergarten, and now and then they call, giggly and shrill, and Lydia shouts
through the line, “I got it.” Some evenings she sits for hours on the window seat
on the landing, the phone base cradled in her lap, receiver wedged between ear
and shoulder. When their parents walk by, she lowers her voice to a confidential
murmur, twirling the cord around her little finger until they go away. This, Nath
knows, is why his parents write their names on the list with such confidence.
But Nath’s seen Lydia at school, how in the cafeteria she sits silent while the
others chatter; how, when they’ve finished copying her homework, she quietly
slides her notebook back into her bookbag. After school, she walks to the bus
alone and settles into the seat beside him in silence. Once, he had stayed on the
phone line after Lydia picked up and heard not gossip, but his sister’s voice duly
rattling off assignments—read Act I of Othello, do the odd-numbered problems
in Section 5—then quiet after the hang-up click. The next day, while Lydia was
curled on the window seat, phone pressed to her ear, he’d picked up the
extension in the kitchen and heard only the low drone of the dial tone. Lydia has
never really had friends, but their parents have never known. If their father says,
“Lydia, how’s Pam doing?” Lydia says, “Oh, she’s great, she just made the pep
squad,” and Nath doesn’t contradict her. He’s amazed at the stillness in her face,
the way she can lie without even a raised eyebrow to give her away.
Except he can’t tell his parents that now. He watches his mother scribble
names on the back of an old receipt, and when she says to him and Hannah,
“Anyone else you can think of?” he thinks of Jack and says no.
All spring, Lydia has been hanging around Jack—or the other way around.
Every afternoon, practically, driving around in that Beetle of his, coming home
just in time for dinner, when she pretended she’d been at school all the time. Ithad emerged suddenly, this friendship—Nath refused to use any other word.
Jack and his mother have lived on the corner since the first grade, and once Nath
thought they could be friends. It hadn’t turned out that way. Jack had humiliated
him in front of the other kids, had laughed when Nath’s mother was gone, when
Nath had thought she might never come back. As if, Nath thinks now, as if Jack
had any right to be talking, when he had no father. All the neighbors had
whispered about it when the Wolffs had moved in, how Janet Wolff was
divorced, how Jack ran wild while she worked late shifts at the hospital. That
summer, they’d whispered about Nath’s parents, too—but Nath’s mother had
come back. Jack’s mother was still divorced. And Jack still ran wild.
And now? Just last week, driving home from an errand, he’d seen Jack out
walking that dog of his. He had come around the lake, about to turn onto their
little dead-end street, when he saw Jack on the path by the bank, tall and lanky,
the dog loping just ahead of him toward a tree. Jack was wearing an old, faded
T-shirt and his sandy curls stood up, unbrushed. As Nath drove past, Jack looked
up and gave the merest nod of the head, a cigarette clenched in the corner of his
mouth. The gesture, Nath had thought, was less one of greeting than of
recognition. Beside Jack, the dog had stared him in the eye and casually lifted its
leg. And Lydia had spent all spring with him.
If he says anything now, Nath thinks, they’ll say, Why didn’t we know about
this before? He’ll have to explain that all those afternoons when he’d said,
“Lydia’s studying with a friend,” or “Lydia’s staying after to work on math,” he
had really meant, She’s with Jack or She’s riding in Jack’s car or She’s out with
him god knows where. More than that: saying Jack’s name would mean
admitting something he doesn’t want to. That Jack was a part of Lydia’s life at
all, that he’d been part of her life for months.
Across the table, Marilyn looks up the numbers in the phone book and reads
them out; James does the calling, carefully and slowly, clicking the dial around
with one finger. With each call his voice becomes more confused. No? She
didn’t mention anything to you, any plans? Oh. I see. Well. Thank you anyway.
Nath studies the grain of the kitchen table, the open album in front of him. The
missing photo leaves a gap in the page, a clear plastic window showing the blank
white lining of the cover. Their mother runs her hand down the column of the
phone book, staining her fingertip gray. Under cover of the tablecloth, Hannah
stretches her legs and touches one toe to Nath’s. A toe of comfort. But he
doesn’t look up. Instead he closes the album, and across the table, his mother
crosses another name off the list.
