Everything I Never Told You Read Free

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?”
    “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