Read Online Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - Free Book Online

want to see last—not Nath or Hannah or even James, but the daughter she thinks of first and always. Now her last glimpse of Lydia has already passed: James, to her bewilderment, has insisted on a closed-casket funeral. She will not even get to see her daughter’s face one last time, and for the past three days, she has told James this over and over, sometimes furious, sometimes through tears. James, for his part, cannot find the words to tell her what he discovered on going to identify Lydia’s body: there is only half a face left, barely preserved by the cold water of the lake; the other half had already been eaten away. He ignores his wife and keeps his eyes trained on the rearview mirror as he backs into the street.
    The cemetery is only a fifteen-minute walk from their house, but they drive anyway. As they turn onto the main road that circles the lake, Marilyn looks sharply to the left, as if she’s spotted something on the shoulder of her husband’s jacket. She doesn’t want to see the pier, the rowboat now re-moored, the lake itself stretching out into the distance. James has the car windows rolled up tight, but the breeze shakes the leaves of the trees on the banks and corrugates the surface of the water. It will be there forever, the lake: every time they leave their house, they will see it. In the backseat, Nath and Hannah wonder in unison if their mother will turn her head away for the rest of her life, every time she passes by. The lake glints in the sun like a shiny tin roof, and Nath’s eyes begin to water. It seems inappropriate for the light to be so bright, for the sky to be so blue, and he’s relieved when a cloud drifts over the sun and the water turns from silver to gray.
    At the cemetery, they pull into the parking lot. Middlewood is proud of its garden cemetery, a sort of graveyard and botanical garden in one, with winding paths and small brass signs to identify the flora. Nath remembers middle-school science trips with sketch pads and field guides; once the teacher had promised ten extra-credit points to the person who could gather the most kinds of leaves. There had been a funeral that day, too, and Tommy Reed had tiptoed between rows of folding chairs to the sassafras tree, right in the middle of the eulogy, and plucked a leaf from a low-hanging branch. Mr. Rexford hadn’t noticed and had complimented Tommy on being the only one to find Sassafras albidum, and the whole class had stifled giggles and high-fived Tommy on the bus ride home. Now, as they walk single file toward the cluster of chairs set up in the distance, Nath wants to go back in time and punch Tommy Reed.
    In Lydia’s honor, the school has closed for the day, and Lydia’s classmates come, lots of them. Looking at them, James and Marilyn realize just how long it has been since they’ve seen these girls: years. For a moment they don’t recognize Karen Adler with her hair grown long, or Pam Saunders without her braces. James, thinking of the crossed-out list of names, finds himself staring and turns away. Slowly the chairs fill with some of Nath’s classmates, with juniors and freshmen he finds vaguely familiar but doesn’t really know. Even the neighbors, as they file in, feel like strangers. His parents never go out or entertain; they have no dinner parties, no bridge group, no hunting buddies or luncheon pals. Like Lydia, no real friends. Hannah and Nath recognize a few professors from the university, their father’s teaching assistant, but most of the faces in the chairs are strangers. Why are they even here, Nath wonders, and when the service starts and they all crane their necks toward the coffin at the front, under the sassafras tree, he understands. They are drawn by the spectacle of sudden death. For the past week, ever since the police dragged the lake, the headlines in the Middlewood Monitor have all been about Lydia. Oriental Girl Found Drowned in Pond.
    The minister looks like President Ford, flat-browed,