When they’ve called the last number, James puts the telephone down. Hetakes the slip of paper from Marilyn and crosses out Karen Adler, bisecting the
K into two neat Vs. Under the line he can still see the name. Karen Adler.
Marilyn never let Lydia go out on weekends until she’d finished all her
schoolwork—and by then, it was usually Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, those
Sunday afternoons, Lydia met her friends at the mall, wheedling a ride: “A
couple of us are going to the movies. Annie Hall. Karen is dying to see it.” He’d
pull a ten from his wallet and push it across the table to her, meaning: All right,
now go and have some fun. He realizes now that he had never seen a ticket stub,
that for as long as he can remember, Lydia had been alone on the curb when he
came to take her home. Dozens of evenings he’d paused at the foot of the stairs
and smiled, listening to Lydia’s half of a conversation float down from the
landing above: “Oh my god, I know, right? So then what did she say?” But now,
he knows, she hasn’t called Karen or Pam or Jenn in years. He thinks now of
those long afternoons, when they’d thought she was staying after school to
study. Yawning gaps of time when she could have been anywhere, doing
anything. In a moment, James realizes he’s obliterated Karen Adler’s name
under a crosshatch of black ink.
He lifts the phone again and dials. “Officer Fiske, please. Yes, this is James
Lee. We’ve called all of Lydia’s—” He hesitates. “Everyone she knows from
school. No, nothing. All right, thank you. Yes, we will.”
“They’re sending an officer out to look for her,” he says, setting the receiver
back on the hook. “They said to keep the phone line open in case she calls.”
Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems
like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that
whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.
The phone does not ring. At midnight, James sends the children to bed and,
though they don’t argue, stands at the foot of the stairs until they’ve gone up.
“Twenty bucks says Lydia calls before morning,” he says, a little too heartily.
No one laughs. The phone still does not ring.
Upstairs, Nath shuts the door to his room and hesitates. What he wants is to
find Jack—who, he’s sure, knows where Lydia is. But he cannot sneak out with
his parents still awake. His mother is already on edge, startling every time the
refrigerator motor kicks on or off. In any case, from the window he can see that
the Wolffs’ house is dark. The driveway, where Jack’s steel-gray VW usually
sits, is empty. As usual, Jack’s mother has forgotten to leave the front-door light
on.
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 along 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 thebook 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.
It’s not until Wednesday afternoon that a passerby notices the rowboat out on
the lake, adrift in the windless day. Years ago, the lake had been Middlewood’s
reservoir, before the water tower was built. Now, edged with grass, it’s a
swimming hole in summer; kids dive off the wooden dock, and for birthday
parties and picnics, a park employee unties the rowboat kept there. No one
thinks much of it: a slipped mooring, a harmless prank. It is not a priority. A
note is made for an officer to check it; a note is made for the commissioner of
parks. It’s not until late Wednesday, almost midnight, that a lieutenant, going
over loose ends from the day shift, makes the connection and calls the Lees to
ask if Lydia ever played with the boat on the lake.
“Of course not,” James says. Lydia had refused, refused, to take swim
classes at the Y. He’d been a swimmer as a teenager himself; he’d taught Nath to
swim at age three. With Lydia he’d started too late, and she was already five
when he took her to the pool for the first time and waded into the shallow end,
water barely to his waist, and waited. Lydia would not even come near the water.
She’d laid down in her swimsuit by the side of the pool and cried, and James
finally hoisted himself out, swim trunks dripping but top half dry, and promised
he would not make her jump. Even now, though the lake is so close, Lydia goes
in just ankle-deep in summer, to wash the dirt from her feet.
“Of course not,” James says again. “Lydia doesn’t know how to swim.” It’s
not until he says these words into the telephone that he understands why the
police are asking. As he speaks, the entire family catches a chill, as if they know
exactly what the police will find.
