Free Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng Page A

upstairs to his room to ruminate over what he’s heard.
    There’s no one for him to see anyway. While Nath fretted under the elm tree, his family has dispersed. During the car ride, Marilyn doesn’t look at James once, focusing instead on her knuckles, picking at her cuticles, fiddling with the strap of her handbag. As soon as they come inside, Marilyn says she wants to lie down, and Hannah too vanishes into her room without a word. For a moment James considers joining Marilyn in their bedroom. He’s filled with a deep longing to burrow against her, to feel her weight and warmth surrounding him, shielding him from everything else. To cling to her and feel her cling to him and let their bodies comfort each other. But something scratches and scratches at the edge of James’s mind, and at last he lifts his keys from the table again. There is something he must do at the office, urgently. It cannot wait another minute.
    When the police had asked if he wanted a copy of the autopsy, he had given them his office address. Then yesterday, a thick manila envelope appeared in his mail cubby, and he decided he’d made a mistake: he didn’t want to see it, ever. At the same time, he could not bring himself to throw it away. Instead he slipped it into the bottom drawer of his desk and locked it. It would be there, he thought, if he ever changed his mind. He had never expected to.
    It is lunchtime, and the office is almost empty; only Myrna, the department secretary, still sits at her desk, changing the ribbon of her typewriter. All the other office doors are shut, their frosted-glass windows dim. Now James unlocks the drawer, takes a deep breath, and slits the envelope open with his finger.
    He has never seen an autopsy report before and expects charts and diagrams, but it opens like a teacher’s progress report: The subject is a well-developed, well-nourished Oriental female. It tells him things he already knows: that she was sixteen years old, sixty-five inches tall; that her hair was black, that her eyes were blue. It tells him things he hadn’t known: the circumference of her head, the length of each limb, that a small crescent moon scarred her left knee. It tells him that there were no intoxicants in her blood, that there were no signs of foul play or sexual trauma, but that suicide, homicide, or accident could not yet be determined. The cause of death was asphyxia by drowning.
    And then it begins in earnest: The chest is opened using a Y-shaped incision.
    He learns the color and size of each of her organs, the weight of her brain. That a white foam had bubbled up through her trachea and covered her nostrils and mouth like a lace handkerchief. That her alveoli held a thin layer of silt as fine as sugar. That her lungs had marbled dark red and yellow-gray as they starved for air; that like dough, they took the impression of a fingertip; that when they were sectioned with a scalpel, water flowed out. That in her stomach were snippets of lake-bottom weeds, sand, and six ounces of lake water she’d swallowed as she sank. That the right side of her heart had swollen, as if it had had too much to hold. That from floating head down in the water, the skin of her head and neck had reddened to her shoulders. That due to the low temperature of the water, she had not yet decomposed, but that the skin of her fingertips was just beginning to peel off, like a glove.
    The office air-conditioning clicks on and a cool breeze floats up from the floor. His whole body trembles, as if he’s caught a sudden, lasting chill. With his toe, he closes the vent, but he can’t keep his hands from shaking. He balls them into fists and clenches his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. In his lap, the autopsy report quivers like something alive.
    He can’t imagine telling Marilyn that these things could happen to a body they loved. He doesn’t ever want her to know. Better to leave it as the police summed it up: drowning. No details to catch in the