It’s not until early Thursday morning, just after dawn, that the police drag the
lake and find her
did I miss it? but What else have you been hiding? Nath had pulled up and
wobbled and tipped over and toddled right in front of her, but she didn’t
remember Lydia even beginning to stand. Yet she seemed so steady on her bare
feet, tiny fingers just peeking from the ruffled sleeve of her romper. Marilyn
often had her back turned, opening the refrigerator or turning over the laundry.
Lydia could have begun walking weeks ago, while she was bent over a pot, and
she would not have known.
She had scooped Lydia up and smoothed her hair and told her how clever she
was, how proud her father would be when he came home. But she’d felt as if
she’d found a locked door in a familiar room: Lydia, still small enough to cradle,
had secrets. Marilyn might feed her and bathe her and coax her legs into pajama
pants, but already parts of her life were curtained off. She kissed Lydia’s cheek
and pulled her close, trying to warm herself against her daughter’s small body.
Now Marilyn sips tea and remembers that surprise.
The high school’s number is pinned to the corkboard beside the refrigerator,
and Marilyn pulls the card down and dials, twisting the cord around her finger
while the phone rings.
“Middlewood High,” the secretary says on the fourth ring. “This is Dottie.”
She recalls Dottie: a woman built like a sofa cushion, who still wore her
fading red hair in a beehive. “Good morning,” she begins, and falters. “Is my
daughter in class this morning?”
Dottie makes a polite cluck of impatience. “To whom am I speaking,
please?”
It takes her a moment to remember her own name. “Marilyn. Marilyn Lee.
My daughter is Lydia Lee. Tenth grade.”
“Let me look up her schedule. First period—” A pause. “Eleventh-grade
physics?”
“Yes, that’s right. With Mr. Kelly.”
“I’ll have someone run down to that classroom and check.” There’s a thud as
the secretary sets the receiver down on the desk.
Marilyn studies her mug, the pool of water it has made on the counter. A few
years ago, a little girl had crawled into a storage shed and suffocated. After that
the police department sent a flyer to every house: If your child is missing, look
for him right away. Check washing machines and clothes dryers, automobile
trunks, toolsheds, any places he might have crawled to hide. Call police
immediately if your child cannot be found.
“Mrs. Lee?” the secretary says. “Your daughter was not in her first-period
class. Are you calling to excuse her absence?”
he’s hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start George Washington,
Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar . . .
“Did you want something, Stan?” James asks. He’s acutely conscious of his
hand, index finger and thumb outstretched as if pointing a popgun at Louisa’s
shoulder, and pulls it back.
“Just wanted to ask a question about the dean’s latest memo,” Stanley says,
holding up a mimeographed sheet. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
“I have to get going anyway,” Louisa says. “Have a nice morning, Professor
Lee. I’ll see you tomorrow. You too, Professor Hewitt.” As she slides past
Stanley into the hallway, James sees that she’s blushing, and his own face grows
hot. When she is gone, Stanley seats himself on the corner of James’s desk.
“Good-looking girl,” he says. “She’ll be your assistant this summer too, no?”
“Yes.” James unfolds his hand as the ladybug moves onto his fingertip,
walking the path of his fingerprint, around and around in whorls and loops. He
wants to smash his fist into the middle of Stanley’s grin, to feel Stanley’s
slightly crooked front tooth slice his knuckles. Instead he smashes the ladybug
with his thumb. The shell snaps between his fingers, like a popcorn hull, and the
insect crumbles to sulfur-colored powder. Stanley keeps running his finger along
the spines of James’s books. Later James will long for the ignorant calm of this
moment, for that last second when Stan’s leer was the worst problem on his
mind. But for now, when the phone rings, he is so relieved at the interruption
that at first he doesn’t hear the anxiety in Marilyn’s voice.
“James?” she says. “Could you come home?”
• • •
The police tell them lots of teenagers leave home with no warning. Lots of
times, they say, the girls are mad at their parents and the parents don’t even
know. Nath watches them circulate in his sister’s room. He expects talcum
powder and feather dusters, sniffing dogs, magnifying glasses. Instead the
policemen just look: at the posters thumbtacked above her desk, the shoes on the
floor, the half-opened bookbag. Then the younger one places his palm on the
rounded pink lid of Lydia’s perfume bottle, as if cupping a child’s head in his
hand.
Most missing-girl cases, the older policeman tells them, resolve themselves
within twenty-four hours. The girls come home by themselves.
“What does that mean?” Nath says. “Most? What does that mean?”
The policeman peers over the top of his bifocals. “In the vast majority of
cases,” he says.
“Eighty percent?” Nath says. “Ninety? Ninety-five?”“Eighty percent?” Nath says. “Ninety? Ninety-five?”
“Nathan,” James says. “That’s enough. Let Officer Fiske do his work.”
The younger officer jots down the particulars in his notebook: Lydia
Elizabeth Lee, sixteen, last seen Monday May 2, flowered halter-neck dress,
parents James and Marilyn Lee. At this Officer Fiske studies James closely, a
memory surfacing in his mind.
“Now, your wife also went missing once?” he says. “I remember the case. In
sixty-six, wasn’t it?”
Warmth spreads along the back of James’s neck, like sweat dripping behind
his ears. He is glad, now, that Marilyn is waiting by the phone downstairs. “That
was a misunderstanding,” he says stiffly. “A miscommunication between my
wife and myself. A family matter.”
“I see.” The older officer pulls out his own pad and makes a note, and James
raps his knuckle against the corner of Lydia’s desk.
“Anything else?”
In the kitchen, the policemen flip through the family albums looking for a
clear head shot. “This one,” Hannah says, pointing. It’s a snapshot from last
Christmas. Lydia had been sullen, and Nath had tried to cheer her up, to
blackmail a smile out of her through the camera. It hadn’t worked. She sits next
to the tree, back against the wall, alone in the shot. Her face is a dare. The
directness of her stare, straight out of the page with not even a hint of profile,
says What are you looking at? In the picture, Nath can’t distinguish the blue of
her irises from the black of her pupils, her eyes like dark holes in the shiny
paper. When he’d picked up the photos at the drugstore, he had regretted
capturing this moment, the hard look on his sister’s face. But now, he admits,
looking at the photograph in Hannah’s hand, this looks like her—at least, the
way she looked when he had seen her last.
“Not that one,” James says. “Not with Lydia making a face like that. People
will think she looks like that all the time. Pick a nice one.” He flips a few pages
and pries out the last snapshot. “This one’s better.”
At her sixteenth birthday, the week before, Lydia sits at the table with a
lipsticked smile. Though her face is turned toward the camera, her eyes are
looking at something outside the photo’s white border. What’s so funny? Nath
wonders. He can’t remember if it was him, or something their father said, or if
Lydia was laughing to herself about something none of the rest of them knew.
She looks like a model in a magazine ad, lips dark and sharp, a plate of perfectly
frosted cake poised on a delicate hand, having an improbably good time.
James pushes the birthday photo across the table toward the policemen, and
the younger one slides it into a manila folder and stands up.
“This will be just fine,” he says. “We’ll make up a flyer in case she doesn’t“This will be just fine,” he says. “We’ll make up a flyer in case she doesn’t
turn up by tomorrow. Don’t worry. I’m sure she will.” He leaves a fleck of spit
on the photo album page and Hannah wipes it away with her finger.
“She wouldn’t just leave,” Marilyn says. “What if it’s some crazy? Some
psycho kidnapping girls?” Her hand drifts to that morning’s newspaper, still
lying in the center of the table.
“Try not to worry, ma’am,” Officer Fiske says. “Things like that, they hardly
ever happen. In the vast majority of cases—” He glances at Nath, then clears his
throat. “The girls almost always come home.”
When the policemen have gone, Marilyn and James sit down with a piece of
scratch paper. The police have suggested they call all of Lydia’s friends, anyone
who might know where she’s gone. Together they construct a list: Pam
Saunders. Jenn Pittman. Shelley Brierley. Nath doesn’t correct them, but these
girls have never been Lydia’s friends. Lydia has been in school with them since
kindergarten, and now and then they call, giggly and shrill, and Lydia shouts
through the line, “I got it.” Some evenings she sits for hours on the window seat
on the landing, the phone base cradled in her lap, receiver wedged between ear
and shoulder. When their parents walk by, she lowers her voice to a confidential
murmur, twirling the cord around her little finger until they go away. This, Nath
knows, is why his parents write their names on the list with such confidence.
But Nath’s seen Lydia at school, how in the cafeteria she sits silent while the
others chatter; how, when they’ve finished copying her homework, she quietly
slides her notebook back into her bookbag. After school, she walks to the bus
alone and settles into the seat beside him in silence. Once, he had stayed on the
phone line after Lydia picked up and heard not gossip, but his sister’s voice duly
rattling off assignments—read Act I of Othello, do the odd-numbered problems
in Section 5—then quiet after the hang-up click. The next day, while Lydia was
curled on the window seat, phone pressed to her ear, he’d picked up the
extension in the kitchen and heard only the low drone of the dial tone. Lydia has
never really had friends, but their parents have never known. If their father says,
“Lydia, how’s Pam doing?” Lydia says, “Oh, she’s great, she just made the pep
squad,” and Nath doesn’t contradict her. He’s amazed at the stillness in her face,
the way she can lie without even a raised eyebrow to give her away.
Except he can’t tell his parents that now. He watches his mother scribble
names on the back of an old receipt, and when she says to him and Hannah,
“Anyone else you can think of?” he thinks of Jack and says no.
All spring, Lydia has been hanging around Jack—or the other way around.
Every afternoon, practically, driving around in that Beetle of his, coming home
just in time for dinner, when she pretended she’d been at school all the time. Ithad emerged suddenly, this friendship—Nath refused to use any other word.
Jack and his mother have lived on the corner since the first grade, and once Nath
thought they could be friends. It hadn’t turned out that way. Jack had humiliated
him in front of the other kids, had laughed when Nath’s mother was gone, when
Nath had thought she might never come back. As if, Nath thinks now, as if Jack
had any right to be talking, when he had no father. All the neighbors had
whispered about it when the Wolffs had moved in, how Janet Wolff was
divorced, how Jack ran wild while she worked late shifts at the hospital. That
summer, they’d whispered about Nath’s parents, too—but Nath’s mother had
come back. Jack’s mother was still divorced. And Jack still ran wild.
And now? Just last week, driving home from an errand, he’d seen Jack out
walking that dog of his. He had come around the lake, about to turn onto their
little dead-end street, when he saw Jack on the path by the bank, tall and lanky,
the dog loping just ahead of him toward a tree. Jack was wearing an old, faded
T-shirt and his sandy curls stood up, unbrushed. As Nath drove past, Jack looked
up and gave the merest nod of the head, a cigarette clenched in the corner of his
mouth. The gesture, Nath had thought, was less one of greeting than of
recognition. Beside Jack, the dog had stared him in the eye and casually lifted its
leg. And Lydia had spent all spring with him.
If he says anything now, Nath thinks, they’ll say, Why didn’t we know about
this before? He’ll have to explain that all those afternoons when he’d said,
“Lydia’s studying with a friend,” or “Lydia’s staying after to work on math,” he
had really meant, She’s with Jack or She’s riding in Jack’s car or She’s out with
him god knows where. More than that: saying Jack’s name would mean
admitting something he doesn’t want to. That Jack was a part of Lydia’s life at
all, that he’d been part of her life for months.
Across the table, Marilyn looks up the numbers in the phone book and reads
them out; James does the calling, carefully and slowly, clicking the dial around
with one finger. With each call his voice becomes more confused. No? She
didn’t mention anything to you, any plans? Oh. I see. Well. Thank you anyway.
Nath studies the grain of the kitchen table, the open album in front of him. The
missing photo leaves a gap in the page, a clear plastic window showing the blank
white lining of the cover. Their mother runs her hand down the column of the
phone book, staining her fingertip gray. Under cover of the tablecloth, Hannah
stretches her legs and touches one toe to Nath’s. A toe of comfort. But he
doesn’t look up. Instead he closes the album, and across the table, his mother
crosses another name off the list.
When they’ve called the last number, James puts the telephone down. Hetakes the slip of paper from Marilyn and crosses out Karen Adler, bisecting the
K into two neat Vs. Under the line he can still see the name. Karen Adler.
Marilyn never let Lydia go out on weekends until she’d finished all her
schoolwork—and by then, it was usually Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, those
Sunday afternoons, Lydia met her friends at the mall, wheedling a ride: “A
couple of us are going to the movies. Annie Hall. Karen is dying to see it.” He’d
pull a ten from his wallet and push it across the table to her, meaning: All right,
now go and have some fun. He realizes now that he had never seen a ticket stub,
that for as long as he can remember, Lydia had been alone on the curb when he
came to take her home. Dozens of evenings he’d paused at the foot of the stairs
and smiled, listening to Lydia’s half of a conversation float down from the
landing above: “Oh my god, I know, right? So then what did she say?” But now,
he knows, she hasn’t called Karen or Pam or Jenn in years. He thinks now of
those long afternoons, when they’d thought she was staying after school to
study. Yawning gaps of time when she could have been anywhere, doing
anything. In a moment, James realizes he’s obliterated Karen Adler’s name
under a crosshatch of black ink.
He lifts the phone again and dials. “Officer Fiske, please. Yes, this is James
Lee. We’ve called all of Lydia’s—” He hesitates. “Everyone she knows from
school. No, nothing. All right, thank you. Yes, we will.”
“They’re sending an officer out to look for her,” he says, setting the receiver
back on the hook. “They said to keep the phone line open in case she calls.”
Dinnertime comes and goes, but none of them can imagine eating. It seems
like something only people in films do, something lovely and decorative, that
whole act of raising a fork to your mouth. Some kind of purposeless ceremony.
The phone does not ring. At midnight, James sends the children to bed and,
though they don’t argue, stands at the foot of the stairs until they’ve gone up.
“Twenty bucks says Lydia calls before morning,” he says, a little too heartily.
No one laughs. The phone still does not ring.
Upstairs, Nath shuts the door to his room and hesitates. What he wants is to
find Jack—who, he’s sure, knows where Lydia is. But he cannot sneak out with
his parents still awake. His mother is already on edge, startling every time the
refrigerator motor kicks on or off. In any case, from the window he can see that
the Wolffs’ house is dark. The driveway, where Jack’s steel-gray VW usually
sits, is empty. As usual, Jack’s mother has forgotten to leave the front-door light
on.
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 along 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 thebook 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.
It’s not until Wednesday afternoon that a passerby notices the rowboat out on
the lake, adrift in the windless day. Years ago, the lake had been Middlewood’s
reservoir, before the water tower was built. Now, edged with grass, it’s a
swimming hole in summer; kids dive off the wooden dock, and for birthday
parties and picnics, a park employee unties the rowboat kept there. No one
thinks much of it: a slipped mooring, a harmless prank. It is not a priority. A
note is made for an officer to check it; a note is made for the commissioner of
parks. It’s not until late Wednesday, almost midnight, that a lieutenant, going
over loose ends from the day shift, makes the connection and calls the Lees to
ask if Lydia ever played with the boat on the lake.
“Of course not,” James says. Lydia had refused, refused, to take swim
classes at the Y. He’d been a swimmer as a teenager himself; he’d taught Nath to
swim at age three. With Lydia he’d started too late, and she was already five
when he took her to the pool for the first time and waded into the shallow end,
water barely to his waist, and waited. Lydia would not even come near the water.
She’d laid down in her swimsuit by the side of the pool and cried, and James
finally hoisted himself out, swim trunks dripping but top half dry, and promised
he would not make her jump. Even now, though the lake is so close, Lydia goes
in just ankle-deep in summer, to wash the dirt from her feet.
“Of course not,” James says again. “Lydia doesn’t know how to swim.” It’s
not until he says these words into the telephone that he understands why the
police are asking. As he speaks, the entire family catches a chill, as if they know
exactly what the police will find.
It’s not until early Thursday morning, just after dawn, that the police drag the
lake and find her
